Society of Authors boffin continuing to win friends and admiration.

Times Higher Ed reports:

Mathematics degrees in the UK are being “unnecessarily politicised” because of expectations that lecturers decolonise the curriculum, leading academics claim.

Decolonize math? I can see decolonizing a lot of things, but math?

A letter shared with Times Higher Education accuses the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) of trying to mandate a “narrowly skewed perspective on the history of mathematics” via its new subject benchmark instead of giving academics the freedom to design courses as they see fit.

Are we talking the history of math, or math itself? I can see decolonizing the first, but not the second.

The benchmark statement for mathematics, statistics and operational research (MSOR) – a document intended to establish a common understanding of what students can expect from a UK degree in this area – has grown by 50 per cent since 2019 to include sections on equality, diversity, accessibility and inclusion as well as sustainability and employment.

Equality AND diversity AND inclusion. Couldn’t they bundle all three and save some space?

The proposed guidance – which has been put out for consultation – states that “the curriculum should present a multicultural and decolonised view of MSOR, informed by the student voice”.

It adds that students “should be made aware of problematic issues in the development of the MSOR content they are being taught”, listing examples such as how some pioneers of statistics supported eugenics, and mathematicians’ connections to the slave trade, racism or Nazism.

Oh ffs. That’s just stupid. It’s crude, it’s childish, it’s a category mistake.

And while decolonisation might have some relevance when teaching the history of mathematics, it has little bearing on other areas of the curriculum, the letter argues.

What I’m saying. It’s meta. You can do a course on meta-math, an intellectual history type of class, and then who was or wasn’t racist could be of interest, but other than that – don’t be silly.

It’s like taking on a house maintenance project and before getting to that leak around the window taking a few years to investigate the views of glassmakers.

“We struggle to imagine what it would mean to decolonise, for example, a course on the geometry of surfaces. For the most part, the concept of decolonisation is irrelevant to university mathematics, and our students know this. If we engage in obviously tokenistic anti-racism efforts we will simply be sending a signal that we do not take racism seriously,” they write.

And/or that they think their students are all lunatics.

“These things may be very virtuous and interesting, but they are not mathematics, they are not our expertise; and mathematicians really want to talk to our students about the mathematics that fascinates them,” [Dr Armstrong] added.

A QAA spokeswoman said the benchmark statement was created by an expert advisory group “to ensure the resulting documents will be of current value to the discipline communities”.

There’s your problem right there. Stop thinking of everything in terms of “communities” and you’ll avoid a lot of this bedwetting nonsense.

This is revolting.

I can find only three women, stuck way off in a back corner. One is the Italian PM according to a reply.

The net tightens.

Writers in Scotland have warned that a code of conduct imposed by a national book charity threatens to infringe on the free speech of authors and poets who disagree with “gender identity theory”.

The Scottish Book Trust sent the code to 600 writers on its Live Literature register, advising that they must sign up in order to keep their listing. Inclusion on the register is essential for writers, poets and spoken-word artists who want to earn a living from public events in schools and libraries.

It’s a new version of the code, and it includes the threat that the trust “will not tolerate bigotry and transphobia.” Since the censorious word “transphobia” can mean simply saying men are not women, the Scottish Book Trust is basically excluding women for the sake of men who call themselves women.

The trust is a national charity whose mission is to promote literature, reading and writing. Its income for 2020-21 was £4.8 million, 86 per cent of which came from the Scottish government. Critics of the trust fear it is toeing the government line.

…

The row comes as the SNP-Green reform of the Gender Recognition Act makes its way through parliament. Supporters say it will simplify the process of gender recognition but opponents say it “rides roughshod over the rights of women and girls”.

It has become all too clear that you can’t “simplify the process of gender recognition” without destroying the rights of women and girls.

Another entry for the Encyclopedia of Pointless Groveling: The Jam Jar Bristol posts an apology to The Trans Communinny on Facebook and then issues a second apology a week later saying the first one wasn’t groveling enough.

The Jam Jar is “an independent arts venue.” What they’re apologizing for is that time a bunch of trans activists bullied and threatened a group of non-submissive feminist women, blocking them on a staircase and screaming in their faces.

The first apology starts with this:

We apologise for how long it has taken us to publicly address the concerns of the Trans community regarding an event in April 2018 organised by a group with controversial views. The panel discussed issues affecting trans people, some of these views were hurtful for the trans community. This occurred due to a poor understanding of the issues faced by these communities and bad management structures at the time. Whilst much has changed at The Jam Jar in recent years, we acknowledge the harm caused by this event. We have since done our best to identify how we might heal this relationship and recognize a written statement is necessary.

It goes on with Core Values, all are welcome, communities, diverse audiences, Safer Space Policy. Nothing about women or feminists of course, no reaching out or apologizing to them, only “the trans community.”

But that wasn’t good enough. They felt they had to crawl even lower so they apologized for the apology.

We would like to follow up from our post last week. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback. We appreciate that the post was not framed correctly and did not go far enough to address people’s concerns. Nor did it properly demonstrate what actions we have taken to rectify the damage done by the occurrence of an Event in April 2018 organized by ‘We Need to Talk’. The Jam Jar’s involvement in this event and how it was dealt with was incredibly distressing for the Trans Community & their allies, causing a huge degree of harm to an already marginalised group. Understandably some have since felt unsafe or chosen not to attend the venue.

Still not a word about any distress for the Women Community and their allies, of course.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on “Updating”.

…but the general public are not at all informed about the issues.

And if they rely on mainstream media to inform them, good luck with that. Their style guides and codes of conduct are preventing them from reporting honestly.

Asked “do you support giving trans people rights?” they say yes, of course. Asked “should biological men who claim to be women compete in female sports, use female changing rooms, have open access to women’s refuges?” they say no, don’t be daft.

Showing the importance of framing what little debate there is, and clarity of language. If the media manage to wake up and smell the lipstick, and start doing their job properly, we might get an informed discussion that doesn’t result in women getting robbed.

How a group like midwives get captured like this bewilders me.

Maybe it’s a generational thing? Can anyone be that scared of the whole “wrong side of history” bullshit? They can’t see that expunging “mother” from midwifery guarantees that that’s the side of history they’ll be on? Women have had to fight for their health care since forever; for an organization supposedly dedicated to the most woman-centered form of health care it’s possible to have to succumb to this is mindboggling.

It’s long since past the point where I see this sort of thing as benign or well-meaning, for the sake of being “inclusive.” It’s possible to be inclusive without obliterating the word “woman.” Add a clause or two onto what you’ve already got written down. Erasing “woman” or “mother” is not being “inclusive” it is supplanting. Replacing. It excludes and disappears most of their clientelle. The move to erase rather than add to shows me that the erasure itself is the point of the excersize.

To be that concerned about triggering the tiny number of trans identified females WHO ARE PREGNANT with the word “woman” is too much of a stretch. You’d think the PREGNANCY itself would be a hell of a lot more triggering than a word or two. If it is that disturbing, then maybe they’re really not cut out to be a parent at all.

How ugly.

Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley thinks that America should deport Senator Raphael Warnock. It’s not clear where exactly she wants to deport him to, given that he was born in Savannah, Georgia.

Haley called for the deportation of Georgia’s first Black senator at a rally in Hiram, Georgia on Sunday, as she stumped for Warnock’s Republican challenger, Herschel Walker.

“Legal immigrants are more patriotic than the leftists these days,” she said. “They worked to come into America and they love America. They want the laws followed in America. So the only person we need to make sure we deport is Warnock.”

Hur hur. A “joke,” no doubt, in the style of the former guy, who lashes out at people in that random meaningless way whenever the mood strikes him. Not a funny joke though, given the citizenship issue and its relationship to slavery. (See the Dred Scott case.)

I think I see a bit of tension looming. The Guardian tells us:

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has invested £1m in a new education toolkit, which is to be made available to all secondary schools in the capital to help pupils recognise and call out sexist and misogynistic behaviour.

Really!? That’s a thing? Those are things? Sexism and misogyny exist?

“We must put the onus of responsibility on men and boys to change the way they perceive, treat and talk about women if we are going to truly fix the problem of violence against women and girls and build a safer, fairer London for everyone,” said Khan.

I’ll be darned.

But…what if the boys all decide to be girls? Where will the onus of responsibility go then?

The mayor’s initiative will help pupils understand the impact of sexist and misogynistic behaviour on women and girls, as well as support them to identify and call out misogyny and help prevent VAWG.

Unless, of course, the pupils being called out for misogyny identify as girls. In that case the girls will be punished.

“In London and across the country we face an epidemic of violence against women and girls,” the mayor said. “As well as taking action against the perpetrators of violence, I’m determined that we do more to prevent and end the violence and misogyny too many women face on a daily basis.”

Then start with yourself, Mr Khan. Start with the fact that you booted Joan Smith out of her role as Co-Chair of the London Mayor’s Violence against Women and Girls Board after eight years of unpaid service, without a word of explanation, and you ignored her requests for an explanation. Start there. Start explaining to us how that’s not sexist as well as rude and boorish.

Go on then.

Back in the old days, 40 years ago or so, scientists and journalists were cautious in talking about climate change. Didn’t want to be seen as cranks and alarmists doncha know. Those days are over.

More and more scientists are now admitting publicly that they are scared by the recent climate extremes, such as the floods in Pakistan and west Africa, the droughts and heatwaves in Europe and east Africa, and the rampant ice melt at the poles.

That is not because an increase in extremes was not predicted. It was always high on the list of concerns alongside longer-term issues such as sea level rise. It is the suddenness and ferocity of recent events that is alarming researchers, combined with the ill-defined threat of tipping points, by which aspects of heating would become unstoppable.

For real. It’s not that long ago that the orthodox take was don’t expect big dramatic changes right now, then suddenly the big dramatic changes were all up in our faces.

Climate computer models have typically projected a fairly consistent but smooth rise in temperatures. But recently the climate seems to have gone haywire.

That heat wave in the west last summer wasn’t smooth. The floods in Pakistan aren’t smooth. The drought that dried up Europe’s rivers this past summer wasn’t smooth. The wildfires in Australia and California weren’t smooth. The disappearance of the Colorado river isn’t smooth. The melting of the permafrost, the rapidly shrinking glaciers, the disappearance of the North Pole as a solid object…none of that is smooth.

But it is the threat of unstoppable long-term change that most worries Prof Dame Jane Francis, director of the British Antarctic Survey. She has witnessed temperatures in the Antarctic of 40C above the seasonal norm, and 30C above in the Arctic.

Francis was most alarmed by a recent report warning that if the 1.5C threshold were exceeded, seen by most scientists as almost inevitable, it could trigger multiple climate tipping points – abrupt, irreversible and with dangerous impacts.

She said: “It’s really scary. It seems some of [these trends] are already under way.” She said she feared for the permafrost, the Greenland ice sheet, the Arctic sea ice, and Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier and western ice sheet.

The Arctic sea ice used to be a large solid thing that was a kind of continent. Now it isn’t.

Which counts, reality or dogma?

The hearing continues:

MG: In LGBAs own evidence they are forced to push back on othodoxy that they disagree with. We note that CC was satisfied that LGBA was engaged in political purposes but were ancillary. MM do not have to prove that CC was wrong. 

CC view is that more evidence has been made available since decision. It is clear that LGBA has purposes that are political. These are not ancillary. LGBA was established for lobbying and political purposes. They suggested investigation against Stonewall. It is clear beyond doubt that they want to change policies that are relevant to GC beliefs. BJ said in this tribunal that they were building an org that fought against GI beliefs. It was said in the tribunal that self-ID erases same-sex attraction. 

The distinction matters here because whether or not LGBA can be defined as a charity is what the hearing is about, but all the same it never stops being odd that they are having to defend themselves for knowing the difference between women and men. It never stops being odd that all this is about a mass delusion dressed up as a human rights issue. It’s not a view that men are not women, it’s just the reality. Try telling a bull elephant in musth that he’s a cow. (Kidding. Don’t try telling a bull elephant in musth anything. Stay far away.)

LGBA views must be of benefit. We say there is no concensus re this. The law is undergoing an ongoing process and for current purposes the law is not as clear as LGBA says it is. Re EA section 7. Re PC of gender reassignment. Sex isn’t used in exclusively biological sense. 

It’s bizarre to try to alter reality via laws. Theocracies of course do it all the time, but it’s still odd. A gender theocracy is really odd.

In terms of using Equality law, it is not as clear as they say it is. Re education public. LGBA approaches this with one point of view only. KH and BJ said LGBA would educate the public using GC beliefs as facts. BJ said education must be based on facts – shouldn’t say boys can be girls and girls can be boys. We say this is not neutral. On the totality of the evidence LGBA are saying they will be putting forward the GC view as the factual view. The evidence shows they haven’t done much outside the GC side of education.

The GC view is the factual view. People can have fantasies about who and what they are, but the world in general has to keep a grip on what’s fantasy and what’s real. It’s not “factual” that boys can be girls any more than it’s factual that parrots can be mastodons.

Are LGBA views of the consensus? They put forward their GC position and so can’t say that there is a common understanding. This is a paradigm case. We say that the chosen approach of LGBA is fundamentally confrontation[al] and unpleasant. 

The consensus and the common understanding are one kind of thing, and the reality is another. The consensus can be wrong. The common understanding can be wrong. A public opinion poll isn’t a biology textbook.

The Mermaids-LGB Alliance hearing resumed today.

They talk about political versus charitable, and the complexities of distinguishing between them.

MG: LGBA say gender is a construct. One needs to go beyond articles on any footing. What other material is admissable? Who is the audience to whom the article is addressed? [Bev Jackson and Kate Harris] contacted “stroppy” people re formation of LGBA.

GC views – no comprehensive definition but says sex is immutable. So people should be described with ref to their sex so male or male-bodied. Says GI orgs are homophobic. Also a view that LGB rights are not same as GI rights. The effect is to challenge or be against trans rights.

Who is the audience to whom this is addressed? The mission statement was to challenge the notion of gender and unscientific doctrines. [Allison Bailey]’s tweet encapsulates the mission of LGBA “gender extremism is about to meet its match”.

There is no single statement that shows LGBAs views – we can conclude that they go further than sex is immutable. BJ said “The word lesbian is taken”. The phrase TATG is used.

We say the articles should be read against that background. We consider that the articles are incomplete. In light of this, we say you can conclude that GC beliefs (in campaigns etc) want to change the law on policies. This would affect MM and other trans orgs. We don’t want to get into equality legislation. This is a charities case.

We should draw a distinction between what a witness says in court and what was said prior to tribunal. We say that these are expressive of LGBA views – KH speech says “[Stonewall] is at the heart of the lie of GI. We are going to campaign that confirms that there are 2 sexes.” She is talking about political lobbying. Also BJ says: “our 1st priority is to press pause on GRR in Scotland” “Our battle against Stonewall law” 

It’s weird to call it “political lobbying” to say “there are two sexes.” I know why they say it, of course, but it’s weird. It’s worth reminding ourselves of how weird it is.

Erase erase erase, don’t stop until every last trace is gone.

The Midwifery Council of NZ is updating its Midwifery Scope of Practice guidance for midwives to entirely remove the words ‘mother’ and ‘woman’.

So then it will have to be the Midpersonry Council of NZ, yes? No point in deleting “mother” and “woman” but leaving “wife.” Husbandry, like “man” and “father,” will continue as before.

With midwifery arguably the most woman-centred and mother-centred of all health professions, [Dr Sarah] Donovan says clarification is needed on what evidence base and advice underpinned the Midwifery Council’s decision to remove these words entirely. The words ‘wahine’ and ‘māmā’, used almost universally in other maternity care material in New Zealand are also not used anywhere in the English language version of the document. The lack of these words seems conspicuous considering the inclusion of te reo [the language, i.e. Maori] in the English version for other terms.

…

The previous version of the NZ Midwives Scope of Practice document referred to women and mothers throughout.

Not surprisingly, because what else would it do?

What are the nations going to be talking about in Sharm El-Sheikh this week? Payments due.

Last year’s UN climate conference in Glasgow delivered a host of pledges on emissions cuts, finance, net zero, forest protection and more.

Yay pledges! Unless…they haven’t been carried out?

Egypt says their conference will be about implementing these pledges.

What that really means is it will be all about cash, and specifically getting wealthy nations to come good on their promises of finance to help the developing world tackle climate change.

So expect the main battle lines to be between the north and south, between rich and poor nations.

And expect the rich nations to do the least they can possibly get away with. Pledging they can do, action not so much.

Top of Egypt’s “to-do” list is the $100bn (£89bn) a year developed countries promised way back in 2009 to help the developing world cut emissions and adapt to our changing climate.

Listen, the developed countries have been having a hard time, the kids are all in expensive schools, we had to buy them all SUVs, holidays in Venice and the Swiss Alps don’t come cheap, we’re taking a cruise next year – we just don’t have the cash right now. Or ever.

Europe and the US have agreed there should be a formal discussion of the issue but are unlikely to make commitments of cash.

They worry the costs will spiral into trillions of dollars as the impacts of climate change get more severe in years to come.

So what they plan to do instead is nothing, which will make the impacts of climate change pack up and go away.

The second contributor to the Guardian’s civil war in the US roundup is Stephen Marche, a Canadian novelist and essayist.

One of the surest markers of incipient civil war in other countries is the legal system devolving from a non-partisan, truly national institution to a spoil of partisan war. That has already happened in the US.

The overturning of Roe v Wade, in June, was both a symptom of the new American divisiveness and a cause of its spread. The Dobbs decision (in which the supreme court held that the US constitution does not confer the right to abortion) took the status of women in the US and dropped it like a plate-glass window from a great height. It will take a generation or more to sweep up the shards. What women are or are not allowed to do with their bodies – abortions, IVF procedures, birth control, maintaining the privacy of their menstrual cycles, crossing state lines – now depends on the state and county lines in which their bodies happen to reside. The legal reality of American women is no longer national in nature. When a woman travels from Illinois to Ohio, she becomes a different entity, with different rights and duties.

Because of the lawless refusal to appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.

The supreme court feels illegitimate because it is illegitimate. The Dobbs decision does not reflect the will of the American people because the supreme court does not reflect the will of the American people.

I’d add a second illegitimate move to Marche’s: the lies and maneuvers of the Kavanagh hearing, especially the bit where it was paused for a few days so that the FBI could “investigate” further, when it was insultingly obvious that the FBI did no such thing.

Elections have consequences, right up until the point when they don’t. On a superficial level, the 2022 midterms couldn’t matter more; American democracy itself is at stake. On a deeper level, the 2022 midterms don’t matter all that much; they will inform us, if anything, of the schedule and the manner of the fall of the republic.

I wish I could say oh things aren’t that bad.

In the Guardian three scholars tell us how a civil war could unfold in the US. The first is Barbara F. Walter, political scientist and author of How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them. She starts by pointing out that a second civil war here won’t resemble the first.

If a second civil war breaks out in the US, it will be a guerrilla war fought by multiple small militias spread around the country. Their targets will be civilians – mainly minority groups, opposition leaders and federal employees. Judges will be assassinated, Democrats and moderate Republicans will be jailed on bogus charges, black churches and synagogues bombed, pedestrians picked off by snipers in city streets, and federal agents threatened with death should they enforce federal law. The goal will be to reduce the strength of the federal government and those who support it, while also intimidating minority groups and political opponents into submission.

Some of that is already happening. It’s unpleasantly undifficult to imagine more of it happening until the fascists win.

We know this because far-right groups such as the Proud Boys have told us how they plan to execute a civil war. They call this type of war “leaderless resistance” and are influenced by a plan in The Turner Diaries (1978), a fictitious account of a future US civil war. Written by William Pierce, founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, it offers a playbook for how a group of fringe activists can use mass terror attacks to “awaken” other white people to their cause, eventually destroying the federal government. The book advocates attacking the Capitol building, setting up a gallows to hang politicians, lawyers, newscasters and teachers who are so-called “race traitors”, and bombing FBI headquarters.

It sounds like a video game. It sounds like “fun” if you like that kind of thing. I can easily imagine a lot of people joining in not on ideological grounds but just because they like that kind of “fun.”

I found this pretty exhilarating. (Too exhilarating: I couldn’t sleep afterwards.) It’s streaming until December 2.

They are if they say they are. No really.

A notorious transgender pedophile in Scotland was forced out of his house on October 19 following a citizen’s protest against his presence in a public housing complex in which many children resided.

Katie Dolatowski, 22, a trans-identified male, appeared in Kirkcaldy Sheriff’s Court on October 18 after breaching a probation condition which required Dolatowski [to] inform police of his address changes. Dolatowski is a registered sex offender, and his conditions stem from two incidents involving young girls.

On February 8th, 2018, Dolatowski was caught filming a 12-year-old girl in a women’s bathroom at an Asda supermarket in Fife, Scotland. Dolatowski was with a care aide using the women’s restroom and as the pair left, he doubled back alone to film the young girl who was within a cubicle in a state of undress by holding his phone over the cubical wall.  After noticing she was being filmed, the girl screamed for help and Dolatowski ran away. He was later identified on the supermarket’s CCTV and 12 seconds of film of the girl were found on his mobile phone and iPad.

About a month later, at another supermarket women’s restroom, he grabbed a 10-year-old girl by the face, pushed her into a cubicle, and told her to get naked below the waist. Fortunately she punched him and got away.

You’d think this would be one category where even the most ardent True Believers in the gender religion would rule out self-identifying into the female sex. If you’re a male predator who goes around attempting rape in women’s toilets then the state really should not be helping you to pretend to be a woman.

Despite his two attacks on children, Dolatowski avoided jail for the incidents, and was instead handed a three-year community order. He was also banned from having contact with children, placed on the sex offenders registry, and ordered to complete community service.

So what did he do? Amble off to live in a women’s hostel. What could go wrong?

Remember Dr Carol Hay? The philosophy academic who mourned the tragic plight of trans women in Ukraine while cheerfully calling actual women “terfs”? She’s still busy living her definition of feminism as a movement for men who call themselves women.

“Feminist professor of philosophy” her Twitter bio calls her. Yes it’s so feminist to welcome men into feminism, to center men in feminism, and to call feminist women who object rude names.

So according to “intersectional feminism” Donald Trump is a woman and a feminist if he says he is. Elon Musk is. Alex Jones is. Boris Johnson is. All they have to do is say so.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Smirky little goon.

What they owe her is the courtesy of actually understanding her stance before going public about her.

It is a sign of the times that the trans activists could simply say “transphobe” and have so many people turn on someone, even in many cases, someone they’ve felt respect for, they liked, they spent time with.

It’s the casual betrayal of someone you’ve been close with (to some degree) for years that really gets me. They don’t want to be linked to the pariah. Not because she actually is one, but because everyone else says she is. Radcliffe, Watson and Grint would have had better access than most to talk to her privately if they felt so inclined. I’m thinking none of them did. If they had, they could claim to have talked with her personally to no avail, and thus acquire even higher trans cred. Seeing how low they’ve already stooped, I doubt they’d have had any qualms about betraying the contents of any such private conversations, had they occurred.

None of these people ready to pillory Rowling for her public statements seem to understand that the rest of us can read what she actually said, and see there was nothing “hateful” or “transphobic” in them. It puts people like Radcliffe at an extreme disadvantage to have to rely on the hearsay of others’ distorted takes on them when confronted by people who have read her words for themselves. We know better. It didn’t have to be that way; they knew her.

Another individual who has tried to save his ass in all this is screenwriter (now producer) Steve Kloves. In writing the screenplays of most of the Harry Potter films, and producing the Fantastic Beasts series, he has worked alongside Rowling for the better part of twenty years. You’d think that if he’d been that close to her for that long, something would have come up. I would think he would be better placed than most to know what she thinks on any number of subjects. If anything had come up in the course of their working relationship, he could have commented on it. But what is he reacting to? Activist-led fallout from Rowling’s public statements. Not the statements themselves, not any interactions they might have had in the time of their collaboration, but the perception that whatever it was she said is “transphobic.” Did he say, “yes, I felt she was transphobic when I was working with her,” offering proof and corroboration to the charges leveled against her? No. He’s just riffing on “trans rights” in conjunction with the baseless smear campaign that failed to address or quote (or sometimes even link to) what she actually said that was transphobic. If he had any additional ammunition to bring to the fight, he would have. But he didn’t. So his lofty “statement” in “solidarity” is just another opportunistic joyride on the libelous bandwagon.

Contrast this to what happened with the accusations against Cosby and Weinstein. Once the lid was off, others came forward with their own stories of abuse suffered at the hands of these two predators. The personal testimonies of those who came forward added details and showed what appeared to be a pattern of behaviour that extended over many years. They were their own accounts, in their own words. It wasn’t the tired repetition of anodyne, boilerplate statements of “solidarity” that added nothing to the substance and detail of the accusations. Had there been a similar outpouring of previously hidden Rowling statements and actions, detailed by people who were in a position to know what Rowling “really believed,” and who were now speaking out with evidence of actual hatred of trans identifying people, then that might have been a clue. If there was more to point at than the careful, malicious, misrepresentation of her public statements, then we would have heard about that. It would have blown up all over trans twitter. Trans activists would not have hesitated to use the most powerful evidence and arguments at their disposal: instead, they were forced to make shit up, because they had to. If any such actual evidence had come up, there would be some reason to suspect that Rowling harboured some pre-existing animosity towards trans people. (That she might now feel some amount of dislike or distaste at trans activists would hardly be surprising, given the treatment she’s received at their hands. Not everyone is as eager as Mike Pence is to lick the hand that’s struck you.)

Rowling’s greatest sin was to expose the lie of “no conflict” between trans “rights” and women’s rights. What little she said about trans identified males was actually very tolerant and compassionate (more so than I would be inclined to be). Most of her statements have been about protecting the rights, safety and dignity of girls and women. Her need to voice her concern showed that she believed that trans demands were a danger to girls and women. She was right to so believe. It is instructive that this was reflexively understood by trans activists as being “anti-trans.” The careful failure to quote exactly what was transphobic about what she actually said is also telling. It would have exposed the fact that what Rowling was saying was reasonable and correct. Better to hide her actual words under your own preferred spin than to give wider exposure to her completely logical, pro-woman position. To rephrase Lewis’s Law, the response to any statement in support of protecting women’s rights against trans demands demonstrates the very need for those rights.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on A set of enduring core principles.

The problem is that the Founders were so terrified of democracy that they installed a system with so many “checks and balances” that it’s a recipe for gridlock and lack of accountability. Recent custom has only made this worse through things like requiring 60 votes in the Senate to pass most measures.

In other countries, one party (or a coalition of parties) wins an election, and has more or less free reign to govern as they see fit, subject to some broad restrictions. Then after however many years they have to return to the voters and be judged on their governance. But in the U.S., what are voters deciding this midterm election on? Democrats haven’t been able to do much of what they’d like because they weren’t able to get 60 votes in the Senate, or because Manchin or Sinema wouldn’t supply the 50th vote, or because the Supreme Court intervened. And it’s even worse when there’s divided government. Assuming the GOP takes at least one house of Congress, governance in 2023-24 is going to consist of whatever Biden can do through executive power alone, plus the bare minimum that can actually be agreed upon to keep the government funded and the debt ceiling raised. Will voters in 2024 blame Biden for not getting more done, or blame the GOP for obstructionism? Who knows? We’re lucky if the average voter knows who controls either house of Congress at any given point in time, they sure as hell don’t know what a cloture vote is.

Since most voters don’t know who to praise or blame for what they like or don’t like about the state of the country, there’s no real accountability. As a result, we’re seeing more and more “Constitutional hardball.” Not enough voters give a shit about things like democratic norms, so the GOP seeks to grab power by whatever means are technically available or at least give the appearance of being available.

Some Americans are so used to Constitutional hardball that they’re befuddled that other countries don’t play it. Many of them can’t grasp the idea that the sovereign of the United Kingdom “reigns but does not rule.” (Note: I’m not referring to Americans who dislike the idea of monarchy or have objections to it. I’m just talking about the jokers who think that there’s a real danger that Charles is going to, I don’t know, outlaw certain types of architecture he doesn’t like.)

The Canadian constitution allows federal and provincial legislatures to override the constitutional Charter of Rights, via something called the “notwithstanding clause.” It gets used occasionally, but mostly to prohibit strikes by certain unions (Ontario is considering that now, I believe), or by Quebec to enforce some of its language laws. There’s also a power of disallowance whereby the federal Cabinet — it doesn’t even require a vote of Parliament — can veto a provincial legislature’s passage of a bill. That power hasn’t been used since 1943. I can only imagine the shitshow that would result if American states could override the Bill of Rights, or if a President could invalidate state laws.