Michael Biggs responded to Bernadette Wren’s long piece in the LRB defending the GIDS.

Richard Rorty is a favourite philosopher of Bernadette Wren, and her Diary (‘Epistemic Injustice’, London Review of Books, 2 December 2021) brings to mind his definition of truth as ‘what your contemporaries let you get away with saying’.

Wren blames the disarray in her Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) on the increasing number of referrals starting in 2016. She must know that a whistle-blower, Sue Evans, had already raised concerns over a decade before. The ensuing internal review in 2006 highlighted all the problems that have become familiar: the failure to collect basic data on patients (the unit did not bother to count the number of adolescents subjected to endocrinological intervention); the inability to understand informed consent; and the pressure from patients influenced by lobbying organizations. The review was buried, of course, until the Information Commissioner’s Office forced its release last year.

Wren talked about how they thought about treatment for gender misery, but she didn’t talk about collecting basic data or counting the number of adolescents subjected to endocrinological intervention. She touched on informed consent in general but not the inability to understand it, if I remember correctly. Her leaning was all in the other direction, toward doing away with this antiquated idea that very young people are too young to make informed decisions about things like endocrinological intervention.

As Wren notes, the National Institute for Health and Care Evidence found no evidence to justify puberty suppression as a treatment for gender dysphoria. (The drugs have never been licensed for this condition, in the United Kingdom or anywhere else.) What she does not acknowledge is the responsibility of the GIDS for this lack of evidence. For over thirty years it has refused to collect data on long-term outcomes, conveniently losing track of patients when they turn 18. Indeed, it only published the short-term results of its initial experiment with puberty blockers after a protracted campaign by Stephanie Davies Arai and me.

I wonder why she doesn’t explain any of that in the LRB piece.

Was it a coincidence that clinicians started taking consent from patients exactly when the legal challenge to GIDS was launched in January 2020?

Central to that legal challenge was Keira Bell. Her absence haunts Wren’s Diary, which cites the eponymous legal judgment but never refers to her as an individual person, let alone a woman with the courage to speak honestly about her treatment. Wren continues to deny the harms inflicted on vulnerable patients like Keira Bell—say her name!—by clinicians who pursued what Wren grandiloquently calls a ‘justice project’ rather than practicing evidence-based medicine. As the former Head of Psychology at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust and the Associate Director of the GIDS, she should not be allowed to get away with it.

One person’s justice is another person’s trashed body.

I’m reading a 5k word piece by Bernadette Wren in the LRB last year. In the first part, at least, she comes across as highly aware of the questionable nature of and risks attached to the gender ideology. Around halfway she gets to the controversies.

I will offer only a few brief reflections on some of the issues over which GIDS has been most vociferously attacked. The first contention is that there wasn’t enough research evidence to enable GIDS to offer medical therapies to young people with confidence. This is an important challenge, but it relies on an idealised conception of medicine as offering effective and safe interventions, based on a wide range of randomised-control studies with extended evaluation. The problem with this view is that many paediatric medical interventions are not backed up by such studies, but depend on confidence in the existing, broader knowledge base (often from studies on adults) and are justified by the concern to relieve suffering.

But is trying to swap a person’s “gender” actually a medical intervention at all? Is it medical at all?

 Very many mental health treatments (medical and psychological) are poorly evidenced by these standards, including those routinely offered at the Tavistock to both children and adults. But compassion demands that we provide forms of treatment that are grounded in theory and in the experience of well-trained and accredited professionals, and which correspond to the values of the patient. Put simply, many questions around treatment are not settled by science alone, because scientific knowledge is itself social knowledge. When we devise treatment plans, we inevitably work within what society considers a just response to suffering; our research is based on culturally derived ideals about what constitutes a worthwhile life; treatment decisions reflect prevalent notions of self-determination, including of the rights of minors.

But is trying to change someone’s “gender” really a treatment? Or is it something else? I think I get what she’s talking about, but I also think “gender” swapping is snake oil, and very damaging snake oil at that.

A second point of attack is that the service was in the grip of an ideology, one that has taken hold in government, academia, medicine and the law. I disagree. GIDS’s patchwork of pragmatic, values-based commitments, its agnosticism about causality and its hesitancy over the absolute normalisation of gender transition in young people, strike me as far from ideological.

Well, she knows it from the inside and I don’t, but there is for instance Keira Bell, so…

What is true – and perhaps the ideology attack is trying to get at this – is that GIDS, from its modest start, was a justice project as well as a therapeutic project. By justice, I mean it aspired to widen the circle of people whose experience of the self is listened to with respect. This meant not automatically deeming a child’s atypical gender identification problematic, and not striving to modify that identity in the direction of a more orthodox body/mind relationship. It also meant not evading the fact that trans, non-binary and queer people have been (and often still are) dismissed as knowledge holders within healthcare systems; that they are subject to ‘epistemic injustice’, since society as a whole lacks an adequate interpretative framework to understand their experiences.

Ah. Perhaps this is where the problem resides. The thing is, there are good and compelling reasons not to take “a child’s atypical gender identification” at face value, or to “affirm” it, or to amplify it with hormones or blockers or both. There are good and compelling reasons not to take a child’s experience of the self at face value. Children are children. Their brains are still developing. There’s a lot they don’t know, and a lot they don’t understand. A justice project that overlooks that or pretends it’s not true is going to make mistakes.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Specialists.

In the therapy room, therapist and client draw on these different vocabularies and matrices of meaning, and our task is always to resist speaking one dimensionally; this is the reflexive work of therapy. The decision to recommend physical treatment for young people is then a genuinely shared but imperfect decision, involving the client, family, other professionals in the context of a wider cultural world, in which the meaning of trans is constantly shaped and re-shaped, but which rests on no foundation of truth. The therapist is not burdened with needing to be right or certain, but to offer a reflexive and thoughtful space to help clients explore the architecture and borders of their gendered world view. [Thinking postmodern and practising in the enlightenment: Managing uncertainty in the treatment of children and adolescents, Dr Bernadette Wren]

Time to break out the decoder ring again. Here’s what I get out of this:

We really don’t know what the fuck we’re talking about, but if we notice that we’re in danger of drifting towards concepts of “truth” and “fact”, we’ll move swiftly back to confusing obscurantism that cloaks our ignorance in a smokescreen of esoteric, multisyllabic verbiage. We might be making this shit up as we go along, but at least it will look like we’re doing something.

In the meantime, we’re going to screw around with drugs and “surgery” that might not even help you feel any better about yourself, but we’ll have made you and your family complicit in your own mutilation and permanent medico-psychological dependency. We’re making sure there’s plenty of blame to go ’round, and lots of others who aren’t us to share in it.

There is no end-point or goal in this process beyond the process itself. We don’t know what “transness” is, but we’ll leave no stone unturned in our search for whatever we end up deciding it might be, for the moment. Then it might mean something else, and we’ll chase that fleeting idea too. After all, it’s the journey that counts, and who better to travel with than those of us who’ve helped shape your entire self-image and world view. But if things go south, you’re as much to blame as we are.

And aren’t “reflexive” and “thoughtful” opposites? Are they being hastily deliberative, or are they cogitating immediately? Perhaps she was reaching for “reflective”, but thought it sounded to ordinary and inactive, and so grabbed for the next word in the “matrix of meaning.” One word’s as good as another when you’re making shit up, right?

H/t Night Crow

Narcissism continues its march through the institutions:

A transgender mountain biker dominating the women’s competition has said it’s ‘horrifying’ that critics think people like her are ruining the sport.

People like HIM. Of course people like him will, if allowed, ruin women’s sport.

Kate Weatherly, 20, who began taking hormone blockers when she was 17, said a proposed open competition for transgender athletes would ‘limit their abilities’.

It will “limit their abilities” only in the sense of limiting their ability to cheat by competing against women and thus ruining the women’s sport.

The New Zealand athlete was considered an average rider when she formerly competed in the men’s open division, where she usually finished about mid-pack.

But competing against women of course he wins every race. Bully for him.

In a recent appearance on TVNZ, Weatherly said female athletes faced bigger issues than concerns over transgender women ‘ruining the sport’.

That may be, but it’s beside the point. Weatherly still has no business competing against women, and he’s a flagrant bully to insist on doing so in the face of objections.

‘People talk about the fact that we’re coming in and ruining the sport, but there are way bigger issues that women in sport face,’ she said.

Nevertheless having entitled pigs like him come along and tell them what issues they get to talk about, and that he gets to ruin their chances because there are worse things, is more than big enough.

She told Stuff that she disagreed with a proposed gender-neutral category for transgender athletes because, in her mind, she is a woman.

And the Mail is helping him with all this she her crap.

‘My thing is, I’m not gender neutral. I’m a girl. The whole idea of a third category invalidates my sense of identity,’ she said.

And he considers “validation” of his “identity” more important than women’s opportunities to play women’s sports. He’s entirely happy to ruin it for all women who have to compete against him, for the sake of his precious idenniny.

Is that right?

In case you can’t read it, it’s “India” Willoughby replying to a tweet about stochastic terror and the violence against Pelosi:

Stochastic Terrorism is when an individual, website or movement doesn’t physically attack you themselves – but knowingly creates the mood so that others do. Think Donald Trump, the British Gov, the GC movement, Kiwi Farms or Twitter trolls like Alex Belfield.

Yes, Donald Trump, Kiwi Farms, gender skeptical feminists – they all go in the same basket.

The reality is it applies much better to Willoughby, as illustrated by this very tweet. He’s a taunter, a shit-stirrer, a puller of hair, a thrower of spitballs. He’s not serious, he doesn’t make arguments, he just sneers and draws absurd analogies.

Bolsonaro manages what Trump never has and probably never will:

Jair Bolsonaro has reportedly thrown in the towel after his presidential election defeat in Brazil on Sunday, telling members of the supreme court: “It’s over.”

He went silent for nearly two days after being beaten by the leftwing former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the vote. When Bolsonaro finally appeared before the cameras on Tuesday afternoon, he failed to explicitly concede defeat or congratulate his vanquisher.

However, shortly after that appearance, he made his way to the supreme court where he met seven of its judges, including Edson Fachin, who later told journalists that Bolsonaro had indicated to them that he understood the writing was on the wall.

He could tell Brazil, or he could tell seven judges. He’s not all that different from Trump.

In an interview with the newspaper O Globo, Bolsonaro’s vice-president, Hamilton Mourão, made it clear he accepted the defeat. “There’s no point in crying any more, we lost the game,” he said.

Mourão also signalled that he opposed the pro-Bolsonaro protests that have involved hardcore supporters blockading roads to demand a military uprising, bringing traffic chaos to cities including Rio and São Paulo. “There are 58 million people who are unhappy,” Mourão said of Bolsonaro’s voters. “But they agreed to take part in the game. So they now need to calm down.”

Bolsonaro appeared to send a different message with his deliberately ambiguous two-minute address on Tuesday. In it, the rightwing populist called the demonstrations “the fruit of indignation and a feeling of injustice about how the electoral process played out”. “Peaceful protests will always be welcome,” Bolsonaro said, although he said destruction was not welcome.

“We love you, you’re very speshul…”

When headlines manipulate the readers:

Gender identity specialists accuse psychology body of ‘contributing to fear’

What are gender identity specialists? What is gender identity? What kind of thing is gender identity? How are specialists in gender identity trained? What do they know? Why can’t they make it make sense?

Some of the most senior gender identity specialists in the UK have accused their professional body of “contributing to an atmosphere of fear” around young people receiving gender-related healthcare.

What is “gender-related healthcare”? In what sense is it health care? In what sense is it not experimentation on children and adolescents?

More than 40 clinical psychologists have signed an open letter to the Association of Clinical Psychologists UK in protest at the organisation’s recent position statement on the provision of services for gender-questioning children and young people.

What do they mean by “services”? Who is defining them as “services”? Is it a “service” to mutilate people’s genitals and/or breasts? What does “gender-questioning” mean? How is it different from “gender identity”? Why was the term changed without explanation?

They say they believe there was a failure to properly consult experts in the field or service users, resulting in a “misleading” statement that “perpetuates damaging discourses about the work and gender-diverse identities more broadly”.

What makes people “experts in the field”? What exactly is “the field”? What is “the work”? What does “gender-diverse identities” mean? Is it the same as “gender identities” and “gender-questioning”?

The co-organisers of the letter, Dr Laura Charlton, who worked at GIDS from 2014 to 2020 and is now clinical lead at the Leeds Gender Identity Service, and Dr Aidan Kelly, who worked at the service from 2016 to 2021 and is now principal clinical psychologist at the Nottingham Centre for Transgender Health, said that the letter was particularly significant because it was the first time that these practitioners, who share many decades’ worth of experience, had come together in public to express their concerns.

Yes but experience of what? Can we be sure it’s not experience of credulous affirmation of a new and highly questionable ideology?

“We acknowledge that there were some valid concerns about the GIDS service, not least the significant waiting times, but we take issue with how it is now being portrayed. This is the first time that so many specialists working within UK gender services have come together to speak out about their portrayal, often by people who do not share our specialist knowledge.”

But what is the “specialist knowledge”? Is it really knowledge? Is it more a collection of assumptions? Is it like specialist knowledge of infectious diseases or specialist knowledge of homeopathy?

Daniel Radcliffe Says Speaking Out Against J.K. Rowling Was ‘Important’: ‘Not Everybody in the Franchise’ Shares Her Beliefs

Yes very important to bite the hand that made him famous and rich, because some people In The Franchise (by which he means some people who have profited hugely from Rowling’s novels) believe in magic fantasy gender.

In a new interview with IndieWire, Radcliffe opened up about why he decided to speak out publicly against the author who essentially gave him his acting career.

We know why he did it. He did it because he believes in a stupid new religion of gender, and he believes that open disbelief in that religion is heretical and evil and should be punished.

“The reason I felt very, very much as though I needed to say something when I did was because, particularly since finishing ‘Potter,’ I’ve met so many queer and trans kids and young people who had a huge amount of identification with Potter on that,” Radcliffe said. “And so seeing them hurt on that day I was like, I wanted them to know that not everybody in the franchise felt that way. And that was really important.”

Radcliffe published his letter on The Trevor Project’s website. The group is a nonprofit organization that focuses on suicide prevention efforts in the LGBTQ community.

There is no such “community.” T doesn’t belong, and Q doesn’t mean anything.

“It was really important as I’ve worked with the Trevor Project for more than 10 years, and so I don’t think I would’ve been able to look myself in the mirror had I not said anything,” Radcliffe added. “But it’s not mine to guess what’s going on in someone else’s head.”

Radcliffe should talk to some people in the LGB “community” who haven’t accepted the forced teaming and don’t buy into the gender religion.

Citizen journalism in action:

It didn’t take long for the news of the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, to get wrapped up in conspiracy theories.

Once the police identified the suspect in custody as David DePape, journalists quickly identified blog posts that appeared to be written by him. The writer of those posts embraced far-right views, including antisemitic tropes, false claims about the 2020 election and conspiracies about COVID vaccines. DePape’s daughter told The Los Angeles Times that her father wrote the posts.

So, naturally, people who embrace antisemitic tropes, false claims about the 2020 election, and conspiracies about COVID vaccines are going to rush to embrace fantasy-based accounts of the attack on Paul Pelosi. It’s what they do.

The Gateway Pundit, a website well-known for publishing false stories, called the attack “another liberal lie.” Conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza tweeted “nothing about the public account so far makes any sense.”

Do such things usually “make sense”? Is logic the primary characteristic of violent fascists?

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz shared a tweet calling the attacker “a hippie nudist from Berkeley” and dismissed the idea that the attack was motivated by right-wing ideology as “absurd.” The new owner of Twitter, billionaire Elon Musk, retweeted a story with lurid suggestions from a website that’s notorious for publishing falsehoods. Donald Trump Jr. also shared a meme amplifying that same theme. All three have since deleted their posts.

Oh darn. They might have made it make sense.

As is often the case, many aspects of false narratives aren’t new. One that ISD identified surrounding the attack was that the attack was a so-called false flag operation, where the apparent perpetrator is affiliated with the perpetrator’s opponents.

Alex Jones type of thing.

Jones infamously said that the Sandy Hook school shootings were staged by gun-control advocates to create a pretext to restrict gun ownership. He was recently ordered to pay more than $1 billion in damages stemming from those false claims. Fact-checking organizations like PolitiFact have debunked similar false flag claims in the wake of the Uvalde shooting, Buffalo shooting, and El Paso and Dayton shootings in 2019 and have flagged it as a recurring theme.

False flag conspiracies as a reaction to far-right violence became more entrenched after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Holt says. Supporters of former President Donald Trump alleged that the attack was actually engineered by the FBI and other elements of the so-called “deep state” to discredit Trump and prevent him from serving another term.

Donald Trump himself is a false flag conspiracy, engineered by The Left to make The Right look bad. Hahaha it’s working, although the side effects have been a little harsh.

A lot of lies being pushed about the Pelosi attack:

False claims are being spread online about the assailant who broke into the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and attacked her husband with a hammer on October 28. Authorities have stated that the suspect, David DePape, broke a glass door of the home and entered with a hammer, zip ties and other supplies, intending to kidnap the Democratic lawmaker, who was not present. DePape instead confronted Paul Pelosi and struck him with a hammer before he was tackled by officers and arrested.

Authorities have indeed stated that. The Department of Justice for instance has stated it:

A California man was charged today with assault and attempted kidnapping in violation of federal law in connection with the break-in at the residence of Nancy and Paul Pelosi in San Francisco on Friday.

According to the complaint, David Wayne DePape, 42, of Richmond, was arrested on Friday inside the Pelosi residence by San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) police officers responding to a 911 call from Paul Pelosi, husband of U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Paul Pelosi later described to police that he had been asleep when DePape, whom he had never seen before, entered his bedroom looking for Nancy Pelosi.

According to the complaint, minutes after the 911 call, two police officers responded to the Pelosi residence where they encountered Paul Pelosi and DePape struggling over a hammer. Officers told the men to drop the hammer, and DePape allegedly gained control of the hammer and swung it, striking Pelosi in the head. Officers immediately restrained DePape, while Pelosi appeared to be unconscious on the ground. As set forth in the complaint, once DePape was restrained, officers secured a roll of tape, white rope, a second hammer, a pair of rubber and cloth gloves, and zip ties from the crime scene, where officers also observed a broken glass door to the back porch.   

DePape is charged with one count of assault of an immediate family member of a United States official with the intent to retaliate against the official on account of the performance of official duties, which carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison. DePape is also charged with one count of attempted kidnapping of a United States official on account of the performance of official duties, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

U.S. Attorney Stephanie M. Hinds for the Northern District of California, Special Agent in Charge Robert K. Tripp of the FBI San Francisco Field Office, and Chief J. Thomas Manger of the U.S. Capitol Police made the announcement.

But hey, some guy on Twitter said otherwise. Who ya gonna believe?

Pips & Andy respond (except not really):

I haven’t been able to find another source for the statement so that I could just quote it, so it will have to be images via Stoat.

Helen Joyce points out what’s missing:

A sequel we can all do without:

The Republican nominee for Congress in Texas’ 7th district is a self-proclaimed history buff, but his take on Anne Frank is not one that most historians would endorse.

Johnny Teague, an evangelical pastor and business owner who won the district’s primary in March, in 2020 published “The Lost Diary of Anne Frank,” a novel imagining the famous Jewish Holocaust victim’s final days in the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps as she might have written them in her diary. 

The kicker: In Teague’s telling, Frank seems to embrace Christianity just before she is murdered by the Nazis.

Why stop there? Why not have her embrace Nazism too? It would make as much sense. Hitler’s hatred of “the Jews” was rooted in Christianity, so embracing Xianity in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen would be a pretty strange thing to do.

Published by Las Vegas-based publisher Histria Books, the speculative book attempts to faithfully extend the writing style of Frank’s “original” diary entries into her experiences in the camps: it “picks up where her original journey left off,” according to the promotional summary…

“I would love to learn more about Jesus and all He faced in His dear life as a Jewish teacher,” Teague’s Anne Frank character muses at one point, saying that her dad had tried to get her a copy of the New Testament. Anne’s father Otto Frank, who in real life did survive the Holocaust, seems to have been spared a tragic fate in Teague’s telling because of his interest in learning about Jesus. 

Later, Anne does learn about Jesus through other means, reciting psalms and expressing sympathy for Jesus’ plight.

It’s not just the conversion that’s repulsive, it’s also the presumption to try to continue the diary, to pretend to be able to imagine and convey what that was like from the point of view of a victim. We can’t imagine it and we sure as hell can’t convey it. It’s disgusting to pretend we can.

H/t What a Maroon

Varsity did an interview with Arif Ahmed last May…on the subject of free speech.

In an interview with Varsity, Arif Ahmed, an outspoken philosophy lecturer at Gonville & Caius College, said that “free speech is deeply radical and progressive”, but is currently under threat in Cambridge.

…

He believes such training is necessary because “it is a very natural impulse to try and suppress the views of people you don’t agree with.”

The philosopher is no stranger to defending free speech in Cambridge.

In 2020, he led the charge against the University’s plans for a new “free speech” policy which Ahmed wrote would have “required all of us to ‘respect’ the opinions and ‘identities’ of others” – plans which “offered practically endless scope for censorship”.

And for lavish magical “respect” for practically endless new magic meaningless “identities.” A vision of hell.

Cambridge students will get some training in not trying to suppress every opinion they dislike.

Students at the University of Cambridge will be given free-speech training in an effort to tackle so-called “cancel culture” against guest speakers.

The sessions by two academics will aim to teach undergraduates to tolerate views that they disagree with and could be rolled out to more universities if successful.

Note that what’s meant here by “tolerate views” is not agree with them or accept them or even try to understand them, it’s just allow them to be heard. That’s not asking all that much. Cambridge isn’t likely to invite professional racists to spew racist abuse for half an hour, so maybe the students can actually bring themselves to stop trying to filter out scary feminist speakers who think women matter.

A lot of scary events were cancelled last year, and this year hasn’t begun all that robustly.

Cambridge alumni threatened to pull funding from Gonville and Caius College after its master boycotted a gender-critical speaker last week. Helen Joyce, an author and former Economist journalist, was invited to the college by one of its fellows for a debate on gender ideology.

However, before she spoke, Professor Pippa Rogerson, the college’s master, joined Dr Andrew Spencer, the senior tutor, in telling students that Joyce’s views were “polemics”.The head of Cambridge’s sociology faculty also apologised to students for the “distress caused” after sending an email out inviting them to the talk.

It’s good that Pipps and Andy got named, given how they treated Helen Joyce. They should be getting some training themselves. Too bad the sociology weasel wasn’t named.

The new training scheme is being led by Arif Ahmed, an outspoken Cambridge philosophy professor, who will host a two-part series of free-speech training sessions at Gonville and Caius College next month.

Pipps and Andy, meet Arif. You have a lot to learn.

He said the training sessions were for students but he would consider opening them up to fellow academics and suggested that some employed by universities refused to tolerate views they disagreed with.

Why yes, they do. Sally Hines anyone? Alison Phipps? And of course our own Pipps & Andy.

He added: “As we have seen recently there are also many academics who don’t understand the importance of tolerating views that they find offensive. It may be that similar training is necessary for academics — as much as it horrifies me to say that.”

May we call you Professor Ahmed?

Wait a little longer.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. temporarily halted the release of former President Donald Trump’s tax records to a congressional committee, and called for more briefing in the case by Thursday.

Without the Supreme Court’s intervention, the records were set to be turned over to the House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday.

And we can’t have that, can we. Trump must be protected. Not that this has anything to do with partisanship at all.

Mike Pence has written a memoir.

A post-election meeting at which advisers led by Rudy Giuliani attacked campaign lawyers and urged Donald Trump not to accept his election defeat was “a new low” for a president “well acquainted with rough-and-tumble debates”, Mike Pence writes in a forthcoming memoir.

That is, a president who is a notorious crook and cheat and bully, whose every act is a new low because everything he does and says is low so each new item is automatically a new low. Mike Pence was part of the crook’s team, so it’s way too late for him to be talking about new lows.

Of the meeting in November 2020, the former vice-president writes: “In the end, that day the president made the fateful decision to put Giuliani and [attorney] Sidney Powell in charge of the legal strategy … The seeds were being sown for a tragic day in January.”

Not tragic, evil. That day was all Trump’s doing, and the doing was evil. Pence is prettying it up because he was part of it.

By openly blaming Trump for events leading to the January 6 insurrection, when a pro-Trump mob attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory, Pence risks angering Republicans he must court as he considers the next nomination for president.

Diddums. Pence should go away from any form of politics forever. He worked for Trump throughout his “administration” and he should isolate himself in shame and regret.

Ah the ol’ tax returns – you know, the ones he couldn’t release because he was being audited, even though being audited doesn’t in any way prevent the release of tax returns.

Former President Trump on Monday filed an emergency application asking the Supreme Court to temporarily block a House committee from obtaining his tax returns.

The ones he could have released back in 2015 if he hadn’t been such a crook. It’s not required, but presidential candidates have been doing it for years, and he was the first to refuse in all those years. Why would he do that? Same reason he’d take the 5th, probably, but in this case we get to draw conclusions from the refusal. My conclusion: he’s dirty.

His request comes after a federal appeals court last week declined the former president’s request to block the release of his tax returns, CNN reports.

They must be Communists and Antifa and filthy immigrants on that court, right? No decent American patriot would decline a request from Trump.

CNN has more:

The House Ways and Means Committee is set to receive former President Donald Trump’s IRS tax returns in one week after a federal appeals court on Thursday declined Trump’s request to hold up the release.

The Supreme Court could still intervene if Trump appeals.

A three-judge panel on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals decided they won’t put the handover of the former president’s tax returns on hold after the full appeals court rejected Trump’s request that they review an earlier decision allowing for the release of the returns.

The god-emperor doesn’t win every time.

New boss just like the old boss. Again.

But what is he calling “trans rights”? What are the rights that are specific to trans people? Do they conflict with other people’s rights? Do they conflict with women’s rights? If they do, why does he refuse to discuss the issue?

Same old same old same old. We have to assume that all demands by all people who call themselves trans have to be met without question and without delay. We have to assume that any objections to the loss of their own rights coming from women and/or LGB people are evil and outrageous and to be ignored.

Sorry, that doesn’t work for us.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is underwhelmed by Elon Musk.

It took less than 48 hours for Elon Musk to reveal just how dangerous his new toy can be to this world. Replying to a tweet from former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the man worth more than $210bn with more than 112 million Twitter followers spread a dangerous conspiracy theory intended to distract people from an attempted political assassination just one week before a major US election.

Clinton had warned that “the Republican party and its mouthpieces now regularly spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories”, in response not just to the attack on home and spouse of Nancy Pelosi but a slew of attempted kidnappings and threats against elected officials who have stood up to the Trump agenda and the attempted overthrow of the US government in January 2021.

Musk replied to it by citing a discredited rightwing blog claiming there was something else at work in the hammer attack that put Paul Pelosi into the hospital, that it might not have been motivated by animus on the extreme right. Musk later deleted his response. “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” Musk wrote on Sunday morning.

The trouble is that like so many extremely rich people, he’s not particularly thoughtful or intelligent.

Then again, everything that Musk expresses is unclear. It’s a series of hunches and feelings, devoid of learning, analysis, rigour or consideration of consequences.

Musk, despite his wealth, good fortune and global influence, is not a serious person. He never exhibits any deep grasp of any issue of substance. He’s shown from the beginning of his dance with buying Twitter that he does not understand the company, how it makes money, how or why it tries to keep the experience pleasant and clear for its 230 million users, or why it’s such a terribly run business.

…

Musk is unserious but is toying with dangerous ideologies nonetheless. He subscribes to “longtermism”, a muddled pseudo-philosophy that emerged from an amalgam of radical utilitarianism and “effective altruism”. It exhibits complete faith in the ability of technological and financial elites like Musk himself to re-engineer humanity, transcend corporeal limits, embrace other planets as homes and destinations, and surrender autonomy to elites instead of people. It’s fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-humanistic.

Not to mention anti-knowing what’s possible. We can’t stop destroying this planet but we can figure out a way to move the necessary contents of this planet to a different planet so that we can move ourselves there?

Any group or force that can disrupt or distract serious thought about serious problems serves the cause of longtermism. If enough people resign from the public sphere and surrender their autonomy to technology, those who control that technology can guide us anywhere they want, regardless of the pain suffered along the way. The basic tenet of longtermism is something like: “As long as we can check out of this hotel room, we might as well trash it. We will build and own a better hotel in the long term.”

Except that we won’t, because we can’t, because it can’t be done.

A man tells the world what a magnificent, subversive act it is for a man to sing a song about how much better than women he is and then get naked on live tv.

Maybe the problem is that the naked body was transgender? he says. And/or that he called Jordan’s penis and boobs magnificent?

I called them that because their very exposure felt like a magnificent, subversive act, saying as it did, “Here I am.”

That’s so interesting because you know what it feels like to a woman? It feels like all those other times a man has exposed his penis [though usually not his “boobs”] to them without invitation, starting in childhood. To us it doesn’t feel magnificent or subversive, it just feels like the same old sly power move.

It takes really impressive stupidity and obliviousness to blather in public about the magnificent subversion of a man getting his dick out when it’s not exactly a secret that girls and women are all too familiar with this particular brand of “subversion.” It’s like calling it magnificent and subversive to walk around in a KKK t-shirt. It’s like calling it magnificent and subversive to slap posters of lynchings on telephone poles. The penis has a very dual nature for women, inevitably. It’s one thing for lovers and spouses, and very much another for strangers. An unrequested penis is not just a gesture, subversive or otherwise; it’s also a threat and potentially a weapon. That’s sad but it’s the reality. How utterly indifferent to female people do you have to be not to know that?