Oops!

Even now the ACLU is promoting its stupid all-trans all the time babble on Facebook. They’re obsessed. I’ll never understand why. Maybe because they missed out on the earlier struggles and want to experience something like them? But it’s a hiding to nothing, because the trans issue isn’t like Civil Rights or feminism or lesbian and gay rights or the peace movement. They want it to be but it isn’t. One it’s a tiny fraction of any population, and two it’s fictitious, and three it’s unavoidably narcissistic. People who aren’t narcissists don’t consider their personal discomforts worth a political campaign, let alone one that destroys the rights of women and lesbians and gays. It just doesn’t work to try to gin up political fervor about bratty narcissists telling other people what pronouns to use.

Anyway. Their wisdom:

Trans women are women.

Bad beginning. No they’re not. And as always, it’s just women they push around. They don’t bother to say Trans men are men. New boss exactly like the old boss – and they can’t even see it.

“Cisgender women should be concerned whenever an alleged concern for ‘protecting’ our well-being is invoked to justify exclusion.” — Shayna Medley & Galen Sherwin

Exclusion of what though? Of men from the class “women.” That is, of course, not “exclusion” in any pejorative sense, it’s just reality. It’s not “exclusion” to pat the dog instead of the table or the window, it’s just knowing what is what. There is nothing invidious about “excluding” men from the category “women.” The ACLU can keep its thoughts about “protecting” women to itself, because they’re bad and destructive.

Trans people have always been here.

They don’t know that. How would they know that?

“Trans people are not new. We have always been here. As long as there’s been recorded human history, we have always existed. But we have been written out of the human story — and when you come from a community that is without a full range of possibility models, it raises the question, in yourself as well as others, of whether or not you deserve rights or a place in society.”

If trans people have been written out of the human story, how do they and the ACLU know they’ve always been here?

You couldn’t make it up. “We’ve always been here, and we know this because there’s no record of it.”

It’s sad. There isn’t much time left, and apparently what little there is is going to be spent replacing women with petulant men talking about their pronouns.

Jon Pike flagged this up as a must listen and boy is he right.

I took the deep breaths during more than before, but I made it through.

I might make “mother of swimmer” a new swear.

Not playing games any more.

Climate breakdown is accelerating rapidly, many of the impacts will be more severe than predicted and there is only a narrow chance left of avoiding its worst ravages, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said.

And, one more item, does it look as if anyone is doing enough to avoid its worst ravages? Hell no.

Even at current levels, human actions in heating the climate are causing dangerous and widespread disruption, threatening devastation to swathes of the natural world and rendering many areas unliveable, according to the landmark report published on Monday.

As we keep noting – it’s already happening. Not soon, but now.

In what some scientists termed “the bleakest warning yet”, the summary report from the global authority on climate science says droughts, floods, heatwaves and other extreme weather are accelerating and wreaking increasing damage.

And they’re not all happening Somewhere Else.

Allowing global temperatures to increase by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, as looks likely on current trends in greenhouse gas emissions, would result in some “irreversible” impacts. These include the melting of ice caps and glaciers, and a cascading effect whereby wildfires, the die-off of trees, the drying of peatlands and the thawing of permafrost release additional carbon emissions, amplifying the warming further.

And that last item is a big unknown, because the scientists don’t have enough data yet.

The report says:

• Everywhere is affected, with no inhabited region escaping dire impacts from rising temperatures and increasingly extreme weather.
• About half the global population – between 3.3 billion and 3.6 billion people – live in areas “highly vulnerable” to climate change.
• Millions of people face food and water shortages owing to climate change, even at current levels of heating.
• Mass die-offs of species, from trees to corals, are already under way.
• 1.5C above pre-industrial levels constitutes a “critical level” beyond which the impacts of the climate crisis accelerate strongly and some become irreversible.
• Coastal areas around the globe, and small, low-lying islands, face inundation at temperature rises of more than 1.5C.
• Key ecosystems are losing their ability to absorb carbon dioxide, turning them from carbon sinks to carbon sources.

And still we’re not really doing anything.

We’re just a primate species, just great apes who have developed some impressive talents, but it turns out those talents have empowered us to destroy our own and everyone else’s ecosystem, without empowering us to stop.

Not only are we cooking the planet, we’re also funding Putin’s war on Ukraine.

The war in Ukraine should encourage the world to accelerate the switch to renewable energy, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has said.

…

A quarter of the European Union’s petroleum oil imports come from Russia, along with almost half its gas.

The irony that European nations are effectively paying for the war in Ukraine has not been lost on the continent’s leaders.

The panic that Putin’s actions caused in energy markets has only increased the profits Russia makes by driving up the price we all pay for energy – which is one reason we are already seeing a dramatic pivot to alternative supplies.

Maybe he’s doing it to drive the prices up.

Quack demands Fauci debate him, complains when Fauci fails to take him up on the attractive opportunity.

GOP Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz, more commonly known as Dr Oz, is facing backlash from the medical community after his sustained attacks on infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci in his campaign ads.

Oz got his celebrity-start by appearing on Oprah Winfrey’s show. He’s a woo-peddler. Fauci has other things to do.

Appearing on Newsmax last Thursday, Dr Oz said he wanted to debate Dr Fauci on vaccine mandates and natural immunity from coronavirus infections. “He is a petty tyrant. He got Covid wrong. He continues to get it wrong,” Dr Oz told the outlet.

In a separate tweet that he posted along with his campaign ad video, Dr Oz said: “It’s past time Fauci faces the fact that he got Covid wrong. So, doctor to doctor – let’s debate. This Doctor is in, are you?”

In what though?

Dang, that’s insulting.

A lesbian conference next week:

The 25th Lesbian Lives Conference will take place in University College Cork, Ireland from 4th-5th March 2022. The LGBT+ Staff Network of University College Cork, in conjunction with the community organisation LINC and scholars from University College Dublin, Cambridge University, and University of Brighton Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender Research, are delighted to host the conference.  

Great! Something for women for a change. Well done University College Cork.

The theme for the 2022 Lesbian Lives Conference is Solidarity.  

The confirmed Keynote Presenters at the Lesbian Lives 2022 Conference are:  

– Professor Susan Stryker, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Institute of LGBT Studies, University of Arizona   

Oh. Wait. Susan Stryker is a man.

He’s a man and he’s the first item on the list. They’re importing him all the way from Arizona – for a lesbian conference.

The insults just keep rolling in.

The “who cares?” people were saying “who cares?” in response to Peter Boghossian for one. I’m not a fan of Peter Boghossian’s, but this time I’m on his team as opposed to theirs.

Well, it shows it’s possible to agree on some of them, some of the time – but as I mentioned, there are people being ostentatiously indifferent and scornful. But broadly speaking, yes, there are some things that very few people will celebrate or shrug off with “I don’t care and neither should you.”

I’m seeing a weird little pocket of people on Twitter bragging about how much they don’t give a shit about Ukraine and how fake it all is and how people who are talking about it are just ____ – you know, showing off, virtue signaling, following the woke herd, that kind of thing.

Well, first of all, nukes.

Second – why wouldn’t we give a shit? Why is it wrong to give a shit, and enlightened not to?

I suppose one answer could be that we can’t do anything about it, and paying attention and giving a damn is just self-indulgent or showing off or whatever. But I don’t think that’s right. I think paying attention and giving a damn does matter to the people who are having to live through this. Material help matters more, of course, but then material help starts with giving a damn, so the two are not opposites or either-or. And I think the people huddled in their basements listening to the shells explode do need to know we’re not singing a happy tune all the while.

Also, though…trying to dig a little harder…I don’t want to be the kind of person who doesn’t give a shit. Now that I say that I think there’s a philosopher or psychologist or someone who says that’s central to morality: not wanting to be the kind of person who doesn’t have any. I wonder who. Jonathan Haidt? Joshua Green? Patricia Churchland? I’m not remembering. Maybe it’s all of them, maybe it’s common knowledge. Anyway I don’t. Seeing people make callous jokes about Ukraine makes me feel sick. I suppose you can say that’s a self-regarding reason for caring therefore you don’t actually care at all, but…I still don’t think so. I think not wanting to be cruel or callous is…better than wanting to.

India Willoughby has no shame.

I read this anorexia-child celebrity story in the Guardian because anorexia interests me, and the intersection of it with women, celebrity, fashion, conformity, the pressures on women to be hot and emaciated both at once interests me a lot. So I read down and read down and – get to this ironic juxtaposition.

Gee, I wonder why so many young women are anorexic. I just can’t figure it out, can you?

Originally a comment by Pliny the In Between on Special Alert.

My actual earliest childhood memory is of my parents whispering to each other when they thought my brother and I were asleep. Dad consoling my mother that being as we lived only a handful of miles from the US Navy’s primary ordinance depot that building a fallout shelter was probably a waste of time. That was during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I was staying at my grandma’s house the night that Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia.

I was in high school when Nixon set our strategic alert status to its highest level since the Cuban Missile Crisis in response to Soviet threats to intervene in the 1973 Arab Israeli War.

I scared the shit out of my civics teacher when my semester oral report was on the effects of a 5 megaton thermonuclear blast over our city center (it showed that our school was in the zone of ‘dead or to die later’).

From age 5 to 1991, I was quite sure that nuclear war was one of the three ways from which I was likely die.

Then the wall fell. Like millions I sighed with relief. Unlike most I lobbied my representatives to embrace a new Russia and do everything to find common ground and mutual advantage. The Cold War hadn’t been won – we’d just all survived it by the skin of our teeth.

Now we are right back where we (I) started – once again on the brink. Taken there by a handful of hateful old men. On the brink of the end because of one man’s greed and hatred. We must find a better way. We must find a way that prevents a handful from murdering us all. But all that hangs in the balance, it would seem, as to whether there is some senior Russian official or general who is as scared as the rest of us and says not on my watch.

As a flying horse, I know it’s not just horses that get Streptococcus equi.

As a nonbinary person, I know it’s not just women who get endometriosis

She doesn’t know that though, because she can’t, because it’s not true. Of course it’s “just” women who get endometriosis, on account of how it’s women only who have the endometrium. Just as you can’t have a broken leg unless you have at least one leg, you can’t have endometriosis if you don’t have a uterus. Men don’t have them; women do.

Imagine going to a specialist doctor and looking around the waiting room to see everyone is a different gender to you. They’re all staring at you, wondering why you’re there.

On the posters, in the magazines, behind the desk, in the chairs around you – no one looks like you.

As a nonbinary person with symptoms of endometriosis, this is my reality.

The article is accompanied by a photo and she doesn’t look like a man. She doesn’t even look very butch. She doesn’t look “feminine,” but come on now, so don’t lots of women, and that doesn’t make them some baffling third sex.

Around the same time my periods began to incapacitate my normal day-to-day life – when I was in university in Boston – I started to realise I was nonbinary (not strictly ‘girl’ or ‘boy’ but somewhere in the middle).

How does one “realise” such a thing? By spending too much time on Tumblr?

Experiencing menstruation as a trans person is bizarre because all of the horrible experiences that some cisgender women claim ‘make them a woman’ are experienced by trans men and nonbinary people daily.

That’s because trans men are women and some “nonbinary” people are women.

Also women don’t “claim” that menstruation “makes” us women, we just understand that it’s women who menstruate.

Even some trans women get monthly period cramps after being on hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

They may get some kind of cramping, but it ain’t period cramps.

Her story is sad, but not because she’s “non-binary.”

It’s all about _______

I do love the low carb one, I have to say.

Putin is allowed to do this because white privilege.

Bicycles forevaaaaaaaaaaaa

Putin has again threatened to use the nukes.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the Russian military to put its nuclear forces on “special alert” – the highest level of alert for Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces.

Speaking to top military officials, including Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, he said Western nations had taken “unfriendly actions” towards Russia and imposed “illegitimate sanctions”.

And what does he think he’s doing? Other than taking “unfriendly actions” toward Ukraine? And imposing “illegitimate” bombing and shooting and destroying?

But don’t worry, he’s just threatening to use them, not actually saying he’s going to.

The very public shift to high alert status is a way for Moscow to send a warning. Moving to alert status is likely to make it easier to launch weapons more quickly. But it does not mean there is a current intent to use them.

And? It also does not mean there is not a current intent to use them, let alone a future intent to use them.

It doesn’t help that he’s gone insane.

More on the “what is a woman?” non-question:

The Tate Modern has become engulfed in a transgender rights row after promoting a short film about the definition of “woman”.

Isn’t it interesting that it’s about the definition of woman? Not man? Not woman and man? Just woman? I think it’s very interesting. I think it’s fascinating that it’s only women who are up for debate in this intrusive, patronizing way. I just can’t take my eyes off the fact that men are allowed to go right on being men, but women are constantly interrogated and rebuked and hounded for continuing to know what women are and refusing to be told that we’re suddenly something else.

Some women protested, as well they might.

A spokesman for the group said: “We are here to say loudly and proudly to Tate Modern that women are adult human females. Many of us work with galleries and in the arts, and we know that stating this simple fact can lead to loss of work and harassment.

…

The Tate rejected the activists’ criticisms, telling The Telegraph: “We have chosen to screen a work that does not propose one perspective on the question of womanhood, but instead considers multiple perspectives.”

We don’t want multiple perspectives on “the question of womanhood,” we want womanhood to stop being a question. Never mind multiple perspectives on what we are, what about asking what men are? If you’re not asking about men, then why are you asking about women? Why is it only women who are suddenly so puzzling and question-worthy? Why do men get to skate past all of this whistling a cheerful tune?

Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on 14 million people.

The war in the East was terrible, likely the worst three years of human conduct that ever has or ever will be enacted; the horrors that the Germans and Soviets committed upon one another and the millions of civilians across the battlespace are unimaginable even to historians who’ve documented them.

The Red Army was particularly brutal to women in the territories it clawed piece by piece from the Wehrmacht, during the three years it took to reconquer the territories lost to Operations Barbarossa and Blue. The German authorities estimate that at least two million East German women were raped, not a few of them to death, and eyewitnesses in the siege of East Prussia claim that no woman between eight and eighty was spared. Estimates for the reconquered Eastern European countries are harder to come by, but there are also plenty of anecdotal accounts that tell us the Red Army’s conduct in Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland was at best a difference of degree, and not of kind. Given the much larger populations of Polish, Ukrainian, and Belarusian women, it is likely that the German share of such brutality was at most half of the whole, if not less.

Anthony Beevor’s Berlin: The Downfall 1945 goes into this aspect of the Red Army’s conduct during their victorious encirclement of Berlin. He has also written a forward to the English translation of A Woman in Berlin, which was published out of the diary of an anonymous woman who experienced the conquest first-hand. I am currently picking my way through the original version, and I have not yet gotten to the truly harrowing parts yet, but I will steel myself for them.

This brutality is in some sense understandable, though by no means excusable. The Germans launched a genocidal war in order to enslave and work to death every non-German between the Vistula and Volga rivers, and they prosecuted this war in contravention of every law of warfare ever established on the theory that their victims were at once subhumans barely capable of cultivating their lands and a dire ideological threat to the German way of life. The only real reason Germans did not employ chemical weapons on the battlefield, aside from the bitter experience they had gained in the First World War over the stalemate quality of such tactics, is because much of their capacity for producing such chemicals was dedicated to the Holocaust.

And make no mistake, if the Germans had defeated the Soviet Union and finished murdering the Jews and Roma and Soviet POWs, they would have kept the camps humming along for the Slavs in their conquered lands, in an attempt to replace the entire population with ethnic Germans (at least those themselves not deemed worthy of extermination). I personally believe that the enterprise would have collapsed in on itself even in this worst-case scenario, that the literal and social people-eating machines the Nazis developed would wind up eating the Nazis and millions of Germans besides before the society fell to civil war and anarchy, but I am grateful that these musings of mine were not tested by history.

In any case, in the face of such barbarism — not really seen since before the Bronze Age — the Soviets made great and terrible sacrifices simply to survive. Essentially every man between the ages of fourteen and sixty who could walk and hold a gun was pressed into military service, while almost all the women were set to work in military industries. And, of all those called, between a third and 40 percent would not survive to see the end of the fighting. Indeed, Germans took between two and three Soviet lives for each German life lost, but the Soviets did not stop until they had pushed the Germans from Moscow and Stalingrad all the way back to the Elbe. In order to do this, the Soviets had to endure privations, brutalities, and terrors that are quite simply unimaginable to any of us.

Americans often like to boast that they “won” WWII, that they “beat” the Nazis…and they aren’t exactly wrong, but they are usually misidentifying America’s role in winning the war in Europe. It is true that America invaded North Africa and Italy and France, and engaged in fierce combat at many points of the war on their own path to the Elbe, but for all that, less than two hundred thousand American lives were sacrificed in Europe, essentially every one of them a soldier. By comparison, the Soviet Union (including the countries it had occupied which became a part of the so-called Bloodlands) sacrificed approximately 27 million people, civilians and soldiers, in order to beat back and defeat the Germans.

But the Soviets were only able to accomplish this titanic loss of life, and the victory in the face of it, because the Americans supplied them with a vast amount of food and civilian supplies; indeed, Operation Lend-Lease sent more materiel to the Soviet Union than to the rest of the Allies combined, though this fact has been all but forgotten. The Soviets even made sure to stamp-over the American livery with Soviet emblems, so that their own troops wouldn’t realise that so much of their food had come from the United States. As it happens, a great deal of these supplies came up through the Volga, which had the benefit of never freezing over and not being threatened by German U-boats, unlike the Arctic port of Arkhangelsk; it is likely that Hitler set his sights on Stalingrad at least in part to cut this supply line, which might well have forced the Soviets to capitulate.

So imagine life as a young Soviet grunt. You’ve been indoctrinated your entire life into a cult of personality and into an ideology that places the existence of the state above your own, and gives you all the positive and negative incentives in the world to at least pretend to trust the word of those speaking on behalf of the leader of your country. Your country has been invaded by millions of maniacs that are actually intent on killing you and everyone you love, and geopolitical forces far beyond your understanding have turned your entire army into what is essentially the vanguard of the powers allied against your enemy — regardless of your position, you and everyone you know is in principle a front-line soldier. Half of the men you have fought with have died, and the only way that you have survived is to let almost everything human within you die, to become more pitiless and ruthless than your enemy and your comrades both.

Now imagine that the personality whose cult you’ve been pulled into has decreed that every civilian in occupied territory who is not a partisan or has not died fighting the enemy is a collaborator and a traitor, someone responsible for all of the suffering and death you have had to endure and inflict just to keep breathing. It becomes not simply a right, but something like a duty to punish them, to take your pleasures where you can before you, too, meet your end. Imagine that your superiors look the other way, or slap you and your fellow soldiers on the wrist — or, if you cross too many lines, they shoot you cleanly in the head and hand your rifle to the next man in line behind you, just as you were handed the rifle of the man who fell in front of you.

…as I said, this does not excuse such brutal conduct, but in the war in the East, there were no excuses. There was only horror, and blood.

One reason “surrogacy” is not the sweet touching altruistic fairy tale some would like us to think:

Nine-day-old baby Luke Moynihan woke up on Thursday morning safely at home in Co Kerry with his parents Dermot and Dorothy, after a frantic mission to bring him home succeeded just ahead of the Russian invasion. 

“At home” is stretching it, since his life up to that point was spent in Ukraine. He wasn’t kidnapped and taken to Ukraine by criminals, he was born there.

Just two days before, the Moynihans were in Lviv, scrambling for emergency travel documents to bring their baby home before the military invasion began.

Charming – “their baby”…that some random Ukrainian woman had carried and pushed out for them, and never mind what happened to her, the important thing is the baby-shoppers got out.

Mr Moynihan said it had been a surreal journey of “intense emotions” from when Luke was born in Lviv last week to touching down on Irish soil with their precious cargo on Tuesday.

It’s ugly stuff. They didn’t plan it that way, but it’s the nature of “surrogacy.”

There are many many more words, about their joy at getting home, and about the baby, and about how difficult it was getting out, and even about “the people of Ukraine,” but there’s not one fucking word about the woman who gestated and gave birth to the baby. Not a single mention.

White supremacist and pro-Putin – what’s not to like?

Republican leaders are facing fresh demands to expel the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, after she spoke at a conference of white nationalists and sympathisers with Vladimir Putin.

The event in Orlando, Florida, on Friday night was organised by the far-right extremist Nick Fuentes, who told attendees: “Now they’re going on about Russia and Vladimir Putin is Hitler – they say that’s not a good thing.”

Fuentes, eh – is he aware that most white supremacists probably consider him non-white?

Liz Cheney, a member of the House select committee investigating the January 6 riot, tweeted: “As Rep[resentative] Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rep[resentative] Paul Gosar speak at this white supremacist, antisemitic, pro-Putin event, silence by Republican party leaders is deafening and enabling.”

Trump loves Putin. What more do we need to know?

Edward Lucas suggests some background reading:

The first book on anyone’s reading list should be Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. This revisionist history, which explores the overlap between Nazi and Soviet atrocities in the “bloodlands” of Poland, Ukraine and Belarus, shows that between 1930 and 1945 14 million people were shot, gassed or starved. The book is the best rebuttal to Putin’s Soviet-centred, cod-imperialist approach to the past displayed in his rambling essay last summer and his even more incoherent speech on Monday. It is also a corrective to the simplistic western-focused approach to history, which involves neat starting and finishing dates to the Second World War, and frames it as a simple contest between good and evil.

Also a corrective to the, how shall I say, the unconscious habit of just not really noticing that part of Europe all that much. I know it was a habit of mine, and I doubt I’m the only one. The point Snyder made that really jumped out and punched me in the face is that the vast majority of the WW2 deaths in Europe were in the Bloodlands.

Complementing this is Anne Applebaum’s gruelling Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, an account of Stalin’s mass-starvation programme in Ukraine. Only by understanding Ukraine’s historical trauma at Russian hands can western readers begin to appreciate the depth of the country’s desire for peace and sovereignty.

And the depth of the insult of Putin’s claims that Ukraine is and always has been part of Russia, as if it were a much-loved errant offspring.