Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Eric Trump, Constitutional scholar.

Eric Trump has called New York Attorney General Letitia James the “most unethical prosecutor in the history of the United States” while saying her office’s investigation[s] into his father’s business practices are unconstitutional.

No, hon. He’s not president any more. He’s just a shameless crook, and the law can touch him.

Donald Trump’s son made the remarks on Monday during an appearance on Sean Hannity‘s Fox News show more than a week after it was revealed James had subpoenaed two of the former president’s adult children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, as part of the inquiry.

Chronologically adult. Intellectually, morally, psychologically, not so much.

James’ office is looking into allegations Donald Trump fraudulently inflated the value of assets to get better loans from banks and undervalued them to reduce his tax bills. James began the investigation after Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen testified to Congress in 2019.

It’s her job.

“You have Letitia James out there, probably the most unethical prosecutor in the history of the United States, who literally said on video ‘I’m going to go into office every single day and I’m going to sue Trump and then I’m going to go home,’” Eric Trump said.

We’re all really fascinated to hear what Eric Trump thinks is unethical.

“She ran on the campaign promise of suing my father because she didn’t believe in his political party, because she didn’t like us, because the people of Washington, D.C. told her to do that. It violates the Constitution, it’s unethical, it’s wrong.”

That might be a little more credible if Trump were in fact not a crook, but since this is the real world and not a fantasy, it’s not.

In December 2021, Donald Trump sued James while arguing that the inquiry violates his constitutional rights.

“The investigations commenced by James are in no way connected to legitimate law enforcement goals, but rather, are merely a thinly-veiled effort to publicly malign Trump and his associates,” the lawsuit filed in New York court reads.

“Her mission is guided solely by political animus and a desire to harass, intimidate, and retaliate against a private citizen who she views as a political opponent. James has deprived, and will continue to deprive, Plaintiffs of their rights under federal law, state law and common law by virtue of her callous acts.”

Goodness. That doesn’t sound like lawyer-speak, it sounds like Trump-speak. I guess he doesn’t let his lawyers re-write his rage blurts. “Callous” is a nice touch – what, she’s supposed to have sympathy for the pack of filthy rich crooks?

I don’t even recognize this world.

Yeah it’s definitely connected to white Christian nationalism even if not in the minds of every individual GC person.

— @etvpod.bsky.social (@ETVPod) January 10, 2022

https://twitter.com/mauscuba7500/status/1480579079292153858

Who are these people they’re talking about? Nobody I know.

Originally a comment by latsot on “Mass formation psychosis”.

Ah that word narrative – be very cautious around anyone telling you something is a “narrative” when it bears no resemblance to a story. It’s a favorite of bullshitters.

That’s partly because to many, many people ‘narrative’ is the same thing as ‘evidence’. I mean this in the most literal sense; I come across many people, especially on social media, who seem to sincerely believe that being able to tell a story about something – even if that story doesn’t really seem to explain the facts – is the same as providing huge great chunks of evidence of something being true.

In fact, they feel it gives them license to dismiss evidence, because to them, that evidence belongs to a different story so just isn’t valid. They’re happy to cite ‘evidence’ when it appears superficially to support their story but they’re unable or unwilling to distinguish between what is evidence and what is not.

So they get to tell their lovely story and cite any willy-nilly thing as evidence because the story is always so meandering and vague. And they also get to dismiss our evidence because they believe it belongs in another, nastier story they want nothing to do with.

Meanwhile, we are explaining what our evidence says and why it says what it says (and doesn’t say) and it’s being entirely ignored.

This is the culture war.

We’ve only spelled out our goals eleventy billion times.

I’ve honestly never met a community less able to openly state their policy goals. Even the white nationalist are more forthcoming than this. https://t.co/IXDUcwqiRI

— @etvpod.bsky.social (@ETVPod) January 10, 2022

Policy goals – not allowing trans ideology to erode women’s rights and women’s prizes, set-asides, honors and the like. I think we’ve been very clear and very forthcoming about it. Where’s he been?

The replies are uniformly nuts.

https://twitter.com/UltraVioletPod/status/1480566322438283268

“the genocidal” – yes sure, plus we’re vampires and that thing from Alien.

More brazen by the day.

https://twitter.com/firewomon/status/1480494789246210053

Glinner tells us which women missed out because a man won Best Actress.

Creepy shirtsleeves guy defies the law:

The Ohio Republican Jim Jordan is the second sitting congressman to refuse a request for cooperation from the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack.

In a Sunday night letter to the committee chair, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the Trump ally accused the panel of “an outrageous abuse” of its authority.

Sure, it’s “outrageous” for the House to investigate a violent attack on the Capitol and Congress. BLM protests are of the devil, but actual violence inside the legislative building is fine.

In columns for the Guardian, the former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal has laid out Jordan’s extensive contacts with Trump before and on 6 January, throughout legalistic efforts to throw out results and the Capitol riot itself.

…

On Sunday night, a spokesperson said the committee would respond to Jordan soon and “consider appropriate next steps”.

“Mr Jordan has admitted that he spoke directly to President Trump on 6 January and is thus a material witness,” the spokesperson said. “Mr Jordan’s letter to the committee fails to address these facts.”

By this time next year he could be holding hearings on why there were hearings on the insurrection at all.

Oh give it a REST.

Narcissist comes out as first openly self-involved twerp shock-surprise.

American figure skater Timothy LeDuc is set to become the first openly non-binary athlete to compete at an Olympic Winter Games.

They might as well say he’s the first openly breathing athlete to compete at an Olympic Winter Games. He’s the first openly two legs-having athlete to compete at an Olympic Winter Games. He’s the first openly anthropoid ape athlete to compete at an Olympic Winter Games.

Unfortunately he’s not the first person or athlete to seek extra attention by claiming to be the first ever something or other, even if the something or other is of absolutely no consequence or interest to anyone at all.

“My hope is that when people see my story, it isn’t focused on me and saying, ‘Oh, Timothy is the first out non-binary person to achieve this level of success in sport,’” LeDuc said during a news conference Saturday, according to NBC Sports.

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha no it isn’t. That isn’t his hope. His hope is the opposite of that. He’s non-binary-publicity-seeking.

“My hope is that the narrative shifts more to, queer people can be open and successful in sports. We’ve always been here, we’ve always been a part of sports. We just haven’t always been able to be open.”

If he means lesbian and gay that’s true; if he means “non-binary” it’s just hot air-attention seeking.

Our friend latsot has signed up for various wheelchair distance events in 2022 including the Leeds and Sheffield half marathons, the Middlesbrough 10k and (fingers crossed) the Great North Run.

He’s raising money for nia, a women-led, women-only, secular, rights-based registered charity which has been delivering services to women, girls and children who have been subjected to sexual and domestic violence and abuse, including prostitution, since 1975.

His crowdfunder for the Sheffield event (in March) is here.

He urges you to donate if you can and share the link if you like!

Liberal shmiberal – union-busting at the NY Times:

Last April, 650 tech employees at the New York Times announced that they were unionizing. Rather than applauding them and proceeding to negotiate a contract, the company instead refused to voluntarily recognize the union. This is despite its own editorial board supporting a bill that would have made it legally binding for employers to voluntarily accept union requests when they are backed by a majority of the staff.

As the paper’s own editorial explained: “Under current law, an employer can reject the majority’s signatures and insist on a secret ballot. But in a disturbingly high number of cases, the employer uses the time before the vote to pressure employees to rethink their decision to unionize.” Now, this is what the New York Times company is accused of doing to its own employees.

Since last year, the Times has been accused of trying to scare workers into changing their minds – to sow division among the employees, divide the unit, and erode support for organized labor. Last week, federal labor regulators claimed that the company had broken the law by telling large swaths of employees that they were actually “managers”, and that they were therefore prohibited from publicly supporting the union.

“Liberal” is often used as a synonym for “left-wing” or “progressive” in the US, but they’re not really the same. Unions aren’t really a liberal cause these days. Not sexy enough…as well as of course having to do with redirecting a little of the wealth from the bosses to the workers, when lots of liberals are bosses or allied with bosses.

The New York Times gets away with a lot. They are the journalism equivalent of the supreme court. They offer prestige, big budgets and job stability at a time when those things are in short supply in this industry. The half of our country terrified by Trump sees them as an army of truth, and everyone in media wants to work there. (Call me!) But let’s be honest: the people who control the New York Times company are acting like real weasels.

It’s not just that they are hypocritical, yammering about the public good while acting from pure selfishness – it’s that they want to have it both ways. While more outwardly evil media bosses like Rupert Murdoch may be proud to embrace their Ayn Randian reputation, those who lead the Times want to be accepted as good people on the Brooklyn-brownstone cocktail party circuit, even as they quietly try to stop those who work for them from having an equal seat at their tastefully appointed table. Screw that.

I think Hamilton Nolan is exaggerating the keenness of Times people to be seen as liberal. The news side is keen to be seen as non-partisan, and the editorial side is very mixed – there are plenty of conservatives and “centrists” along with some a little more leftish. The Times is more establishment than it is liberal.

I have covered hundreds of anti-union campaigns. No matter where they happen, they are all based on lies and fear. Whether they happen at an Amazon warehouse or at the New York Times, they are a demonstration of contempt for the idea that an employee may deserve to be treated as someone whose humanity is just as real as that of an employer.

Respectable people don’t engage in union-busting. People who run anti-union campaigns are not Good Liberals. Hundreds of workers raising their voices have not been enough to convince the New York Times executives to act right. Maybe it’s time to stop inviting them to the cocktail parties.

Ok, but I think it’s either naive or hyperbolic to say the Times sees itself as composed of nothing but Good Liberals.

The questions around Trump’s encouragement or otherwise of the insurrection are boiling down to: was he evil or just stupid? Did he deliberately delay telling the insurrectionists to go home, or was he just having too much fun watching them on tv to get off his ass?

Adam Kinzinger, a Republican congressman from Illinois who sits on the committee, underlined the laser-like focus of the investigation on Trump’s potential complicity.

Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press, he said the key question now was: “What did the president know about 6 January leading up to 6 January?”

Kinzinger added that the panel wanted to know why Trump failed to take any action for almost three hours while the violence at the Capitol was unfolding on his TV screen. Was it a sign of weakness or complicity?

The answer is in the question – the violence at the Capitol was unfolding on his TV screen. He was watching. He was busy, dude. You don’t just stop watching a great show like that to do your job.

“It’s the difference between, was the president absolutely incompetent or a coward on 6 January when he didn’t do anything or did he know what was coming? That’s a difference between incompetence with your oath and possibly criminal.”

It will be very easy for his lawyers or just his press people to convince relevant parties that Trump is just too stupid and self-involved to get up off the couch and tell insurrectionists to stop.

Politifact has more on this Robert Malone fella:

Video of Spotify host Joe Rogan’s controversial interview with a doctor known for making false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines was removed from YouTube, just days after Twitter banned the doctor’s account for violating its COVID-19 misinformation policies.

Dr. Robert Malone, who gained hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers in recent months as he promoted anti-vaccine falsehoods, drew a comparison in the interview between COVID-19 vaccination efforts in the U.S. and the environment in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Nazi party rose to power.

I’m not seeing it. Not seeing the similarity between Weimar Germany and the effort to vaccinate populations against a dangerous virus. Also not seeing how the effort to vaccinate populations against a dangerous virus is likely to lead to Nazism. That’s especially true since the authoritarian types are on the anti-vax side rather than the pro-vax side. I get that they portray mass vaccination as itself authoritarian, but that’s bullshit, and apart from bullshit, the comparison makes no sense.

Twitter also booted Marjorie Taylor Greene, but she’s a good deal more ignorant and stupid than Malone.

But unlike Greene, Malone has a medical degree. He bills himself as the “inventor” of mRNA vaccines and has leveraged that title to push one false claim after another. 

Not the inventor; a major contributor.

Even as Twitter and YouTube sought to stem the spread of Malone’s claims, videos highlighting various segments from the doctor’s hours-long conversation with Rogan continued to circulate on both platforms and others such as Facebook and TikTok. They’ve been shared by the likes of Seb Gorka, a radio host and former Trump adviser, and Dr. Simone Gold, the founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, a group that has fought restrictions to curb the virus’ spread.

Primum non nocere.

Also in Y R people so dumb, a made-up mass delusion is made up.

An unfounded theory taking root online suggests millions of people have been “hypnotized” into believing mainstream ideas about COVID-19, including steps to combat it such as testing and vaccination.

In widely shared social media posts this week, efforts to combat the disease have been dismissed with just three words: “mass formation psychosis.”

Sounds technicalish and sciencey and psychologicalesque, doesn’t it. That was Freud’s way of bullshitting too.

The term gained attention after it was floated by Dr. Robert Malone on “The Joe Rogan Experience” Dec. 31 podcast. Malone is a scientist who once researched mRNA technology but is now a vocal skeptic of the COVID-19 vaccines that use it.

…

CLAIM: The concept of “mass formation psychosis” explains why millions of people believe in a mainstream COVID-19 “narrative” and trust the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.

Ah that word narrative – be very cautious around anyone telling you something is a “narrative” when it bears no resemblance to a story. It’s a favorite of bullshitters.

“When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it, and then their attention gets focused by a leader or a series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere,” Malone said. He claimed such people will not allow the “narrative” to be questioned.

Uh huh. It can’t at all be a matter of on the one hand people with long careers in public health and on the other hand internet personalities and Donald Trump. It can’t possibly have to do with more reasons to trust public health experts than random shouters and ragers and makers up of stuff.

Crediting a professor in Belgium, Malone also said in a December blog post that this “mass hypnosis” explains millions of people becoming captivated by the “dominant narrative concerning the safety and effectiveness of the genetic vaccines.”

Or, there are two choices, vaccination or no vaccination, and given what we know about vaccination and what they’ve accomplished, we have pretty good reasons to think vaccination is better than no vaccination to avoid a serious disease. There are reasons life expectancy has risen dramatically since the 19th century, and successful vaccines are one of those reasons, a major one of those reasons.

The description of “mass formation psychosis” offered by Malone resembles discredited concepts, such as “mob mentality” and “group mind,” according to John Drury, a social psychologist at the University of Sussex in the U.K. who studies collective behavior. The ideas suggest that “when people form part of a psychological crowd they lose their identities and their self-control; they become suggestible, and primitive instinctive impulses predominate,” he said in an email.

That notion has been discredited by decades of research on crowd behavior, Drury said. “No respectable psychologist agrees with these ideas now,” he said.

They make such a good story though.

Back in 2014 local public radio did a story on The Little Street at the Bottom of a Landslide-prone Bluff aka Y R people so dumb?

It’s no secret that Western Washington is prone to landslides. The combination of glacial soils, steep slopes and water creates a risk that’s greater than in other parts of the U.S.

And it’s not just river valleys like the one near Oso: The region’s coastal bluffs are also danger zones that have experienced large landslides in recent decades.

But that still doesn’t deter people from living in those slide-prone areas.

Because people are just that dumb.

Ruth Trail has lived in the Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle for 23 years.

She said she loves it for the views. Standing in a park that sits atop a bluff overlooking Elliot Bay, Trail can see downtown Seattle, Mt. Rainier, West Seattle and the Olympic mountains.

The views are indeed nuts. That’s why I take my dog friend/client there often. The boulevard is neither straight nor flat so the vista changes as you go, and it’s all breathtaking. It’s just…don’t live at the foot of it, you know? Don’t put your expensive house at the bottom of a landscape-prone bluff. Put it at the top, a healthy distance back from the edge (all the houses on the boulevard are across the street from the edge). Safer.

It was here, 18 years ago, that a deep-seated landslide hit. During an especially wet winter, a big chunk of the bluff collapsed, wiping out five houses below.

From above, on the boulevard, you can see where it happened. You can go up to the fence and look down at the empty space.

Geologists consider Perkins Lane Seattle’s poster child for landslide risk.

“The Perkins Lane area has been failing back since the 1930s; and probably long before that,” said David Montgomery, a geomorphology professor at the University of Washington.

But there are houses on it. People live in them. People live in them and even stay in them after a couple of inches of rain fall in a matter of hours.

When the slope at Perkins Lane failed in the winter of 1996, residents were lucky in a sense: The slide moved slowly, and they were able to evacuate their homes. No one was killed.

This time not so much.

Now, the portion of the street where the big slide hit is closed off, and no new homes have been built in the slide zone. But many homes remain nearby, in an established and rather pricey community, perched between the steep bluff above and the water below.

One of which just got taken out.

Just a little local story of no particular significance for once, simply because I saw some of it. I was out for a walk with a dog friend (or dog client, or something), on a boulevard that runs along the top of high bluffs at the western edge of Seattle, where Elliott Bay meets Puget Sound, and we came to a place with a lot of yellow tape between the sidewalk and the edge of the bluff. Part of the bluff there had collapsed recently, I’d noticed it some weeks or months back when walking the dog there, but it wasn’t yellow-taped then. Clearly this was new collapse, which was completely unsurprising given the record rains we’ve just had, and the history of those bluffs, which is a history of serial collapses after heavy rains.

So when I got home I googled and learned what had happened.

On Jan. 7 around 1:30 p.m., Seattle’s Fire Alarm Center dispatchers received a 911 call about a house that had slid 15-20 feet off its foundation at the 2400 block of Perkins Ln. W. The steep slope area behind the house had slid likely as a result of high levels of precipitation which resulted in the top floor of the structure partially collapsing on top of the daylight basement.

Magnolia Boulevard is up there at the top, out of sight. It has spectacular views, as you can imagine, and in places a fair bit of grassy area between the street and the edge, so dogs can ramble around at the end of a long leash.

Upon Seattle Fire’s arrival, there were reports of an adult male trapped inside, along with a fire involving propane tanks on the back side of the house. An adult female was also inside of the home at the time of the slide and was able to escape on her own.

Engine 41 from Fire Station 41 in the Magnolia neighborhood arrived first on scene and quickly conducted a size-up of the incident and began to put a strategy in place to conduct a rescue and mitigate the fire simultaneously.

Additional fire units arrived on scene to help as part of the “Heavy Rescue Major” response, including the department’s Rescue 1 Company (technical rescue).

Oh that’s what that was, thought I. The dog and I saw some of that ourselves. There’s a fire department in the nabe and we saw a fire truck come shrieking down the hill from the station and head south at that hour, and as we kept walking I heard more and more and more sirens – far more than usual.

It’s all a big mistake, frankly, because Perkins Lane has had these slides repeatedly, sometimes with several houses taken out at one time. There just shouldn’t be any houses there.

Heh.

So the great skeptical mind has decided that we can only discern sex with 100% accuracy or with the accuracy of made up woo-woo nonsense.

Stellar critical thinking. https://t.co/8Ohjo3CklB

— Dr. Jane Clare Jones (@janeclarejones) January 8, 2022

a high degree of reliability. And it turns out, female people are better at it than males. So we'd thank you to stop telling us we can't perform a cognitive task we're much better at than you because you're a bit shit at it.https://t.co/1gPpj4qkun

— Dr. Jane Clare Jones (@janeclarejones) January 8, 2022

He will have been identifying females by visual inspection. 😂

Honestly, what is this crap? He’s forgotten science.

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) January 8, 2022

Yes PZ, sexual maturation is just like changing sex how right you are. https://t.co/GMex2VeJxB

— Dr. Jane Clare Jones (@janeclarejones) January 8, 2022

A new treat for your schedule:

https://twitter.com/V_Lundsten/status/1479788989846597640

“Feminist Gender Equality” – starring three men and Sally Hines talking about feminism. It doesn’t get much more equality than that.

Vandalism or termination of a hate crime?

THE Attorney General is considering referring the case in which four people were cleared of tearing down a statue of slave trader Edward Colston to the Court of Appeal.

Suella Braverman said the verdict is causing “confusion” and she is “carefully considering” whether to use powers which allow her to seek a review so senior judges have the chance to “clarify the law for future cases”.

…

The verdict prompted a debate about the criminal justice system after the defendants – dubbed the Colston Four – opted to stand trial in front of a jury and did not deny involvement in the incident, instead claiming the presence of the statue was a hate crime and it was therefore not an offence to remove it.

It’s not difficult to see some perils in that argument. Trans “activists” could claim that a feminist march is a hate crime and it’s therefore not an offence to disrupt and bully it, to take just one example. On the other hand do the Tories think of the destruction of the Berlin Wall as an offence or crime?

But the prosecution said it was “irrelevant” who Colston was and the case was one of straightforward criminal damage.

Well…what if the statue had been of Hitler? Or Stalin? Or Slobodan Milošević? How about a statue of General Dyer in Amritsar?

Joanna Cherry, the QC and SNP MP, said “possible confusion” would not provide a legal basis for the sort of referral Braverman is looking at – saying there would need to be an error of law identified that required clarification.

…

“The petty and ill-informed attacks on the Colston jury verdict which we have seen from Tory MPs are on par with the attacks on the judiciary we saw at the height of the Brexit crisis.

“Politicians should not question jury verdicts just because they don’t like them, that is damaging to the separation of powers and the rule of law.”

At any rate I can’t muster much concern about the welfare of a statue of a slave trader.

He’s unhappy about the Wes Streeting interview.

I think what I found hardest to take about the interview is his framing of women's rights versus trans rights. No attempt to interrogate that proposition. From there, there is nowhere good to go.

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) January 7, 2022

When’s the last time Jolyon Maugham “interrogated” the proposition that trans dogma takes nothing from women at all whatsoever in the least? My rough estimate is that would be never.

I was trying (a bit ineptly) to emphasise a slightly different point, which was that only some women and some feminists (a minority as I understand the evidence) feel as he describes all women and all feminists feeling.

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) January 8, 2022

Ok, my turn: I would like to emphasize another slightly different point, which is that Jolyon Maugham should fuck right off out of women’s rights. Women’s rights are not his to bargain away and minimize and share with men who say they are women.

There are lots of women, you included Jan, who are left out of that description. That framing pitches it as women v trans women and is both wrong and hugely harmful.

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) January 8, 2022

Jolyon Maugham is both wrong and hugely harmful to women and our rights.

What’s depressing is that you have formed an opinion based on a single clip and not the full interview. The clip was about how we win hearts and minds for trans equality. I am clear where I stand: pic.twitter.com/ILeTEdGg5H

— Wes Streeting MP (@wesstreeting) January 8, 2022

Political fox hunting?

— Glenn (@CommunityLd) January 8, 2022

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on More emp and und.

There was an essay on Forbes the other day about gatekeeping in fandoms, which I actually think is kind of relevant.

…the accusations of gatekeeping are being used to leverage access to effectively run each fandom and acquire power as a result.

I think there is a lot of truth in the complaints fans of various properties have about “wokeness” invading their spaces. A lot of the time, the issue keeping people out of specific hobbies isn’t that the hobbyists are saying “This isn’t for you” – it’s that the hobby just isn’t the “excluded” person’s bag.

Which is fine. You’re not being excluded if the thing isn’t to your taste, to a large extent you decide what those tastes are. A piece of bad media isn’t an exclusive club, its a failed one.

Now, if we look at womanhood as a fandom – it sort of fits the pattern of dictatorial types demanding to be included in it, only to then start kicking the people who were already there out of it.

“White feminism”, “Terfs” and the focus on an “intersectionalist” feminism that represents everyone except those women convicted of having privilege, which seems to be all of them.

I’ve long been an advocate for the idea that social progress benefits everyone, not just the group that gets progressed. That said, in order to be able to function, a social justice movement has to be about its core issue – so feminism may benefit men in various ways, but it cannot be about men’s rights.

The drive for a peculiar inclusivity in which there are large parts of the movement you won’t march with because they’re not “intersectionalist” enough, sounds like the old princess bride meme. “You keep using that word…”

So we get to “More empathy and understanding” – I can see what Streeting is trying to do. I really can. He’s doing the both sides thing, in order to try and avoid antagonizing one side, to bring people to the table.

The trouble is – one side’s been flipping tables for a few years now, has been actively working to exclude voices from the other side, has sent death and rape threats to the other side, has tried to ruin the other side’s careers and in some cases succeeded in doing precisely that.

And it isn’t simply a matter of TRAs doing this – but a broader movement of social justice nitpickers.

In December, Lindsay Ellis quit YouTube due to the harassment she’d been receiving from about March, when she was declared a villain for saying a movie looked a lot like Avatar the Last Airbender. The creators of the movie credited Avatar as one of their inspirations, but somehow Lindsay saying it was similar, was racist against Asian people. It wasn’t even a particularly well regarded movie.

Ellis is not on team TERF, but the harassment was bad enough to just destroy her. Her career as a critic started at Channel Awesome, a clusterfuck of sexual harassment, at least one pedophile, egotistical wankery and general unpleasantness, and it was the social justice crowd that did her in.

How can one have understanding and empathy with sociopaths? With people who behave in ways that are utterly monstrous, while loudly proclaiming that they’re advocating for victims?

A few years ago, I would have decried this as respectability politics, but I’ve since come around on that. There is a degree of respectability that is a necessity for conversation to even be possible.

And the problem is not a “both sides” issue. Kathleen Stock isn’t trying to get book shops to stop stocking her opponents’ books.

One side’s “empathy and understanding” is being exploited by a side that shows no intention of showing either trait, that has a long history of exploiting “empathy and understanding” to get away with being vile tin-pot dictators.

And yes, I get the argument that “Freedom of speech only applies to government” – and I utterly disagree. I think civil rights can be violated by individuals and organizations that are not the government. This is why I’m a liberal, and not a libertarian.

The harassment campaigns we’ve seen over the past few years are vigilantism, which is the alt med of government. Much like the medical establishment, we know that government has a lot of problems – it is a corrupt, inefficient mess that quite frequently goes badly wrong.

This is why we regulate the government. The solution proposed by vigilantes is the same solution proposed by alt med, to turn to a parallel system that has none of the safeguards we put in place to do the same job, in the blind belief that this will not result in the same problems only worse.

The restrictions we place on government are things we’ve more or less agreed that we shouldn’t do – trying to get around those restrictions by proclaiming it isn’t government, doesn’t get around why we put those restrictions on the government in the first place.

Saying it is not government doing these things does not mean it is fine to have people arbitrarily dishing out punishments for what they consider wrongthink.

The solution here isn’t “empathy and understanding” on both sides, it is an enforcement of basic standards. Standards which should be aside from ideology. “Don’t harass people”, “don’t try and get people fired”, “don’t send death threats” etc…

These are basics.

Doing all of that stuff “for a good cause” doesn’t excuse any of it. If you stalk someone in the name of social justice, do you know what that makes you? A stalker.

The social contract by which discussion is made possible has been systematically violated at every turn, and it is not going to be fixed until we recognize who exactly has been violating it. I was recently introduced to the term “‘cry bully” – and empathy cannot fix a cry bully. Empathy is the cry bully’s weapon of choice.

We tend to think of apathy as a bad thing – but in this case, it really is necessary to apply it, because of the abuses of empathy that are rife in this debate. We need to stop acting like the would-be dictators’ sob stories are worth listening to, and start looking at what is actually being done.

The Women’s Sports Foundation? Are they sure about that?

Kudos to @Penn and @IvyLeague for standing up for inclusion. We need to create sport environments that allow athletes to be their authentic selves. Having supportive schools and organizations behind them is critical.

All girls. All women. All sports. https://t.co/WFvuq3Zq7O

— Women's Sports Foundation (@WomensSportsFdn) January 7, 2022

The Women’s Sports Foundation says we need to create sport environments that allow athletes to be their authentic selves – by which they mean we need to let men pretend to be women so that they can steal all the prizes. What a peculiar thing for a Women’s Sports Foundation to mean. You’d think they’d be cheering on women rather than men who steal women’s prizes.