Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • One notable exception

    Ingratitude thou marble-hearted fiend.

    The cast and crew of the Harry Potter movies are coming together for a reunion, with one notable exception – the author, JK Rowling.

    HBO Max announced on Tuesday it would bring together the cast members from all eight Harry Potter films for a retrospective special entitled Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return To Hogwarts. 

    The release said it would feature stars Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint – who have not made a public appearance together since the premiere of the last premiere of the franchise, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 2, in July 2011, as well as filmmaker Chris Columbus, who directed the blockbuster film.

    The Mail doesn’t say whose decision it was that Rowling won’t be there.

  • Really think about why

    Oh yes? Well I want Ellie Mae O’Hagan to really think about why it might be upsetting for women to have men calling themselves women, and bullying any women who don’t comply.

  • No Trump pardon forthcoming

    QAnon shaman gets 41 months in prison.

    The sentence matches one [Judge Royce] Lamberth imposed on a former mixed martial artist filmed punching a police officer during violence, who was sentenced last week to 41 months in prison. The two are the stiffest sentences handed down in any of the roughly 675 riot prosecutions.

    …

    While in detention, Chansley was diagnosed by prison officials with transient schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety. When he entered his guilty plea, Chansley said he was disappointed Trump had not pardoned him.

    Trump doesn’t do things for other people.

  • In an exclusive interview

    So DOCTOR Adrian Harrop decides it would be a wizard idea to blab to a journalist (a highly partisan journalist) for publication during his GMC hearing. And share documents with the journalist. The journalist is Ben Hunte, the outlet is Vice.

    From Ben Hunte’s dispassionate journalisticky report:

    A British doctor who used social media to defend trans rights could lose his job because of complaints about his posts. 

    He didn’t just “defend trans rights.” Not even close.

    Dr Adrian Harrop, a GP based in Liverpool is currently going through a Medical Practitioners Tribunal hearing regarding his conduct on his Twitter account, which he dedicated to speaking up for trans lives. 

    He dedicated his Twitter account to bullying and harassing women who spoke up for women’s rights.

    The witnesses and tweets involved in the case are currently being kept anonymous, but VICE World News was sent all of the material being discussed in the tribunal, including the full dossier of allegations, witness statements, and documents defending the doctor. 

    Was sent? What, by the tooth fairy? Santa Claus? Teddy the transgender bear?

    If Harrop sent it…well I don’t imagine that will meet with universal approval.

    Then there’s a lot of stuff that makes it easy to identify people who were anonymous.

    https://twitter.com/EulittleB/status/1461002832035950592

    No doubt it’s all part of a cunning plan.

  • Diary of a transgender Teddy bear

    School of trans.

    Anna Slatz has more:

    In October, Colmers Farm Primary School gave its Year 6 studens an assignment to write diary entries from the perspective of “Tilly, a transgender bear.” The school initially posted about the results of the project on their Twitter, but has since deleted the month-old tweet, likely due to some emerging public attention. The tweet had included screenshots of some of the children’s assignments, which were quickly preserved by netizens.

    Here’s the tweet:

    Start the indoctrination early!

    All students were required to state “I can define/understand what transgender and transitioning means” at the beginning or end of their essays.

    They’ve been thoroughly indoctrinated. In primary school.

    The assignment was part of the school’s No Outsiders scheme, one created by author and teacher Andrew Moffat.

    Who?

    Andrew MoffatMBE (born 1972) is a British teacher at Parkfield Community School in Birmingham, and the author of several books and educational resources, including the No Outsiders programme, an approach to teaching primary school-aged children about diversity and tolerance, for which he was nominated for the Global Teacher Prize.

    What kind of “diversity” and “tolerance” though? Does diversity include bullies, sadists, exploiters? Are children taught to “tolerate” cruelty, hitting, biting, lying?

    Back to Anna Slatz:

    People have reported that while No Outsiders claims to teach respect for all forms of diversity, there is an extreme slant on transgender subjects and issues, as well as an outright misrepresentation of some facets of the U.K’s Equality Act in favor of supporting gender ideology at the expense of other protected rights and groups.

    Who knew Teddy was a secret agent?

  • Definitions are exclusionary

    Oh honestly.

    The BBC woman to the right of Rosie Duffield asks her: “Do you understand why transgender people and groups of people who have been excluded from that definition have become upset about it?”

    For god’s sake! The whole point of definitions is to exclude almost everything! You can’t make definitions “inclusive” without destroying them as definitions. Let’s define definitions as being inclusive of all the meanings, possible and impossible – that will be useful!

    Definitions need to be exact and narrow and accurate, in order to do their job. If you start InClooding extras, then what you get is a worthless definition. Women are by definition adult human females, and if you’re adding words like “infant” or “tiger” or “male” to that definition you will be talking useless gibberish.

  • Freedom fries

    I saw a shrinkwrapped notice/sign stapled to a utility pole this afternoon with rainbows in the upper left and lower right corners, and the message:

    ALL HUMANS ARE WELCOME

    Citizens Unite!

    We Do Not Discriminate

    Based On Sex, Gender

    Race, Creed, Age

    Vaccination Or No

    Vaccination

    And below that, in much smaller type:

    END THE MANDATES

    Picture me rolling my eyes.

    I took it down. We’re not supposed to staple things onto utility poles anyway.

  • Due to their transgender status

    IOC to women: sucks to be you.

    That second one is so stupid. The issue isn’t being trans, the issue is being male. It’s grossly and obviously unfair for men to compete in women’s sports, and calling themselves women does nothing to change that fact.

    And…disproportionate advantage? Why should women have to accept men in their sports if some committee decides that the male advantage is proportionate?

    Yes of course it will frustrate women more, because it’s an outrageous injustice to women. We’re funny that way.

  • Sounding awesome

    FAQ Q&A your questions answered:

    Isn’t there…isn’t there already an Alaska Pacific University?

    There might be, sure. Lots of things have similar names, or share initials.

    OK but “Pacific”?

    Alaska borders the Pacific Ocean.

    The reason that’s funny is that there already is a University of Texas at Austin, which is quite well known and well regarded. (It’s also, come to think of it, the location of that tower where one Charles Whitman locked himself in and shot a lot of people in 1966, a time when mass murders of that kind were a novelty. That part’s not funny.)

    Will there be “safe spaces” or “trigger warnings” at The APU?

    No. No topics are disallowed and no uncomfortable subjects are off-limits at The APU.

    Will The APU promote CRT or BDS?

    No, The APU will not allow students or professors to practice the poisonous academic assault on American history known as Critical Race Theory, or to engage in political, cultural, or economic boycotts that unfairly target the only democracy in the Middle East.

    …

    What degree programs do you offer?

    None.

    Doesn’t a university almost definitionally have to offer degrees, and in fact isn’t the term generally understood to mean institutions with post-graduate programs?

    The APU is not so vain as to imagine it can know what “most people” understand by the term “university.” All we know is that United States law does not specifically define what can and cannot be called a “university.” Maybe in other countries only “the queen” or “the state” get to define what is and isn’t a university; to us that smacks of intellectual authoritarianism.

    OK well then what are the undergraduates you mentioned going to do if they can’t get a degree from The APU

    We do plan to offer degrees eventually. We expect to offer our first MA program, Applied Entrepreneurial Optimism, to be ready by 2022.

    Heh heh heh. Just what I thought – they sound much more like entrepreneurs than academics.

    H/t Rob

    Updating to add for the pre-caffeinated: this here is satire.

  • To discuss views freely

    https://twitter.com/Docstockk/status/1460650434218106880

  • One nation and one religion

    And we call that “theocracy.”

    Sounds great, right? Like Pakistan, like Saudi Arabia, like Iran, like Afghanistan…like Ireland until quite recently, like El Salvador now. Mullahs or priests – always male, of course, and not “identifying as” male either but the real thing – telling you what you can and can’t do.

  • To celebrate

    Oh will they now.

    That’s rich seeing as how they’ve all shat on the source of their fame and wealth i.e. JK Rowling.

  • The fearless pursuit of fame and glory

    Two down…

    Exactly a week after former New York Times opinion columnist Bari Weiss unveiled the creation of a hypothetical new “university” stacked with advisers united by “a common dismay at the state of academic and a recognition that we can no longer wait for the cavalry,” two riders in that brave regiment have resigned their commissions.

    Robert J. Zimmer, the chancellor of the University of Chicago, and Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, quit the University of Austin’s advisory board on Monday.

    Just one week. It seems so embarrassing for the project.

    “As is often the case with fast-moving start-ups,” a statement from the University of Austin said, “there were some missteps.” It noted that its website “initially failed to make clear the distinctions between the Founding Trustees and the Advisory Board.”

    That’s the thing, though – universities aren’t usually “fast-moving start-ups.” That’s more profit-making entrepreneurial go-getter language than it is serious intellectual language. If you start up a university too fast you might find yourself holding a steering wheel connected to nothing.

    While advisers were “aligned in general” with the project without necessarily endorsing everything the University of Austin says or does, the trustees “bear responsibility for those things.” This, the statement claimed without elaboration, “led to unnecessary complications” for advisers like Zimmer and Pinker.

    Hahahaha we can imagine the panicky conversations. “Wait, what? I didn’t mean to sign up for all this crap!”

    That’s the trouble with ideas: there’s overlap everywhere, and it’s easy to get confused, or recruited into something you don’t want to be in. Clearly that’s what happened with Zimmer.

    Zimmer said in a statement posted to a UChicago news site that he’d resigned from his advisory role on Thursday. He wrote that while he valued the “new organization” and its commitment to freedom of expression, it “made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views.”

    Some overlap and some sharp divergence.

    It’s like the rupture with Pharyngula and similar – there’s still a massive amount of overlap there, but one issue made it all untenable.

    The University of Austin, which is unaccredited and has yet to break ground on a physical campus, was launched last Monday and is “dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth,” according to a triumphant post to Weiss’ Substack.

    See that’s already a red flag, at least to me. You don’t want to flatter yourself too grossly in your advertising. You don’t want to claim too much for yourself because…well because everything, really. Because conceit is repellent, it’s trumpish, it’s absurd, it’s an accident waiting to happen. Screaming “WE ARE THE NEW FEARLESS WARRIORS” is just not cool.

  • A week later

    Hm, not going so well.

    University of Chicago chancellor Robert Zimmer is distancing himself from the University of Austin, a newly announced institution that’s drawn scrutiny for its critiques of higher education and politicized nature, officials announced today.

    Jeez. After a week?

    Zimmer was initially listed as a member of the board of advisers when the website was launched last week, but he has since stepped aside, a U of C spokesman confirmed.

    The school is being established to combat cancel culture and promote intellectual diversity, its founders say. They also lamented that higher education is fundamentally broken and that elite schools are failing students.

    And Bari Weiss is front and center, which…

    “University of Chicago Chancellor Robert J. Zimmer was asked to serve in an advisory role (without fiduciary, oversight or management responsibilities) to the newly formed University of Austin by its founding president, Dr. Pano Kanelos,” the U of C said in a statement. “Chancellor Zimmer informed Dr. Kanelos on Nov. 11 that he was resigning from the advisory board, noting that ‘the new university made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views.’ The University of Chicago is committed to upholding the core value of free expression as articulated by our faculty and university leaders over many decades, most recently in the faculty committee Report of the Committee on Free Expression, now widely known as the Chicago Principles.”

    In other words they carried on as if they were the first people ever to talk about the value of free expression, so it all seemed a little bit…Bari Weiss.

  • Using his public platform for good

    The Adrian Harrop tribunal started today. The issue: was his Twitter activity inappropriate for a medical doctor? As is only right, there is a Harrop tribunal Twitter account.

    Yes, they all see that as their job. Not all of them see patients though.

    God he’s a nightmare.

    There will be more tomorrow.

  • He went live on social media

    Steve Bannon is starring in The Steve Bannon Turns Himself In show.

    Bannon arrived at the FBI Washington field office in a black SUV shortly before 9:40 a.m. He was met by a swarm of media and was defiant when addressing TV cameras outside the building, saying, “We’re taking down the Biden regime.”

    Anything for attention.

    Moments before turning himself in Monday, Bannon went live on social media and told his supporters to “stay focused.”

    “I don’t want anybody to take their eye off the ball from what we do every day, OK,” Bannon said to a camera for his online show “WarRoom.”

    “I want you guys to stay focused on message,” he added before walking into the FBI office. “Thank you very much.”

    Jawohl mein Führer.

  • At the Bar, precious darlings

    There may be many hooray responses to the LGBTQ+ letter to Middle Temple on Twitter that I’m not seeing because Twitter selects what we see, but the ones I am seeing are not at all impressed. They are especially not impressed that these are people who argue for a living, and yet they pitch a fit because ooooh a dissenter ewwwwww.

  • To provide an affirming environment

    Here we go again.

    You can’t do that, you can’t say that, you can’t invite her, you can’t do anything without our prior approval.

    I did read it. It’s utterly typical and utterly contemptible.

    Image

    None of them are “LGBTQ+” because no one can be all of those things. By “allies” they don’t mean people who think same-sex attraction should not be ostracized or shamed in any way, they mean people who are eager to enforce a new and stupid doctrine of Magic Gender on the entire world. With Allies like that who needs an Axis?

    By the same token there’s no such thing as “an affirming environment for LGBTQ+ members” because they have different and incompatible goals and worldviews, whether they realize it or not.

    In both cases of course the wording is meant to function as a threat and a shaming device. “Y R U abusing the LGBTQ+ communiddy?”

    Ah the inclusion of the last speaker is the problem, is it? Inclusion for me but not for thee.

    Image

    What are her crimes?

    She has said that in the particular post she is writing she won’t refer to a man who calls himself a woman as a woman, because the fact that he’s a man is at the heart of what she’s writing about.

    She wrote that post about Mridul Wadwha, a man who applied for a job as head of a rape crisis centre advertised as women-only, and she referred to him as a man, because putting a man in charge of a rape crisis centre is a very bad thing to do.

    But these bedwetters want all that covered up and concealed in language that pretends Wadwha is a woman, and they want groveling and reparations and everybody gets a new car because Naomi Cunningham was invited to their dire “annual dinner and discussion.”

  • Excluded

    Oops.

    Sam Smith, the pop singer whose gender identity is non-binary, has been excluded from the gendered categories at the 2021 Brit awards.

    Well he would, wouldn’t he. Or was he expecting to be nominated in both categories as opposed to neither?

    The awards system has maintained its usual artist categories, with prizes for British solo male and British solo female. That means there is no room for Smith…

    It’s not that there’s no room for him (poor little baby Jesus), it’s that he doesn’t fit. If you’re a sculptor you can’t expect to be nominated for a Booker prize, either. You have to fit the categories.

    In a statement on Instagram, Smith said: “The Brits have been an important part of my career … Music for me has always been about unification not division. I look forward to a time where awards shows can be reflective of the society we live in. Let’s celebrate everybody, regardless of gender, race, age, ability, sexuality and class.”

    All must win, all must have prizes!

    Dodo bird verdict - Wikipedia

  • Don’t wanna debate

    Hm.

    https://twitter.com/ciarabartlam/status/1459660280137494529

    Well, no doubt, because it’s more soothing to be cuddled and flattered than it is to be disputed and asked for reasons, but the fact remains that we can’t have good policies or ideas or institutions if we refuse to think carefully about what they are.

    Like, what does Bartram mean about being LGBTQ+? Does it mean being all those things? Some of which are incompatible with each other?

    And if we don’t know the answer to that question, how can we know what it is that’s being loved and affirmed? You don’t want to go around loving and affirming pure evil, so you really do have to know what you mean before you say it, instead of just singing a few words as if they’re poetry and leaving it at that.

    And by praising Jolyon Maugham’s presumptuous question, Bartlam is withholding love an affirmation from a fellow member of the alphabet community, so how does that work? Love and affirmation for me but not for thee?

    It’s all just “shut up and don’t ask questions,” and it’s not a good trend.