Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • He lied and obfuscated and shouted

    From a public Facebook post:

    I’m no political expert, but I’ve lived inside the Beltway for the last 30+ years, worked briefly on the Hill as a mere child, and have had a backseat to a lot of what DC has to offer—I don’t think I’ve ever had a political experience quite like the RFKjr hearing today.

    I couldn’t take a lot of photos because I didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to kick me out for causing a disruption. Clips you may have seen on TV cannot possibly recreate the sheer extended bizarreness, dystopia, and surrealism of this event.

    RFKjr has absolutely no respect for anyone at all, not even for FOTUS, the hand that feeds him. He is hell-bent on destroying medical research and scientific standards because, I suspect, his ego has been bruised by folks who’ve actually spent time, energy and effort studying, writing and practicing medicine or microbiology or organic chemistry or genomics. He’s using DHHS as his revenge tour.

    He lied and obfuscated and shouted and told other people they were liars and confabulists and fearmongers. He called female senators “hysterical.” Unlike some other politicians who are masters of dissembling, he’s like a feral cat forced into a basket that jumps and yowls and scratches at the slightest provocation. No ability to keep his composure.

    I often joke that, due to all Rob’s medical interventions, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.” Well RFKjr couldn’t even play one on TV.

    I couldn’t tell if he had any grip on reality, or if he had an actual brain condition that affected his short term memory and his cognitive filtering.

    He claimed he never said things he’d just said 10 minutes earlier. He doesn’t seem to understand the job of being a cabinet secretary. He seems to think that anyone can get a Covid vaccine who wants one and said they were free. He doesn’t appear to grasp that when the CDC, on his orders, does not “recommend” the vaccine for people under 65 that that, in fact, prevents people from accessing the vaccine. When pressed, he told one senator that of course the vaccine was available to all Americans should they choose to have it, but that, no, he was not going to “recommend” a “product” that he didn’t believe in. Dude—you aren’t a spokesmodel for tanning beds or cleanses—you’re the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. You have the power to make rules and also to destroy stuff. He claimed no money had been cut from Medicaid—that the U.S. was pouring money into it.

    He behaved like a person who didn’t, as he told Congress during his confirmation hearing, just want to allow more freedom of choice with vaccines—his words, tone, body language and pugilistic demeanor made it clear to all that he wants to force his own uninformed beliefs on the rest of us, whether we like it or not.

    Great choice for the job, yeah?

  • Our founder

    I still wonder why he keeps advertising himself this way, as if he were charismatic and irresistible instead of toe-curlingly creepy. That stuck in the throat voice is torture to listen to, and his posh boy demeanor is torture x 10.

    Also the “our founder” bit as if he were not talking about himself.

  • Snowflake Tom

    So there’s this fella Tom Harlow who calls himself “Cabaret Against the Hate” and chats about it as if it were a group but it’s really just the one guy. His thing is to make noise where women are talking and/or protesting. That’s it, that’s the cabaret: just drown out women talking. I wrote a post about him in October 2023.

    He was in Glasgow yesterday making noise to drown out women talking and protesting.

  • A tale of twee Tarquins

    Yesterday at Westminster Magistrates’ Court:

    A trans campaigner would have won “kudos” over the arrest of Graham Linehan, a prominent gender-critical activist, a court heard.

    The Father Ted and IT Crowd creator is on trial accused of harassing a trans teenager with social media posts and damaging their mobile phone in October last year.

    The 57-year-old told police his online posts about 18-year-old Sophia Brooks did not constitute harassment, Westminster magistrates’ court heard on Thursday.

    Sophia Brooks aka Tarquin. He’s a male “trans teenager”.

    During cross-examination, Sarah Vine KC, defending, said Brooks, a former police volunteer, wanted to get Linehan arrested for “kudos”.

    She said that, as a prominent gender-critical campaigner, getting Linehan arrested would have been a “massive scalp”. The teenager did not deny that but said she would also get “a lot of harassment from his supporters”.

    He. He would get harassment. This ridiculous deference to the rules of trans ideology means it can’t even be reported on accurately.

    Shortly before her evidence concluded, Brooks was asked if she believed it was “hateful” that trans women were not allowed to use female only spaces. She replied: “Yes it is.”

    Fuck off, kid. You forcing yourself on women is what’s hateful.

  • Punch him in the what madam?

    This is a very nice Jolly Old England-type souvenir.

  • Summarily

    Trump Claims the Power to Summarily Kill Suspected Drug Smugglers

    Cool. In a few months or weeks it will be people who criticize Trump.

    By ordering the U.S. military to summarily kill a group of people aboard what he said was a drug-smuggling boat, President Trump used the military in a way that had no clear legal precedent or basis, according to specialists in the laws of war and executive power.

    Mr. Trump is claiming the power to shift maritime counterdrug efforts from law enforcement rules to wartime rules. The police arrest criminal suspects for prosecution and cannot instead simply gun suspects down, except in rare circumstances where they pose an imminent threat to someone.

    By contrast, in armed conflicts, troops can lawfully kill enemy combatants on sight.

    But Trump doesn’t give a damn about lawfully. Trump does things Trumpully, and that’s good enough.

    “It’s difficult to imagine how any lawyers inside the Pentagon could have arrived at a conclusion that this was legal rather than the very definition of murder under international law rules that the Defense Department has long accepted,” said Ryan Goodman, a New York University law professor who worked as a Pentagon lawyer in 2015 and 2016.

    …

    Martin Lederman, a Georgetown University law professor who helped write legal memos on counterterrorism drone strikes as a Justice Department official in the Obama administration, said that interpreting the law as allowing Mr. Trump to kill people who are not attacking the United States would require an “alarming” expansion of presidential power.

    “Even if it were true they were ‘terrorists,’ the president doesn’t have authority to go around killing terrorists anywhere in the world, let alone to kill drug smugglers,” he said. “The targets of lethal force would have to either be in an armed conflict with us or otherwise be threatening a use of force that would justify self-defense.”

    Whatever. He does what he wants.

  • Targeted by the same malevolent clowns

    Circular firing squad.

  • A fairly good sense

    A former Detective Chief Inspector at the Metropolitan Police is not impressed by recent events.

    Is the Met on an inadvertent campaign to make Nigel Farage the Prime Minister? Politically he is the only winner from the arrest of the comedy writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport on Monday, for a series of posts made on the social media platform X earlier this year.

    The circumstances behind the arrest, by armed officers, are so bizarre that they almost beggar explanation. As a former Detective Chief Inspector in the Metropolitan Police I have a fairly good sense about what happened in this case – and how it could have been avoided.

    By not having damn fools running the place is one way.

    The three offending posts were made on the 19th and 20th April 2025. In one of the posts, Linehan wrote: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

    It would appear that Trans-activists seeking to use the authorities to wage their latest sally against those in the “gender-critical” or “gender-realist” movement chose to report Linehan to the police.

    Ideally at this point the Met would have closed the case as a waste of time and resources. While the posts by Linehan – who is best known for writing the television series Father Ted – are hardly his finest comedic work, it is difficult to see what about them could have led the police to conclude that they were worthy of criminal investigation.

    Oh but sir, you’re forgetting that our trans siblings are the most tragic vulnerable persecuted people on earth.

    Much has been made of the arresting officers being armed – the reality, as we have seen in other cases, is that airports are unique jurisdictions where the threat means that most officers do need to carry firearms. The more relevant issue is who approved the circulation of Linehan as being “wanted” on the Police National Computer, and what checks did the arresting officers make with the original investigators to ensure this was a case where an arrest was genuinely necessary? It seems unlikely that the threat posed by Linehan in that moment was so egregious that the arresting officers needed to be merely a slave to the machine and make an immediate arrest without checking with the originating officers first.

    But sir it was twanzfobeea.

    In this case specifically, a senior police officer with a functioning brain cell should have reviewed the investigation and ended the fiasco before it escalated to the point of Linehan being arrested as he stepped onto the tarmac at Heathrow. It is, however, an unfortunate reality that policing is a large organisation where the leadership at every level is, to say the least, of “mixed ability”.

    In other words – not even one brain cell.

  • Playing for keeps

    I go outside for a few hours and all hell breaks loose.

    A disgraced transgender police officer is believed to have reported gender-critic Father Ted creator Graham Linehan to the police over his social media posts.

    Former Pc Lynsay Watson, who was born Alex Horwood, was sacked by Leicestershire Police for gross misconduct in 2023 after allegedly harassing a free speech campaigner and critic of gender ideology.

    An anonymous social media account, believed to be linked to Watson, boasted in April this year of reporting Linehan, the Father Ted writer and gender sceptic, to the police over several social media posts he made about transgender issues. The account encouraged other transgender activists to do the same.

    Watson has a well-documented history of calling on police forces to pursue criminal investigations of campaigners who are sceptical of the belief that self-identification, and not biological sex, determines what a man or woman is.

    …

    Watson was sacked by Leicestershire Police after being found guilty by a misconduct hearing of sending former police officer Harry Miller more than 1,200 messages over an 18-month period, branding him a “Nazi”, a “bigot” and a “wife-beater”.

    I know, we know all that, but I for one did not know the next bit.

    Helen Joyce, a writer and women’s rights campaigner, said she was also reported to the authorities and now has a police investigation for “harassment” on her record.

    The best-selling author of Trans, a book critical of gender ideology, she took part in a panel discussion with transgender activist Freda Wallace in 2023. Afterwards, she made several social media posts about the experience and Wallace’s “exhibitionism”.

    The scare-quoted exhibitionism was very real. He sat in a very short skirt and crossed his legs. It was an exhibition.

    Unbeknown to Joyce at the time, these Twitter posts were reported to the police. Court documents stated that Watson was behind these reports.

    Joyce’s record shows she was initially looked into over a potential “non-crime hate incident” relating to “malicious communications”, but officers soon began investigating the possibility of “harassment”.

    This is recorded against her name and could show on an advanced DBS check, despite police taking no further action against the author.

    So how fucking outrageous is that?

    She was unaware of this police activity until earlier this year, when Watson asked the High Court to review the police decision not to pursue a criminal investigation into Joyce’s social media posts.

    Men ruining women’s lives for rejecting the lie that particular men are women.

  • Mustn’t overwhelm them

    Sarah Phillimore explains why women don’t get the anxious tender obsequious concern and protection that is lavished on our trans siblings:

    The police have long lived in the shadow of the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the righteous anger directed at their failure to act promptly or at all to find his killers. The Macpherson report of 1999 was clear that as the police were institutionally racist, they could not be trusted to make proper assessments of any report of racial hatred and must therefore simply accept all complaints and investigate them thoroughly.

    The ‘investigate’ bit often got neglected and soon a two tier system gained root – criminal offences and the ‘non crime hate incidents’ where any complaint, no matter how ridiculous made by a member of a ‘monitored strand’ would be accepted at face value and recorded on a ‘crime report’, using the words ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ There was no clarity about when or where that recorded information would be disclosed.

    …

    There are five monitored strands and they mirror some of the protected characteristics of the Equality Act – race, religion, disability and sexual orientation. ‘Transgender identity’ which is not in the Equality Act was added in 2012 – see discussions below.

    Notice anything missing? Yes of course.

    If you commit a crime against a ‘monitored strand’ resulting out of your hatred for them, you are looking at a higher sentence; these groups are deemed worthy of enhanced protection.

    The interplay between protected characteristics and monitored strands has itself caused immense confusion with some believing that the police are following the Equality Act protected characteristics. They are not. A notable omission is ‘sex’. There are longstanding concerns that requiring police to record misogynistic hate crimes would overwhelm them.

    Ohhhhhhhh I see – women are left out because there are too many crimes against us and thus it would be too much trouble to do anything about those crimes. Ok that’s fine then.

    This explains in part why women’s complaints of violent threats from trans identifying men did not get the traction when it was vice versa. Women are not seen as a group requiring enhanced protection but the trans identifying man is.

    Is that fucked up enough yet?

  • Clear disdain

    NY Times sums up the Kennedy v public health hearing:

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced a withering barrage of questioning from a Senate committee on his vaccine policy and his record as President Trump’s health secretary, responding at times with clear disdain for the senators, public health data and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which he oversees.

    That’s just great, isn’t it? He has disdain for senators, public health data, and the CDC. He has confidence and pride in…his own unaided hunches.

    Appearing before the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday, Mr. Kennedy blamed the C.D.C. for the number of American deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic, and said he did not trust the data that showed vaccines saved millions of lives in the United States and elsewhere during the pandemic. Mr. Kennedy also falsely asserted that there were no cuts to Medicaid in President Trump’s domestic policy bill, and rejected bipartisan criticism that his actions were making it harder for people to obtain vaccines.

    And where does he get all this? Nowhere. It just comes from his own brain, which is empty. Trump might as well have strolled into Lafayette Square and grabbed the first person he saw to be the federal health secretary.

    A few snapshots, in reverse temporal order:

    Kennedy has been remarkably salty and dismissive with the senators. As Senator Wyden, who was sharply critical of him from the start, made some closing remarks, Kennedy took out his phone, looked down at it, and began to scroll.

    …

    Kennedy disputed Susan Monarez’s account of her firing as C.D.C. director. “I told her that she had to resign because I asked her, ‘Are you a trustworthy person?’ And she said no,” he said. Kennedy has previously refused to discuss his interactions with Monarez, saying he would not talk about personnel matters. He said she was “lying” when she said he had fired her because she would not accede to his demands on vaccine policy.

    …

    Kennedy’s heated back and forth with Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire just now was the most striking example yet of his disdain for members of the committee, and his disregard for Capitol protocol.

    “This is crazy talk. You’re just making stuff up,” Kennedy said to Hassan as she accused him of reducing transparency around health data and limiting access to vaccines.

    “Sometimes when you make an accusation, it’s kind of a confession, Mr. Kennedy,” the Democratic senator replied.

    You in particular, Mr. Kennedy.

  • Oh no, not rough looking

    Somebody is feeling left out…

  • Why so quiet, bitch?

    This one paragraph in a Telegraph piece on trans ideology and the gun-toting police abuse of Graham Linehan…

    Look at the health service. In Scotland, a nurse named Sandie Peggie has taken NHS Fife to a tribunal after it suspended her for complaining about a male trans colleague using the female changing room. This week, lawyers representing NHS Fife argued that there’s “no evidence” that women, Ms Peggie aside, “have a problem” sharing female-only spaces with male trans people.

    Really? Has it not occurred to NHS Fife that, if women don’t complain, it might just be because they’re scared? Not least because complaining might get them punished by their employer?

    That.

    Trans “activism” is uniquely privileged among social justice movements in the way it is protected by governments and cops, protected so fiercely and thoroughly that most dissenters are silent because they don’t want to be ferociously punished for not being silent.

    Why are the police and the state so extremely intent on protecting trans ideology and its believers when the police and the state were not at all quick to defend feminism or socialism or anti-imperialism?

    I don’t know. All this time, and I still don’t know.

  • The wrong sort of victim

    The NY Times cautiously tests the heat.

    Britain’s most senior police officer has called for the government to change or clarify the law regarding free speech amid intense public debate over the arrest of an Irish comedian on suspicion of inciting violence against transgender people on social media.

    Mark Rowley, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, which serves the London area, said his officers had been put in an “impossible position” in which laws were drawing them into “toxic culture-wars debates.”

    Some toxic culture-wars debates.

    When, I wonder, is the last time 5 UK cops arrested a man for social media threats against women.

    Have any UK cops ever done that?

    They don’t arrest rapists, so it seems unlikely that they pay much attention to threats, let alone remarks that have to be scrutinized very hard in order to detect any genuine threatening quality to them.

    In short I don’t think so. Violence against women goes unpunished, so talking smack wouldn’t even register.

    Why is it, I wonder for the millionth time, that “trans women” are considered so enormously much more vulnerable than actual women?

    Quoting this bit for the second time today – it gets on my nerves a tad.

    Mr. Rowley defended the arrest in his statement, saying that the law “dictates that a threat to punch someone from a protected group could be an offense” and that “most reasonable people would agree that genuine threats of physical violence against an identified person or group should be acted upon by officers.”

    But you don’t. You don’t agree, and you don’t do it. Women get threats of physical violence on social media all the time. How often do you investigate it? Ever?

    Mr. Linehan’s arrest has reignited a debate over the policing of speech in Britain, an issue the Trump administration has fiercely criticized.

    Blah blah blah, yes, we know, but what about this two-tier thing? Why do you see trans people as victims and women as making a fuss about nothing?

    I would really like to know.

  • Green as merde

    Zack Polanski, the new leader of the Greens.

    Well I think Polanski’s remarks are totally unacceptable, therefore he should be arrested by five men with guns and held in a cell for twelve hours.

  • From a protected group

    And then there’s the second part.

    In a statement, Rowley said: “On Monday, officers arrested a man in his 50s at Heathrow in relation to allegations of inciting violence, linked to posts on X. The officers involved in the arrest had reasonable grounds to believe an offence had been committed under the Public Order Act.

    “While the decision to investigate and ultimately arrest the man was made within existing legislation – which dictates that a threat to punch someone from a protected group could be an offence – I understand the concern caused by such incidents given differing perspectives on the balance between free speech and the risks of inciting violence in the real world.”

    See it?

    “a threat to punch someone from a protected group could be an offence”

    He’s making men who pretend to be women the protected group and women the threat. He’s framing women as the powerful violent overlords and men as their helpless victims.

    That’s what this fucking ideology is all about.

  • Allegations of inciting violence?

    Met police chief calls for review of law after Graham Linehan arrest

    The Metropolitan police have declined to drop their investigation into the comedy writer Graham Linehan for tweets about trans issues, and said that the law used by officers to detain him needs reviewing.

    The Met commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, said on Wednesday officers should not be “policing toxic culture wars debates”, and while any review took place, officers would investigate only more serious cases concerning online messages.

    I gather the Met isn’t thrilled about all the headlines.

    In a statement, Rowley said: “On Monday, officers arrested a man in his 50s at Heathrow in relation to allegations of inciting violence, linked to posts on X. The officers involved in the arrest had reasonable grounds to believe an offence had been committed under the Public Order Act.”

    Inciting violence is it?

    The tweet in question:

    If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.

    Is that inciting violence or instructing in self-defense?

    People used to know that women are at a physical disadvantage compared to men, and that therefore it’s useful for them to know some self-defense techniques. I’m wondering what makes the Met so confident that Graham was inciting violence as opposed to suggesting a means of self-defense.

    I don’t think he meant it exactly literally – I think it’s more exasperated hyperbole than advice. But either way, surely it’s about self-defense as opposed to inciting violence. He’s suggesting self-defense techniques for the underdog, which is the obverse of inciting violence. It seems highly perverse for the cops to pretend women are a threat to men.

  • Guest post: The pronoun business is a trap

    Originally a comment by What a Maroon at Miscellany Room.

    It’s fairly common when you’re in a group of three or more to refer to one of the group in the third person. As an example, imagine a classroom discussion, where Johnson (a man who insists that others use female pronouns when referring to him in the third person) has just expressed an opinion. The teacher, in an attempt to stimulate some conversation, may then turn to Smith and say, “Do you agree with what [3rd person sg. pronoun] says?” Of course the teacher could just say “Johnson”, but it gets awkward if the question becomes more complex: “Do you agree with Johnson when Johnson says X?”

    From a linguistics perspective, this is one of my main objections to the whole pronoun business. Pronouns (like most grammatical morphemes) are meant to be semantically and cognitively light, and generally are not very salient phonetically or semantically (which is why they often get reduced or in some languages elided completely). Linguistic communication is cognitively demanding; using pronouns when everyone understands who or what the referent is and, in the case of humans when speaking English, what sex the referent is, lightens the load for both the speaker and the listeners; insisting on pronouns that don’t match the referent’s sex, either in gender or in number (i.e., “they”), forces both sides of the conversation to put effort into producing and understanding what’s normally an effortless part of the discourse, and can impede communication. It’s like sleeping on a lumpy mattress–suddenly you’re noticing and being bothered by things that are supposed to fly under the radar, and you’re not getting a good night’s sleep.

    Sometimes people will say it doesn’t really matter; after all, most English speakers use the same pronoun for second person singular and plural without any problems. Except of course that causes all kinds of problems, which are aggravated by the fact that we often use “you” as a generic pronoun as well. We’ve developed ways to get around the ambiguity (youse, y’all, yinz, etc.; or “Not you personally but you generically”), but the ambiguity is there, and it can defeat the purpose of the pronoun by forcing us to put our communicative and cognitive resources into clearing it up.

    The pronoun business is a trap, one that we’re all bound to fall into at some point, and when we do, we’ll be forced to either grovel in apology or sew the proverbial “T” onto our garments.

  • Prejudicial n outdated

    Steven Pinker writes:

    Evidence that woke isn’t dead, peer review is problematic, and science needs to address deep problems in its culture: A grad student at Harvard conducted the first systematic, data-based study to document & explain the rise in gender dysphoria. His paper was rejected from a leading journal because, among other things, “Throughout the manuscript, the authors use language that is considered prejudicial and outdated (e.g., “natal sex” as opposed to “sex assigned at birth”). It is critical to follow best practice and guidelines surrounding gender inclusive language, particularly for research specifically on the topic of gender incongruence, expression, and identity.”

    Lordy lordy lordy. What sane person considers “natal sex” outdated compared to “sex assigned at birth”? That’s not a matter of scientific language being updated, it’s a matter of politics, and idenniny politics at that. There’s nothing “updated” about pretending that sex is assigned as opposed to observed. Cult language is not an update.

    There are a few replies that insist yes cult language is too so an update. Such as:

    So let me get this straight. Someone’s “smoking gun” that science is collapsing under “woke tyranny” is… that a grad student’s paper got rejected because it ignored established terminology guidelines in the very field it was trying to publish in? That’s not censorship, that’s just bad scholarship.

    Imagine a med student submitting a cardiology paper and insisting on using “dropsy” instead of “congestive heart failure.” A journal would laugh it out the door, not because of politics but because science has agreed-upon, precise language for a reason.

    Uh huh, and “assigned male at birth” is some of that agreed-upon, precise language.

    “Natal sex” isn’t neutral…. it carries baggage and misrepresents the consensus terminology. If you’re studying gender identity, you follow the standards of the field just like youd follow APA style in psychology or IUPAC naming in chemistry.

    Peer review rejecting a sloppy manuscript isn’t proof science is broken….. it’s proof science is working. The whole point of peer review is to keep outdated, imprecise, or biased framing from muddying the literature. If you can’t meet the bar, you don’t get in. That’s not “woke,” that’s quality control.

    It’s science science SCIENCE I tell you!

  • Cowed

    Oh how interesting. I wonder if I will ever see any former colleagues say the same.

    As for the mad props, how about some mad props for those of us who rejected the bullshit from the outset?