Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Biden seems to have overpromised to European allies.

President Joe Biden told key allies in June that he would maintain enough of a security presence in Afghanistan to ensure they could continue to operate in the capital following the main U.S. withdrawal, a vow made before the Taliban’s rapid final push across the country, according to a British diplomatic memo seen by Bloomberg. 

Biden promised U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other leaders at the Group of Seven summit in Cornwall, England, that “critical U.S. enablers” would remain in place to keep Kabul safe following the drawdown of NATO forces, the note said. British officials determined the U.S. would provide enough personnel to ensure that the U.K. embassy in Kabul could continue operating. 

Sooooo they’re now pretty pissed off at him.

The British document also showed that the U.S. was privately briefing  allies that they should be prepared for a Taliban offensive before any settlement that might have allowed former President Ashraf Ghani to remain in power. U.S. diplomats said that the Taliban would “test the Afghan government militarily” before they started taking seriously peace talks that were taking place in Doha, the note said.

Ah test it, is that what they were doing – so they “tested” it and next thing you know they had taken over every inch of it.

Trans dogma as professional requirement:

[A] social worker who was critical of aspects of transgender ideology has been sanctioned by Social Work England (SWE), the regulatory body for social workers. In July this year, a female social worker was given a one-year ‘warning order’, following a complaint from a member of the public that she ‘used social media unethically’. Case examiners at SWE agreed that she made a number of posts on Facebook that were ‘discriminatory in nature’. According to the disciplinary report, she shared links ‘to fundraising pages for people and / or organisations which appear to hold and / or have publicised discriminatory views’. She also ‘shared and signed petitions that pursue a discriminatory goal’. Because of this, Social Work England ruled that her ‘fitness to practise is impaired by way of misconduct’.

The social worker’s posts expressed ‘gender critical’ views in relation to the increasingly toxic and polarised transgender debate. Case examiners at Social Work England say explicitly in their report that ‘no evidence has been offered that would suggest that the social worker acted in a transphobic manner while at work’. Similarly, examiners heard testimony from her line manager that she ‘has never practised in a discriminatory way’. In other words, the whole basis of the case against her was that she expressed the ‘wrong’ views about trans issues on social media.

And the ‘wrong’ views aren’t that X people are inferior or naturally subordinate or both, they are simply that people are the sex they are and not the other one. The ‘wrong’ views are views that were universal until a few years ago. The ‘wrong’ views are about a matter of fact, on which the ‘right’ views are more eccentric and fantasy-based and hard to believe than the ‘right’ views – in other words a professional body is making it a disciplinary matter to believe obvious facts instead of non-obvious fictions. Apparently you have to believe (or at least pretend to believe) that people are whatever sex they say they are if you want to be a social worker.

So if a woman is married to an abusive man, and they have kids and no money and are struggling, if the man says he’s a woman any social worker who takes their case has to agree with him, including if the woman married to the man doesn’t agree that he’s a man.

How’s that going to work out?

Chapter 572 of the Infantilization Chronicles:

Romeo and Juliet audiences have been given an entire page of warnings about suicide, fake blood and stage fighting for a new prodution at Shakespeare’s Globe.

Oh gosh, really? Suicide? Fighting? I had no idea, I thought it was about a couple of kittens who find a ball of yarn and hilarity ensues.

The double suicide of the star-crossed lovers has been deemed a mental health issue in a guide reminding viewers that the actors playing Romeo and Juliet do not really die at the end of the play.

They don’t??? Who knew?

This “sensitivity” is all the more bizarre given the movies and tv shows and video games everyone is steeped in. I could see Cousin Joe from deep in the country who’s never seen a play or a tv show or a movie and has never read a book and never talked to any humans needing to be told that the actors aren’t really dead, but other than that…

More seriously…I think people who are so fragile that they can’t deal with onstage violence probably don’t go to the theater. I also don’t think this is a left-right thing particularly, it’s more a…what…therapy culture versus get a grip culture. There’s a kind of cult of fragility going on, which we’re all too familiar with in relation to the people who keep yelling that trans people are the most oppressed ever. Encouraging people to think they’re so weak and excitable that they think stage murder is real is not doing them a favor. Most people are not made of crystal and don’t shatter at a touch.

Dennis Kavanagh has some questions.

It’s “capricious” to say that same sex attraction is not the same as being trans and that the former doesn’t have to be lumped with the latter at all times? It’s the other way around, isn’t it – it’s “capricious” to treat them as the same or closely related enough to be inextricably bound together for all purposes.

Labour Women’s Declaration addresses Sadiq Khan:

Sadiq – “Do you support the single-sex exceptions in the 2010 Equality Act or do you wish to repeal them?” This is the question which Joan Smith asked you in private letters last year, but you failed to respond, in spite of her position as the independent Chair of your VAWG Board, in which role she was charged with leading independent scrutiny of your performance towards ending VAWG.

We are now publishing our own letters to you so that it cannot be said that you were not aware of our safeguarding concerns. As Labour Peer Philip Hunt warned in July 2020 “When the eventual public enquiry happens, as inevitably it will, there will be many organisations and leaders who will have to face up to the consequences  of their inaction.”

Thousands of Labour party members who have signed our Declaration are also waiting for your answers to our letters to you and your Deputy Mayors, dating back over 2 years. We believe you are publicly promoting views which will have a chilling effect on women, and on lesbians in particular. We have repeatedly asked to meet you and your colleagues so that you can at least understand our concerns. We are not asking you to agree with us, but to hear us.

I’d like him to do both. I’m fed up with seeing women’s concerns brushed off and ignored.

The letters make interesting reading.

Even with Trump gone, they still flop around in the sewer.

Dr Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to US president Joe Biden, has been labelled a “snivelling little twit” by a Republican congressman. Matt Gaetz, who represents Florida, made the remarks during an America First rally in Iowa on Thursday. During his speech, Gaetz told the crowd. “Speaking of government bureaucrats, I have heard enough of that snivelling little twit, Dr Anthony Fauci.”

Gaetz is the latest Republican to take aim at Fauci, after Representative Madison Cawthorn said last month that the doctor would be ‘prosecuted’ if the GOP takes control of the House in the midterms next year.

Because…? He’s doing his best to deal with a viral pandemic. How is that a reason to call him names and threaten to prosecute him?

Joan Smith wonders aloud why Sadiq Khan’s office fired her:

Back in 2013, when Boris Johnson was Mayor of London, I was surprised to get a message from City Hall. One of Johnson’s deputies, Stephen Greenhalgh, wanted to know if I would be willing to join him as Co-Chair of the Mayor’s Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Board — the body that draws up policy to tackle domestic and sexual violence in London. Johnson and Greenhalgh wanted to bring in an independent expert and decided to invite me on the advice of a number of women’s organisations.

I jumped at the chance, even though I am a member of the Labour party, and we worked amicably together for the next three years. Fast forward to 2021: Johnson is prime minister, Lord Greenhalgh (as he now is) is a government minister and I am out. Now I am in a peculiar situation: I have voted Labour all my life, yet was brought into City Hall by a Conservative administration — and sacked by its Labour successor.

Peculiar but all too familiar – the left is now the party of magical thinking while the right is the party of obvious facts when it comes to sex n gender. Usually it’s the other way around.

After eight years of unpaid work on behalf of women and girls in London, it seems reasonable to expect that Sadiq Khan or Sophie Linden, the deputy mayor who replaced Greenhalgh, would have wanted to tell me themselves. But I have not heard a word from Khan and I only had a call from Linden yesterday after the Times published a story about the incident. Before that, all I had received was a series of diary notifications from her office, cancelling all the meetings I was supposed to have with her over the next twelve months.

Which seems quite staggeringly rude and offhand. Or rather – “Seems, madam? I know not seems; nay, it is.”

The news was delivered in an email from Diana Luchford, a former civil servant at the Home Office, who is now CEO of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. I had to read it twice before the meaning sank in: I am out, thus removing independent scrutiny at a moment when the behaviour of the Metropolitan police towards women has been fiercely criticised.

Free expertise unceremoniously thrown away, apparently without so much as a thank you.

As Co-Chair, I was able to make sure that vital issues raised by recent events were discussed. For example, I argued that we needed to know what the Metropolitan Police intend to do to improve the way they identify sexual predators in their own ranks, and to make sure that complaints of domestic abuse against serving officers are handled properly. I also expressed my concern, privately, that the Mayor’s focus on issues such as knife crime risked diverting attention from crimes against women, including black women in London who suffer disproportionately high levels of rape and sexual assault.

…

“Trans women are women, trans men are men,” Khan declared in February, repeating the mantra of trans activists.

The mantra that is a mantra because it is untrue. If it were true and obvious there would be no need to keep repeating it.

I discussed the Mayor’s tweets with Karen Ingala Smith, indomitable CEO of nia, the organisation that provides services to victims of sexual and domestic violence in east London. We decided to write to Linden, warning her about the impact Khan’s statements were having on organisations that depend on City Hall for funding: “How can it have anything other than a chilling effect when the Mayor publicly takes sides with a group of activists on such a contentious issue?” we asked.

We received an equivocating reply, repeating the Mayor’s view that “trans women are women” and making the dubious claim that the “basic human rights [of trans people] remain unmet”. Linden told us that the Mayor’s approach to providing services “is led by the needs of victims and survivors on a clear principle of non-discrimination”, a puzzling statement since women’s organisations are highly unlikely to discriminate on grounds of age, race, religion or disability.

But we bitches “discriminate” on grounds of reality. That can’t be allowed. Either we repeat the mantra or we get the hose get summarily fired from an unpaid position without even a polite thanks for your service.

Sarkie.

The thing about this is that the “all of our boards are being restructured” retort is completely worthless, because what does restructuring have to do with getting rid of a well known highly informed UNPAID expert on violence against women? Restructure to your hearts’ content, fine, but don’t throw out your genius unpaid experts! Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel, instead!

Which, of course, hints that “restructuring” isn’t really the reason they did it at all, but they can’t admit the real reason, because it’s so contemptible and disgusting.

Originally a comment by Sastra on The toxic meaning attached to “woman.”

I’ve come to the conclusion that the Sloppy Analogy is one of the major players in turning otherwise reasonable people unreasonable. I’ve long noticed this when it comes to religion and believing in God. A direct examination of the god concept requires too much light on a blurry idea based primarily on emotion. Enter then the popular apologetic of Sloppy Analogies.

“Remember how your mother would put something out for you to find and do something she wanted? God works like that. Think of your mother. God is like that. Think of your mother in another room so you can’t see her. Now you’re starting to understand. God’s like that. Now think of quantum physics. Hard to wrap your mind around, huh? God’s like that, too ….”

Once they start playing Sloppy Analogy, they can go on and on. The game is for them, as much as it is for you. And it seems to me that TRAs play it all the time.

“Think of knowing something true about yourself and not being believed. Being trans is like that. Think of black women not being able to use a bathroom reserved for whites. “Sex-based” spaces for women is like that. Think of religious conservatives disgusted over homosexuality. Opposition to trans folks living according to their Gender Identity is like that. Think of Jews hiding from the Nazis. That’s how trans people feel when Gender Identity is treated like a theory…”

And on and on. Sloppy Analogies are intuition pumps.

“Asking me to define ‘God’/define ‘woman’ is like asking me to reduce someone I love to a math equation. It just can’t be done. You’re making a category error.”

Ha.

Joan Smith on erasing women:

The Labour MP Rosie Duffield has been relentlessly bullied for liking a tweet that queried the language of an American cancer charity which referred to women as “cervix-havers”, but she is absolutely right. Cancer prevention is about identifying a possibly fatal disease, not affirming someone’s gender identity. If a charity wants to add that women who identify as men should also get checks, that’s absolutely fine. But replacing “woman” with a clumsy neologism risks failing to reach natal females who aren’t familiar with their bodies and don’t know they have a cervix. Nor have I seen equivalent demands to erase the word “men” from medical advice. “Men, we are with you,” begins a message from Prostate Cancer UK. “Penis-havers”, surely?

Now, to top it all, I discover I’ve been ejected from high-level discussions at City Hall about domestic and sexual violence. Eight years ago, I was asked to become Co-chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, after a group of women’s organisations voted unanimously in my favour. Women wanted me there, to provide an expert independent voice, but now I’ve been sacked. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think the scale of violence against women in London has reduced in the meantime. (Spoiler alert: it hasn’t.) Women’s organisations in London weren’t consulted before it happened.

Maybe the thinking is “Now we know that if women don’t like being hated and assaulted they can just identify as men, there’s no need for a Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board.”

The toxic meaning attached to “woman” is misogyny in its purest form. Dressed up as “progressive”, as though we have finally reached the stage of recognising an historic injustice, it is actually quite the opposite — an attempt to shame women into accepting erasure from public discourse. This is something that centuries of patriarchy never quite achieved, perhaps because it didn’t feel the need as long as women were firmly in their place. But once the category of “women” has been demolished, everything is up for grabs and literally anyone can claim to be whatever they feel like. How can we fight for our rights if we’re not even allowed to name ourselves? 

And we’re not even allowed to name the others, either, not if they “identify as”…us.

People really should stop saying this. They’d be better off just drooling.

“It is wrong for the governor to force caring, experienced, and dedicated educators to get a vaccination, or have their jobs, livelihoods, and dreams ripped away from them,” said Rep. Alex Ybarra, R-Quincy, in a statement. “It was my choice to get vaccinated. That’s the way it should be — a personal health-care choice.”

Of course that’s not the way it should be, and of course it’s not simply a personal health-care choice. It’s not simply a personal vehicular choice to drive 90 miles an hour down a residential street, it’s not a personal business choice to sell contaminated food, it’s not a personal marketing choice to say that smoking is good for you. There are such things as personal health-care choices but vaccination isn’t one of them.

It certainly does.

Amnesty Ireland is getting a pasting.

Women’s rights are human rights? Is that so?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali bonfires the vanities:

We’ve become so focused on microaggressions in America that we have lost sight of the macroaggressions happening to women around the world.

In my latest book, Prey, I argue that the modern-day feminist movement in the West does not take seriously the concerns of women in working-class communities, many of whom have immigrant backgrounds, and who face a steady rise of sexual harassment and assault on the streets of their own neighbourhoods.

In today’s perverse American culture, however, more attention is devoted to the use of preferred gender pronouns than to the plight of women whose most basic rights — to education, personal autonomy, the right to be present in a public space — are either removed or under serious threat.

That’s not exactly the feminist movement though – it’s part of the feminist movement along with part of the left. There still are some of us feminists (and lefties) who despise the whole idea of “preferred pronouns.”

What will now happen to the women of Afghanistan? When asked if women’s rights will be respected, the Taliban governor of the Andar district in Ghazni province, Mawlavey Kamiil, said: “We assure this to people all over the world, especially the people of Afghanistan: Islam has given rights to everyone equally. Women have their own rights. How much Islam has given rights to women, we will give them that much.” Similarly, a member of the Taliban’s cultural commission, Enamullah Samangani, has promised that women “should be in the government structure according to Sharia law”.

This caveat is important: women will only have the rights afforded to them by Islam. Under orthodox Sharia law, women can inherit property but not at the same level as men (generally half as much); women can testify in court but their testimony is not equal to a man’s word; women have a right to divorce under specific circumstances but not a unilateral right (as men have); a male guardian is essential for a woman; a woman can have one husband whereas a man can have up to four wives.

Yet the texts of Sharia law do not fully capture the brutal reality of daily life for women under a regime like the Taliban’s. In the last period of Taliban rule, which ended with the invasion of 2001, women were forced to wear the burka when outside, if they were allowed to leave the house at all. They were not educated in any meaningful sense (other than, in some cases, the most basic religious education). They were forced into marriages (often as young girls) with men who used them as chattels. Brutal punishments for small transgressions made women little better than slaves.

Yes, the “modernised” Taliban has done some media training, but we should not be fooled. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan will be governed by the same draconian Sharia law as the Taliban regime of the past. Reports are already emerging of girls being taken as child brides, with the Taliban “ordering local religious leaders to give them a list of girls over 15 years of age and widows under 45” to marry their fighters.

Women’s faces are being whitewashed from billboards throughout Kabul. Women in Kandahar have been told not to return to their jobs at Azizi Bank, and that instead “male relatives could take their place”. In a small village in the Faryan province, the Taliban knocked on doors and demanded to be fed. If women protested, they were beaten and even killed.

And nobody asked what their pronouns are.

This took my breath away.

I know the feeling well. Women talking about women’s issues are constantly interrupted and told to talk about trans issues instead, and now this. I’m feckin fuming too, basically all the time.

Scotland’s LGBT community is frightened by the current anti-trans obsession screams the headline on a story by Josh Mennie.

I NEVER picked a “side” – I was born this way. Common decency would argue that a group of people put into the continuous, never-ending, daily cycle of defending their existence should not be simply classed as a “side”. For many of us, this “side” was never a choice. However, undermining LGBT+ rights and inclusion – the other side in the so-called debate – is a choice.

Born what way? Born “identifying as” the other sex? Nobody is born “identifying as” anything. Are there gender dysphoric infants? If so how does anyone know? How do the infants know? Infants don’t know their sex, or their “gender,” so how would they know they’re in the Wrong Body for their real sex?

Nobody puts any people in any never-ending cycle of “defending their existence” – that’s just the usual hyperbole that’s used to try to lash people into feeling ever more lachrymose sympathy for people who spend too much time thinking about themselves.

It never really was the gender debate, though. More like a misinformation war, targeting a particular sector of the LGBT+ community by divide-and-conquer tactics.

No, it’s the other way around. The T has nothing to do with the LG, and should never have been added on. Same-sex attraction and delusions about one’s own sex are completely different things.

Society is being stirred up by hate and discrimination toward a minority group. Looking back in history, every time a group has been demonised like this without challenge, it ends in absolute disaster. We have multiple historical examples of how people’s minds buy into irrational hate campaigns toward a minority grouping. Just open your history books – you won’t need to read very far.

He’s clearly never read very far in any book, because if he had he wouldn’t write so badly. It’s also clear that he knows nothing about history – “it ends in absolute disaster” is the kind of hand-waving you do when you haven’t read the homework assignment. “Can you be more specific?” “Really really bad disaster!”

This is real now. We are at a point in history where LGBT+ organisations, rape crises centres, and almost every organisation which uses trans inclusive language are being hounded to the extent it is impacting the work they do – and for what? Is it because they had the audacity to provide services to people daring to be trans? Trans people have existed for millennia. It shouldn’t be controversial anymore.

They’re not being hounded, and what it’s for is the preservation of women’s rights, including the right to avoid men when they need the rape crisis centre. That’s for what. Narcissistic twerps who think they think they think they’re in the wrong body are not a good reason to force women to share their spaces with men in the wake of sexual violence.

The argument that trans rights are eroding women’s rights is the mantra from people who cannot specify which rights would actually be eroded.

Oh yes we can. The right to women-only spaces and institutions. The right to have jobs and awards and prizes for women continue to be for women, not women and men who claim to be women – just women. The right to talk about women, and to read newspapers and magazines and books that continue to use the word “women” instead of the generic “people.” The right not to be erased from public discourse. The right not to be called “the birthing parent.” The right to have feminist organizations and institutions that are just for women. The right of women to focus on women’s issues instead of constantly being prodded to be more “inclusive” of male people. Rights of that kind. We know all too well what rights we mean.

We laugh as you do, bleed the same, cry as you will.

Yeah blah blah blah you once read a comic book version of The Merchant of Venice, go you. Nobody says you don’t, but that’s not the issue. The issue is your relentless attempts to colonize women and your refusal to take “no” for an answer. There’s a word for that.

Welp. That’s clear enough.

Although this terrorist’s motivation is not yet publicly known, and generally speaking, I understand citizenry anger directed at dictatorial Socialism and its threat to liberty, freedom and the very fabric of American society.

There is no socialism, let alone dictatorial socialism. There’s no such thing as “Socialism’s march.” Centrist Democrats are not socialists, nor are they dictators.

It’s true that the US’s future is at risk, but that’s because of climate change and authoritarian conservatives like Mo Brooks, not because of phantom “socialism” red in tooth and claw.

Surprise surprise the Taliban appear unlikely to protect women’s rights. You don’t say.

Taliban guarantees that women and girls will be able to study and work under their rule have been thrown into doubt after one of their leaders said that the decision would be left to a council of Islamic scholars.

“Thrown into doubt” – who believed them in the first place? Don’t be silly. They included the proviso “as long as/to the extent that they are compatible with sharia.” Sharia is not a human rights respecting system of laws. Sharia perceives women as inferior and as constantly on the verge of spreading their legs for any man who approaches.

“Our scholars will decide whether girls are allowed to go to school or not,” Waheedullah Hashimi, a senior Taliban leader said, less than 24 hours after the group held its first press conference and promised that women would be allowed to work and study.

But they didn’t promise that, they included the “if sharia” bit, at least in all the reporting I saw.

Zabihullah Mujahid, the previously unknown spokesman who chaired the Taliban’s first press conference as the de facto leaders of Afghanistan, had sought to present a more moderate face to the world than that of the regime that ruled with an iron fist from 1996-2001.

Mujahid vowed that the Islamic Emirate, the Taliban’s name for their nascent administration, would “respect the rights of women” before adding the caveat “within the framework of Islamic law”.

Exactly – so what did you think that meant? We already know how they interpret “within the framework of Islamic law.”

He said that women would be allowed to work “with different areas like health and education” but he would not be drawn on whether they would be allowed in public life or leadership positions.

So what did you think that meant?

Hashimi also said the ulema, or council of scholars, would decide what women would be required to wear. “They will decide whether they should wear hijab, burqa, or only a veil plus abaya or something, or not,” he said. “That is up to them.”

That is, up to the council of male religious fanatics, not of course up to the women. The male religious fanatics think women are all ravenous whores who want to fuck every male animal on the planet. There’s no ambiguity in any of this.

Yesterday the International Criminal Court (ICC) sent a shot across the Taliban’s bow, reminding them of the investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan opened last year. The statement amounted to a warning to the Taliban that its leaders could end up in the dock at the Hague.

Karim Khan, the ICC chief prosecutor, endorsed the UN security council’s assessment that there were credible allegations of war crimes in the course of the Taliban’s military offensive.

“These reports include allegations of extrajudicial executions in the form of revenge killings of detainees and individuals who surrendered, persecution of women and girls, crimes against children and other crimes affecting the civilian population at large,” he said.

Khan warned that the court “may exercise its jurisdiction over and investigate any act of genocide, crime against humanity or war crime committed within the territory of Afghanistan since May 1, 2003”.

But can they get any actual Taliban criminals to the Hague? I wouldn’t think so, but I don’t know everything.

Troublesome women object.

The deputy mayor in charge of the pesky women responds with oh no we didn’t.

But it is true – she was sacked after expressing those concerns. After; notice it doesn’t say because. Maybe the Times’s cautiousness wasn’t so excessive after all.

Women don’t matter.