Sarah Ditum on the decline in sanctimony:

When actors in the new [Harry Potter] production are challenged about Rowling’s views, they tend to respond in robustly live-and-let-live style.

Asked whether criticism of Rowling had put him off accepting the role of Dumbledore, John Lithgow offered a genial: “Heavens, no.” Nick Frost, the new Hagrid, shrugged: “She’s allowed her opinion and I’m allowed mine.”

Frost’s comment might be the lowest possible bar of support for free speech imaginable, and part of me unkindly wants to demand a point-by-point explanation of exactly how he disagrees with Rowling. But it’s a million miles from the thoughtless acceptance of five years ago that, by demurring from activist talking points, Rowling was maliciously endangering vulnerable trans people.

It’s been a very long and very tedious journey, but it’s good to be here.

What’s changed? Partly, the debate has moved on in law and politics. But more important is the way social media has changed. In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter, later renaming it X and gutting many of the features that allowed opinions to go viral. Meanwhile, liberal users decamped to a new service called Bluesky.

Bluesky has never been able to match old Twitter’s power for promulgating outrage and generating headlines. The users on there are very, very opposed to anything they consider “right wing” (I gave it up as a bad job after a solid day of being told to kill myself) but it doesn’t matter: no one outside Bluesky is likely to care.

In the words of the journalist Josh Barro: “Bluesky isn’t a bubble. It’s a containment dome.” Finally, furious liberals have a safe space to be righteously unpleasant in, leaving everyone else to safely ignore them as they rile themselves into ever-more unpopular positions.

Pass the lemonade.

How interesting. Deep religious convictions are compatible with mass murder. Deep religious convictions even inspire and motivate mass murder.

The man accused of assassinating the top Democrat in the Minnesota House held deeply religious and politically conservative views, telling a congregation in Africa two years ago that the U.S. was in a “bad place” where most churches didn’t oppose abortion.

How deeply deeply deeply religious of him to draw up a list of legislators to murder for the crime of not wanting to force women to bear children against their will. Many deeply religious people see men as people and women as tools. Apparently murder-guy is of that clan.

Friends and former colleagues interviewed by AP described Boelter as a devout Christian who attended an evangelical church and went to campaign rallies for President Donald Trump. 

Being a devout Christian=voting for Trump? I’m not seeing the connection. I know Trump is happy to force women to have babies they don’t want to have, but that’s not because he’s a devout or even frivolous Christian. It’s because he likes harming people.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on “I don’t think there is an issue”.

An intractable problem (as I see it) is that the formation of stereotypes and norms is a natural and automatic process. Linguistic innovation, for example, spreads because people tend to mimic each other. As mimicry spreads, behavior becomes (statistically) normal. When things are normal for long enough, which really isn’t very long at all, they become (normatively) normal as people begin to see deviation as wrong or indicative of potential danger. A pet example of this is how quickly it became a red flag for potential employers and romantic interests that someone didn’t have a social media presence. Another is how using punctuation and proper capitalization in text messages became rude. Humans are norm generation machines. We can’t help it.

Formation of stereotypes and norms is also epistemologically necessary. The universe is unfathomably huge, while we are so very, very small. Abstractions, simplifications, and heuristics are the only things that let us do anything at all. Ethics, as a philosophical discipline, sees a similar problem in “act consequentialism”, the evaluation of moral correctness according to the consequences of discrete actions. This original formulation of consequentialism was eventually observed to be an impossibly heavy cognitive burden. Forced to evaluate every possible action and its totality of consequences whenever deliberating, we’re left in a state of analysis paralysis. Rather than being action-guiding, act consequentialism becomes action-denying. “Rule consequentialism” seeks to resolve this paralytic problem by moving the ethical calculus from evaluation of individual acts to evaluation of rules. [I’ll leave for another day the issue of whether it collapses to act consequentialism.]

Elimination of gendered stereotypes is, perhaps unfortunately, an impossible goal. Any observable trend can and will lead to the formation of a new statistical or normative expectation; i.e., a stereotype or a norm. If something trends among boys, then that will likely become something expected of boys. If something trends among girls, then that will likely become something expected of girls. A commitment to the erasure of gendered stereotypes becomes a commitment to eternal whack-a-mole against the essential nature of human reasoning and belief formation.

The best we can hope for is to minimize maladaptive stereotypes or norms and to proscribe certain domains as off-limits for legal enforcement. Norm transgressions of the “man in a dress” or “woman in a tuxedo” sort, for example, would have explicit mention in law. Essentially, it would be the type of non-discrimination protection that we see for traditionally oppressed or exploited groups. One does wonder whether such a list of exceptions would be manageable, as it very easily could grow too large or vague to be useful.

More fundamental is that we could run into Chesterton’s Fence. Norm transgression itself can be a reliable indicator of danger in many cases. A man who is willing to break norms regarding sex-specific restrooms is probably one who’s willing to violate other norms, and that should give us pause. To what extent is violation of any given norm potentially a reliable indicator of other transgressions, and to what extent does violation of certain norms facilitate harm? An example of the latter is that allowing males into female restrooms interferes with women’s and girls’ ability to defend themselves by recognizing a male presence as the warning sign it absolutely is. Another example would be that repeated violation of child safeguarding norms desensitizes children and adults to threat signals, such as those that could alert us to sexual predators.

One might respond to the second example by saying that we ought not relax any norms having to do with child safeguarding. Confounding this response, however, is the spectre of the act vs rule consequentialism debate: we can’t be sure whether holding a particular stereotype or adopting a particular norm is tied to child safeguarding, because the universe and human society are complex systems composed of nearly infinite variables that interact and interpenetrate in unknowable ways. Every rule choice and every decision in the moment to follow a rule is an act to be evaluated under our ethical calculus, leaving us once again paralyzed by reality’s irrational immensity. [And here I said I’d leave the collapse of rule consequentialism to act consequentialism for another day. Whoops.]

I don’t know. Pessimism’s got me today. I’m going to go back to my June project of turning the first seven chapters of Journey to the West into Just So Stories. Because haven’t you ever wondered why so many monkeys on so many mountains never grow old or how seas and rivers got their tides, O Best Beloved?

He had a list.

The man suspected of shooting and killing a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband as well as shooting and wounding a second lawmaker and his wife “stalked his victims like prey” and “shot them in cold blood,” acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota Joseph Thompson said.

“His crimes are the stuff of nightmares,” Thompson said at a news conference as he outlined the “chilling” details.

…

Boelter, who was arrested overnight near his farm in Green Isle, Minnesota, is facing federal charges including stalking and firearms charges and state charges including first-degree murder, officials said.

Boelter allegedly surveilled his victims’ homes and took notes, Thompson said. He allegedly had firearms and a list of 45 elected officials in notebooks in his car, Thompson said.

…

The target list recovered from the suspect’s car outside the Hortmans’ house had a list of dozens of Minnesota Democrats, including Hoffman, Hortman, Gov. Tim Walz, U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar and U.S. Sen. Tina Smith, according to law enforcement sources familiar with the matter.

…

A motive is unclear, Thompson said.

Not really. I think “because Democrats” is pretty clear.

There’s a UK organization called ELECT HER.

What do they do?

We work to motivate, support and equip women in all their diversity to stand for political office in Britain.

Good stuff.

Do you include trans women in your work?

Yes. We are a fully inclusive organisation. All women are welcome to register to access our activities. We acknowledge that non-binary people do not fit into the binary categories of women and men, but we recognise that some non-binary people’s experiences or identities intersect with women’s and if you feel you would benefit from accessing a women-centred space, we want to welcome you.

Oh. So it’s not for women in all their diversity, it’s for women and men who call themselves women.

Why don’t you support men?

There are many barriers faced by women who are politically active that are not faced by men – we exist to change this. We adhere to our belief that our workshops are best delivered as women-only spaces where women can come together to share, collaborate, and support one another.

Except that they’re not women-only spaces, because you include men who claim to be women and people who claim to be “non-binary.”

The same rude joke told over and over and over…

Guest post by Mike Haubrich.

I’m really only an “Out” atheist because religious people keep on assuming that they are the only ones who matter in the public square. (Not all religious people.) I don’t care about other people’s religions, they “neither pick my pocket nor break my leg.”

I realize that there are atheists who are insulting towards the religious, so no need to point that out, either.

In a thread from a state party google group, a religous person related his grief about the assassinations and attempted assassination in Minnesota yesterday. It was a heartfelt post, but he ended it by telling people to pray for the State Senator’s recovery, and then added “even my hardcore atheist friends.”

I replied that atheists grieve in our way, and hope for a quick recovery, but that it is patronizing to tell us to pray at a time like this. Following this someone else sent me a private message that this is “not about you.” I replied “no shit,” but that since the first person called us out, it was insulting. He responded “Why don’t we try to let minor offense pass and focus on what unites us?”

My dad told me when I was 47 that my atheism is just a phase. We are constanly reminded that our lack of beliefs don’t really matter, and treated as if we are just “Christians in remisison” who will run back to god when tragedy strikes.

I expect this from the other party, which is infused wtih God. But my party expends a great deal of effort to be inclusive and not to offend those whose religions differ. Our signs include the icons of religious inclusivity, one of them being women in head coverings. But atheists are often treated as second class in our meetings, our missives, and even our events. I have been to conventions which open with non-denominatonal prayer, to be inclusive. We open our conventions with the Pledge of Allegiance, the Catholic Version that was adopted in the Red Scare days and includes “Under God.”

We don’t want to make this tragedy about us, but we don’t need to be singled out and told to pray. Many of us knew the vicitms of this event, and need to grieve without being told we need to grieve in a way that does not work for us.

We are not “Christians in Remission,” we don’t pray in foxholes, nor when parents or friends die or are injured. We do want respect, and we aren’t asking for anything else. Don’t beliittle atheists. We won’t continue to take it quietly.

Yup uhuh that’s not a deranged thing to say at all. Keep it up Jonathan: show everyone how batshit you are.

The moral high ground?

Hmm. Remind us who and what Boy George is?

JK Rowling has highlighted Boy George’s conviction for beating a male escort with a chain after the singer criticised her campaign to protect women-only spaces such as prisons.

It’s a tough one. On the one hand a guy who handcuffs a male escort to a bed and then beats him with a chain, on the other hand a woman who says men are not women and should not invade women’s spaces. Which to choose, which to choose.

The author of the Harry Potter books was called a “rich bored bully” by the former Culture Club singer in a row on X that erupted when Rowling was accused of being “the person maybe most responsible for the push to take away trans rights”.

When Rowling asked the X user “which rights have been taken away from trans people?”, Boy George responded: “The right to be left alone by a rich bored bully!”

Says the guy who handcuffed a male escort to a bed and then beat him with a chain.

That takes some gall.

Boy George was jailed in 2009 for handcuffing an escort to his bed and inflicting “wholly gratuitous violence”. The court was told that the cocaine-fuelled attack on Audun Carlsen, a Norwegian man, had been “premeditated and callous” and had left the victim “traumatised”.

But he’s atoning for it now by flinging verbal abuse in the direction of a woman who defends women’s rights.

This is very safe and healthy and multicultural. Nothing can possibly go wrong.

The “schoolgirl” outfit is of course no such thing.

Dude is furious that some pesky woman who is too short and not-thin for his liking told him he can’t go into the women’s toilets. The Guardian is passionately sympathetic.

I was visiting family in London when the British supreme court handed down its unexpected ruling: under the Equality Act, sex was now considered “binary” in law, which meant transgender people could be banned from single-sex spaces of their gender identity.

Circular enough? What he means is: men could be banned from women’s spaces. Well no shit, Sherlee.

It was my last night in London before returning to Australia. I was in full makeup and a dress when my female friends took me out dancing at an alternative hub that has always prided itself on being an accepting space.

Accepting of what? Men putting women in danger? Funny thing to pride oneself on.

In 15 years of visiting Britain I have been presenting feminine in public without any problem, including using women’s bathrooms.

But now I needed to piss, and I was afraid.

Imagine how all those women felt when they found him in their bathrooms. Imagine how afraid they may have felt. Imagine the problem they saw in his presence in their toilets. When he says “without any problem” he of course means any problem for him. Other people are just wallpaper in his drama.

Sensing my discomfort my friends loyally announced their own need to pee. So we filed through a maze of corridors until we got to the pair of doors that have bifurcated so much of my life.

And there she was. The literal toilet police. She was a stocky woman marking each visitor as they approached the door…

Omigod no. A stocky woman???? How could the alternative hub put him through that???

My friends came to the rescue, telling the guard to back off and escorting me into the women’s, which was crowded with people.

Well. It was crowded with women. Rudeboy and his rude friends hadn’t been there to storm their way into the women’s toilets so it was only women who were crowding the women’s toilets – but of course if he said that it would make it too clear how intrusive and threatening and women-hating he was being.

Gaze fixed downwards to hide my humiliation, I pushed into a cubicle and peed.

Diddums. It’s all about his humiliation. What the women might want is not on the radar. Ever.

Did any of yez do any No Kings partying? I didn’t. No doubt I should have, but I couldn’t muster the enthusiasm. We couldn’t keep him out 6 months ago so what’s the point of protests now? We’re fucked, and pouring into the streets isn’t going to change that. But maybe I should have anyway. But I didn’t.

Others did.

Hundreds of protests against President Donald Trump have taken place in towns and cities across the US, organised by a group called “No Kings”.

The demonstrations coincided with a rare military parade hosted by Trump in Washington DC, and came after days of protests in Los Angeles and elsewhere over his immigration policies.

Lawmakers, union leaders and activists gave speeches in cities including New York, Philadelphia and Houston to crowds waving American flags and placards critical of Trump.

You can add Seattle to that. Much of the city was at a standstill. Well ok not much, but some.

The military parade on Saturday evening, also Trump’s birthday, was timed to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the US Army. He warned that any protests at the parade would be met with “heavy force”.

But we’re allowed to protest.

Dreaming the glorious dream.

Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber’s trans daughter, Kai, always had a vision for her future.

“I want to be a supermodel. Period,” Kai, 16, said in a Q&A with Interview Magazine published Wednesday when asked to share her dream career.

Ahhhh isn’t that lovely? Right up there with wanting to find cures for lethal diseases and ending poverty and lawyering for justice. He wants to be stared at. Kids today have such lofty ambitions!

“I’ve been practising my walks in the kitchen for years; my mum can show you all the videos I forced her to film,” she continued. “Struggling with gender identity from a young age most likely had something to do with it.” The teenager added, “I always wanted to grow up and be a beautiful, glamorous, influential woman, like Marilyn.”

And there you go. The kid, like many kids, had a fixation on a movie star, and unlike many kids went from there to trying to be the movie star. Also unlike many kids: he’s failed to grow out of it. He’s also failed to grasp that Marilyn was not “influential” in any way that sane adults want. He’s even failed to grasp that she was miserable.

Children with this little ability to grasp basic facts should not be encouraged to self-mutilate.

Living in a sewer chapter eleventy billion.

Donald Trump is trying to justify federal agents handcuffing California Senator Alex Padilla by suggesting that he “looked like an illegal,” his leading biographer has revealed.

“Trump saw these pictures and then has been on the phone saying to people, ‘Nobody’s ever heard of this guy,’” Michael Wolff, the bestselling author, said this week on The Daily Beast Podcast. “As though that’s an excuse. And then he’s gone on to say, ‘and he looks like an illegal.’”

…

Wolff said that Trump excused the assault by dismissing Padilla as an immigrant nobody. “If you are famous, that would obviously put you in a different category and ICE agents would not have tackled you,” said Wolff, explaining Trump’s rationale.

“Padilla is actually a relatively new senator from California, nobody knows about this person. Therefore, perfectly understandable that the ICE agents would tackle him. And of course he looks like ‘an illegal.’ This is just his visceral response: Nobody’s ever heard of him,” Wolff added. “We can take the blame off the ICE agents because they haven’t heard about this guy.”

How would a random unknown person get into that press conference?

Also note the absolutely classic Trump solipsism: Trump doesn’t know who Padilla is so he assumes everyone doesn’t know who he is. Trump ignorance is the best ignorance, and people who don’t share it barely exist.

In response White House Communications Director Steven Cheung recycled a previous attack on Wolff and said, “Michael Wolff is a lying sack of shit and has been proven to be a fraud. He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”

How dignified. Goebbels was a gentleman compared to these lying sacks of excrement.

Judge “Victoria” McCloud is not best pleased.

The UK’s only judge to ever publicly say they are transgender has told the BBC she is concerned the Supreme Court’s ruling on biological sex puts lives at risk and fears “someone’s going to get killed” because of it.

Why “they” and “she” in the same sentence?

As for the lives at risk – has the judge ever worried that women will get killed because of the anti-reality ideology he’s promoting? Has he ever told the BBC he’s worried about it?

Dr Victoria McCloud is planning to take the government to the European Court of Human Rights over the April ruling, which said a woman is defined by biological sex under equalities law.

It is a human right that men are women if they say so. It is also a human right that a dropped object flies upward.

Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg on Newscast, the BBC’s daily news podcast, Dr McCloud said: “This incident is putting lives at risk. I can’t go out to the pub now, for example. It might not be the be all and end all of life but I am a lawyer. I’ve got to use the men’s loos in a south London pub with a bunch of blokes who are drunk. I mean, come on. That’s now government policy. Someone’s going to get killed.”

I mean, come on. That really is an incredibly stupid thing to say. Turn it around, dude. Think about it.

If only doctors could bring themselves to use the word “women”…

The Trump administration on Tuesday rescinded Biden-era guidance clarifying that hospitals in states with abortion bans cannot turn away pregnant patients who are in the midst of medical emergencies – a move that comes amid multiple red-state court battles over the guidance.

The guidance deals with the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala), which requires hospitals to stabilize patients facing medical emergencies. States such as Idaho and Texas have argued that the Biden administration’s guidance, which it issued in the wake of the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade, interpreted Emtala incorrectly.

…

“This action sends a clear message: the lives and health of pregnant people are not worth protecting,” Dr Jamila Perritt, an OB-GYN and the president of Physicians for Reproductive Health, said in a statement. “Complying with this law can mean the difference between life and death for pregnant people, forcing providers like me to choose between caring for someone in their time of need and turning my back on them to comply with cruel and dangerous laws.”

Dr Jamila Perritt means pregnant women. Generic “people” don’t get pregnant; women get pregnant. Pregnant=specific to women.

You can’t fight this fight and erase women from it at the same time. The women part is central.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Bjarte’s The hardest lesson to swallow.

I keep coming back to this idea when I try to understand why people stay loyal to groups that clearly do harm — whether it’s cults like Scientology or gender ideology or extreme political movements like MAGA or Fascism.

It’s that tribal loyalty lives in a completely different part of the brain than rational thinking. And sometimes, the tribal part takes over.

Roughly speaking, it’s the lower brain versus the higher brain. Or if you prefer Freud, the id versus the superego. Or if you’re Homer Simpson, it’s Devil-Homer versus Angel-Homer.

The “lower brain” (or limbic system) is evolutionarily older. It handles emotion, fear, reward, and motivation — all things tied to survival. The “higher brain” (the prefrontal cortex) is newer and handles planning, decision-making, and impulse control. It’s supposed to step in and override the lower brain when it’s about to make dumb, emotionally driven decisions.

But that override system doesn’t always work — especially in kids and teenagers (whose prefrontal cortexes aren’t fully developed) or in adults under stress or fear. In those states, control shifts back to the limbic system. Survival mode kicks in, and rational thinking takes a back seat.

Here’s where tribalism comes in. I think emotional bonding with a group is a deep, evolved instinct, rooted in survival. For most of human history, being cast out from your group could mean death. So once that bond forms, the brain treats any threat to it — like criticism of the group — as a threat to you.

And when do these bonds usually form? Often during periods of vulnerability: isolation, fear, major life changes, or identity crises. People are most susceptible when they’re seeking belonging, certainty, or meaning, and some people need those things more urgently than others. That’s why some fall harder or faster into extreme ideologies or cults. It’s not because they’re weaker or less intelligent — it’s because the group offered something they deeply needed, at the exact moment they needed it.

Once the emotional bond is locked in, rational information is treated like an attack, not a challenge to think through. The emotional brain slams the door shut. You’ll defend your group, even if it means ignoring evidence, contorting logic, or getting angry at facts. Not because you’re stupid, but because some ancient part of your brain thinks your life depends on it.

And if some part of you does recognize that something’s wrong? That’s when cognitive dissonance kicks in — that uncomfortable mental tension when your beliefs and your reality don’t match. The rational brain starts to panic, but the emotional brain is already guarding the gates. And almost always, to relive the tension, people don’t question the tribe. They double down on it.

Right now, we’re living through a period of massive technological and social upheaval. Everything everywhere is changing; the future feels uncertain; everyone’s overwhelmed. That uncertainty creates fear, and fear activates the limbic system. The result is what we’re seeing all around us: the culture war is less about ideas than about instinct — people retreating into opposing tribes, not because they’ve thought it through, but because some deep part of their brain is trying to feel safe.

And the deeper into the tribe people go, the more fear they generate in the opposing tribe — fueling a feedback loop that keeps the whole thing burning. It’s Mutual Assured Destruction.

If there’s a way out, it probably starts with recognizing the pattern and calming the fear. That means speaking not just to people’s facts and logic, but to their need for safety, respect, and belonging — the things the lower brain craves. Moments like the end of the Cold War, where dialogue and empathy defused decades of mutual fear, taught us that calm, patient communication can re-engage the higher brain. Political leaders like Nelson Mandela showed this when he chose forgiveness over revenge.

So basically, what we need right now is the exact opposite of Donald Trump. His political strategy works because it runs on activating the lower brain — fear and anger — which is where most people’s minds are at right now. Michelle Obama’s slogan, “When they go low, we go high” seemed a little trite at the time, but at the moment, it feels like a solid first step in a disarmament plan — an antidote to Trump’s apocalyptic destructivism.

The BBC tells us lie after lie in its story on a man who tried to make a gun, but so does the Telegraph. How about nobody doing that?

First the Beeb:

A former police community support officer (PCSO) with an “obsession” for weapons has been found guilty of trying to make a gun using a 3D printer.

Zoe Watts, 38, of St Helen’s Avenue, Lincoln, was found with parts for a semi automatic weapon, a machete, bladed article, crossbow and bow during a raid on her home on 11 December. During her trial at Lincoln Crown Court, Watts claimed she was making a “fidget” toy gun as a Christmas present.

She is believed to be the first person in the UK to be convicted of attempting to manufacture a prohibited gun using a printer. She will be sentence[d] on 8 August.

…

Two days before the raid on her home, Ms Watts had also searched the internet for “Has anybody been killed by a 3D printed gun?” and read about a man who had been shot dead in New York. Watts was previously jailed in 2021 after she was found with banned weapons and explosive substances and had also made an improvised explosive device.

But he’s a man.

It’s grotesque that mainstream news outlets deliberately lie to the public that women do this kind of shit.

The Telegraph is every bit as bad.

A former police community support officer with an “obsession” for weapons tried to build a gun using a 3D printer. Zoe Watts, 38, was found with an “arsenal” at her Lincoln home, with items including parts to make a semi automatic weapon, a machete and a crossbow.

Watts, who previously served as a PCSO with Lincolnshire Police, was arrested during an armed operation on Dec 11. It came less than four years after she was previously jailed for possessing illegal weapons and manufacturing explosives in 2021.

…

The 3D printer was found in a cupboard during a search of Watts’ home along with many of the parts needed to make the FGC MK II Nutty, including a “very short” steel barrel. Other items including a machete, bladed article, crossbow and bow were recovered from Watts’ home.

“The defendant had an arsenal, we say this was part of it,” Mr Dee told the jury.

But it wasn’t a woman who did all that. Everyone knows it wasn’t a woman who did all that. The news media should not be telling the public that women are every bit as violence-prone as men by calling men “she” in their reporting. The news media should stop lying about this.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on If.

…all his opponents thought that he was engaging in hyperbole for dramatic effect

There is certainly no shortage of normalization or “sanewashing” – not to mention delusional levels of wishful thinking – going on. I also suspect that the moderate, centrist tendency to “err on the side of least drama” has become such a reflex to a lot of people that any suggestion that things might actually be that bad sounds like obvious “alarmism” and “hysteria” and hence self-refuting.

Still “all his opponents” seems like an exaggeration to me. There are plenty of people out there who never had any illusions about Trump himself. What a lot more people seem to have a hard time fathoming is that a large minority of the American electorate (almost certainly the single largest identifiable “constituency” at the present) really do support Trump’s authoritarian and illiberal agenda and will not start turning against him in droves if only nice liberals and lefties can make them understand how awful he truly is. Sam Harris* once made the point (rightly in my opinion) that because most secularists or moderate believers are unable to imagine what it’s like to really believe the things that religious extremists claim to believe, many can’t bring themselves to accept that anybody else believes it either, hence the obligatory attempts to find secular motives for everything from suicide bombings to the practice of letting your own children die rather than allowing necessary blood transfusions. Apparently any correlation between theses people’s actions and their expressed beliefs was a pure coincidence.

I think the same goes for nice, moderate, centrist liberals and the MAGA crowd. In the summer of 2016 a writer in Der Spiegel argued that Trump was actually a lot closer to the White House than most liberals and leftists were prepared to admit to themselves. In part his argument was based on the observation that, according to the most recent poll results, if you took the rural bias of the electoral system into account, the outcome was basically a coin toss. But the part that really stuck with me was that because liberals and lefties found everything about Trump so repulsive, they couldn’t quite bring themselves to believe that anybody else could find anything to like about him either, hence his “apparent” popular support could only be a great big misunderstanding.

Others, like Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, may not have started out with any particular illusions about the electorate, but underestimated the degree to which the Republican Party had become radicalized. Levitzky and Ziblatt are on record as saying that when they published How Democracies Die in 2018, they saw Trump as a dangerous demagogue with strong anti-democratic tendencies, but they did not see the GOP as an anti-democratic party. They have been forced to revise their opinion on this latter point, however.

Perhaps the hardest lesson to swallow is that he really can get away with anything and that neither the constitution nor the greatly over-hyped system of “checks and balances” is going to stop him. As someone once commented I think most people used to have a vague idea that “they would never let him get away with that”. It’s time to face the fact that there are no such people as “they”, and that no one is coming to the rescue.

*Yes, I know, but as I keep saying, people are not split into those who are right about everything and those who are wrong about everything.

More Bad Kennedy news:

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s overhaul of a federal immunization panel has created uncertainty around how widely vaccines will be available this fall and if they’ll be free, according tosix current and former health officials.

You want vaccines to be widely available and free, so that more people get them.

After Kennedy purged the influential committee that recommends vaccines and appointed his own picks, staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who provide the panel withresearch have now been pushed aside, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. With the new advisers scheduled to meet in less than two weeks,other CDC staff are also uncertain whether they will be able to present the necessary scientific and medical data to help the committee make informed decisions, officials said.

It’s unclear what direction this new group, which includes vaccine critics, will go, and whether they’ll be able to give the stamp of approval needed for Americans to get free vaccines against coronavirus and other pathogens in time for the fall vaccine season.

“If we have a system that has been dismantled — one that allowed for open, evidence-based decision-making and that supported transparent and clear dialogue about vaccines — and then we replace it with a process that’s driven largely by one person’s beliefs, that creates a system that cannot be trusted,” Helen Chu, a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine who was ousted from the vaccine committee, said in a news conference Thursday.

And that’s bad, because if the system is not trusted, fewer people will get vaccinated, and that’s bad.

HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said the previous members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices had become a rubber stamp for any vaccine. “This group will go where the science takes them,” he said in a statement, noting half of the eightnew appointments have previously served on federal health boards. “Secretary Kennedy has replaced vaccine groupthink with a diversity of viewpoints on ACIP.”

Yeah you don’t want a “variety of viewpoints” on this subject. It’s not a movie review or a chat about personalities; it’s a technical subject, on which random people’s random opinions are not useful.

The CDC official overseeing theoperations of the paneland the staff who gather and present vaccine data was removed from her role this week, according to two current and one former federal health official. Melinda Wharton,who has nearly 20 years experience in vaccines and immunization at the agency, has been replaced by the director of scheduling and advance in the immediate office of the CDC director. The new official now reports toCDC’s chief of staff, a political appointee, the officials said.

“The biggest fear is that science and data won’t be the primary drivers of decisions,” said one federal health official. “The largest public health concern is that this move will end up broadly restricting vaccine access.”

All because of one conceited crank sitting in the boss chair.

NPR reports:

RFK Jr. sent Congress ‘medical disinformation’ to defend COVID vaccine schedule change

Interested as I am in Kennedy’s criminal meddling in public health, I’m also interested in a surprising fact about this NPR item: it uses the word “pregnant” seven times and – take a deep breath here – every single time the next word is “women”. Has something shifted?

On to Kennedy’s campaign to make Americans sicker.

A document the Department of Health and Human Services sent to lawmakers to support Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to change U.S. policy on COVID vaccines cites scientific studies that are unpublished or under dispute and mischaracterizes others.

One health expert called the document “willful medical disinformation” about the safety of COVID vaccines for children and pregnant women.

…

“It is so far out of left field that I find it insulting to our members of Congress that they would actually give them something like this. Congress members are relying on these agencies to provide them with valid information, and it’s just not there,” said Dr. Mark Turrentine, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Baylor College of Medicine.

Kennedy, who was an anti-vaccine activist before taking a role in the administration, announced May 27 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would no longer recommend COVID vaccines for pregnant women or healthy children, bypassing the agency’s formal process for adjusting its vaccine schedules for adults and kids.

The announcement, made on the social media platform X, has been met with outrage by many pediatricians and scientists.

…

“This is RFK Jr.’s playbook,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the Committee on Infectious Diseases for the American Academy of Pediatrics and an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “Either cherry-pick from good science or take junk science to support his premise — this has been his playbook for 20 years.”

…

In two instances, the HHS memo makes claims about dangers to pregnant women that are actively refuted by the papers it cites to back them up. Both papers support the safety and effectiveness of COVID vaccines for pregnant women.

The HHS document says that another paper it cites found “an increase in placental blood clotting in pregnant mothers who took the vaccine.” But the paper doesn’t contain any reference to placental blood clots or to pregnant women.

“I’ve now read it three times. And I cannot find that anywhere,” said Turrentine, the OB-GYN professor. If he were grading the HHS document, “I would give this an ‘F,'” Turrentine said. “This is not supported by anything and it’s not using medical evidence.”

Kennedy is a very bad man.