Another thing, that I didn’t pay enough attention to. (It’s like reading Hamlet. There’s always something you missed – some theme or repeated metaphor or word with multiple meanings and overtones – so that it expands like one of those paper flower things, except that it never stops. In Hamlet, that is. In Trump it’s just a bit of stupidity or venality you didn’t notice fully enough the first few times around.)

Why did he send his idiotic letter to multiple ambassadors?

What was the plan? They were going to text each other and hastily put together a rebellion of the ambassadors and keep at it until Norway gave in and handed over the prize in a big silver-paper box with a red bow on top?

Or maybe he was hoping to form a clique. It would be like high school only better. His clique would sit at the best table and nobody else would be allowed to sit there, ever. He would be the boss of the clique. He would humiliate all the kids with glasses or acne or a brain.

Pretty much. I’m guessing he thought the ambassadors would all totally see his point, and they would call each other up and discuss it and decide to tell Norway it has to give Trump the Nobel or they won’t do any ambassing any more. It will be like a strike but with luxury restaurant dinners.

And another thing. I just can’t let go of this one, can I.

What could possibly be more uncool, more gross, more not in the spirit of the thing, more tacky, than telling the world that you think you should have won a big major famous global prize? You’re not even supposed to say you’d like to win, let alone screaming like a giant baby with a wasp up his ass because you didn’t, and let alone times a billion saying that you should have won it because you deserve it more than 8.3 billion people.

This is of course even more true when you are a murderous megalomaniac who has caused many deaths.

I wonder what he means by this bit:

Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace

What’s the logic? How is that not a non sequitur? Not to mention based on a false premise?

It wasn’t Norway that “decided” not to give him a prize, it was the Nobel committee. Except it didn’t have to “decide” anything because it never considered him for the prize. Ok I don’t actually know that for a fact, but why would it? Why of all people in the world to elevate as a force for peace would anyone pick out Donald Trump? He’s been trying to get people killed ever since the Central Park Five got his condign attention. He loves violence. He’s had a lot of people murdered over the past year, and been the origin of more deaths, such as that of Renee Good. His whole attitude to life and people is the antitheses of peaceable or peace-promoting. He’s angry, he’s a bully, he’s rude, he’s mean, he’s competitive, he cheats, he’s ruthless. He’s not a peacemaker.

That’s just one of the speed bumps in that particular road.

To cheer us up:

Ht notBruce

Great god almighty.

This is one time when a post on TwitX is the actual source: the news outlets quote it as the source so I might as well start there.

NEW:

@potus letter to @jonasgahrstore links @NobelPrize to Greenland, reiterates threats, and is forwarded by the NSC staff to multiple European ambassadors in Washington. I obtained the text from multiple officials:

Dear Ambassador:  

President Trump has asked that the following message, shared with Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, be forwarded to your [named head of government/state]

“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”

There aren’t enough swears in the whole world.

Note the starting assumption that Norway (not the government of Norway but Norway itself) decided not to give Trump the peace prize – which rests on the prior assumption that it ever crossed “Norway’s” mind to award him any prize at all, let alone a peace prize. Note the mind-numbingly weird assumption that Trump was ever an obvious candidate for a peace prize or any other kind of Nobel prize.

Note that Trump frankly says he was “thinking purely of Peace” in hopes of a tangible reward. Note that he frankly says now in the absence of the award he’ll stop – in short, note that he’s brazenly saying he decides what to do based on what’s in it for him. Note that he admits that until now he was not thinking about what is good and proper for the United States of America.

Note that he asks why Denmark gets to own Greenland. Note that he does not ask why the US gets to own North and South Dakota, or Alaska, or Florida, or Hawaii, or, really, any part of the united states.

Never elect a toddler as head of state. It doesn’t go well.

Hand it over or I’ll shoot the kid.

In a Truth Social post this weekend, President Trump gave an ultimatum to Europe: If they didn’t allow “the Complete and Total purchase” of Greenland, he would slap tariffs on a group of European countries, 10 percent in February, and then 25 percent in June.

European leaders responded that they would not be bullied.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain called the ultimatum “completely wrong.” President Emmanuel Macron of France went so far as to say Europe should retaliate with the strongest trade tool at its disposable: activating a regulation that could restrict the access of American companies to the E.U. market.

Within hours of the post, members of the European Parliament announced that they would freeze the ratification of Europe’s trade deal with Trump. European leaders are set to hold an extraordinary meeting in the coming days to try to agree on a response to Trump’s threats.

Maybe someone could have a meeting with him, try to appease him? It just might work.

Trump argues that the U.S. needs to control Greenland as a bulwark against Chinese and Russian ambitions in the Arctic. But the U.S. already has the right to expand its military presence in Greenland under a 1951 agreement with Denmark.

Whatever. Trump wants to control Greenland because he’s a wants to control kind of guy. To put it in the vernacular, he’s a bully, and he’s thrilled that he gets to take his bullying hobby to the world stage. He’s having a blast. This is like breaking the glasses of a million nerds at a time.

Hadley Freeman in The Times:

The process is the punishment. This is the conclusion every woman will draw from the experience of the Darlington Memorial Hospital nurses who were humiliated and degraded by their employer just because they didn’t want a man, known as “Rose” Henderson, to use the women’s changing room, where he could watch them undress.

On Friday an employment tribunal upheld the nurses’ complaints of discrimination and harassment, which is a victory and should be celebrated. But it is obscene this tribunal was necessary, and future generations will look upon cases like this with the same horrified bewilderment with which we look back on witch trials.

Or perhaps not quite the same because even more so because this is now. This is not the fucking 17th century when people believed a lot of wacko things, this is the 21st century when we know how to put an exploratory tool on Mars and how to put people on a space station that orbits the earth, to name just a couple of examples of humans knowing more now than they did 5 centuries ago. To put it another way: how dare they? How dare they not only pretend to believe that a man who says he’s a woman is therefore a woman, but also punish real women for saying a man is not a woman? How dare they stick this ludicrous reality-denying ideology in the middle of a human world that knows better?

Mind you, the US is just as bad, to judge from a senate committee hearing about abortion medication last week, in which an obstetrician-gynaecologist, Dr Nisha Verma, was asked if men could get pregnant and refused to answer what she described as a “polarising” question. It would be very interesting to learn how and why this anti-science lunacy took such hold in the UK and US medical establishment, and whether biology is even taught in medical schools any more, or if it is deemed just too polarising these days.

What exactly, one wonders, did Dr Nisha Verma learn in the process of becoming an obstetrician-gynaecologist? I mean, were there classes on how to make a man look pregnant? Were their classes on how to deliver a baby born to a man? What??? What can the content have been?

When another nurse, Bethany Hutchison, was interviewed on Woman’s Hour in 2024, she was scolded by the presenter for referring to Rose as a man: “You use the word ‘male’ but what you mean is a trans woman colleague.”

The presenter of Woman’s Hour. That presenter rebuked a woman for referring to a man as a man. Women must bend the knee one way or another. If feminism gets in the way it must be turned inside out so that it becomes all about men.

The Darlington nurses won their tribunal, but it took a 16-day hearing, almost 4,500 pages of evidence and years of being bullied. How many other women will take the risk to stand up for themselves, especially when the outcome is still far from guaranteed? The NHS nurse — yes, another nurse — Jennifer Melle is still waiting to hear if she can work again after she was suspended from St Helier Hospital in Surrey because she refused to refer to, and I swear I’m not making this up, a convicted male paedophile as “she”. The convicted paedophile attacked her and racially abused her, and somehow Melle was seen as the one in the wrong.

A witchfinder-general would be an improvement at this point.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Hand it over or else.

I remember from history classes that during hard times in absolutist monarchies, it was common, for those petitioning for the redress of grievances, to blame harmful conditions and bad policies on a rotten apple or two among the king’s counsellors, rather than the king himself, as complaining about the former was, sometimes, somewhat less dangerous than the latter.

Same in Mao’s China where the disastrous effects of things like the “Great Leap Forward” were always blamed on unfaithful underlings who abused the chairman’s trust and good intentions for their own self-serving ends. The more people were made to suffer as a direct consequence of the chairman’s policies, the more that very same suffering would be blamed on a failure to realize those very same policies fully enough. On the same note, when several leading members of the People’s Temple defected, a few years before the infamous Jonestown massacre, most of them still couldn’t bring themselves to identify Jim Jones himself as the main source of the horrific abuses going on inside the cult, but blamed everything on the self-serving actions of unfaithful, mostly female, staff-members who were actually among the saddest victims of Jones’ reign of terror.

As we can read In Peter Pomerantsev’s biography of British propagandist Sefton Delmer, Joseph Goebbels’ main rival during WW2, there are some practical lessons to be learned from all this. Delmer dismissed the prevailing approach of trying to appeal to the better angels of the German people’s nature as preaching to the choir and a waste of time. Rather than seeing the Nazis as innocent victims brainwashed by propaganda, Delmer thought propaganda was effective because people actually enjoyed it and wanted it – because it gave them permission to be their worst selves as well as (you know what’s coming), an identity (ugh!), a community (double-ugh!) to belong to etc. Instead of appealing to any higher ideals, Delmer’s focus was on driving a wedge between the Nazi party (“Die Parteikommune”) and the individual (especially in the military). While “Der Führer” himself was already treated as a sacred figure and pretty much untouchable at this point, the local party officials, the SS, the Gestapo etc., could be attacked and portrayed as corrupt and decadent traitors engaging in a life of luxury and outrageous sexual depravity while the heroic soldiers were fighting and dying for the Fatherland on the front. To make the attacks appear to come from the inside the German army, Delmer created the character known as “Der Chef” (supposedly a disgruntled military officer; in reality a pre-internet “sock-puppet” and a “troll”) who was hosting one of Germany’s most popular radio stations (actually broadcast from London) at the time.

Interestingly, Delmer’s goal was not to make Germans outraged by the corruption but to encourage them to be corrupt themselves, neglect their duties, sabotage military equipment, feign illness to escape combat etc. People were supposed to think “If our leaders can be that corrupt and self-serving, why not me?”. Incidentally, Russian corruption has been exceptionally useful to the Ukrainians in the current war, diverting vast amounts of money and resources away from the War effort and into the pockets of unfaithful servants.

To bring it back to Trump, it has been suggested that Marjorie Taylor Green’s defection has been more devastating to the MAGA movement than anything Democrats could possibly have said or done, precisely because she was able to attack Trump in MAGA terms, as not being MAGA enough. Realistically though, hardcore MAGA-supporters are probably not going to start abandoning Trump in droves for any reason at this point. Like Hitler, he is already close to untouchable. But Trump is not going to live forever, and Vance, Miller, Hegseth, Bondi etc. may still be vulnerable. Sefton Delmer may have a thing or two teach us in this respect.

Originally a comment by Your name’s not Bruce? on Hand it over or else.

This is a nightmare. How much farther into madness must Trump (and America) plunge before somebody calls for the invocation of the 25th Amendment? I wonder if Putin has the Epstein files, and this is what he’s been holding over Trump all of this time? Putin is the biggest beneficiary if Trump immolates NATO from within. It says nothing good about the United States (or our species) that the fate of billions of people hinges on the psychopathology of one man and his handlers, both American and foreign.

I remember from history classes that during hard times in absolutist monarchies, it was common, for those petitioning for the redress of grievances, to blame harmful conditions and bad policies on a rotten apple or two among the king’s counsellors, rather than the king himself, as complaining about the former was, sometimes, somewhat less dangerous than the latter. I think there’s more than enough rotten to go ’round, but who’s really driving this bus of lunacy?

I really don’t understand what’s going on. I know that I’m probably hopelessly naive about all of this. I can’t truly believe that it is all clumsy, blind, blundering, that there’s nobody guiding and controlling it, even if that guidance and control is malevolent and foreign. It actually makes a perverse kind of sense, more so than if this is the result of pure stupidity and toxic narcissism. How does anyone in Trump’s inner circle benefit from encouraging this kind of brinksmanship and extortion of America’s allies? Are some of them in Putin’s pocket as well? How can none of them see that this plays into the hands of both Russia and China? I know that Trump has surrounded himself with talentless sycophants who know fuck all about anything, but Jesus fucking Christ Almighty, doesn’t anyone know how to tell him “No”? Trump is so easily goaded, manipulated, and fickle, it’s not beyond the admittedly limited capabilities of those around him. Can’t they see that they’re going to go down with him if he crashes everything? Are there no adults in the room? If there actually are individuals or “forces” in his cabinet reining him in, they’re doing a piss-poor job of it.

I know that Vance is probably waiting until he can serve two full terms himself before he pulls the plug on Trump. Vance can only do that if he serves less than two years as Trump’s replacement, so he might sit tight and wait for another year and a bit before finally organizing an internal coup because Trump has “gone too far.” But at this rate, with the combination of internal and external chaos, there might not be much more left for Vance to be president of.

Where did the adults go?

A professor was suspended after defending a gender-critical academic from accusations of “transphobia”.

Prof David Gordon said it was in the “interests” of staff and students at the University of Bristol to hear from Prof Alice Sullivan after he invited her to give a talk in November 2024. The Russell Group university’s LGBTQ+ Staff Network had claimed Prof Sullivan, of University College London, was guilty of “transphobia” and would cause “real and enduring harm” if allowed to speak.

But when Prof Gordon, Bristol’s professor of social justice, responded to their concerns via email, he was suspended because his manager had told him not to do so. An investigation concluded in March 2025 that he had failed to “follow reasonable management instructions” and nine months on he remains suspended.

Well that’s what universities are for, right? Sorting through which ideas we get to discuss and which we don’t?

Gordon is considering suing the university.

“I’d like them to apologise for violating my right to freedom of speech and academic freedom, and not protecting me from discrimination,” he told The Telegraph. “I think you should obey reasonable management instructions, such as marking. But being told to not discuss academic issues is just not reasonable.”

It’s like telling a grocery store not to talk about food.

Prof Gordon first invited Prof Sullivan to speak at Bristol in July 2024, which prompted the university’s LGBTQ+ Staff Network to object, saying: “We would like to raise an objection to this event, which is giving a platform at our university to a member of the academic community who has been noted for her transphobia views and statements. This kind of speaker and event causes real and enduring harm to our community.”

In the same way laws cause real and enduring harm to criminals, and fire departments cause real and enduring harm to arsonists.

The Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) is writing to the University of Bristol to seek clarification on Prof Gordon’s suspension and its implications for academic freedom.

“The length of Professor Gordon’s ongoing suspension is hard to square with a proportionate response,” said Freddie Attenborough, its research manager. “And when it arises in the context of his attempt to address complaints from the university’s LGBTQ+ staff network about supposedly ‘harmful’ gender-critical views being heard on campus, the message to other academics is obvious: steer clear of controversy – and leave the hard questions to those least interested in evidence.”

Well, you have to admit, it simplifies things.

Prof Sullivan said: “Activists make accusations of ‘transphobia’ against anyone who acknowledges the material reality of sex. Universities should treat this tactic with the derision it deserves. The idea that a highly respected senior professor cannot reach out to colleagues to discuss a contentious issue without management reprimand speaks volumes.”

And not the good kind of volumes.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think tariffs are supposed to be used as aids to extortion.

Trump said Saturday that he would impose a new 10% tariff on Denmark and seven other European countries until “a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

The other countries affected would be Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland.

Trump said the duties would increase to 25% if a deal is not reached by June 1.

That seems like not so much a tariff as like a bunch of guys with baseball bats and guns holding up a 7-11.

“We will not allow ourselves to be blackmailed,” said Sweden’s prime minister Ulf Kristersson in a statement. “Only Denmark and Greenland decide on issues concerning Denmark and Greenland.”

Blackmailed or bullied or beaten up.

So what do Norwegians think?

Norwegian lawmakers reacted with shock and dismay over Venezuela opposition leader María Corina Machado’s decision to present U.S. President Donald Trump with her Nobel Peace Prize medal.

“It’s completely unheard of,” Janne Haaland Matlary, a professor of international politics at the University of Oslo and former state secretary in the foreign affairs ministry, told public broadcaster NRK on Friday. She called Machado’s gesture “disrespectful” and “pathetic,” saying it undermined the value of the prize, which the Norwegian Nobel Committee awards annually.

It does rather. It’s just so silly. The object is merely an object; the fact that the award was to Machado and not in any way to Trump makes the object irrelevant.

Only someone as childishly literal-minded as Trump could think the object=the prize.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee and the Norwegian Nobel Institute had previously said: “The facts are clear and well established. Once a Nobel Prize is announced, it cannot be revoked, shared, or transferred to others. The decision is final and stands for all time.”

Unless Trump.

There is no power on earth more powerish than the power of Trump.

From the Department of Weird Manipulative Headlines:

Emma Watson up for national award after JK Rowling comments

Weird because “after” anything and everything. Time is what it is, so pretty much everything is “after” any given X. Emma Watson up for national award after brushing her teeth, after lunch, after someone in China eats lunch, after everyone in China eats lunch – you get the idea.

It’s sly and sneaky, is what it is. They don’t want to say “despite” or similar, because it might make trouble, so they fall back on the neutral “after” and thus say something absurdly devoid of meaning.

Beware of “after”.

Poor Euan Weddell. He’s just not very bright.

Pointless question, bro. Knowing that men are not women is not comparable to racism. Even if you disagree with that knowing, even if you think it’s mean and harsh to act on that knowing, it’s still not comparable to racism.

And to look at it from the other angle, campaigning to force women to agree that men can be women is not comparable to campaigning to force segregationists to stop segregating people by race.

Random comparisons of non-comparable things are not a clever way to make a point.

War fever heightens.

The Trump administration has opened a criminal investigation into elected Democrats in Minnesota, according to a senior law enforcement official familiar with the matter, a major escalation in the fight between the federal government and local officials over the aggressive immigration crackdown underway in the city.

Or to put it another way, Trump and his administration are treating a disagreement about immigration policy as a criminal matter. We know that Trump thinks it’s a crime to dispute his assertions, but we get a little edgy when he says it out loud.

The investigation would focus on allegations that Gov. Tim Walz and Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, had conspired to impede thousands of federal agents who have been sent to the city since last month. Last week, one of those agents killed a 37-year-old woman, Renee Good.

Or to put it another way, Trump and his hirelings have conspired to violate the human rights of thousands of immigrants and their neighbors since last month.

“Weaponizing the justice system and threatening political opponents is a dangerous, authoritarian tactic,” Mr. Walz said in a statement released by his office, which said it had not yet received notice of an investigation. “The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her.”

Mr. Frey described the investigation as an “obvious attempt to intimidate” him, but vowed it would not work.

Unless Trump and co make it work, by whatever means they can find. We know they’re not going to fret about laws or constitutionality.

News of the investigation, which was reported earlier by CBS News, came only two days after Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, posted an incendiary message on social media, accusing Mr. Walz and Mr. Frey of “encouraging violence against law enforcement” and referring to their actions as “terrorism.”

While both the governor and the mayor have criticized agents involved in the immigration crackdown and have at times urged local residents to document their actions, there is no public evidence that either man has explicitly encouraged violence — let alone engaged in acts of terrorism. Both have urged protesters to remain peaceful.

Yes but all Trump and co have to do is interpret criticism of agents as terrorism, and there’s your explicit encouragement of terrorism.

Federal officials have already signaled that they are not likely to bring criminal charges against Jonathan Ross, the agent who killed Ms. Good. At the same time, the officials have said that law enforcement would most likely investigate Ms. Good’s partner, Becca Good, and any possible connections the women might have had to local activists.

That decision prompted at least six federal prosecutors to resign this week from the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis.

Federal officials are only as good as the Big Boss lets them be.

The BBC takes a detailed look at the Darlington ruling.

Hospital bosses never considered ‘female discrimination’, ruling says

When talking to the nurses, NHS managers did discuss “discrimination”, the tribunal found.

But they only ever referred to it in relation to Rose, they added.

Ah. That’s quite the punchline. It’s only the man who claims to be a woman who suffers discrimination. Women who don’t want him leering at them are the lords of the manor spitting on the peasantry.

Tribunal says ruling shouldn’t detract from transgender vulnerability

In its judgement, the panel said the purpose of the Trust’s Transitioning in the Workplace policy was “to create an environment that gave transgender employees comfort and reassurance that they would be accepted and supported in the workplace”.

“This is an admirable and noble purpose,” the panel said, adding: “All good employers will look to ensure that all its staff are treated with respect. We are only too aware that transgender people are vulnerable to exclusion, abuse, mistreatment, lack of respect and misunderstanding in society. Nothing we say in this judgement should detract from that or be seen as diminishing the values that the Trust espouses in supporting its transgender staff.”

Ok but all that applies to women too you know. It’s not the case that feminism has simply shut all that kind of thing down. Furthermore many men who call themselves trans are themselves very hostile to women. We’ve been documenting this fact for years. The purported vulnerability of trans people [meaning mostly trans women i.e. men] does not cancel the vulnerability of women.

Mmmmmmno.

No, see, because the Jews in question were not being told they were not Jews, they were being genocided for being Jews.

That’s a very big difference.

They didn’t “identify” into being Jewish and they couldn’t “identify” their way out. They couldn’t identify their way out of Auschwitz. They couldn’t identify their way out of the six million.

Sophie Molly’s pretending to be comparable to Jews in the Holocaust is about as disgusting as it gets.

And now for the cringe.

Political leaders in Norway have condemned the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado’s “absurd” decision to present her Nobel peace prize medal to Donald Trump, accusing the US president of being a “classic showoff” who takes credit for other people’s work.

Good. It is absurd, of course. That’s not how this works. The whole point of it is recognition of Person X. Giving a physical emblem of the recognition to someone else entirely is dividing zero by zero. It’s like children pretending to be royalty or astronauts or moovee starrz.

Kirsti Bergstø, the leader of Norway’s Socialist Left party and its foreign policy spokesperson, said: “This is, above all, absurd. The peace prize cannot be given away.”

Absurd, pathetic, contemptible, embarrassing, childish, delusional, did I mention pathetic?

Trump’s recent threats to invade Greenland, she said, demonstrated why he was not a worthy recipient. “Trump will no doubt claim that he has now received it, but it cannot be transferred, and Trump’s repeated threats toward Greenland clearly demonstrate why it would have been madness to award him the prize,” Bergstø said.

Trygve Slagsvold Vedum, the leader of the Centre party, said: “Whoever has received the prize has received the prize. The fact that Trump accepted the medal says something about him as a type of person: a classic showoff who wants to adorn himself with other people’s honours and work.”

And a damn fool.

Flatterers!

Hmm.

Ah it’s only the KCs “with an axe to grind” who know that men are not women. What’s the axe? Knowing that men are not women, of course.

Yet another that’s not how it works.

Trump said Friday he may impose tariffs on countries “if they don’t go along with Greenland.”

Tariffs aren’t about forcing other countries to accept one rogue nation’s aggression.

Also wtf is “go along with Greenland” supposed to mean? They are “going along with Greenland”; it’s Trump’s plan to annex Greenland that they’re not going along with, for obvious reasons. Saying “Greenland” when he means “my determination to attack and absorb Greenland” is typical of his mind-blind sloppy way of assuming everyone sees what he sees, even when our refusal to see things the way he sees them is the very thing he’s talking about.

The Trump administration has previously said it is weighing multiple options, including utilizing the U.S. military, in order to take over the Danish territory.

Sir, sir, Denmark is an ally; you’re not supposed to take over territory that belongs to an ally.