Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Pink News tweeted this clip from last year today.

One thing the “non-binary lesbian” on the left said – or “argued” – is interesting.

At the end of the day they are terms, they are linguistic tools to describe an experience that already exists. So someone telling me that I can’t be a non-binary lesbian doesn’t mean anything [snigger] because I already am one.

What?

Yes, they are linguistic tools to describe an experience that already exists, but to do that they have to do that. They have to be accurate as opposed to inaccurate, or otherwise they’re not describing the experience, but failing to do so. If she’s trying to describe her experience of being a lesbian and swaps the word “rabbit” for the word “lesbian” she will fail at describing her experience of being a lesbian because her hearers will think she’s talking about her experience as a rabbit.

It’s the same with “non-binary lesbian.” Lesbians are women and girls attracted to women or girls. I don’t know what non-binary people are, but we are told very firmly what they are not, which is women or men. Our non-binary friend in the flowery shirt is not a woman, so she can’t be a lesbian, because lesbians are women (or girls but she’s an adult). Saying that words are terms are linguistic tools doesn’t change that.

Vancouver Rape Relief & Women’s Shelter today:

A follow up to the dead rat that was nailed to our door recently… this morning we found this writing scrawled across the windows of our storefront space that we use for support and training groups

“KILL TERFS / TRANS POWER”

Any chance it’s provocateurs, I wonder? It seems pretty insane for actual trans people to self-present that way…but then again it would hardly be the first time.

I also went looking for recent Bret Stephens wisdom, and found some on the subject of The War On Excellence a couple of week ago:

Today’s students are not chafing under some bow-tied patriarchal WASP dispensation. Instead, they are the beneficiaries of a system put in place by professors and administrators whose political views are almost uniformly left wing and whose campus policies indulge nearly every progressive orthodoxy.

So why all the rage?

The answer lies in the title of Anthony Kronman’s necessary, humane and brave new book: “The Assault on American Excellence.” Kronman’s academic credentials are impeccable — he has taught at Yale for 40 years and spent a decade as dean of its law school — and his politics, so far as I can tell, are to the left of mine.

But Yale has been ground zero for recent campus unrest, including a Maoist-style struggle session against a distinguished professor, fights about “cultural appropriation,” the renaming of Calhoun (as in, John C.) College and the decision to drop the term “master” because, to some, it carried “a painful and unwelcome connotation.”

Only to some though. To the people who could answer to the word “master,” why, it’s a lovely word. Several words are like that, I think. “Sir,” “your lordship,” “your holiness” – they all hint at a particular form of male power which does not always entail the consent of those subject to that power, so yes, it does carry “a painful and unwelcome connotation.” Fancy that.

It’s this last decision that seems to have triggered Kronman’s alarm. The word “master” may remind some students of slavery. What it really means is a person who embodies achievement, refinement, distinction — masterliness — and whose spirit is fundamentally aristocratic. Great universities are meant to nurture that spirit, not only for its own sake but also as an essential counterweight to the leveling and conformist tendencies of democratic politics that Alexis de Tocqueville diagnosed as the most insidious threats to American civilization.

Why does Bret Stephens get to decide that “master” really means a person who embodies achievement, refinement, distinction as opposed to a person who owns and extracts labor from slaves?

Also notice the cowardly evasion of the fact that it’s an explicitly male word, with the awkward addition that the female version now means non-marital sex partner rather than The Lady of the House. He says “person” but that’s bullshit, it means male person. And the codswallop about refinement and aristocratic is just that. He sounds like Margaret Mitchell with a better vocabulary.

What’s happening on campuses today isn’t a reaction to Donald Trump or some alleged systemic injustice, at least not really. Fundamentally, Kronman argues, it’s a reaction against this aristocratic spirit — of being, as H.L. Mencken wrote, “beyond responsibility to the general masses of men, and hence superior to both their degraded longings and their no less degraded aversions.” It’s a revolt of the mediocre many against the excellent few. And it is being undertaken for the sake of a radical egalitarianism in which all are included, all are equal, all are special.

So. David Karpf wasn’t wrong; dude’s a bedbug.

Oh this is interesting. I wondered if I’d written anything about Bret Stephens here before so I did a search and I’ll be darned, look what I found from April 2018:

But sometimes a person’s worst tweets, like a person’s worst blurts or jokes or exclamations, tell you something.

Expressing a belief in a tweet – or on Facebook or Instagram – does not make that belief any less yours. That’s why I found it so odd when New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote an open letter to Williamson this weekend, apologizing to him over having his character “assassinated”.

“I jumped at your abortion comment, but for heaven’s sake, it was a tweet. When you write a whole book on the need to execute the tens of millions of American women who’ve had abortions, then I’ll worry,” Stephens wrote.

Easy for him; he’s not among the people Williamson would like to see hanged.

The first and last sentences are mine, the quoted passage is Jessica Valenti in The Guardian. The subject was a columnist at the Atlantic who was fired when staff learned that he had argued that women who get abortions should be executed.

So to Bret Stephens a tweet saying – not as a joke – that women should be executed for having abortions is merely a tweet, but a tweet saying – as a joke – that he is a bedbug is not mere at all. One the one hand, they (seriously) should be executed; on the other hand, he (heh) is a bedbug. It’s the second that he thinks really matters.

Dang. Beware the distortions of vanity, my friends, for they are the very spawn of the bedbug.

Another entry in the “horrors inflicted on other people are as nothing compared to a minor insult aimed at me” file: NY Times columnist Bret Stephens goes nuclear on one unnoticed tweet.

On Twitter Monday afternoon, a George Washington University professor compared conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens to a bedbug after a Times editor had posted that bedbugs were spotted in its newsroom.

David Karpf’s tweet, which read, “The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens,” initially gained little traction.

“Little” traction meaning no traction – zero retweets. But never mind traction; Stephens emailed Karpf all the same, and copied in the provost at GWU where Karpf is a professor.

“This afternoon, I tweeted a brief joke about a well-known NYT op-Ed columnist,” Karpf wrote Monday night. “It got 9 likes and 0 retweets. I did not @ him. He does not follow me. He just emailed me, cc’ing my university provost. He is deeply offended that I called him a metaphorical bedbug.”

As many people have pointed out, Stephens should try being a woman or black on Twitter. He doesn’t know he’s born.

The exchange went viral soon after, when Karpf posted Stephens’ full email on Twitter.

“I’m often amazed about the things supposedly decent people are prepared to say about other people — people they’ve never met — on Twitter. I think you’ve set a new standard,” Stephens wrote. “I would welcome the opportunity for you to come to my home, meet my wife and kids, talk to us for a few minutes, and then call me a ‘bedbug’ to my face. That would take some genuine courage and intellectual integrity on your part. I promise to be courteous no matter what you have to say.”

A new standard? Good grief. Donald Trump says worse things than that every other day, and then there are all the other shits on Twitter.

Today Stephens Deleted his Account.

Stephens, an MSNBC contributor, was then asked about the spat by network host Chris Jansing on the air Tuesday morning. Stephens said being compared to a bedbug was “dehumanizing” and “totally unacceptable.”

“Analogizing people to insects is always wrong,” Stephens said, adding there is a “bad history” of comparing humans to insects that “goes back to a lot of totalitarian regimes in the past.”

Always wrong? What about comparing someone to a mosquito whining in your ear? Or a spider? Or an industrious ant? Or a butterfly? Or a moth? Or a caterpillar?

His claim just isn’t true – he should have said “vermin” or “noxious insects” or similar to make it accurate.

But more to the point there’s a consistency issue, combined with a “yes but this was about ME” issue.

Matt McDermott:

Bret Stephens: The biggest threat facing our society today is the stifling of free speech on college campuses.

Also Bret Stephens: I’m going to try and get a college professor fired for a joke he tweeted that didn’t get a single retweet.

I mean come on, @nytimes.

The right to offend! Most precious right! Except when you’re talking about ME!

Also in today – Devon Rape Crisis and Sexual Abuse Services tweets:

Are you a self-identified woman? Are able to commit 3 evenings a month to volunteering? Are you passionate about gender equality & ending violence? If you’ve answered yes to all of the above we want to hear from you. Full details; http://devonrapecrisis.org.uk/support-us/get-involved

Which, as many women angrily responded, is just a terrible thing to do. Women who need rape or sexual abuse services don’t want them from men. They don’t want them from men even if those men “self-identify as” women. Rape and sexual abuse services should not be a place for men to exercise their fantasies. Rape and sexual abuse services should be for women and focus on what women need, not what narcissistic fantasizing men need.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey at the Miscellany Room.

Can you stomach another article on Epstein?

This one is a Mother Jones interview with Stuart Pivar, who described himself as a close friend of Epstein, until he realized what Epstein was up to. Though he still continued to engage in some fairly gross apologetics for him, so I take the claimed separation with a grain of salt. (Pharyngula readers may recall that Pivar once sued PZ Myers for calling him a “crackpot.”)

Some notable excerpts. Those dinners with scientific stars:

There were lavish dinner parties with the likes of Steven Pinker and Stephen Jay Gould during which Epstein would ask provocatively elementary questions like “What is gravity?” If the conversation drifted beyond his interests, Epstein was known to interrupt, “What does that got to do with pussy?!”

Ha ha. Let’s get back to the important topics, amiright? Hmm — one wonders what the women scientists at the party thought of such…. ha, just kidding, obviously there weren’t any women scientists present. Which should have been a red flag to these distinguished male scholars, shouldn’t it? How come they didn’t wonder why Epstein didn’t cultivate any distinguished women scholars? It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy the social company of women, after all.

As I said, Pivar’s claim that he stayed away rings a little hollow, given his attitude towards Epstein’s behavior:

What’s the difference between the punishment which befalls a murderer and a serial murderer? It’s the same. If Jeffrey Epstein was found guilty of fooling around with one 16-year-old trollop, nobody would pay any attention. The trouble is, what he did was quantitative and not qualitative.

What Jeffrey did is nothing in comparison to the rapes and the forceful things, which people did. Jeffrey had to do with a bunch of women who were totally complicit. For years, they went, came there time and time and time again. And if there was only one of them who did it, no one would have noticed—except he made an industry out of it. And why did he make an industry out of it? Because Jeffrey was a very, very, very sick man. For some reason that doesn’t get understood. Did you ever hear of nymphomania?

Ah yes, it was just 16-year-old “trollops,” they don’t count for anything. Why, everybody fucks one from time to time, you just shouldn’t make a habit of it, and anyone who does is obviously just ill, not evil!

He didn’t struggle with it. He was in a position financially to yield to it, big time. But nevertheless, he could not help himself. I’ve seen him do things which he couldn’t—couldn’t help himself, he was afflicted with it. If he had tuberculosis it wouldn’t be called a perversion, would it? Because he coughed too much?

Oh, indeed. Quite an apposite comparison. “(cough, cough) Oh, I’m so sorry, I seem to have gotten my penis in your teenaged vagina. Ooopsie.”

Anyone who did one thing, let us say, to some 16-year-old trollop who would come to his house time after time after time and then afterwards bitch about it— why, no one would pay attention. Except Jeffrey made an industry out of it.

The nerve of those 16-year-olds!

There are plenty of people with satyriasis like there are plenty of nymphomaniacs, except very few of them have the money to, let us say, treat themselves to sex three times a day with young girls. That was what he had to do. Other people, there are plenty of cases, presumably, if you want to read up on the subject—it’s called satyriasis, right? It’s the male version of—did you ever meet a nymphomaniac?

Ah, yes. “Treat yourself” to sex with young girls, just, you know, in moderation!

It goes on from there, often in circles. Pivar repeats himself, lectures the writer on how he should have talked to a psychologist about satyriasis, and read Kraft-Ebbing’s work on sexual perversion, threatens to sue the writer, etc.

The least useful message shirt ever:

Smirk smirk abortions not just for THE LADIES.

As if abortions were like earrings or Jimmy Choos or being on the cover of Vogue.

McKinnon is continuing to show what a reasonable, thoughtful, decent, other-regarding human he is.

Nathan Oseroff thought the issue was David Koch:

I saw one of those show up in my feed and I’m wondering if they really think David Koch was a young woman?

McKinnon had to explain he’d been talking the same shit about Magdalen:

Oh, I also said it in relation to a really truly horrible TERF who’s dying of brain cancer.

It’s the latter that they’re so uppity about.

Magdalen is not horrible. “TERF” is just trans-english for “cunt.” We’re “uppity” because gloating about her terminal brain cancer is disgusting.

Trump was too busy adding up how much money he was going to lose by making the G7 pay him for putting the next one in his hotel to make it to the climate session today. (It’s actually sort of relevant that the Doral is in Miami, because Miami is one of those scandalously reckless places that keep building giant hotels and condo towers on a sinking shore. Miami is committing suicide while the world watches, dumbfounded.)

Donald Trump did not attend Monday’s crucial discussion on climate and biodiversity at the G7 meeting of international leaders in Biarritz, missing talks on how to deal with the Amazon rainforest fires as well as new ways to cut carbon emissions.

Reporters noticed at the start of the session that the US president’s chair was empty.

Trump was later asked by reporters covering a meeting with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, whether he had attended the climate session. He replied: “We’re having it in a little while.” He did not appear to hear when a reporter told him it had just taken place.

He was hearing cash register noises in his head.

Trump says the best possible place to hold the next G7 is…you’ll never guess…one of his golf resorts. What a happy coincidence, because he’s in a position to get them a good deal.

Speaking as this year’s meeting of world leaders wrapped up, he told reporters that “my people” had toured venues across the US before concluding his Doral hotel would be ideal.

“It’s not about me, it’s about getting the right location,” he said at a news conference on Monday.

Of course. It’s never about him, it’s always about doing the right thing, and there is nowhere in the entire United States that would do as well for a meeting of world leaders than his personal golf resort in Miami.

Mr Trump’s property, the National Doral Miami, is located around 8 miles (13 km) from Miami’s airport.

He said Secret Service and “military people” were among his scouts who toured “all over the country and they came up and said this is where we’d like to be”.

Nah, they didn’t, any more than the world leaders came up to Trump and asked why the press is always harshing his mellow.

When asked by a reporter on the propriety of picking his own property to host G7, Mr Trump said doing so would actually cost him money.

“In my opinion, I’m not going to make any money,” he said. “I don’t care about making money… I think it just works out well.”

He insisted the idea was “not at all” to boost his own brand.

Obviously not. Why would booking a whole huge bunch of people into his hotel make him any money? How would that even work? Hotels don’t make a profit unless they’re kept empty, everybody knows that.

Earlier on Monday, during a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mr Trump said Doral was a frontrunner but that no final decision about the exact location had been made.

He added that so far, no other venue “could even come close to competing with” Doral.

“It’s got tremendous acreage, many hundreds of acres, so we can handle whatever happens,” Mr Trump said.

The Washington Post reported that Mr Trump originally floated the idea back in June of his 800-acre Doral property hosting next year’s G7 summit.

Mr Trump’s advisers cautioned against staging such an event at a Trump venue due to ethical questions that would arise, according to the Post.

Oh surely not. What ethical questions could possibly arise, seeing as how having more people paying to stay at his hotel will cost him money?

There are bigger things to talk about in relation to the G7, but all the same…

Bolsonaro jeers at Macron because Bolsonaro’s wife is hot and Macron’s isn’t.

That’s how we’re doing the G7? Playing Whose Wife Is Most Fuckable? Really?

French President Emmanuel Macron has lashed out at Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro for endorsing “rude” remarks about his wife.

A supporter of the Brazilian president mocked Mr Macron’s wife, Brigitte, 66, in a Facebook post.

The post contained a photo contrasting the French first lady’s appearance with that of Mr Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle Bolsonaro, 37.

“Now you understand why Macron is persecuting Bolsonaro?” it reads.

In response to the comment, Mr Bolsonaro wrote (in Portuguese): “Do not humiliate (him)… man, ha ha.”

Hur hur. Hur hur hur hur. She ugly, geddit? That means he eunuch, geddit? Stud man get sex goddess, 37. Eunuch get urrggghhh, 66. Let the Amazon burn!

Mr Macron is spearheading efforts to get world leaders to do something about the fires ravaging parts of the Amazon rainforest.

Mr Macron has described the wildfires as an “international crisis”, which critics have blamed on Mr Bolsonaro’s anti-environmental rhetoric and lack of action on deforestation.

But Mr Bolsonaro, whose country is not in the G7, accused Mr Macron of having a “colonialist mentality”.

And a Nugly wife!

The right-wing Brazilian president has a long track record of making abusive comments about women, black people and minorities.

One of his most infamous remarks came during a heated debate in parliament with left-wing congresswoman Maria do Rosario in September 2014.

“I wouldn’t rape you because you don’t deserve it,” Mr Bolsonaro told Ms Rosario.

Mr Bolsonaro also caused uproar while talking about his own daughter during a public event in April 2017. “I have five children. I had four boys, and in the fifth, I weakened and a girl came,” he said at the time.

But his wife is hawwwwwwwt so let’s cut down some more rain forest before it all goes up in smoke.

Karen L. Blair asks the age-old question, Who will date a trans person?

Who is Blair?

Karen Blair is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia; an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia; and Chair of the Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity Issues (SOGII) Section of the Canadian Psychological Association.

So, not just a random activist on Twitter but an expert.

Regardless of your current relationship status, imagine for a moment that at some point in the future you were to find yourself single and looking. Under such hypothetical circumstances, which of the following people would you consider as a potential dating partner:

• a cisgender[1] woman
• a cisgender man
• a transgender woman
• a transgender man
• or a person with a non-binary gender identification?

In a recent study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 87.5% of the participants who were asked this same question only chose the cisgender options and excluded transgender and non-binary individuals from their hypothetical dating pool.

But, she goes on, romantic relationships are important and healthy, so…what about the trans people?

What then, does this mean for trans people’s overall well-being if the majority of people within society won’t even consider them as potential dating partners under hypothetical conditions?

I don’t know, but the fact that romantic relationships are important and healthy does not impose an obligation on other people to provide them to people they don’t want to have romantic relationships with. This idea is an echo of Amnesty International’s infamous claim that sex [with someone else] is a human right. People who are not trans are under no obligation to be attracted to trans people.

However, despite the fact that most participants were unwilling to consider dating a trans person, there were certain demographic characteristics that were associated with more inclusion of potential trans partners. For example, while only 3.1% of cisgender, heterosexual individuals were willing to date a trans person, 55% of individuals who identified as queer or bisexual included trans persons as potential dating partners, perhaps due to their pre-existing ability to look beyond gender when choosing a partner.

Aka their confusion of gender with sex and their overall confusion on the whole subject and their burning need to be woke about it.

While the study did not ask participants about their reasons for including or excluding trans persons, the authors speculated that exclusion was likely the result of factors ranging from explicit transprejudice, such as viewing trans persons as unfit, mentally ill, or subhuman…

“Subhman”? I call bullshit.

Ultimately, each individual has the freedom to decide whom they date or are interested in dating, and thus the article does not suggest that any single individual must include trans people within their dating pool. However, the article does suggest that examining and following the overall societal patterns of including or excluding trans people within the intimate realm of dating can be used as an indicator of overall acceptance and social inclusion of trans people. In other words, it is one thing to make space for trans people within our workplaces, schools, washrooms, and public spaces, but it is another to see them included within our families and most intimate of spaces, our romantic relationships. We won’t be able to say, as a society, that we are accepting of trans citizens until they are also included within our prospective dating pools; at the very least, on a hypothetical basis.

In other words we’re not saying you have to include trans people in your dating pools but we are saying that you have to include trans people in your dating pools. Entirely up to you of course! But you have to.

The Guardian on Trump in Biarritz:

Senior aides in Donald Trump’s entourage have accused the G7 host and French president, Emmanuel Macron, of seeking to embarrass his US counterpart by making the summit focus on “niche issues” such as climate change, according to multiple US media reports.

Good scare quotes but there should be more of them, or else GIFs of scorn and derision.

Can we focus for just a second? CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT A NICHE ISSUE.

Not in any sense. Climate change is making the planet less inhabitable for most mammals, fish, birds, insects, and plants right now and it’s getting worse all the time, at a much faster clip than was predicted even a few years ago. It’s getting much worse much sooner than anyone thought, and that means for all of us, so how can that possibly be a “niche” issue? How stupid are these “senior aides”?

The spark for the fuse appeared to be lunch. Macron whisked the US president away for an impromptu meal for two on an oceanfront terrace at the Hotel du Palais. Trump initially appeared frosty but later called it “the best meeting we have yet had”.

That probably means he liked the dessert.

Senior administration officials quoted by the New York Times among others were not so sure, complaining the summit had moved from core issues such as global economics and trade to “niche issues” such as climate change, gender equality and development in Africa. The topics were chosen to appeal to Macron supporters, and even to embarrass Trump, who pulled the US out of the Paris climate accord, they said, as protesters marched the streets of the French city calling for action to tackle the fires ravaging the Amazon rainforest.

I guess these senior aides think they will go on being able to eat and drive their cars and live in their big houses even after all the peasants have starved to death? Because the food and fuel and police protection will be provided by Market Magic or The Ghost of Ayn Rand or careful prudent saving?

“It’s our view that with France trying to drive these other issues outside of global economics, national security and trade, they’re trying to fracture the G7,” one official told White House reporter Gabby Orr.

Trade is everything! Trade is God! Trade soars free of the earthly realities of growing seasons and people who know how to plant and harvest! Shut your eyes and just keep trading!

Days earlier, Larry Kudlow, the director of the White House’s national economic council, criticised Macron’s decision to ditch the usual consensus communique at the end of the summit in favour of “coalitions’ of like-minded states. “These coalitions produce politically correct bromides such as calls to ban everything from straws to fossil fuels,” he said in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.

Sure, Larry, just keep calling it politically correct while the forests vanish and the tundra burns and Greenland melts and suddenly the food supply is nowhere to be found. That’ll work.