Aren’t the Republicans supposed to be the Law n Order party?

Republican senators struggled to defend Donald Trump’s decision to commute and pardon hundreds of January 6 protesters, including those who were charged and convicted of crimes against police officers, just hours after the president entered office Monday.

Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, who has warned before about giving a blanket pardon to the rioters, said, “I just can’t agree” with Trump’s decision to commute the sentences or pardon a vast swath of January 6 insurrection participants.

…

Trump pardoned more than 1,000 people who were charged in the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He also commuted the sentences of 14 people in the Proud Boy or Oath Keepers who were charged with seditious conspiracy.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, sidestepped questions about the pardons, saying, “We’re looking at the future, not the past” when asked whether it was a mistake for Trump.

Ah yes the past, meaning something Trump did 15 minutes ago. Blanket self-pardon then – once you say something, it’s in the past, and we don’t look at the past, so do whatever you want.

Chats with Trump on the subject are going very well.

When asked Tuesday whether he believed it was never acceptable to assault a police officer, Trump replied, “Sure.” Pressed on a specific case of an individual who drove a stun gun into the neck of a police officer but who received a pardon, Trump said he didn’t know but would “take a look at everything.”

He didn’t know.

How did he not know? Everyone knew. There was rather extensive coverage at the time.

And if he didn’t know, what the fuck does he think he’s doing with these pardons?

Asked once more whether the pardons were sending a message that assaulting officers is OK, Trump said, “No, the opposite. I’m the friend of police more than any president that’s ever been in this office,” he said.

How is it the opposite? Explain to us in very short words exactly how pardoning people who assaulted cops is the opposite of sending a message that assaulting cops is ok. Don’t just assert it like an idiot, explain it.

Shortly before taking office, Vice President JD Vance said those who committed violence that day “obviously” shouldn’t be pardoned.

Oh really. Well then he should resign, shouldn’t he. Look what his boss has been and gone and done five minutes into his dictatorship.

Shortly before taking office, Vice President JD Vance said those who committed violence that day “obviously” shouldn’t be pardoned.

Asked Tuesday why Vance’s assertion was wrong, Trump said, “Well, only for one reason: They’ve served years in jail. They should not have served — excuse me — and they’ve served years in jail. … These were people that actually love our country, so we thought a pardon would be appropriate.”

Sir, sir, that’s incoherent, sir, do you know what “incoherent” means?

Behold the huge whiney droning man complaining about women thinking they have rights too.

It’s similar to the way “women” was spelt with a y a few years ago; it’s an effort to stop men being part of the phrase

Hold it right there, bro. One, a word is not a phrase; two, and much more important, men don’t get to be “part of” the word “women.” It’s not a ticket to the movies, it’s not a birthday party, it’s not girls’ night out, it’s not a club, it’s not school, it’s not public transportation, it’s not prizes – it’s not any kind of rank or status or club that one can join or aspire to or make great efforts to belong to. It’s not up for grabs in that way. You can’t ever be a woman, because you’re a man. That’s just how it works. You also can’t be a rabbit or New Zealand or Mercury. Stop whining.

The word women with a y actually has some sort of quite elitist very non-intersectional overtones, it’s predominantly a certain type of white middle-class feminist that would use that word, it doesn’t include women of color, it doesn’t include trans women

Somebody tell this guy he’s white. Also fuck off: we don’t have to intersect with you. We’re adults too, we get to choose our friend and comrades too, and we don’t choose you. You’re a spiteful toad calling women names for not submitting to your demands. Stop talking.

Come on, it’s a better name.

In a flurry of first-day-in-office activity, Donald Trump has signed an order to rename the 617,800 sq mile Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s 20,000ft mountain Denali.

The Gulf of Mexico will be renamed the Gulf of America, and Denali, the highest peak in North America, will revert to Mount McKinley – the name it was called before Barack Obama changed it in 2015.

The renaming of the two natural features is to honor “American greatness”, according to a preview of the orders obtained by the New York Post.

Pffff – what’s so great about McKinley?

And anyway Denali is American. Alaska is an American state, thus Alaskans are Americans, thus their name for the mountain is an American name. Plus it means “great one” so there’s your American greatness right there.

Ah, here is the author.

Originally a comment by Dave Ricks on The one silver lining.

The Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) takes credit for being the architect of model legislation used in Executive Order 14166 that Trump signed yesterday about the definition of ‘sex’ in the Federal government:

Independent Women — the Original Champion of Legislation to Define ‘Woman’ — Applauds President Trump’s Day One Executive Order to Restore Biological Reality

Independent Women is the architect of model legislation to define sex-based terms in law and code in order to stop bureaucrats and elitists on the federal and state level from redefining language to fit a false narrative and erase women. Gender ideologues have sacrificed women’s rights to single-sex spaces, opportunities, and privacy on the altar of a radical view of “inclusion.” Trump’s sex-definition executive order is a nationwide victory for women and girls.

Importantly, this executive order uses Independent Women’s definitions of ‘sex,’ ‘female,’ and ‘male’ as based on reproductive potential, rather than chromosomes, to ensure clarity and protection for all individuals.

Senior legal advisor for Independent Women, Beth Parlato said, “Over the past four years, gender ideology has infiltrated our schools, culture, policies and laws and has distorted our language with terms such as ‘pregnant person’ and forced use of opposite-sex pronouns. The lie that sex is fluid erases and endangers women. President Trump’s action today is a resounding victory for truth; that sex is binary, and women are biologically distinct from men. His repudiation of gender identity indoctrination brings back sanity and common sense.”

Carrie Lukas, president of Independent Women’s Forum, concluded: “I’m incredibly proud of the groundwork that the team at Independent Women laid for today’s victory. As we have long argued, the United States is a nation of laws, not men. To have a system of laws, words must have meaning. Today, President Trump stopped the Left’s attempts to erase the concept of women as a separate sex. On behalf of women and girls everywhere, thank you President Trump.”

Female people are basically just their genitals. They’re useful holes for men, and (sadly) they’re the only way to make children. Other than that they’re garbage.

Iraq votes to legalize the rape of 9-year-old girls.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq’s parliament passed three divisive [bad] laws Tuesday, including amendments to the country’s personal status law that opponents say would in effect legalize child marriage.

The amendments give Islamic courts increased authority over family matters, including marriage, divorce and inheritance. Activists argue that this undermines Iraq’s 1959 Personal Status Law, which unified family law and established safeguards for women.

Iraqi law currently sets 18 as the minimum age of marriage in most cases. The changes passed Tuesday would let clerics rule according to their interpretation of Islamic law, which some interpret to allow marriage of girls in their early teens — or as young as 9 under the Jaafari school of Islamic law followed by many Shiite religious authorities in Iraq.

Proponents of the changes, which were advocated by primarily conservative Shiite lawmakers, defend them as a means to align the law with Islamic principles and reduce Western influence on Iraqi culture.

Sometimes Western (or Eastern or Northern or extra-terrestrial) influence on culture is a good thing. If you have a shit culture that treats women like rebellious evil children, then outside influence is desperately needed.

Intisar al-Mayali, a human rights activist and a member of the Iraqi Women’s League, said passage of the civil status law amendments “will leave disastrous effects on the rights of women and girls, through the marriage of girls at an early age, which violates their right to life as children, and will disrupt the protection mechanisms for divorce, custody and inheritance for women.”

Allah and Mohammad hate women.

That one Executive Order:

Section 1.  Purpose.  Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers.  This is wrong.  Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being.  The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.  Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.

Trump doesn’t actually give a rat’s ass about any of that. He would never in a million years be able to put it into those words. But someone did, and it’s about god damn time.

This unhealthy road is paved by an ongoing and purposeful attack against the ordinary and longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms, replacing the immutable biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts.

Kind of like the way Trump’s sense of self is unmoored from a whole range of kinds of facts.

But Trump aside, this swapping of bio reality for daydreams about the self is one of the things I hate most about gender ideology. It is inevitably a narcissistic approach to life, and narcissism is bad. Just look at Trump, for one.

Our subjective senses of self are of interest only to ourselves, and it’s bad and wrong to try to force other people to pay attention to it.

Invalidating the true and biological category of “woman” improperly transforms laws and policies designed to protect sex-based opportunities into laws and policies that undermine them, replacing longstanding, cherished legal rights and values with an identity-based, inchoate social concept.

Accordingly, my Administration will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male. 

How did that “my” get in there?! Oh right, this is supposed to be in Trump’s voice.

(f)  “Gender ideology” replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true.  Gender ideology includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex.  Gender ideology is internally inconsistent, in that it diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body.

(g)  “Gender identity” reflects a fully internal and subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality and sex and existing on an infinite continuum, that does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.

Good stuff.

Where’s the joined-up argument?

In what way does feminism (aka women escaping the kitchen) depend on the belief that there are more than two “genders”?

In no way. It’s a stupid leap Bragg is making, and it’s devoid of sense.

Women have been escaping the kitchen for decades, without any help at all from trans ideology or trans activists.

Across the pond

Europe’s left-wingers on Tuesday raced to condemn Elon Musk after the world’s richest man performed a stiff-armed salute at an event to celebrate new United States President Donald Trump.

…

The salute immediately generated a viral and divided response, with online critics attacking Musk for the gesture and supporters minimizing its significance.

“I will start by talking about the response, or perhaps the lack of responses of the EU to Trump’s inauguration. It represents a threat to the whole of the European Union,” said French member of the European Parliament Manon Aubry, co-chair of The Left group, at a press conference Tuesday morning. “Let’s start by keeping things simple, I am sure everyone saw the Nazi salute, I select these words carefully, the Nazi salute of Elon Musk.”

In Germany, where Musk’s political backing for the far-right Alternative for Germany has already caused issues ahead of a snap election on Feb. 23, the government hit out over the controversial salute.

“I definitely don’t think highly of Elon Musk as a politician, from what we know so far. But such a gesture, given his already known proximity to right-wing populists in the fascist tradition, must worry every democrat,” said German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach from the center-left Social Democratic Party.

Meanwhile everybody on the other side said oh don’t be so silly, he was just waving, he’s autistic, you’re so hysterical.

A break for humor.

Ever since he left Britain, Prince Harry has valiantly endeavoured to carve out a new role in life. Unfortunately, however, not all his ideas have been successful – as a remarkable story in the new issue of Vanity Fair makes clear.

Shortly after moving to the US, a source claims, Harry told Spotify that he wished to present a “sociopath podcast”. In each episode, he would interview powerful world figures (for example, “Mark Zuckerberg, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump”) – and ask them how their life experiences had “made them into sociopaths”.

A startling enough suggestion. But there’s more. Because the podcast would also seek to find out why Harry, unlike his honoured guests, was not a sociopath. A source who “worked closely with [the Sussexes] on audio projects” recalls Harry saying: “I have very bad childhood trauma… What is it about me that didn’t make me one of these bad guys?”

Hahahahaha. It’s just a story, of course, so who knows if it’s true or not, but it’s still funny.

A soap opera from Scotland:

Four killers housed in the female wing of a Scottish jail have become embroiled in a “misgendering” row which led to one being accused of a transphobic hate crime, a court has heard.

Never mind that whole murder thing, zoom in on the putative twanzfobeea. Killing people is just one of those things that happen, but misgendering is unforgivable.

Alexandria Stewart, a transgender woman in HMP Greenock previously known as Alan Baker, claims fellow inmate Jane Sutherley carried out a four-year campaign, between Jan 1 2019 and March 23 2023 of verbal abuse that left them feeling suicidal.

Who? Who is this “them” left feeling suicidal? Both of them? Stewart and Sutherley? Or one of them? But which? We can’t tell. In the rush to avoid pronoun crime even a Telegraph reporter bumbles into incoherence. When it’s unclear which person is meant then you use the name, not a pronoun that could mean either of the two people you’re talking about. Ffs, people.

Stewart, 36, who is serving a life sentence with a minimum tariff of 19 years in jail for the murder of a father-of-two, told Greenock Sheriff Court that Sutherley would insist on using “he and him pronouns”.

And that’s what matters. Not the murder of a guy with two children, but what pronouns people use to indicate the murderer.

During a visiting hour at the prison, Sutherley is also accused of referring to Stewart as a man. Stewart told the court: “I was highly mortified that she had outed me as trans to those who didn’t know I was trans.”

Asked how the situation had made her feel, Stewart said: “My first thought was ‘Do I just commit suicide?’” Stewart added: “I have disassociated myself from people. I don’t trust people any more. My anxiety went through the roof and I am on various medications to keep myself going.”

Aw diddums.

Could that have anything to do with having killed a man?

No? It’s just all about you? Not about you not being killed, but about you not being called “she”? Your priorities are interesting.

Musk has gone full Nazi already.

Elon Musk waded into controversy on Monday when he gave back-to-back fascist-style salutes during celebrations of the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump.

Gee, I wonder why two Nazi salutes at a change in government would be of interest.

“I just want to say thank you for making it happen,” the owner of SpaceX, X and Tesla, the richest person on earth and a major Trump donor and adviser, told Trump supporters at the Capital One Arena in Washington.

Musk then slapped his right hand into his chest, fingers splayed, before shooting out his right arm on an upwards diagonal, fingers together and palm facing down.

Not your average random gesture.

Musk asked his audience to imagine American astronauts planting the flag on another planet, miming such actions and shouting: “Bam! Bam!”

“We own Mars, nyah nyah!” How very adult.

Social media users expressed shock at Musk’s gesture. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University, said: “Historian of fascism here. It was a Nazi salute and a very belligerent one too.”

Never mind. He was probably just stretching.

No dissent allowed.

Independent Fundamental Baptist (IFB) Cult Survivors (and their Supporters)

Solisa Zamora  · 8m  · 

@everyone This is your friendly reminder that hate is not welcome here. We recognize all genders, we affirm your identity and we do see color and acknowledge and fully honor and respect it. There is no space here for any of the “-ism’s” Anything to the contrary will be dealt with as quickly as possible, please remember to tag or report to mods/admins. Thank you.

No space here for any of the “isms”? So saying that men can be women and that you can’t say otherwise is not an ism? Saying a man is not a woman is an ism while saying a man is a woman is not?

How exactly does that work?

It’s not just the warming, it’s also ecological overshoot.

Global heating poses a horrific challenge, but climate change is only one co-symptom of a much greater malaise. Explosive growth has propelled the human enterprise into a state of advanced ecological overshoot (EO) (Catton 1982, Rees 2023). EO exists when the human consumption of bioresources exceeds the regenerative capacity of our supporting ecosystems, and the production of wastes overwhelms their assimilative capacities. Co-symptoms include plunging biodiversity, ocean acidification, tropical deforestation, land/soil degradation, the pollution of land air and water, contamination of food supplies, etc., etc.—all so-called ‘environmental’ problems.  When in overshoot, the world community can achieve further growth—and even just maintain itself—only by depleting essential natural capital and overtaxing the life-support functions of the ecosphere including the climate system, i.e. by destroying the biophysical basis of its own existence.

And that is precisely what we are doing. The global footprint network monitors the annual occurrence of ‘Earth Overshoot Day,’ the date in the year when humanity’s demand for ecological resources exceeds nature’s budget (supply) for that year (GFN 2024). Each year, Overshoot Day occurs a little earlier as demand increases and eco-production declines with accelerating ecosystems degradation—in 2024, it fell on August 1. Remember, the difference between human demand and nature’s supply of even renewable resources can be made up only by depleting remaining natural capital stocks—fish stocks, forests, soil organic matter and nutrients, ground water, etc.—that took thousands of years to accumulate in nature, and by over-filling nature’s waste sinks.  (Even climate change is a waste-management issue—CO2 is the greatest waste by weight of industrial economies.)

Think about this for a moment.  Overshoot means that humanity is running an ecological deficit, a material deficit far more important than the fiscal deficits that preoccupy politicians.  Numerous recent analyses present the evidence that that urban civilisation is on track to experience a ‘ghastly’ future (e.g. Bradshaw et al. 2021; Fletcher et al 2024). Yet most politicians, like their constituents, have never heard of overshoot. Instead, popular interest swings with media attention among its various individual symptoms—climate change, micro-plastic pollution, falling sperm counts, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic—without connecting the dots.  The fact is that humans generally have great difficulty thinking in complex systems terms. This cognitive impairment is crucial because overshoot is the ultimate ecological meta-problem.

Well, that, but surely also the ability to stop impairment.

We can’t stop. We can tell this by considering the fact that we haven’t stopped and we aren’t stopping. We take the just one more minute Mom approach. We’ll stop, we’ll stop, we promise, we just need this one more car/trip/boat/house/plane. We’ll stop, but we’re not going to stop now, because nobody else is stopping now. We’ll stop, but everybody else has to stop too or forget it. We’ll stop if you stop. We’ll stop, maybe, but then again, we’re only going to be here a few more decades so how about if our kids stop, is that good enough?

Joan Smith on Yet Another Backlash:

For too long, a motley collection of trans activists and green zealots have only needed to threaten to withdraw from literary events, and the organisers have taken fright. Now the Oxford Literary Festival has discovered a backbone, inviting the gender-critical author Helen Joyce and the feminist campaigner Julie Bindel to take part in this year’s programme. Cue the predictable outrage.

There have been calls for authors to withdraw, on the dubious (some would say bonkers) premise that the invitation puts other writers at risk. Harry R. McCarthy, a lecturer in early modern literature, grandly announced that he had withdrawn from his scheduled session on “Shakespeare for the modern age” because Joyce and Bindel are part of the programme.

Then there was the American author, Hesse Phillips, who apparently uses “she/they” pronouns. “This decision was not taken lightly,” she/they declared in a lengthy statement this week. “I’ve conferred with other queer and trans authors, cis and straight authors, friends and family, and in the end I feel that stepping down from my panel is the only way forward, both for my personal safety and my conscience.”

It’s an odd way to fight a political battle, when you think about it. What’s their “safety” got to do with anything? It’s not as if gender critical feminists run around waving machetes, now is it.

Partly, of course, it’s just more of the same old shit: accuse non-duped feminists of every crime and flaw in the book and see what sticks. “Yer wrong, yer ugly, yer scary, you eat worms.” But it’s also some new shit. It’s deploying rhetoric about “mental health” as a tool in a dispute over truth versus lies. It’s reverse bullying – “We’re not bullying, you’re bullying, by fighting back when we bully you!” And, most infuriatingly, it’s turning the tragic fact that women are not as strong as men, and all that flows from that, into a nameless but debilitating disadvantage for men. “You’re not physically at our mercy, we are physically at your mercy! Ow ow ow Mom she’s hitting me, she has an axe, she’s going to kill me!!”

Men put on skirts and lipstick and take everything women have, and then scream about being unsafe. You couldn’t make it up.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator.

To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the “masses,” to be united in a single community with workers and shopkeepers.

Of course genderism isn’t so much a “mass movement” as it is a movement forced upon the “masses” by way of forced teaming and captured institutions. They’re at no risk of being plowed under if they’re driving the plow. So much the better for one’s self image if you can claim that resistance is bigotry.

You know what I’m thinking about, of course – the chronic question of why so many otherwise reasonable/skeptical people have embraced a loony fantasy-based ideology, and done so with such zeal and venom.

Having fooled themselves that transgenderism is progressive, they can no longer see how much they resemble the forces of compulsory, civic Christianity, and that the ubiquitous “Pride Progress” flag is as much a symbol of a hegemonic imposition as the religious Right’s Ten Commandments plopped on courthouse lawns, or posted in classrooms. Both are the symbols of religious belief systems attempting to turn the commons into a totalizing, state-enforced, intellectual and political monoculture, to which all must give public obeisance or face ostracism, or worse. Questions, criticisms, and pushback are signs of irredeemable Evil, rather than principled defence against the erosion of rights and freedoms. You don’t make deals with the Devil. “NO DEBATE!”

Our erstwhile skeptics, like Republican Dominionists, have decided that the righteousness of their movement means that, so long as it is in the service of She/Her, they can do no wrong. They can say “Be kind,” and “KILL TERFS” in the same breath, with a straight face, without any thought of inconsistency or hypocrisy. After all, they’re fighting for a “marginalized, vulnerable community,” despite the fact that a movement that has succeeded in taking control of large swathes of government, business, the courts, the police, the schools, unions, news media, etc., can no longer convincingly claim to be “oppressed.” But don’t try pointing that out. You don’t have to worry about that sort of thing when you’re on the Right Side of History.

I’m not seeing any journalism reporting on this.

Updating to add:

Yes, go underground, like Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, like lesbians and gay men until the last 5 decades or so – what a cheerful prospect.

Anne Applebaum on Trump v Denmark:

What did Donald Trump say over the phone to Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, on Wednesday? I don’t know which precise words he used, but I witnessed their impact. I arrived in Copenhagen the day after the call—the subject, of course, was the future of Greenland, which Denmark owns and which Trump wants—and discovered that appointments I had with Danish politicians were suddenly in danger of being canceled. Amid Frederiksen’s emergency meeting with business leaders, her foreign minister’s emergency meeting with party leaders, and an additional emergency meeting of the foreign-affairs committee in Parliament, everything, all of a sudden, was in complete flux.

…

In private discussions, the adjective that was most frequently used to describe the Trump phone call was rough. The verb most frequently used was threaten. The reaction most frequently expressed was confusion. Trump made it clear to Frederiksen that he is serious about Greenland: He sees it, apparently, as a real-estate deal. But Greenland is not a beachfront property. The world’s largest island is an autonomous territory of Denmark, inhabited by people who are Danish citizens, vote in Danish elections, and have representatives in the Danish Parliament. Denmark also has politics, and a Danish prime minister cannot sell Greenland any more than an American president can sell Florida.

…

Trump’s demands are illogical. Anything that the U.S. theoretically might want to do in Greenland is already possible, right now. Denmark has never stopped the U.S. military from building bases, searching for minerals, or stationing troops in Greenland, or from patrolling sea lanes nearby. In the past, the Danes have even let Americans defy Danish policy in Greenland.

…

The Danes were loyal U.S. allies [in 1957], and remain so now. During the Cold War, they were central to NATO’s planning. After the Soviet Union dissolved, they reformed their military, creating expeditionary forces specifically meant to be useful to their American allies. After 9/11, when the mutual-defense provision of the NATO treaty was activated for the first time—on behalf of the U.S.—Denmark sent troops to Afghanistan, where 43 Danish soldiers died. As a proportion of their population, then about 5 million, this is a higher mortality rate than the U.S. suffered. The Danes also sent troops to Iraq, and joined NATO teams in the Balkans. They thought they were part of the web of relationships that have made American power and influence over the past half century so unique. Because U.S. alliances were based on shared values, not merely transactional interests, the level of cooperation was different. Denmark helped the U.S., when asked, or volunteered without being asked. “So what did we do wrong?” one Danish official asked me.

Obviously, they did nothing wrong—but that’s part of the crisis too. Trump himself cannot articulate, either at press conferences or, apparently, over the telephone, why exactly he needs to own Greenland, or how Denmark can give American companies and soldiers more access to Greenland than they already have. Plenty of others will try to rationalize his statements anyway. The Economist has declared the existence of a “Trump doctrine,” and a million articles have solemnly debated Greenland’s strategic importance. But in Copenhagen (and not only in Copenhagen) people suspect a far more irrational explanation: Trump just wants the U.S. to look larger on a map.

…

Of course, Trump might forget about Greenland. But also, he might not. Nobody knows. He operates on whims, sometimes picking up ideas from the last person he met, sometimes returning to obsessions he had apparently abandoned: windmills, sharks, Hannibal Lecter, and now Greenland. 

Could we combine them somehow? Sharks living in windmills with Hannibal Lecter while singing songs about life in Greenland? Maybe throw in a narwhal or two?

H/t Tim Harris

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator.

It’s tribalism all the way down. My endless fascination with Scientologists taught me that attachment to a tribe is one of the great instincts that drives human behaviour — just as great as the sexual and pair-bonding instincts are. What the Scientologists demonstrate so vividly is the capacity to completely block out obvious facts if they pose a threat to their sense of belonging within their tribe. The Xenu space alien story is possibly the most obvious pile of bullshit ever conceived, and yet perfectly rational people will find ways to avoid dispelling it, for the sake of staying in the tribe.

Tribalism is the whole reason the myriad sports teams and sports stadiums and sports bars and sports television channels and billions upon billions of dollars in sports team branded clothing exists, for one thing. Football and hockey and soccer are pageants of warring tribes.

It’s the whole reason religion exists, too.

Same for youth subcultures like goth and grunge and hippies and punks.

Same for office and corporate culture, with its cringey jargon and its team-building exercises and its tedious gossipy politics.

Of course, most of those tribes are benign, most of the time. Sports fandom does occasionally turn into violent soccer hooliganism; corporate cultures become monstrously corrupt sometimes (Enron, anyone?); youth subgroups can become criminal gangs; and we all know that religion can turn people murderous.

As for why some people stick with their tribe after it turns dark while other people have the courage to resist, I wonder if it’s got to do with how one learns to cope with rejection in childhood. Perhaps there’s a parallel with attachment theory. Attachment theory says that the other major instinct that drives us to behave irrationally much of the time — human dating behaviour — splits people into four very distinct groups (secure, anxious, fearfully avoidant, and dismissively avoidant), and the factor that sets us off on one of the four trajectories is the early relationship between the infant and primary parent (almost always the mother). The brain wires up its “relationship management strategy” in one of four ways, based on the subtle cues it receives in those crucial first interactions with the mother.

I suspect there’s a “tribal in-group management strategy” that our brains wire up in early childhood, too. We learn early on how to navigate group dynamics — which things one should and should not say and do in order to avoid social punishment or even ostracization from our peers. From my own experience, I had an extremely atypical childhood: I was an absolute outcast. I was a poor kid in the ghetto who took the bus across town to the good, rich kid french-immersion school, which meant that I was absolutely despised by both my hard-knocks, underprivileged neighbours and my sheltered, overprivileged schoolmates. The physical abuse I endured from the neighbourhood boys and the psychological abuse I endured from the mean girls at school both took their tolls on me, but they immunized me against the drive to fit in, which I could clearly see had such a stranglehold on the other kids’ behaviour.

I learned not to fear the social cost of saying or doing something that would put me at odds with my peers. I suspect that ostracization is something I’m completely unafraid of — to this day, I just as quickly step into groups as part ways with them — because I never found belonging within a tribe in my childhood. I have absolutely no fear of telling a boss if I think something’s unjust at work, or walking away from a “scene” that I think is taking a wrong turn (See ya later, gay village community! Sayonara, “gender critical Twittersphere!” Adios, New Atheism!).

I suspect that for a lot of the people who stick with their tribes even when they’ve gone dark, they’re following a course of behaviour that they unconsciously trained themselves to act out in those early days of childhood play, learning to navigate the schoolyard social dynamics, and training themselves to avoid falling out with the tribe at all costs. I suspect they don’t even know that they’re doing it. I suspect all those so-called “skeptics” who’ve gone mad with gender nonsense don’t even realize that what drives their behaviour is an unconscious fear of being kicked out of the playground, cast off like a primordial ape, left to fend for oneself in the wilderness of the savanna.

Anne Applebaum in 2020 on collaboration and resistance:

Separately, each man’s story makes sense. But when examined together, they require some deeper explanation. Until March 1949, Leonhard’s and Wolf’s biographies were strikingly similar. Both grew up inside the Soviet system. Both were educated in Communist ideology, and both had the same values. Both knew that the party was undermining those values. Both knew that the system, allegedly built to promote equality, was deeply unequal, profoundly unfair, and very cruel. Like their counterparts in so many other times and places, both men could plainly see the gap between propaganda and reality. Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator, while the other could not bear the betrayal of his ideals. Why?

It’s a question that never really gets answered.

One possible answer I think is mostly useless: that X has more courage than Y. There’s more to it than that, and what the more may be is an interesting puzzle.

Czesław Miłosz, a Nobel Prize–winning Polish poet, wrote about collaboration from personal experience. An active member of the anti-Nazi resistance during the war, he nevertheless wound up after the war as a cultural attaché at the Polish embassy in Washington, serving his country’s Communist government. Only in 1951 did he defect, denounce the regime, and dissect his experience. In a famous essay, The Captive Mind, he sketched several lightly disguised portraits of real people, all writers and intellectuals, each of whom had come up with different ways of justifying collaboration with the party. Many were careerists, but Miłosz understood that careerism could not provide a complete explanation. To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the “masses,” to be united in a single community with workers and shopkeepers.

That’s the kind of answer that’s more interesting.

You know what I’m thinking about, of course – the chronic question of why so many otherwise reasonable/skeptical people have embraced a loony fantasy-based ideology, and done so with such zeal and venom.

This is why courage is irrelevant. It takes more than fear of ostracism to explain the collapse.