Joan Smith on The Usual 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 Harry R. McCarthy, a lecturer in early modern literature, grandly announced that he had withdrawn from his scheduled session on “Shakespeare for the modern age” because Joyce and Bindel are part of the programme.

Attaboy Harry! Deprive the literary festival of your thoughts on Shakespeare and see if anyone gives the faintest tiniest damn. Do your best to punish women who don’t think what you think, and fail completely.

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.”

Who? Hesse who? Author of what?

Self-importance is not a desirable quality.

A new Pliny:

Mike Davis: “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” from 30-odd years ago:

Malibu, meanwhile, is the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world. Fire here has a relentless staccato rhythm, syncopated by landslides and floods. The rugged 22-mile-long coastline is scourged, on the average, by a large fire (one thousand acres plus) every two and a half years, and the entire surface area of the western Santa Monica Mountains has been burnt three times over the twentieth century. At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the sea. Since 1970 five such holocausts have destroyed more than one thousand luxury residences and inflicted more than $1 billion in property damage. Some unhappy homeowners have been burnt out twice in a generation, and there are individual patches of coastline or mountain, especially between Point Dume and Tuna Canyon, that have been incinerated as many as eight times since 1930.

Malibu used to belong to one very rich guy, but then it was handed over to the real estate business, fire or no fire.

In hindsight, the 1930 fire should have provoked a historic debate on the wisdom of opening Malibu to further development. Only a few months before the disaster, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.—the nation’s foremost landscape architect and designer of the California state park system—had come out in favor of public ownership of at least 10,000 acres of the most scenic beach and mountain areas between Topanga and Point Dume. Despite a further series of fires in 1935, 1936, and 1938 which destroyed almost four hundred homes in Malibu and Topanga Canyon, public officials stubbornly disregarded the wisdom of Olmsted’s proposal for a great public domain in the Santa Monicas.

Nine decades later most of Malibu is still private and still bursting into flames regularly and still being protected at public expense.

Ultimately the 1956 fire—followed by two blazes, one month apart, in 1958–59 that severely burned eight firefighters and destroyed another hundred homes—proved the beginning of the end for bohemian Malibu. A perverse law of the new fire regime was that fire now stimulated both development and upward social succession. By declaring Malibu a federal disaster area and offering blaze victims tax relief as well as preferential low-interest loans, the Eisenhower administration established a precedent for the public subsidization of firebelt suburbs. Each new conflagration would be punctually followed by reconstruction on a larger and even more exclusive scale as land use regulations and sometimes even the fire code were relaxed to accommodate fire “victims.” As a result, renters and modest homeowners were displaced from areas like Broad Beach, Paradise Cove, and Point Dume by wealthy pyrophiles encouraged by artificially cheap fire insurance, socialized disaster relief, and an expansive public commitment to “defend Malibu.”

It could have been a national park. It could have been open to everyone, and free of combustible houses. It could have had brush fires in the fire season without burning down tens or hundreds of houses at public expense. But noooooooooooooo.

Yet, even as they were opening the floodgates to destructive overdevelopment, county and state officials were also turning down every opportunity to expand public beach frontage (a miserable 22 percent of the total in 1969). Nor did they show any interest in creating a public land trust in the mountains, which were now entirely under private ownership, right down to the streambeds. Consequently, most of Malibu remained as inaccessible to the general public as it had been in the Rindge era. (For people of color, moreover, it was absolutely off-limits.) As historians of the coastal access battle put it: “The seven million people within an hour’s drive of Malibu got Beach Boys music and surfer movies, but the twenty thousand residents kept the beach.”

We have mini-Malibus in Seattle, and I hate them – places along the Sound or Lake Washington where the houses sit right on the water, blocking it from us peasants. They don’t regularly start wildfires though, I’ll give them that.

Leave Title IX alone, Joe.

A federal judge in Kentucky on Thursday struck down President Biden’s effort to expand protections for transgender students and make other changes to the rules governing sex discrimination in schools, ruling that the Education Department had overstepped and violated teachers’ rights by requiring them to use students’ preferred pronouns.

It’s not “sex discrimination” to decline to call a boy “she.” It’s more the other way around. Boys demanding to be called “she” are undercutting girls’ and women’s rights.

The ruling, which extends nationwide, came as a major blow to the Biden administration in its effort to provide new safeguards for L.G.B.T.Q. and pregnant students, among others, through Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. 

The usual gibberish. Lesbian and gay students have different needs and issues from trans students. The T and the Q are stowaways and should be pushed out of the plane.

In a 15-page opinion, Chief Judge Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky wrote that the Education Department could not lawfully expand the definition of Title IX to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, as it had proposed last year.

“The entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex,” he wrote. “Throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless.”

Exactly. It’s ridiculous that the Education can’t or won’t grasp that.

Arwa Mahdawi on the fires and women and Musk:

On Wednesday, for example, Musk took some time out from obsessively tweeting about whether the US should “liberate” Britain to proclaim that the Los Angeles fire department (LAFD) “prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes”. He has continued to post spurious claims about diversity initiatives (for example, “DEI means people DIE”) for days now, along with posts insinuating that if LAFD’s fire chief weren’t a woman, then things would be very different.

If only no one were a woman. You know? Wouldn’t that be great? Male competence replacing female incompetence everywhere? Imagine the efficiency, the inspiration, the superhuman strength.

There are, to be clear, various nuanced issues that have contributed to the wildfires spreading with the ferocity that they have. But the climate crisis is clearly a major factor. According to one 2021 study, climate change has been the main driver of the increase in fire weather in the western United States. Greed and hubris are other factors: speculators keep building houses in areas that are prone to flooding and wildfires. There’s a much-cited essay from 1995 by urban theorist Mike Davis called The Case for Letting Malibu Burn that later became a chapter in a book called Ecology of Fear. In it, Davis argues that spending millions saving homes in areas never meant for neighborhoods and power lines is not just foolish, but a waste of public resources.

Malibu and Pacific Palisades feature houses built on the beach; not just near the beach but on it. Little monopolies on beach and ocean. I consider that terrible urban planning even before fires and droughts come into it; I don’t think there should be any monopolies on beaches and oceans and other large bodies of water.

“I’m infamous for suggesting that the broader public should not have to pay a cent to protect or rebuild mansions on sites that will inevitably burn every 20 or 25 years,” Davis told the LA Times in 2018, when the Woolsey fire broke out in Malibu. “My opinion hasn’t changed.”

So now it’s every seven years. Or five, or two, or just non-stop.

This is truly staggering.

Updating to add transcript, thanks to NightCrow.

Question: Hi. Washington State is being sued by a woman who was forced to share a jail cell with a six foot four male who sexually harassed and assaulted her over many days and weeks. And she was told by the prison the Washington State Prison to not report it because she might get retaliated against. She had to suffer that for a long time until he was found on top of her when she was unconscious. His hands on her body and it’s being sued. There are many, there are about a dozen males in the Washington State Prison for women, and women are being traumatized. This is a Geneva Convention violation against women again, against women’s rights. What, what will you do to stop it, especially since you passed a bill that made it harder to find out which males are in the women’s jail? Thank you.

Response: So before getting elected, I worked on an organization called Disability Rights Washington. And at this organization I did some work around this issue of making sure that trans women who are incarcerated had what they needed to be able to navigate safely through our business system. I’m proud of the work that we did there. One of the bills, I’m not sure if it’s what you’re referring to, but one of the bills that I worked on was actually to make sure that things like sensitive images are not released to our public records act. One of the things that we found out in our work with trans women was that you know, those big body scanners you go through at the airport, walk through them to stand up with your arms up. The prisons have similar ones but that are much more high tech, so they don’t have to do invasive cavity searches, but they take pictures of naked bodies and that was subject to our Public Records Act. So we went in and we made that change to protect not just trans women, but to protect all people who were having to go through that to make sure that their naked bodies did not end up in a public records disclosure somewhere. I’m proud of the work that we did there. We need to hold to the work that we did there and we were always gonna stand up for folks who are incarcerated, who are dealing with all sorts of different horrible situations. We can do that. I continue to work on that the community safety committee, and I find it important to state that we’ll always stand with the LGB LGBTQ community.

Transcript courtesy of Erin Brewer

Another conversation with Humanists UK:

Forced teaming creates yet another mess.

Humanists UK can’t explain.

There is no such thing as “LGBT”.

L stands for lesbians. These are women who are sexually attracted to other women. That is not a mental illness and only certain religious extremists make that absurd and offensive argument.

G stands for gay men. These are men who are sexually attracted to other men. That is not a mental illness and only certain religious extremists make that absurd and offensive argument.

B stands for bisexuals. These are people who are attracted to both men and women. That is not a mental illness and only certain religious extremists make that absurd and offensive argument.

T stands for trans. According to Stonewall’s glossary, this is a very large collection of different kinds of people including transgender, transsexual, genderqueer (GQ), genderfluid, non-binary, gender-variant, genderless, agender, nongender, third gender, bigender, trans man, trans woman, trans masculine, trans feminine and neutrois. Until last summer it also included cross-dressers. The definition is a bit fluid…

Some of these people believe they are the opposite sex. That is a denial of reality. Some of them (neutrois) want to have their genitals removed entirely to have a smooth exterior. It is perfectly valid to suggest that some of these people suffer from mental illness. In fact, denying it is quite cruel, since it may deter them from seeking help.

Your thoughtless statements are adding to the existing stigma attached to mental illness. They are ignorant and profoundly unhelpful.

And not all that humanistish.

Hm. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say don’t do this.

The pink hair ribs-deficient person is male.

Originally a comment by Coel on Brought to you by.

Since climate change matters and since the science of climate change is important:

Whenever there is a cold snap or a snow storm some will inevitably quip “so much for global warming” and use one weather event as an excuse to ignore the settled opinion about climate change. They are very wrong to do so.

It is equally wrong to point to a drought event, a drought-caused fire, or indeed a hurricane, and suggest that it is due to climate change, or even to suggest that climate change has made those events much more likely. We don’t know enough to know that. After all, California is a semi-desert and prolonged droughts are normal for California (Bristlecone pines show this over eons).

Now, climate models do suggest that the likelihood of a severe Californian drought should have increased, owing to AGW, but only by about 30 percent or so. And this is a really hard thing to model. At this level of prediction, such models are not really verified by data. The model uncertainties are about at the same level as the predicted effects.

Such models also predict that hurricane frequency and intensity should be increasing (global warming => more energy in the system). The problem is that the data don’t show this. So that means that there is a lot that we don’t understand about the formation of hurricanes (which is not a surprise, we know that we don’t know).

So is climate change increasing drought likelihood in California? Well, maybe, but we really don’t know that. We don’t have a good-enough record of data to answer that directly, and we need to bear in mind the limitations of the models; it is wrong to overclaim.

Note that uncertainties in whether climate change is increasing drought likelihood in California is a very different matter from whether climate change is happening globally (that is settled, yes it is). That’s because it is way easier to model the global response to things like CO2 and the global climate as a whole than it is to then reliably predict local fluctuations in one small part of the system (such as Californian droughts).

As I said, understanding the science of climate change does matter and it’s important to avoid overclaiming (and hence: “this drought is caused by climate change” is as dubious as “this cold snap refutes global warming”).

I was reading someone burbling about trans women menstruating and blah blah blah and a thought suddenly occurred to me (weirdly late, I think) – we’ve heard a lot about gender dysphoria, and especially a lot about men who have it, but what about other kinds of dysphoria? Specifically what about gay men who have to tell people they’re gay? You know what I mean? Gay men who appear straight – not necessarily football playerish, not necessarily muscular or domineering or anything else in particular, but just not clockable as gay.

(I don’t think it works the same way with lesbians. Lots are not clockable. Let me know if I’m wrong.)

I wonder if that can cause a form of dysphoria.

I had a co-worker like that years ago when I worked at the zoo – we worked with the elephants. We had some entertaining conversations about his non-clockability. It didn’t perturb him at all, but I wonder if it does others. If so I wonder how that relates to gender dysphoria and what it feels like. A mismatch between the outside and the inside.

It interests me because maybe if we had a better understanding of gender dysphoria we could figure out better ways to deal with it – ways that don’t trample all over women’s rights and safety and the like.

Originally a comment by Francis Boyle on Making everything worse.

The climate catastrophe deniers have long given up on any attempt to argue a case. They tried that long and hard but there’s only so many times you can use sleight of hand* as an argumentative technique. The Trump technique of more or less random abuse of anyone perceived to be less than 100% supportive of your grift is just so much more effective so everyone is doing it now.

*Favourite sleight of hand techniques that I have personally encountered, in most cases multiple times:

1. cite a scientific paper as demonstrating your point when the paper does no such thing. Indeed in many cases the paper is only tenuously related to the subject under the discussion – the important thing is that the title suggests that it might do what you say since the sucker is not actually intended to follow the link let alone do any reading

2. If 1. seems too much like hard work just make up a title and give it a non-working link to a reputable scientific publication. If someone bothers to follow the link they will hopefully just put it down to link rot or some sort of screw-up.

3. If you’re cashed up hire a PR agency to call itself an institute and have it put out a “report” saying whatever you want them to.

4. Lord Monckton. Just bloody Lord Monckton.

News from Sussex:

A mental health nurse has been struck off after asking a Polish colleague whether he was “some sort of Nazi” while out on a Christmas do.

Rachel Hole was also accused of using the N-word while out with work colleagues amid a string of racist incidents spanning a number of years while working as a ward manager on The Hazel Ward, a Low Secure Mental Health Ward at The Chichester Centre in Chichester.

Ms Hole also scared a BAME colleague by putting a white sheet over her head in a Halloween prank but later defended herself by saying she was “hardly one of the Ku Klux Klan”.

And so on and so on – it continues for 22 paragraphs like that without ever mentioning that “Ms Hole” is a man or that “Hole” is a name he bestowed on himself for reasons we’re all too familiar with.

The libbruls are burning down Los Angeles, it seems.

…mismanages forests and brush, and fires firefighters for refusing an experimental vaccine?”

President Musk steps right up.

Aren’t they just hilarious?

From the Guardian’s live updating:

[A]mid nightmarish images eerily evocative of Cormac McCarthy’s dark post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, a political firestorm has sparked from Donald Trump and his supporters that seems as scorched earth in its characteristics as the blazes ravaging neighborhoods across Los Angeles.

Far from calling a temporary truce, the president-elect and his Maga (make America great again) acolytes have used the fires to attack the Democratic political ruling establishment in Los Angeles and California – possibly foretelling power struggles ahead over a range of issues after Trump assumes office this month.

The attacks have used disinformation, wild claims, conspiracy theories and extremist culture war tropes. But absent from their critique has been any acknowledgement that climate change has played any role in igniting the catastrophic fires – despite a consensus among experts that they have been caused by exceptional environmental conditions, including near hurricane-strength winds, low rainfall and unseasonably high temperatures.

The Republicans have instead blamed Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, for supposedly failing to ensure enough water was available to douse the infernos – along with his fellow Democrat, Karen Bass, the Los Angeles mayor, who drew flak for not returning from a pre-planned trip to Ghana until after the fires began. Also targeted has been the head of LA’s fire department, Kristin Crowley, derided as a “DEI [diversity, equity and inclusiveness] hire” in reference to her being the first openly gay woman to hold the position.

Ah yes, a “DEI hire.” I guess that’s a popular sneer in Trump world these days – it certainly annoyed the hell out of me the other day when it was applied to Kamala Harris, as if she has zero value apart from the DEI type.

Sports matter; women do not matter.

England’s men’s cricket team should play against Afghanistan in the Champions Trophy, despite calls for a boycott in response to the Taliban regime’s assault on women’s rights, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy says.

Female participation in sport has effectively been outlawed since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021.

A cross-party letter, signed by nearly 200 UK politicians, has been sent to the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) calling for England to refuse to play in the Champions Trophy match in Lahore on 26 February.

But Nandy thinks the match should go ahead, because sports.

“I am instinctively very cautious about boycotts in sport, partly because I think they are counterproductive. I think they deny sports fans the opportunity they love and they can very much penalise the athletes and sportspeople who work very, very hard to reach the top of their game and are then denied the opportunities to compete.”

That’s the point. A boycott is useless if it doesn’t hurt anything. Yes of course it’s unfair to the athletes, but so is the Taliban’s termination of women’s sports.

International Cricket Council (ICC) regulations state full membership is conditional upon having women’s cricket teams and pathway structures in place. However, Afghanistan’s men’s team have been allowed to participate in ICC tournaments seemingly without any sanctions.

Which is a damn good reason to boycott the whole thing.

Sir Keir Starmer was asked directly about the matter at Prime Minister’s Questions earlier this week by Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi, who authored the cross-party letter addressed to the ECB.

The prime minister said “the suppression of freedom” should be “condemned in the strongest terms” and said the government was speaking with international counterparts on the issue.

But it’s not some abstract “suppression of freedom,” it’s the very concrete suppression of women and their freedom and rights and ability to participate in public life.

I’m so tired of this filth.

The Supreme Court didn’t help Donald Trump … this time. The court’s 5-4 decision Thursday to deny the president-elect’s last-minute effort to delay sentencing in his New York hush money case sets up a stunning moment – a Friday court date just 10 days before Trump is sworn in for a second term.

Judge Juan Merchan has already said he won’t impose a jail term. But the sentencing hearing will nevertheless mean that Trump will be the first president to take office with a criminal conviction written into his official record.

Isn’t that just fabulous? Behold: President Convicted Felon.

Behold the US, a failed state.

The proximity of the sentencing to Trump’s inauguration will create a stunning juxtaposition. He will be a defendant subject to the authority of a judge and a jury verdict who will within days assume the vast powers of the presidency and become the ultimate guardian of the nation’s laws and the Constitution.

Thus covering all of us in filth that we can’t get off.

Be careful what you wish for and campaign for and talk nonsense for, eh James Woods?

God at Letters from God has the details:

James Woods, a man who hath spent his years spouting MAGA rhetoric and raging against reality, a man who blocked God back when it was still Twitter, now tragically reaps the literal whirlwind of his own climate change denial.

His house burned up. It’s gone.

God continues:

His house is no more, consumed by a climate change-boosted wildfire. It wasn’t a deep state plot. There were no Democrat-controlled weather machines and no space lasers.

And yet, instead of reflecting on climate change or the insane winds that caused this wildfire, he immediately chose to lash out at Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and—of course—”empty water reservoirs.”

But lo, the truth cometh: the reservoirs weren’t empty before the fires started. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power filled them in preparation for the fire season. The problem wasn’t the liberal boogeymen James rails against—it was the sheer scale of the firefighting effort, which drained the reservoirs faster than they could be replenished. Not that James cares for such details; he’s too busy raging to care about the facts.

I’m gobsmacked by all these people astonished that the water ran out. Do they think it’s magic? There’s only so much water that can be stored, so when there are multiple enormous raging fires dotted all over a neighborhood the water is going to run out. It’s not a plot, it’s not Democrats, it’s not Biden, it’s not even Trump, it’s just the nature of the disaster.

There are water towers on the tops of hills all over Seattle, and they’re big, but they’re not infinite. They can’t be infinite. Neither can the water inside them.

When a liberal area suffers a climate change disaster, Republicans say, “God is punishing them.” When a conservative area suffers a climate change disaster, Republicans say, “Democrats control weather machines.”

It must be hard going through life as a full-blown idiot.

Thou shalt stop blaming everyone else and start seeing the truth: climate change is real, and it doesn’t care if you believe in it or not.

Climate change is not divine punishment, nor is it a liberal plot. It is the result of greed, inaction, and denial. And until humans get their shit together, the planet is going to continue to be pissed off.

Again: Los Angeles is in a desert. It’s vulnerable to drought and wild fires.