"Channel 4’s Gender Wars fails both women and trans people – while missing the real story" by Patrick Strudwick, inews.co.uk, May 29, 2023
Image of elf ornament from Wikimedia Commons. Taken by Jelene Morris. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
"Musk has a penchant for sharing memes and diving deep into the bellows of Twitter conversation, to what end, no one knows. But as with most things on the internet, it all eventually goes Nazi." — David Covucci, Musk shares Nazi soldier meme—after deleting praise of quote from Nazi, Daily Dot, November 7, 2022
Elon Musk says his politics are in the center but extremism experts say he's using Twitter to increasingly empower right-wing viewpoints, Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert and Hannah Getahun, Business Insider, Dec 11, 2022
A Jan 31 screenshot I took of what was trending, at least in my location, at that moment.
Here's a May 27 tweet by Elon Musk — consistent with conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the media.
Here's a May 27 tweet by Elon Musk. (I took the screenshot around mid-day on May 31, exactly four days later, so the views/engagement stats reflect that timeframe.) The sentence is not by Voltaire, but by neo-Nazi Kevin Alfred Strom, who said it on the radio in 1993.
Here is what Seth Abramson had to say about it. "Community Notes," by the way, is a feature on Twitter that allows users to say that the information is incorrect or portrayed incorrectly and to provide essential context so others can understand it properly.
Where to find Seth Abramson: for politics, sethabramson.substack.com and Notes, and for other stuff retrostack.substack.com
"Do you not see the intolerant graffiti on the walls now? You are in the middle of Westboro Baptist Church trying to talk to people about the debt ceiling. They don’t care. They want you dead.
I still check Twitter occasionally, out of habit. My thumb finds the Bird icon, I can’t help it.
The app is a swamp. The most prominent accounts, the ones that the owner enjoys, are engaged in open homophobia. The top replies to any news story include bizarre accusations of 'grooming' by guys who shouldn’t be allowed to own firearms. A basset hound could win the Westminster Dog Show and the first 18 replies would be accusations that Hunter Biden runs a child sex dungeon.
Is that enjoyable to journalists? What are you doing there?"
— Jason O. Gilbert, Why Are Journalists Still on Twitter?, JOG Blog, Substack, June 2, 2023
At a June 24, 2023 Pride parade near Portland, Oregon, "rival far-right groups and neo-Nazis who began fighting among themselves while protesting," CNN reported. "Online conspiracy theorists soon jumped into the fray. Rather than accept the fact that two far-right groups who have previously embraced violence were responsible for the clash, online trolls insisted it must be a so-called 'false flag' event – a set-up of some kind to make the neo-Nazis look bad." They randomly picked a 22-year-old Jewish man who had just graduated college and falsely asserted he was a Neo-Nazi working undercover for the federal government. Elon Musk engaged with the harassment. Brody's lawyer, Mark Bankston, is "the same attorney who successfully sued conspiracy theorist Alex Jones over his lies about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre."
June 29, 2023 tweet from LGBTQReads:
A.R. Moxon:
"It's hard not to look at Elon Musk’s cartoon villain smirk-face and not see a cruel boy with a magnifying glass who just spotted an anthill.
It strikes me that the experience of being on Twitter is very much like the experience of living in the United States, or anywhere else where the whims of wealth hold the reins of power, where increasingly the answer wealth has for those of us experiencing misfortune or calamity—much of it brought on by conditions caused by the decisions of wealth—is: work for us until you can't, then give us all your money to stay alive until it’s all gone, then die as politely as you can. And to be sure, many of us are far more vulnerable to this than others, because our systems are inherently supremacist, but a supremacist system is an unsustainable system, and an unsustainable system will not sustain, so the reason that you feel vulnerable is ... you are."
— A.R. Moxon, "The State of Things," The Reframe newsletter on Substack, July 12, 2023
A.R. Moxon again:
"...since the new owner—a fella I’ll call Owner X, whose overall sensibilities seem to have arrested around 7th grade, who seems like the kind of guy who finds it amusing to pull wings off flies—seems intent on wrapping his $44 billion toy around a telephone pole, and so it seems foolish to blindly trust it to stick around in the long term or maybe even the near term..."
* * *
This leads to a lot of talk about why. Some believe he’s just a profoundly ignorant fool with a predilection for bullying, in over his head and demolishing something he barely understands. Others think that he’s a deliberately destructive vulture capitalist with a predilection for bullying, who wants to sabotage something of public value to create an environment more conducive to oligarchy.
* * *
...maybe it’s all a little too abstract a question to matter, since the result is the same."
— A.R. Moxon, "The Dipshit Paradox": Profoundly ignorant? Deliberately malicious and lying? Does it matter? The demand to engage in good faith with supremacists in a musky age, The Reframe newsletter on Substack, July 26, 2023
Not that it was ever meant to be good.
"there's a lot of bad tweets every day. In my thinking, the worst tweets are really the best tweets, because that's what the website is designed to do." — Rick Paulas, 2021 interview
"He dresses up his antisemitism in tech jargon and cutesy tweets, but it’s antisemitism nonetheless. Musk actively promotes the conspiracy that Jews are responsible for all the world’s ills, a tale as old as time. He’s dangerous, and not to mention staggeringly unoriginal. And terrifyingly for Jews, he’s also incredibly powerful. ...with his encouragement over the weekend of the Twitter hashtag “#BantheADL”...now he’s actively threatening to sue the ADL because of an erroneous and unquantifiable claim that somehow the organization’s calls for the Twitter CEO to regulate hate speech resulted in a 60% reduction in advertising revenue."
"Elon Musk is an antisemite," Marisa Kabas, The Handbasket (Substack), September 5, 2023
Kabas acknowledges that "One of their [the ADL's] core values is that any criticism of Israel is equal to antisemitism. ... they often equate right wing antisemitism with progressive criticism of Israel’s leadership and policy ... But we can hold two things true at once: The ADL is not representative of all American Jews, and Elon Musk is an antisemite who’s singling out the organization as a stand-in for all of us." She points out this article from the Guardian:
"Research published by the ISD and CASM Technology (CASM) earlier this year found a major and sustained spike in antisemitic posts on Twitter since the company’s takeover by Musk, with the volume of English-language antisemitic tweets more than doubling.
Analysts detected 325,739 English-language antisemitic tweets in the nine months from June 2022 to February 2023, with the weekly average number of antisemitic tweets increasing by 106% when comparing the period before and after Musk’s acquisition. The rate of creation of antisemitic accounts more than tripled in the period after Musk’s takeover."
— Twitter faces legal challenge after failing to remove reported hate tweets, Jason Burke, The Guardian, July 10, 2023
"I’m going to call it X when I'm talking about the evil bullshit; whatever the users built that is still good and fine is still Twitter to me." — A.R. Moxon, "How to Help Writers Leave X," September 7, 2023
Elon Musk Threatens To Sue Anti-Defamation League For X’s Lost Ad Revenue (HuffPost)
In October 2023, upon war between Israel and Palestine:
On November 15, an X (Twitter) user who identifies as Jewish said that anyone who believes "Hitler was right” should “say it to our faces." Someone else replied that certain "hordes of minorities" don't "like" Jews, and the user gives not "the tiniest shit" since "western" Jews "support[ed]" those groups "flooding their country" in the first place. Musk replied to the second person: "You have said the actual truth."
Apple, X's largest advertiser, said it would temporarily pause ads, as did Amazon, Lions Gate Entertainment, Disney and the European Commission. “It’s self-destructive for any advertiser to be associated with him,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management, told CNN.
"Essentially, they [right-wing leaders including Musk] argue that left-wing Jews who have supported progressive causes have incited racial division and hatred. Antisemitic claims along these lines have been around for years — they’re just usually dressed up as opposition to 'cultural Marxism.'
* * *
Matt Gertz of Media Matters observed that 'Musk is, in the parlance of the white nationalists who applauded his remark, explicitly ‘naming the Jew’ as the source of the problem.'"
— Matt Shuham, Right-Wing Figures Go All In On Antisemitism, HuffPost, November 17, 2023
On Musk's endorsement of "the vile replacement myth," A.R. Moxon writes ("Channels of Rage," The Reframe (Substack), November 19, 2023):
"It’s the latest incident in Musk’s ongoing promotion of white supremacist and neo Nazi ideology, and probably the most unignorable one, or at least it isn’t being ignored by advertisers, who have pulled their ads. Musk may be confused by this, since they didn’t pull their ads after many other horrible things he’s said recently, but he may also be counting on them coming back, as they have after other times he’s said horrible things."
On November 19, Ron DeSantis — polling second in the upcoming presidential primary, behind Donald Trump — when asked for a reaction to Musk's comment (made four days previously), said "I did not see the comment" and added that he assumed Musk was the victim here: "And so I know that Elon has had a target on his back ever since he purchased Twitter, because I think he’s taking it in a direction that a lot of people who are used to controlling the narrative don’t like." So does DeSantis mean Jews control the media, or what? He went on to say "I know Elon Musk. I have never seen him do anything." He added that it would be "surprising" if Musk had said anything antisemitic.
Musk tweeted on the afternoon of November 19: "This past week, there were hundreds of bogus media stories claiming that I am antisemitic. Nothing could be further from the truth. I wish only the best for humanity and a prosperous and exciting future for all." Someone who is truly not antisemitic would, in this situation, apologize for the hurt they've caused, acknowledge that they said specific words that were ill-chosen or misunderstood, listen to Jews and thank them for their feedback, and commit to improving their speech and behavior. Actually, someone who is truly not antisemitic would have followed these general steps at the first opportunity and thus would never get years-deep into antisemitism as Musk is.
Brian Krassenstein, co-host of a podcast with 159,000 followers on X, replied to Musk six minutes later: "as a Jewish man I have never once thought that you were even remotely close to an antisemite." Musk replied one minute later: "Thank you". This helps reveal the interests of Musk and his supporters. They want to polish Musk's image and come up with a reason not to listen to Jews. Their answer: They've found one Jew who's willing to tell Musk that it's unthinkable that anything he should ever say is "remotely close" to antisemitic.
Musk "wants it both ways. He wants the following he’s cultivated to know very clearly that he remains antisemitic, but he wants to simultaneously appear to toe a line meant to stem the exodus of advertisers from Twitter, and keep his other businesses from being affected. It should be very easy to see through this façade." Netanyahu can see the truth as well as anyone else, but unfortunately "the fascist Zionist right places their nation above the safety of Jews everywhere else. Some, like Netanyahu, even appear to embrace the perverse incentive that danger to Jews around the world bolsters Israel as the only place that can ensure our safety. It’s a deal with the devil. Or, in this case, a deal with Elon Musk."
— Fascist Meetup: Netanyahu Welcomes Elon. Plus the Netherlands, Argentina, and the global far-right. Joshua P. Hill. November 28, 2023.
"A day after Elon Musk restored the X accounts of notorious right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his website, Infowars, the platform is actively promoting Jones’ account to other users, giving the fringe figure a major platform to air his deceptive and dangerous views.
Conspiratorial posts from Jones’ account appeared Monday in the “For You” feed of some users who do not follow him on X; his account was promoted in some users’ “Who to Follow” recommendations; and his name was promoted in X’s top trending topics section.
Musk on Sunday also elevated Jones’ newly restored profile, which had 1.6 million followers as of Monday, by engaging with him in a live streamed interview on X. They were joined by Andrew Tate, the self-proclaimed misogynistic internet personality who earlier this year was indicted on human trafficking and rape charges in Romania although he denies the claims, far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer and Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy."
— Elon Musk’s X is encouraging users to follow conspiracy theorist Alex Jones after reinstating his account, Clare Duffy, CNN, December 11, 2023
[Update:]
“I don’t really have much of a life, you know?” Loomer says. “So I’m happy to dedicate all my time to helping Trump, because if Trump doesn’t get back in, I don’t have anything.”
* * *
Loomer’s ability to remain visible to Trump is, perhaps, a testament to the former president’s media diet — which apparently includes content on the platforms where the self-described “most banned woman in the world” still freely posts. Her show, “Loomer Unleashed,” airs via Rumble. She’s also on Gab, Gettr, Telegram — and now X, formerly Twitter, where she was unbanned after Elon Musk took over. “It’s pretty amazing,” she says of her reinstatement. “It’s given me an opportunity to have a comeback.”
* * *
“Donald Trump is, like, hope for me,” she says. “I don’t really feel like I have anything in my life. I got canceled everywhere for what, speaking the truth? And they treat me like a criminal. Half the world thinks I’m a Nazi. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
— For Laura Loomer, a Trump comeback is everything: The anti-Islam, anti-immigration crusader has repelled even would-be allies in the MAGA movement — with one major exception. Kara Voght, Washington Post, May 2, 2024
On January 9, 2024, another journalist informed Stephen Monacelli that his X account was gone:
"My Twitter/X account with more than seventy-thousand followers had been suspended overnight, along with the accounts of several other prominent journalists and leftist posters. Thalen and other journalists were asking if I knew why. ...by the afternoon, the other suspended accounts and I had been reinstated. I never received a notification as to why my account had been suspended. Elon Musk himself claimed in a public post that the entire episode had been an accident, the result of a sweep for “spam/scam accounts — an assertion as convenient as it is implausible."
Matt Taibbi has seen his X posts suppressed, so he's complaining on YouTube.
Hmm.
Sometimes you see a news report, or an anecdote embedded in another story, saying that someone was fired for some genuine, curious, innocent, non-harassing, or accidental questioning of trans person's identity. So the person was fired for misgendering someone? Yeah! Well, why do you think that? Because that's what the article said!
However, sometimes articles say things a certain way, and the way they frame the story or sell the story is not the full story of what actually happened.
So, for example, you may have heard J.K. Rowling defense of Maya Forstater, who complained that her work contract was not renewed because she was seen as a transphobe and that this job loss amounted to a violation of her own rights. But in this clarification from Think (December 20, 2019), there is more substance to the trans-inclusive claim. Forstater wasn't only expressing an opinion to which she was entitled, as she'd like to have had it. She was judged to be speaking inappropriately according to professional and legal standards. We place all kinds of limits on speech in various contexts, and there are reasons to identify certain statements as transphobic and therefore unacceptable in professional contexts.
"This, then, is what Forstater wanted the courts to uphold: Her right to make her co-workers uncomfortable; her right to place her nonprofit organization in an untenable position vis-à-vis potential donors (like Credit Suisse senior directors); her right to be, even as she defines it, rude and disrespectful in social and professional contexts; and her right to disrespect U.K. law, which defines transgender women as women and transgender men as men if they jump through the right legal hoops. (As Judge James Tayler noted in his ruling against her: 'If a person has transitioned from male to female and has a Gender Recognition Certificate that person is legally a woman. That is not something that the Claimant is entitled to ignore.')"
In the judge's determination, as Think paraphrased it, "Forstater's repeated statements that trans women are not women — statements that by her own admission she knew were rude and disrespectful, and that she knew bothered her co-workers — violated the rights of trans women to be free from such harassment, and were a legitimate cause to not renew her contract."
I'm interested in Gemma Stone's analysis in January 2024. If the issue were over, say, pacifism, "two separate pacifists in two separate tribunals would both have to explain their own individual pacifist views and those views would then be measured against the Grainger criteria. The same applies to transphobes and transphobia — each individual’s views and the way they choose to manifest those views are very important to deciding whether they pass Grainger." In the Forstater decision, "a specific selection of views held by Maya Forstater were found to not be sufficient reason to fire her."
See my article on J. K. Rowling's 2020 essay: The Misrepresentation of Compassion and Solidarity (Medium)
On 2 November 2023, the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) said "exploratory therapy must not be conflated with conversion therapy." Seems to be a result of the Forstater ruling.
Matt Walsh wants to make LGBTQ-inclusivity seem politically "toxic."
What's the tactic for achieving that? Well, the department store chain Target received threats of violence for its line of Pride merchandise.
![Alejandra Caraballo, tweet May 24, 2023: They've developed a playbook of inciting violent threats against any institution that's supportive of LGBTQ people to get them to back down. Matt Walsh is fully endorsing terrorism to accomplish his goals. In reference to a Matt Walsh tweet screenshot with one line highlighted: [Conservatives] needed those of us who are incorrigible assholes to come along and do what they didn't have the stomach for.](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpuHIdyWeM6CsBifdhIbpbrcKAUZWQU3RM0obwJypnOPD1sO0WI76XPMLe_OFnUuDKdeNV7G6k3MCRdosqLIXltUQUvzuB0mqHBI8E6MxFKxkZJ-ajJvMYt9smQ8FQmeacW0JPA-HUCmqk7ZgfANqhHClkJoSrpSvQPUtAzQgqqa-sOWUhtvTcPbMI/s1600/playbook.png)
The result? Target removed its Pride merchandise.
Parker Molloy says: On Monday [April 22], I wrote a piece about how I hope brands make their decisions about what sort of Pride Month pandering they want to do and," crucially, "stick with it." Molloy continued:
"And then the very next day, Target panicked in response to right-wing tantrums, lies, and threats of violence, with a spokesperson saying that 'we've experienced threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety and wellbeing while at work,' and 'removing items that have been at the center of the most significant confrontational behavior.' Target knew this was coming, as right-wingers have been having meltdowns over the super corporate, super sanitized Pride displays of past years. Even so, it caved to terrorism.
How do you think people on the right reacted to that? Do you think they said, 'Oh wow, thank you, Target! You’ve addressed our very real and not-at-all insane demands to reduce the visibility and drop inventory of some of your Pride collections. We are happy that you heard us, and we are going to get along now.'? No, of course not. They saw it as evidence that their campaign of terrorizing store employees and vandalizing in-store displays was working."
Trans/queer people have various individual perspectives.
I saw concern expressed by a queer worker at Target. This individual said they felt Target had made the right choice in this situation, since employees just want to feel a sense of basic safety restored so they can continue showing up to work. Employees might not want their employer to have a fight over pride flags if the assumption is that the fight baits terrorists.
(Of course, as Parker Molloy said above, appeasing terrorists doesn't work. Terrorists cannot be appeased by satisfying their demands because their demands aren't literal or sincere.)
Also, arguably, when a corporation caves to terrorists, it can increase their employees' fear level. It suggests the employees really are in danger and that no one is really in control — unless, just perhaps, they are a large corporation, but perhaps not even then. If a retail corporation is acting in a way that suggests its CEOs are stressed or confused, what are individual LGBTQ people supposed to do?
Here's another perspective:
One trans woman's perspective: No more "rainbows that disappear at the first gust of fascist wind." Please.
By the way, these screenshots are from Twitter and Twitter is (IMO) dying, but you can subscribe to Erin on Substack: www.erininthemorning.com
Here are selected screenshots from a thread (not the whole thread):
Right-wing reactionaries are going into Target and causing mayhem anyhow.
Bud Light and Target appeased bigots, so the bigotry continues, of course. Now they're coming after Lego.
40 years ago...a trans actress in the lesbian vampire film genre.
The film is on IMDB, but I learned about it from this book:
"...its Black Seductress is a trans woman, the pioneering Ajita Wilson. An American actress who gained fame working in European skin flicks and soft-core pornography, the statuesque Wilson wasn't open about having had sexual reassignment surgery, but there are reports that some within the industry were aware of it before her death from a car accident in 1987. Still, she was featured in Jet magazine as a Beauty of the Week in 1981 — a stunning accomplishment at this time for a trans woman but one that made it clear that she was not generally acknowledged to be trans.
In Macumba Sexual, Wilson headlines as the mystical Princess Obongo, who haunts the dreams of White lead Alice (Lina Romay, Franco's wife) while she's vacationing in the Canary Islands, seducing the tourist with the voodoo-esque religion Macumba. The film exploits the taboo nature of both race and sexuality in no uncertain terms, with the princess at one point telling Alice, 'I'm everything that's forbidden, that's shameful: a Black woman with an undefined sexuality, shameless and irresistible.' It's not clear if Wilson's trans status was known by the filmmakers (Franco claimed ignorance), but the film could be interpreted as inferring that she's less than 100% woman when, during the climax (so to speak), she holds a small ivory statue between her legs and uses it as a phallus to penetrate Alice, transferring her magical powers to her before dying."
— Robin R. Means Coleman and Mark H. Harris. The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema From Fodder to Oscar. New York: Saga Press, 2023.
Douglas E. Cowan writes:
"Whatever else vampires in general — or Dracula in particular — represent, their narrative presence signals a contested vision of the unseen order. They too are a product of the religious imagination, insofar as they propose a different answer to the question that very likely started it all: What happens when we die? ... [The undead] represent a religious threat — or at least an implied risk to the storyworld’s established religious order. Which means that any notion we had about consensus reality, whether informed by the rationalism of nineteenth- century Western medicine or the supernaturalism of the dominant religious worldview, has flown out the window."
Douglas E. Cowan. The Forbidden Body: Sex, Horror, and the Religious Imagination. New York: New York University Press, 2022. The reference to the "unseen order" comes from James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Cowan adds that "not only does the existence of such a creature [like Dracula] challenge consensus reality; his (or her) effects reshape social decorum." Indeed: "They eroticize evil."
See also: "A philosopher discusses gender". It's a 6-minute read on Medium.
A moment to remember threatened animal species:
"...it is important to say the names of some of the creatures whose remaining time on Earth may be cut short due to human action. Among them are the African forest elephant, Amur leopard, black rhino, Bornean and Sumatran orangutans, Cross River gorilla, eastern and western lowland gorilla, hawksbill turtle, Javan and Sumatran rhinos, saola, Sumatran elephant, Sunda tiger, vaquita, Yangtze finless porpoise… To recite aloud the names of all the earth’s threatened species one by one would take about two sleepless weeks."
Leah Penniman. Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations With Black Environmentalists. Amistad, 2023. Chapter: "It Is Time for a New Covenant."
Recently, hundreds of elephants died in Botswana from cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) in their drinking water. (This 2023 article by Muhammad Arif is on Medium; you may encounter a paywall.)
In 2024, Zimbabwe will shoot elephants for people to eat. In a drought, the land cannot support human needs as well as a large number of elephants, authorities have decided.
"...a team of economists from the International Monetary Fund estimated a single baleen whale provides about $2 million worth of Earth services, both in life and death." (CNN, 2024)<.p>
2024: An endangered whale gets tangled in lobster gear. Threats to life come from various directions and cannot be forgotten because they all add up.
In 2024, a new species of anaconda was discovered in the Amazon.
Erratic Fish Behavior In Florida Prompts 'Emergency Response' From National Agency
Endangered smalltooth sawfish are spinning around and dying in unusual numbers in the Florida Keys.
Curt Anderson. HuffPost, March 30, 2024
Biologists Rescue Sawfish As Dozens Of Ancient Animals Die For Unknown Reasons, Curt Anderson, HuffPost, April 13, 2024
‘The final result was good’: 130 whales rescued from mass beach stranding in Western Australia, Teele Rebane, Heather Chen and Manveena Suri, CNN, April 25, 2024
The animals know it, and they're panicking
About 100 rescued elephants escape flash floods at popular sanctuary in northern Thailand, by Helen Regan and Kocha Olarn, CNN, October 4, 2024
For more: "Climate change is expensive, but that's not the point". It's a 9-minute read on Medium.
The alternate history novel To Climates Unknown by Arturo Serrano was released on November 25, the 400th anniversary of the mythical First ...
