Monday, September 30, 2024

We've been warned off Matt Walsh's latest film

Quote:

"You will learn little about DEI in this film–there is no probing into our racist history, so necessary if we are really to gain an understand of our situation—no mention of Jamestown 1619, slavery, Jim Crow, or the misuse of the 13th Amendment. Just the attempt to mock, and thus discredit, the earnest efforts of of those seeking to heal the deep wounds caused by racism. Were this film a medicine, the bottle should include a skull and crossbones and “Poison” on its label. It is obvious that the film’s title is not a sincere question but merely a come-on."

— Ed McNulty, reviewing Matt Walsh's film 'Am I Racist?', September 13, 2024

I've previously written on this blog about Matt Walsh.

dog with ball

Trump's ongoing demonization of immigrants and of Kamala Harris

Margaret Sullivan says that "if you watched the speech, or even snippets of it, you saw ... an absolutely ugly and brutal attack on Kamala Harris, full of lies and racist misogyny" (The three phases of normalizing Trump's attack on Harris in Wisconsin, Substack, Sep 30, 2024)

Sullivan continues:

"I used to think that Trump’s rallies and speeches should not be shown live because that only gave him a media megaphone for his propaganda. I believed, and often wrote, that such coverage should only come later, accompanied by plenty of fact-checking and context. But I’m not so sure any more. Maybe, in order to get across how unhinged and offensive this really is, it needs to be seen in its full live form, complete with the red-capped faithful cheering on his every ugly insult."

Trump's face in a mushroom cloud

Accounts Of Abuse Emerge At The Texas Border: There’s little oversight or accountability for how Texas soldiers guarding the border treat migrants and asylum-seekers, critics say. Matt Shuham, HuffPost, Oct 11, 2024

Tuesday, September 24, 2024

The car wasn't worth $7,000: A reminder that I wrote a novel

In September 2024, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told investors:

“We completely redesigned body cameras. Our body cameras cost $70, normal body camera costs, I don’t know, $7,000. Our body cameras are simply lenses, two lenses attached to a vest attached to the smartphone you’re wearing. We take the video of the police officer. And the camera is always on. You don’t turn it on and off.
Larry Ellison's AI-Powered Surveillance Dystopia Is Already Here, Jason Koebler, 404 Media, Sep 17, 2024

When you think of cameras and things that cost, I don't know, $7,000, I want you to think of my novel, Most Famous Short Film of All Time.

cartoon of three people in a pink convertible. detail from the book cover of Most Famous Short Film of All Time
Most Famous Short Film of All Time (tRaum Books, 2022)

Talking about transphobia (September 2024)

'Legislators don’t see me as human’: Missouri trans youth fight to survive www.theguardian.com/us-news/arti...

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— Tiffa (@tranniehathaway.bsky.social) August 24, 2024 at 2:25 PM
surprised blonde kid

On a fundamental level anti-trans bigotry is incompatible with capital "L" Liberalism: you do not have to give any more deference to these folks than you would to racists, antisemites, or xenophobes.

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— Stephen Nuñez (@socio-steve.bsky.social) September 23, 2024 at 6:00 PM

So much of it is just “I don’t believe trans people are real, REALLY.” Which is not an argument. It’s just a declaration that I happen to think is bad and wrong. I don’t need to hear it a magic number of times to really decide.

— Linda Holmes (@lindaholmes.bsky.social) September 23, 2024 at 6:22 PM

on the rare occasions trans women are allowed to participate in the national discourse, we are siloed as ‘trans activists’, whatever we actually do for a living. meanwhile, people who dedicate massive portions of their lives to campaigning against us get to be ‘feminists’, ‘authors’, ‘experts’, etc.

— Alyson Greaves (@badambulist.bsky.social) September 24, 2024 at 5:56 AM

Echo chamber

The article that kicked off a fresh round of "echo chamber" discourse:

"...fair enough. ... Why not have a place on the internet that you can go and have a nice, civilised chat with someone who shares your worldview without the risk of coming across a load of vile racist content?" Because, Kelly says, "I believe" a "messier" platform that's more of a "digital town square" just is "preferable to a series of siloed echo chambers."
— "With Bluesky, the social media echo chamber is back in vogue," Jemima Kelly, Financial Times, Sept 22, 2024 (archive link)

"IRL do you expect to sit down at a table of your friends and have a stranger grab a seat and shout racist and/or sexist epithets at you and everyone you're with? ... The people complaining about echo chambers don't want a party. They want an awkward family dinner. ... the only way they can get people to listen to them is if they're forced to because they're creepy weirdos. I'm convinced they don't even like one another or else they'd go have their own party." (Bluesky 1, 2, 3)

"debate perverts" is an incredibly funny name for that kind of person, I gotta keep that one in my back pocket

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— Maddy B. Hare 🏴⚧️ (@mbhare.bsky.social) September 22, 2024 at 7:48 PM

"i just cannot get over someone writing an op-ed about wishing for a social media platform with a diversity of viewpoints, who then recoils when people with different viewpoints weigh in. i cannot i cannot i cannot" (Bluesky)

absolutely incredible how journalists cannot take ultimately toothless online criticism from trans women when we have to take the full force of the institutional media to the face every time they whisper to the government that taking more rights away from trannies would be good for pageviews

— Alyson Greaves (@badambulist.bsky.social) September 24, 2024 at 5:55 AM

If someone says you're in AN ECHO CHAMBER, they almost always want to be transphobic or racist without consequence. Yet they never ACTUALLY think anything transgressive. Instead, their hate is utterly bog standard. Biological sex is real? I've never heard THAT one before, brave truth-teller.

— Emily St. James (@emilystjams.bsky.social) September 23, 2024 at 6:14 PM

These people operate on the same principle as evangelical Christians who believe that anyone who isn't a Christian just hasn't heard the truth about Jesus. Most people have at this point! They've just rejected the message!

— Emily St. James (@emilystjams.bsky.social) September 23, 2024 at 6:15 PM

The views they want to share are never, like, "I believe all private property should become property of the community" or "The family unit should be abolished" or "Animals should have human rights" or anything actually transgressive. It's always stuff that was old hat _when I was born_.

— Emily St. James (@emilystjams.bsky.social) September 23, 2024 at 6:17 PM

Sunday, September 22, 2024

Manual for dealing with right-wing Hindu nationalist attacks

Hindutva Harassment Field Manual

South Asia Scholar Activist Collective

Holy cow, I had no idea entire handbook existed to deal with right-wing racist Hindutva hate brigade. Have had to deal with them daily since Bangladesh revolution ousted India’s puppet dictator & global Hindutva army has suddenly found Bangladeshis to target en masse hourly. Incel racists galore.

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— Prof. Farhana Sultana (@farhana.bsky.social) September 21, 2024 at 6:52 PM

Yep. We wrote the manual because of how unbelievably fucked up Hindutva assholes are and how they insidiously (like Zionists) mobilize the rhetoric oppression to mask their supremacism.

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— Dheepa Sundaram, PhD (she/her) (@themodsisyphus.bsky.social) September 21, 2024 at 9:32 PM
symbols of multiple religions to symbolize coexistence

Saturday, September 21, 2024

Economic 'growth' and true freedom: A few quotes

purple flowering sprig on sprucelike tree

The logic of exploitation can creep into "environmentalism":

Curtis White:

Environmentalism consorts with the enemy when it makes science and quantitative reasoning its primary voice, and when it agrees – as it does in the utterly failed Kyoto protocols – that economic growth is a desideratum of the future and that any negative environmental consequences will be handled by wiser bureaucracies, laws, and technological fixes.

We need, first of all, clean air and water. Next, healthy food, which must be grown or gathered.

Clara Price:

When it comes down to it, would you really choose economics over environment? Where will you be when there is no clean air or water? Screw economics. I want to live.

You may be interested in my essay:
Earthpocalypse Isn't a 'Marginal' Cost (Despite What Economists Say) (Oct 15, 2022)


Some environmental conservationists were racist.

Leah Penniman:

White supremacy was built into the parks system from the outset. The US national parks comprise eighty-four million acres of land that were stolen from Native communities through forced treaty agreements under the genocidal project of Manifest Destiny. Among these displaced Native people were twenty-six Indigenous groups living in Yellowstone. They were fired out in the 1870s in a settler effort to create, then protect, ‘uninhabited wilderness.’ This became the blueprint for the ‘fortress conservation’ strategy that has displaced Indigenous people across the globe, ignoring the fact that Indigenous communities currently protect around 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity.

Some of the founders of the Western environmental movement espoused eugenics and white supremacy. Madison Grant was instrumental in creating the Everglades, Olympic, Glacier, and Denali National Parks as a strategy to strengthen the ‘Nordic race.’ Adolf Hitler referred to Grant’s 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, as his ‘Bible.’ The first head of the US Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, was on the advisory council of the American Eugenics Society and a delegate to the International Eugenics Congress. John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club in 1892, referred to Black and Indigenous people as ‘dirty, lazy, and uncivilized.’ John James Audubon, famed ornithologist and scientific illustrator and namesake of the Audubon Society, owned slaves and stole human remains for a pseudo-scientific study claiming white superiority.

We are part of nature, and both humans and nature must be free.

Leah Penniman:

Among the Free Soilers, whose framework included opposition to the westward expansion of slavery, was Frederick Douglass (b. 1817/18). Douglass critiqued capitalism’s alienation of workers from the land and expropriation of the commons, arguing that ‘liberty achieved its truest expression when free people mixed their labor with nature in the pursuit of self-reliance.’ Paying tribute to the agrarian ideal, Douglass advised Black people to own land, forgo urban wage employment, and turn toward agriculture as a means of true independence. * * * Consistent with the African conception of humans as part of nature, Free Soilers believed that the oppression of people on the land had cursed the American soils themselves. Redemption of the land could be achieved through emancipation, and absent that, free soil would be sought across the ocean.

Sources

"Pants on Fire." Curtis White, interviewed by Cheston Knapp. UTNE. March-April 2010. p. 77.

Clara Price. Quoted in "Sunbeams," The Sun. January 2010. p. 48.

Leah Penniman. Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations With Black Environmentalists. Amistad, 2023. Chapter: “Reading the Sky.” [on the parks system]

Leah Penniman. Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations With Black Environmentalists. Amistad, 2023. Chapter: "These Roots Run Deep." [on Free Soilers]

Please also see

Texas Agriculture Commissioner sounds the alarm, says Texas is running out of water: In a recent op-ed, Sid Miller outlined the problem and offered possible solutions. Michael McCardel, WFAA, September 8, 2024.

And this:

Thursday, September 19, 2024

September 2024: Will Republicans shut down the U.S. government?

Yesterday, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson "failed to pass a six-month extension of government funding, with a measure attached to please Trump that makes it harder for Americans to vote." It's Trump who has insisted on "target[ing] noncitizen voting, which is already illegal," and Johnson has "not provided evidence to back his claims that hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants could vote in November," as Stephen Collinson explains for CNN today ("Why Trump’s election fraud falsehoods might cost the GOP the House," September 19, 2024).

"The gambit has zero chance of producing a new law — since Democrats who control the Senate oppose it. And Johnson couldn’t even get 16 of his own members to vote for it for various reasons — including unreconcilable demands by some arch conservatives for massive budget cuts, which also have no chance of making it into law because of the reality of divided power in Washington."

Republicans currently control the House. If the government shuts down right before the election, Republicans are likely to take the blame in the public perception, if history is any guide.

Johnson, insofar as he feels obligated to do whatever Trump says (rather than, say, serve the public's needs and govern effectively), is stuck. That's his fault and his party's fault.

Late September update: The House passed the funding bill. There probably won't be a shutdown.

Oh, but look

Mike Johnson: There’s No Rush For Congress To Approve Hurricane Relief: “We’ll be back in session immediately after the election,” the House speaker said of waiting until November for Congress to vote on emergency funding. Nina Golgowski, HuffPost, Oct 7, 2024

Read more

I wrote about Why the Republicans Chose Mike Johnson (unpaywalled friend link on Medium).

tornado twister

Wednesday, September 18, 2024

A riff on the 'undecided voter' (from Bluesky)

Gift link to the NYT focus group:

these focus groups are really a good reminder that undecided voters are people who don’t actually care about politics

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— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) September 17, 2024 at 4:23 PM

Yes, the undecided voter would have to not care about politics at all...

...which in practice translates to not perceiving any personal risk from a Trump presidency, nor caring whether anyone else suffers a risk from a Trump presidency, and thus already leaning Trumpist.

The average 23 yo women who is still undecided at this point would have to be very conservative, wouldn't she?

— Shadow Hedgie 🌻 (@shadowhedgie8.bsky.social) September 17, 2024 at 3:55 PM

wealthy and otherwise insulated from having to interact from people who have been and stand to be materially harmed by conservative politics...yeah, tracks

— Tyrone Slothrust (@yesreallyj.bsky.social) September 17, 2024 at 4:45 PM

If they're already essentially Trumpist yet haven't decided (after nine years! with two months to go!) whether to vote for Trump, their inability to decide isn't due to a lack of available information.

What is the point of these interviews with "undecided" voters, to whom no amount of delivered information will help them decide?

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— Sarah Posner (@sarahposner.bsky.social) September 17, 2024 at 4:49 PM

Frank Luntz, known for developing Republican messaging like "death tax instead of estate tax, and climate change instead of global warming" (Wikipedia), chose participants for a focus group. He and Patrick Healy, NYT deputy Opinion editor, moderated the discussion. The NYT paid Luntz.

call me crazy but i do not believe that a 23 year old who is outraged about the treatment of **Mitt Romney** in 2012 is an “undecided voter”

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— Peter (@notalawyer.bsky.social) September 17, 2024 at 2:50 PM
Abigail, 23, graduate assistant, voted Biden in 2020: It's the progressives' fault. They dragged Mitt Romney and John McCain through the mud, saying horrible things about them. If you keep crying wolf over and over, eventually, you're going to get a wolf in the party.

All the kids were saying "Romney's 47% quote was taken badly out of context!" around the Pokemon table at the card shop

— Doctor Acula (@doctoracularf.bsky.social) September 17, 2024 at 2:51 PM

It’s me, a 24 year old deciding how I’m going to vote in 2004 based on my deeply held opinions of the Willie Horton ad.

— Jonathan M. Katz (@katzonearth.bsky.social) September 17, 2024 at 4:54 PM

I’m 43 and enraged at how Bork was treated. Incensed even. Also undecided.

— smoketypething.bsky.social (@smoketypething.bsky.social) September 17, 2024 at 2:51 PM

Here's Robert Bork in the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre, if you're 43 and don't know. During the Watergate scandal, President Nixon ordered Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox to be fired, which two officials resigned rather than do, but Bork, as the third in line, complied with Nixon's order and fired Cox. He said Nixon had expressed willingness to nominate him as Supreme Court Justice, though this never happened. He went on to be a federal judge on the DC circuit.

INT. McLean, Virginia living room, November 2012 An 11-year-old ABIGAIL sits on the couch, tears streaming down her face as Barack Obama claims victory

— emma (@emmaroller.bsky.social) September 17, 2024 at 2:53 PM

on top of the clear ideological tilt, this is a grad student who speaks like she is very engaged with politics. if you can’t clock this little rat fuck as an op you shouldn’t be running focus groups.

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— Peter (@notalawyer.bsky.social) September 17, 2024 at 3:35 PM
Character flows into policy, but policy reveals character. So when Kamala Harris says something that's very progressive about transgenderism or about health care, that to me signals that she's not moderate, that she's rather extreme about who she is as a person.

"Op," as in "operative." This supposed focus group sounds like a psyop. Previously, I wrote: 4 psyops not to fall for

Gonna interject on behalf of everyone to point out that Harris hasn't specifically mentioned trans people in her campaign yet lmfao

— Katelyn Burns (@transscribe.bsky.social) September 17, 2024 at 3:38 PM

Right — exactly what is it that Harris has supposedly said about "transgenderism"? Since her campaign began on July 21, apparently nothing. You have to go back in time to find "when Kamala Harris says something" about trans people.

"Abigail" is suggesting here that she herself may not care about policies about trans people per se; she cares whether a candidate has a "character" that is "moderate" and not "extreme," and she perceives statements about trans people as a symbol of extremism in other areas.

Of course, even when Harris says nothing whatsoever about trans people, Republicans will talk about her as if she said something, and thus impute "extremism" to her.

Just as Trump — just by saying so on a debate stage — can make half of his supporters believe an absurdly offensive rumor about a particular immigrant community, he can make his supporters believe that Harris said something about trans people even when she is standing right next to him on the debate stage not saying it.

Now this

on those days when i am feeling blackpilled it is because i am dwelling on the fact that a lot of americans — and, potentially, a critical number of american voters — experience political life with a high degree of ironic detachment, as if it’s all just a television show

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— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) September 24, 2024 at 9:31 PM

NYT doesn't get an interview

a significant part of the NYT’s problem specifically, I think, is that Astead Herndon absolutely shat the bed when he interviewed her in 2023 and there is no external evidence that NYT has even really attempted fence-mending since

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— ghost malone ergo propter malone (@proptermalone.bsky.social) October 7, 2024 at 9:12 AM

Still at it, now on NPR

NPR currently running a five minute “won’t somebody think of the men” piece, saying that more men vote for Trump bc the left just doesn’t do enough to cater to them, not bc they’re racist or sexist. This came from a focus group of what sounded like a bunch of really whiny, entitled dudes. 🙄

— Cass Morris (@cassmorriswrites.com) November 1, 2024 at 7:20 AM

To be clear, I don't mind NPR doing stories like this because they reinforce my own belief that there are assholecin the world who need to be opposed. Here's the link, if you can stand it: www.npr.org/2024/11/01/n...

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— Chris Barkley (@cmzhang42.bsky.social) November 1, 2024 at 7:37 AM

Ohhh, it's Frank Luntz, messaging guy for Republicans. A couple months ago, he chose participants for a focus group ("These 14 Undecided Young Voters"... NYT, Sep 17) including a 23-year-old "Abigail" allegedly still mad that Democrats talked mean about Mitt Romney and John McCain when she was 11.

— Tucker Lieberman (@tuckerlieberman.bsky.social) November 1, 2024 at 7:46 AM

Monday, September 16, 2024

Energy: Headlines on alternatives to coal

Earth seen from space

Entering 2022, this prediction: "The world could burn a record amount of coal next year despite efforts to scrap the dirtiest fossil fuel, Reuters, December 17, 2021

China, the world’s biggest polluter, at risk of missing climate targets, new report finds, Reuters, February 22, 2024

But change is possible:

A polluting, coal-fired power plant found the key to solving America’s biggest clean energy challenge, Ella Nilsen and CNN Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir, September 16, 2024

After years and years of media reports that coal is having a comeback in the UK the last coal plant will go offline in just 2 weeks. Coal in the UK is no more. Credit for graph to @ketanjoshi.co

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— Jan Rosenow (@janrosenow.bsky.social) September 16, 2024 at 11:54 AM

Climate change conversations can be tricky. What do you say when someone says there is no point in taking action because China is still building coal plants? ourclimatejourney.ca/common-reaso... #ClimateActionCanada #ClimateChange #ClimateAction

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— ourclimatejourney.bsky.social (@ourclimatejourney.bsky.social) October 29, 2024 at 7:44 PM

On solar power:

"...we’ve finally moved on to the steep part of an S curve, and if we can keep up anything like that pace of expansion it won’t be long before the numbers are truly incredible. ... we are on the cusp of a true explosion that could change the world. We are starting to put out the fires that humans have always relied on, and replace them with the power of the sun."
— Bill McKibben, Here Comes the Sun: Solar power is no longer marginal; now the (all-important) question is when it will be dominant. The Crucial Years, Sep 5, 2024

"Solar panels have, over the last months, suddenly gotten so cheap that they’re now appearing in massive numbers across much of the developing world. Without waiting for what are often moribund utilities to do the job, business and home owners are getting on with electrifying their lives, and doing it cleanly."
— Bill McKibben. Silent Solar: Some really really good news you haven't heard. The Crucial Years. Sep 16, 2024

Anti-trans & racist too, Exhibit #927365 (Lowry and Kelly)

Here's Rich Lowry in the New York Times a couple weeks ago:

Aug 26: Opinion: Trump Can Win on Character. Presidential races are won and lost on character as much as the issues, and often the issues are proxies for character. By Rich Lowry PRINT EDITION August 28, 2024, Page A18

Yesterday, on the Megyn Kelly show, he used the n-word, then cutting off his sentence and offering a different noun, "migrants."

Rich Lowry speaking on YouTube episode of Megyn Kelly show. Auto-caption: and they've only found two Springfield residents calling to complain about...

Megyn Kelly had nothing to say about that, as Lowry continued.

Megyn Kelly smiling and Rich Lowry speaking on a split screen in the YouTube episode of Megyn Kelly show. Auto-caption: Haitian migrants to come and take the geese off the golf course

She was still doing this on November 4, the day before the election. HuffPost feels confident summing it up as "transphobia."

Taiyler S. Mitchell. Megyn Kelly Praises Trump’s Transphobia, Calls Him A ‘Protector Of Women’, Stumping for Trump at his Pittsburgh rally, former Fox News personality Megyn Kelly focused primarily on divisive and transphobic gender politics. Kelly said she chose to vote for Trump because of his transphobic goal of keeping trans girls out of girls’ sports and girls’ bathrooms. She also claimed that Trump would be a “protector of women” while in office and went on to say that she prefers the “old version” of masculinity.

This is how they are

They're also anti-trans. I wrote about both of them (separately) last year:

Trans people have trans community even if Rich Lowry says we don't

Trans kids were kicked like soccer balls at the 4th GOP primary debate

Sunday, September 15, 2024

On Buechner's 'stewardship of pain'

We can "do something redemptive" with our pain.

Around the time of the book release of Telling Stories in the Dark: Finding healing and hope in sharing our sadness, grief, trauma, and pain, the author was interviewed.

book cover of TELLING STORIES IN THE DARK

Here:

"If readers are looking for the phrase “the stewardship of pain,” I found it in an essay titled Adolescence and the Stewardship of Pain in the book The Clown in the Belfry. [Frederick] Buechner looks at the parable of the ‘talents’ in Matthew 25 in which Jesus tells about a man going on a journey who gives pieces of his property to be managed by his servants. Usually, in all the sermons I’ve heard about this passage, it’s about how we should manage our resources, our money and property, a pretty literal reading of the parable. But Frederick Buechner totally flips the parable around by asking: What if pain is the thing we’re given in life—and our temptation is to bury that pain and hold it inside of ourselves. The reality is that burying pain doesn’t work. Anything we bury like pain won’t stay buried. So what could it mean if we tried to do something redemptive with that pain?"
— Jeffrey Munroe, interviewed by David Crumm in Read the Spirit, January 2024

Elsewhere, Munroe wrote:

"The stewardship of pain so resonates with me that I collect stories of people who are good stewards of their pain, people who, whether or not they are even familiar with Buechner, make the shift to seeing their pain as something entrusted to them for the sake of others."
— Jeffrey Munroe, The Stewardship of Pain (Part II): TELLING OUR STORIES, frederickbuechner.com, November 2023

'New Gatekeepers' (2022): Anti-trans essay

I've just discovered this essay:

The New Gatekeepers: How the major institutions of American society all came to sing in the woke chorus, and what can be done about it. Michael Lind, Tablet, October 25, 2022

dinosaur skeletons fighting

His first sentence is: "Between 2010 and 2012, American culture changed." During those years, he alleges, "obscure concepts in politicized university departments...became orthodoxy" everywhere, including in for-profit companies and medical associations.

The second paragraph begins:

"In 2010, if you had said that unisex bathrooms in public schools were necessary to accommodate nonbinary students, hardly anyone, even among progressives, would have known what you were talking about."

Immediately followed by:

"Then in 2016 the Obama Education Department suddenly threatened to cut off federal funding to K-12 schools that did not allow students suffering from gender dysphoria to use bathrooms reserved for the opposite sex. The Obama Justice Department threatened to sue North Carolina for passing a law requiring people to use bathrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificates."

Just look at how the first sentence isn't logically connected to what follows. Redesignating a men's or women's bathroom as gender-neutral is not the same as continuing to offer the choice of "men's" or "women's" and deciding for themselves which to enter. Those are two different scenarios, and not having heard of the former in 2010 doesn't form a coherent narrative with "then in 2016" the latter happened.

He then refers to "the transgender controversy" as something that "might have been viewed as a strange aftershock of the gay rights movement, which achieved its much more moderate goals of civil and marriage equality for gay men and lesbian women by the first decade of the 21st century." Of course, he leaves out that (a) trans people have sought rights throughout the 20th century, and did not newly begin doing so "after" gay rights victories (b) many demands for gay rights have not been considerated "moderate" by everyone and have in themselves often been considered "strange," so trans rights are not necessarily stranger in comparison.

He also refers to "the imposition of transgender ideology through economic compulsion by the federal government and major private sector institutions."

He complains that "large corporations and banks, universities and major foundations, and the Democratic Party" were serially promoting "social justice cause[s]" one at a time: "Black Lives Matter, climate change, gender radicalism."

Then, he makes this complex statement:

"Ironically, the rainbow flag of the gay rights movement became the logo of U.S. corporations and U.S. embassies, even as gay men and lesbians who questioned the new orthodoxy were hounded out of the T- and Q-dominated LGBTQ+ acronym alliance for the sin of 'transphobia.'"

My observations:

  1. He says the rainbow flag belongs to "the gay rights movement." The rainbow stands for diversity. He incorrectly assumes it didn't also represent bisexual, trans, and other sorts of queer people. This assumption is made plain by the word "ironically": He's saying that gay people are being pressured to stand under the same umbrella with trans people, while "ironically" institutions are promoting a flag that stands specifically for gay pride.
  2. While many queer radicals have complained about pride turning corporate, that doesn't seem to be Lind's complaint here. He may grudgingly tolerate corporate pride statements as long as they remain "moderate" and gay-only. It's hard to tell.
  3. It isn't true that trans/queer inclusion is a "new orthodoxy" — certainly not within Pride, as trans/queer people have always existed.
  4. It doesn't make sense to say that transphobic "gay men and lesbians...were hounded out of the...LGBTQ+...alliance." If they are trans-exclusive or trans-hostile, they aren't allies of trans people, so they were never part of an LGBTQ+ alliance to begin with. See how Lind accomplishes this by a shift in his own language: the rainbow flag belongs to "the gay rights movement" (no trans people there, on his reading!), and simultaneously trans-exclusive gay people are being shoved out of a trans-inclusive "alliance" (that supposedly didn't historically exist!) Playing along for a moment to expose the illogic: If the LGBTQ+ acronym were new, some gay people might simply refuse to join under that umbrella, but they couldn't be "hounded out" of a community they'd never belonged to.

I've written about this "new homophobia" nonsense (i.e., against the idea that it's homophobic to expect gay people to be respectful toward trans people) regarding Gareth Roberts (short and long), Andrew Sullivan, Jonathan Rauch, and Blake Smith who is, like Lind, published in Tablet (here and here).

This is plainly nonsense:

"Seeking historical analogies for this sudden revolution in American institutional life, some spoke of the Great Awokening, alluding to the two Great Awakenings that animated Anglo-American Protestantism in the 18th and 19th centuries. A case can indeed be made that wokeness is a secular religion, complete with its own ersatz rituals, like “taking the knee,” invoking the imminent apocalypse of anthropogenic climate change, and icons of George Floyd, a victim of police brutality who was elevated into a martyr."

Taking the knee is a choreographed motion done as public protest, not (as far as I know) as prayer. Similarly, images of George Floyd would be displayed at protests or in remembrance of him. Messaging something creatively, passionately, and effectively does not mean that you have a "religion." Also, it is scientists, not clergy, who say that anthropogenic climate change will make the planet uninhabitable.

Next, he says that "woke activists...camouflage radical beliefs in bureaucratic acronyms like DEI and CRT." Well, CRT isn't a bureaucratic acronym at all. It's deliberately misused by Chris Rufo, who is spreading lies about it.

He also complains that "gender-affirming health care" is "often a euphemism for castrating boys and men and sterilizing and performing irreversible mastectomies on girls and women" [emphases mine]. Here, you can see a hint of his opposition for gender transition for adults.

Then he says: "The center left of the political spectrum" has always tended to be infiltrated "by small, radical sects of zealots." Referring to acceptance of trans people, he says, "adding 'T' and 'Q' to LGB legitimated public acceptance of radical gender ideology, as though insisting that controversial and often dangerous 'gender transitions' are a natural and unobjectionable continuation of the campaign to allow same-sex couples to marry." Here, he suggests that the gay rights campaign for equal marriage, at some point of achieving or anticipating success — perhaps upon its final successes at the Supreme Court in 2013 and 2015, or perhaps earlier, as it began to anticipate success, in 2010–2012, a timeline he suggested at the beginning of this essay — tacked on trans inclusion. And this is simply not true, because trans people have existed for quite a long time and have (collectively, generally) always allied with gay people. This timeline is false.

He must, of course, answer why certain diversity concerns that have been raised since the 1960s have suddenly became (alarmingly, unacceptably) mainstream "beginning around 2010?" He does ask that. His answer is: "Today, unlike a generation ago, young Americans typically must pass through three gateways, in order to be economically successful. They must obtain college diplomas; they must join professional accrediting organizations; and they must be able to do business via platforms in the marketplace." He quoted David Samuels's article published just a few weeks earlier (October 8, 2022) as saying that "the Woke is a vanguard movement that seized control of a new technology and used it as a force multiplier to discipline and terrorize the larger institutional landscape." Lind says: "Waiting for people at each gateway, like trolls under a bridge in a fairy tale, are woke leftists, who demand that they recite the in-group passwords before they are allowed to pass through the gates." The gateways are "mostly private and unregulated."

He also says:

"Last year [2021], the AMA Board of Trustees passed a resolution demanding that sex cease to be noted in all future birth certificates, on the theory that a boy might have been born by accident in a girl’s body or vice versa, and that the individual might not realize he or she was in the wrong body until decades later. Yes, this is the American Medical Association, not the American Association of Astrologers."

Well, I just don't know that that is the AMA's reasoning. The AMA's highlights and press release says that binary sex designations fail to reflect the reality of intersex bodies as well as people who identify as transgender, nonbinary, or gender-nonconforming. As a birth certificate is an important document needed for school, employment, and to generate other important documents downstream like driver's licenses and passports, sex designation should be removed "to protect individual privacy and to prevent discrimination." The AMA Board Chair-elect added that sex designation isn't always "permanent," and having it on the birth certificate and available as a public record is used to promote a "view" (i.e., opinion or standpoint) of this permanency. That's the AMA's reasoning, as they provided it. On these two webpages, they did not cite, contrary to Lind's allegation, any specific "theory" that some people are "born by accident" with the body of the other gender and "might not realize" it "until decades later."

That's about as far as I can go with this long essay.

AZ District 4: Lynda Carter's sister Pamela opposes repro rights and LGBTQ people

Pamela Carter is running to represent Arizona’s Legislative District 4 (part of Maricopa County) in the Arizona House of Representatives.

"Her platform," Lydia O'Connor writes for HuffPost, "includes being opposed to same-sex marriage, abortion in nearly all cases and transgender inclusion in sports. She supports arming teachers."

Her sister Lynda Carter, who played Wonder Woman in the 1970s TV series, is a strong supporter of abortion rights and told Mother Jones on September 13 that she doesn't support her sister's campaign.

Wonder Woman says no: ⬇️

black-and-white photo of Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman costume, including a broad shiny headband with a star and matching wide bracelets. Her hands are in fists and her arms are crossed on her chest. A lasso hangs from her hip. Her outfit resembles a leotard.
ABC Television - Scan of publicity photograph, public domain, Wikimedia

Friday, September 13, 2024

Jesse Watters needs to know if you're gay

Ron Dicker, "Jesse Watters: 'I Need To Know If Someone Is Gay'," HuffPost, Sep 13, 2024:

“I don’t like ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’” he [Jesse Watters] said in an exchange shared by Media Matters. “I need to know if someone is gay. I have to know ― and they should tell.”

“And if you don’t tell me, I know. And it’s OK, I want to know,” he continued.

Gutfeld playfully called Watters nosy and Perino chimed in, “Why do you need to know?”

“I’m soooo interested in it,” Watters replied.

One type of anti-trans moral panic laws out there right now is the idea that teachers need to report suspected trans kids to their parents.

Defenders of the anti-trans law will say: Oh, this law isn't going to be used against gay kids, only against trans kids.

Oh yes it will be used against gay kids, because Jesse Watters needs to know who's gay. He's really quite interested in that.

Policy updates

A policy of the Chino Valley Unified School District would have required that parents be notified if a student "requested to use a different name or pronoun or use a bathroom that differed from their assigned sex at birth," Erin Reed explains. A court overturned that part of the policy. However, the school will still notify parents if the student changes anything in their "official or unofficial records."
California Judge Nixes School Forced Outing Policy, But Allows Workaround The ruling overturned a forced outing policy that explicitly targeted gender identity, but allowed a policy to stand that mandated disclosure of all "official or unofficial" records. Erin Reed, Sep 13, 2024

surprised blonde girl

Thomas Szasz endorsing Janice Raymond's 'Transsexual Empire' (1979)

Previously I wrote about Janice Raymond's Transsexual Empire.

When The Transsexual Empire was first published, the New York Times ran this book review by Thomas Szasz (1920–2012): Male and Female Created He Them (June 10, 1979)

surprised horse sketch

The opening paragraph is:

"In the old days, when I was a medical student, if a man wanted to have his penis amputated, my psychology professors said that he suffered from schizophrenia, locked him up in an asylum and threw away the key. Now that I am a professor. my colleagues in psychiatry say that he is a “transsexual,” my colleagues in urology refashion his penis into a perineal cavity they call a vagina, and Time magazine puts him on its cover and calls him “her.” Anyone who doubts that this is progress is considered to be ignorant of the discoveries of modern psychiatric sexology, and a political reactionary, a sexual bigot, or something equally unflattering."

In other words: In the good old days of normalcy, trans people were locked up, but today in 1979, trans people are celebrated. The main problem here is the current threat that all normal-thinking people are likely to be called unflattering names for making old-fashioned anti-trans statements.

45 years later, anti-trans people are still making the same complaint, based on the same falsehood that, supposedly, in some very recent yet thoroughly jettisoned past, trans people weren't allowed to exist. And that today they are allowed to exist, and that this is mainly a problem for people who are righteously transphobic.

Szasz attempts analogies that he proposes as a reductio ad absurdum:

"we might ask what would happen, say, to a man who went to an orthopedic surgeon, told him that he felt like a right‐handed person trapped in an ambidextrous body and asked the doctor to cut off his perfectly healthy left arm? What would happen to a man who went to a urologist, told him that he felt like a Christian trapped in a Jewish body, and asked him to re‐cover the glans of his penis with foreskin? (Such an operation may be alluded to in I Corinthians, 7:17‐18.) * * * If such a desire [to belong to the other gender] qualifies as a disease, transforming the desiring agent into a “transsexual,” then the old person who wants to be young is a “transchronological,” the poor person who wants to be rich is a “transeconomical,” and so on. Such hypothetical claims and the requests for “therapy” based on them (together with our cognitive and medical responses to them) frame, in my opinion, the proper background against which our contemporary beliefs and practices concerning “transsexualism” and transsexual “therapy” ought to be viewed." [emphases mine]

He's saying: Your hypothetical "cognitive" response to a "hypothetical" claim of a person wanting to change in any way, i.e., just whatsoever you happen to think about the person you're imagining, is the "proper" way to understand trans people. This is an act of cis dominance: Anything whatsoever a cis person wants to think about a trans person is the proper thing for the cis person to think about them.

He says that Raymond has "analyzed with great sensitivity and skill" why "transsexualism" is accepted as a disease and that her book is "an important achievement."

He says trans people are "fake" members of our genders:

"Chromosomal sex is fixed. And so are one's historical experiences of growing up and living as boy or girl, man or woman. What, then, can be achieved by means of “transsexual therapy"? The language in which the reply is framed is crucial — and can never be neutral. The transsexual propagandists claim to transform “women trapped in men's bodies” into “real” women and want then to be accepted socially as females (say, in professional tennis). Critics of transsexualism contend that such a person is a “male‐to‐constructed‐female” (Miss Raymond's term), or a fake female, or a castrated male transvestite who wears not only feminine clothing but also feminine‐looking body parts."

But then he acknowledges that the society a trans person lives in may accept them as a member of their gender. This, he says, is "an emblem of modern society's unremitting — though increasingly concealed — antifeminism." The surgeons and psychologists who support gender transition are operating "a Trojan horse in the battle between the sexes, helping men to seduce unsuspecting women, or women who ought to know better, to join forces with their oppressors," Szasz says.

He calls it a "betrayal of human dignity and integrity" to support a trans woman in manifesting

"a caricature of the male definition of 'femininity.' What makes transsexual surgery a male‐supremacist obscenity is the fact that transsexing surgeons do not perform the operation on all clients (just for the money) but insist that the client prove that he can 'pass' as a woman. That is as if Catholic priests were willing to convert only those Jews who could prove their Christianity by socially appropriate acts of antiSemitism."

An obvious problem here is Szasz's equation of "'pass[ing]' as a woman" with "socially appropriate" bigotry or persecution. An essential part of passing is how you are automatically perceived by others. If a new acquaintance doesn't perceive you as a woman, you haven't passed as a woman. Whatever you do (intentinoally or not) to be seen as a woman is not necessarily sexist, nor (if you are sexist) have you necessarily made your sexism "socially appropriate" just because some passerby perceives you as a woman. Szasz equates passing as a woman with caricaturing a woman, and this is a false equivalence.

He also suggests that doctors who provide gender-affirming care are trying to arrange "a phony armistice" in "the war between the sexes." (I don't really know what he means by that.) He furthermore says that the only way to end the war between the sexes is for everyone to "place personal dignity before social sex‐role identity" — implying, I guess, that anyone who primarily cares about being a man, woman, boy or girl is engaging in the war on the other sex, and that those who primarily care about their "personal dignity" (however he defines that) are uniquely positioned to end the war. Of course, the more literal meaning is that he does not want trans people to exist.

The war between the sexes is a part of our, human heritage. It's no use denying It. If that war ever ends, it will be not because of a phony armistice arranged by doctors, but because men, women and children will place personal dignity before social sex‐role identity.

Sunday, September 8, 2024

A new song for today

I just learned about this song.

Here's the blog post:

"I still remember that sunny afternoon in the summer of 2003 when I opened a yellow padded envelope from the Touch & Go label, always a priority at the store. Inside was a CD, its cover a blurred-out “WALK” sign on a quiet street, with some small, elegant script at the bottom reading: TV on the Radio. We immediately put it on, and a few of us stood around, unable to articulate what we were hearing. None of us could quite pin it down...

"Staring at the Sun" is one of the rare songs that still hits me as hard today as it did on that first listen."

— Nabil Ayers, Staring At The Sun, Nabil's Feels, Sep 8, 2024

Wednesday, September 4, 2024

Don't sanitize Trump's nonsense

News outlets are "continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse," says Parker Molloy in The New Republic today, Sept 4, 2024. Example:

" While speaking at an event put on by the extremist group Moms for Liberty, Trump spread a baseless conspiracy theory that “your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation,” referring to transition-related surgeries for trans people. In their write-up of the event, a glowing piece about how Trump “charmed” this group of “conservative moms,” the Times didn’t even mention the moment where he blathered on and on about a crazy conspiracy that has and will never happen."

[Hey, here's CNN for more on that.]

random monster statue

Also, Molloy points out, Shawn McCreesh writing recently for the Times "liken[ed] Trump to literary giants James Joyce and William Faulkner, and even psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud" even though he acknowledged "it is difficult to find the hermeneutic methods with which to parse the linguistic flights that take him from electrocuted sharks to Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, windmills and Rosie O’Donnell." Molloy says: "This analysis goes beyond mere sanitization; it ventures into the realm of the absurd," as it's "framing Trump’s incoherent ramblings as some form of avant-garde oratory."

Trump finally explained the Hannibal Lecter bit, and it's worse than you think.

[image or embed]

— Comfortably Numb (@numb.comfortab.ly) Sep 7, 2024 at 5:10 PM

Margaret Sullivan, September 7, 2024:

"According to the dictionary — well, the Urban Dictionary, at least — the term '“sanewashing” has been around since 2020. But I only encountered it in the past couple of weeks as a few smart commentators have started using it to describe the way journalists translate the rambling and nonsensical “word salad” that Donald Trump cooks up and turn it into something coherent.

Giving credit where due, Parker Molloy, Michael Tomasky, Aaron Rupar and Greg Sargent have all written about this perceptively."

Sullivan continues: "But why does the media sanewash Trump? It’s all a part of the false-equivalence I’ve been writing about here in which candidates are equalized as an ongoing gesture of performative fairness."

One of the two political parties in this country has gone entirely and completely off the rails, embodied by the nominee that they prop up and treat like a monarch. Our media apparatus is incapable of accepting this, so they “balance” coverage by creating coherence and competence where none exists.

[image or embed]

— Kaitlin Has Had Enough (@gothamgirlblue.com) October 24, 2024 at 9:35 AM

Tuesday, September 3, 2024

Don't try to decide whether others should care, but talk about climate because you care

"But how do you get people to care," someone asked yesterday.

"You don’t," Katharine Hayhoe replied. "The idea that we personally decide what everyone else needs to care about is one of the central barriers to effective communication."

On that note, she shared her 2018 TEDWomen talk.

The whole talk is great. If you're most interested in not deciding what everyone else needs to care about and you only have three minutes, listen to 5:00–8:00
There, Prof. Hayhoe says essentially: First, know why climate matters to you. Then, when you talk about it, start with the values you share with the other person. If you don't know what values they might share with you, build that relationship and find out. Then, talk about why climate matters to you — those reasons are probably also salient to the other person.

spruce-type flower

Relatedly, on Caring

I wrote about The Importance of What We Care About by Harry G. Frankfurt (on Medium, paywalled).

Ice cream metaphor for 2 degrees of warming

We all understand ice cream!

walrus

Dryden: 'Not the tipping point...the end point'

"This is not the tipping point, it’s the end point…the point of no return. All the indicators are now looking like it could be much earlier, maybe 2035."
— Howard Dryden, LinkedIn, 2 Sep 2024

Earth seen from space

Again:

In case you missed it

Have you seen inside the book 'To Climates Unknown'?

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