Quotulatiousness

December 21, 2019

J.K. Rowling falls afoul of the woke zeitgeist on Twitter

Filed under: Books, Britain, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The author of the immensely popular Harry Potter books suddenly finds herself on the wrong side of a Twitter firing squad:

The persecution of women who question transgenderism has got to stop.

Standing up for women’s rights is a risky business these days. Just ask JK Rowling. She has had merry hell rained down upon her over the past 24 hours. She has been called a stupid cunt, a bitch, trash, an old woman and so fucking ugly by an army of tweeting sexists. Her crime? She defended the right of a woman to express her opinion about sex and gender without losing her job.

The witch-hunting of JK Rowling, the ceaseless online abuse of her over the past day and night, exposes how unhinged, hateful and outright misogynistic the transgender movement has become. Rowling’s sin was to tweet in defence of Maya Forstater, the charity worker who was sacked for her belief that there are two sexes and that sex is immutable. That is, a man cannot become a woman, and vice versa. This week, an employment tribunal outrageously upheld Ms Forstater’s sacking and in the process it decreed what it is acceptable for people in the workplace to think and say. The judge said the kind of views held by Forstater are “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”. This essentially gives a green light to the harassment, isolation and expulsion from the workplace of anyone who questions the transgender ideology.

Not surprisingly, this chilling diktat, this judge-led effort to outline what opinions we are allowed to hold, alarmed people who care about freedom of conscience and freedom of speech and who think that women should not be punished for holding particular opinions. There is a foul, pre-modern vibe to the idea that women should keep their filthy opinions to themselves and if they don’t they should be expelled from polite society. Trans-sceptical feminists in academia and the cultural sphere responded to the censorious persecution of Ms Forstater by tweeting their backing of her – #IStandWithMaya – and calling for freedom of speech for women who think biological sex is an actual thing. Rowling joined in. The bile she has since received perfectly illustrates the problem at hand – that it has become tantamount to a speechcrime to say there are two sexes.

[…]

There is a powerfully Orwellian streak in the punishment of people for expressing obvious truths. That you can now be sacked and demonised for saying men are men and women are women confirms that the trans tyranny is out of control. This is why Rowling’s intervention was so important. The only way this woke censorship and persecution of disobedient women will be countered is if more individuals and institutions stand up to it. Everyone must now say what has, surreally, become unsayable: that sex is real, that sex is immutable, and that if you are born male, you will die male, regardless of what you do to yourself.

December 18, 2019

Mark Steyn on what passes as “conservatism” these days

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s certainly Conservative-In-Name-Only:

In 2000, when the Vermont Supreme Court mandated same-sex “civil unions”, American conservatives were outraged. By 2010, when the left had moved on to gay marriage, conservatives were supportive of civil unions but insisted marriage was an ancient institution between a man and a woman. Now, the left having won that one and moved on to transgenderism, conservatives profess to be a bit queasy about transitioning grade-schoolers.

So you can take it to the bank that by 2030 rock-ribbed Republicans will be on board with penises in the girls’ changing rooms, but determined to hold the line against whatever the left’s next cause du jour is: human cloning, the state appropriation of parenthood, voting rights for animals.

There really isn’t much point to conservatism that’s just leftism ten years late, is there? It’s like that ITV+1 satellite service they have in Britain that offers you the ITV schedule but an hour later, in case you were caught in traffic heading home. If you’re considering on which side to bestow your tribal loyalty, the left is right quicker; the right is left behind — but only for a few years until they throw in the towel. If you’re all headed to the same destination, why not ride first class on the TGV instead of the creaking, jerking stopping service? Justin Trudeau’s vapid modishness was perfectly distilled by his campaign catchphrase of four years ago: “Because it’s 2015.” But that beats waiting till 2025 to say “Because it’s 2015”.

While we’re on the subject of the northern Tories: Because the late unlamented Andrew Scheer finessed his views on same-sex nuptials as lethargically as did Barack Obama, he was flayed by the Canadian media as some fire-and-brimstone social conservative of televangical inflexibility. I wish. As I wrote the other day, he’s as unmoored from principle as Boris Johnson, but without the countervailing strengths of being able to stick it to the other guy and to pass himself off as a human being. He was particularly contemptible in the hours before my appearance at the House of Commons Justice Committee, as I may discuss in detail one of these days. Yet the never-learn Conservatives are minded to replace an entirely hollow man with someone just like him, only more so.

It is surely telling that the only issues on which the right has made any progress at all in moving the ball in its direction — Brexit in the UK; illegal immigration and a belated honesty about the rise of China in the US — had to be injected into public discourse by two outsiders, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump. And indeed in the teeth of opposition by the establishment’s catch-up conservatives.

Catch-up conservatism gives the game away: The right has lost the knack of persuasion, and increasingly doesn’t even bother to try.

November 26, 2019

“Women’s sports are dying, and very quickly”

Filed under: Australia, History, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn outlines the rise and sudden fall of women’s sports:

Rachel McKinnon on the podium after winning the Union Cycliste Internationale Masters Track Cycling World Championship, October 2018.

When the Olympic Games was revived in 1896, it was assumed by all that, as in the ancient games of Greece, the competitors would be men. The inclusion of women, said Baron de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympiad, would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and incorrect”.

By “uninteresting”, he meant that the innate differences between the male and female bodies ensured that women’s participation would require one to feign interest in races that were slower and jumps that were shorter. In a competitive celebration of excellence, what’s the point? So the first female Olympians were women who could hold their own with men and compete in the chaps’ events — such as Hélène de Pourtalès, who won a gold medal at the 1900 Paris Olympics as part of the Swiss sailing crew. A week later Mesdames Guerra and Moulin competed, unsuccessfully, in the hacks and hunter rounds of the equestrian events. In the croquet competition, seven men and three women participated, with the men taking all the medals.

And then came the tennis, for which they introduced a ladies’ singles event, at which Miss Charlotte Cooper (a five-times Wimbledon champ) prevailed.

These were the two models for female sportsmen, if you’ll forgive the expression: Compete in mixed events and spend most of your life losing to blokes, or compete only against other women where the lesser achievements are, as M le Baron saw it, “uninteresting”. In the case of certain activities, male sports felt obliged to spin off more genteel and (in Coubertin terms) even less interesting female variants — softball and netball, rather than baseball and basketball.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the latter model — female-only sports — prevailed, as part of what was understood by the general trend of “women’s rights”, loosely defined, and indeed more explicitly so by things like America’s Title Nine legislation.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Charlotte Cooper model is collapsing, very fast. Women are back to losing to rivals who, whatever their lipstick, skirts or breast implants, are biologically male with all the inherent advantages. Miss Hannah Mouncey, for example, is six-foot-two and 220 pounds, which is rather heavier than me and an inch taller. The average Australian woman is five-foot-four-and-a-quarter and just under 157 pounds. If you have to catch a ball, standing six inches above anybody else on court comes in helpful:

Did Miss Mouncey procure her advantages over her sisters through a rigorous workout regime? No. She gained them by being born male. She played for Oz’s national men’s handball team until 2016, when she revealed she was transitioning and thus would henceforth play for the women’s team. She also announced she was taking up Aussie football, again for the ladies.

November 7, 2019

Blanchard’s transsexualism typology

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Quillette, Louise Perry interviews Dr. Ray Blanchard about transsexualism, and his controversial-in-the-LGBT-community typology of transsexualism:

Ray Blanchard, PhD.
Image from his Twitter profile.

Ray Blanchard is an adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto who specialises in the study of human sexuality, with a particular focus on sexual orientation, paraphilias, and gender identity disorders. In the 1980s and 1990s he developed a theory around the causes of gender dysphoria in natal males that became known as “Blanchard’s transsexualism typology“. This typology — which continues to attract a great deal of controversy — categorizes trans women (that is, natal males who identify as women) into two discrete groups.

The first group is composed of “androphilic” (sometimes termed “homosexual”) trans women, who are exclusively sexually attracted to men and are markedly feminine in behaviour and appearance from a young age. They typically begin the process of medical transition before the age of 30.

The second group are motivated to transition as a result of what Blanchard termed “autogynephilia”: a sexual orientation defined by sexual arousal at the thought or image of oneself as a woman. Autogynephiles are typically sexually attracted to women, although they may also identify as asexual or bisexual. They are more likely to transition later in life and to have been conventionally masculine in presentation up until that point.

Although Blanchard’s typology is supported by a wide range of sexologists and other researchers, it is strongly rejected by most trans activists who dispute the existence of autogynephilia. The medical historian Alice Dreger, whose 2015 book Galileo’s Middle Finger included an account of the autogynephilia controversy, summarises the conflict:

    There’s a critical difference between autogynephilia and most other sexual orientations: Most other orientations aren’t erotically disrupted simply by being labeled. When you call a typical gay man homosexual, you’re not disturbing his sexual hopes and desires. By contrast, autogynephilia is perhaps best understood as a love that would really rather we didn’t speak its name. The ultimate eroticism of autogynephilia lies in the idea of really becoming or being a woman, not in being a natal male who desires to be a woman.

I interviewed Blanchard over email and Skype. The text has been lightly edited for clarity.

November 1, 2019

The “Wokescreen” protecting the Prime Racist

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Justin “Blackface” Trudeau has been completely exonerated for any racist acts he committed, thanks to what Julie Burchill calls “the Wokescreen”:

Justin Trudeau with dark makeup on his face, neck and hands at a 2001 “Arabian Nights”-themed party at the West Point Grey Academy, the private school where he taught.
Photo from the West Point Grey Academy yearbook, via Time

Justin Trudeau seems as compulsively drawn to blacking up as his mother was to hanging around pop groups; after the third example of him doing so was revealed this year, he admitted that he had actually lost count of the number of times he’d done it. Nevertheless, he was defended by minority spokesmen and liberal commentators. This contrasts strikingly with the fate of Atlantic Records UK president Ben Cook, who was forced to resign earlier this month after old photographs of him in blackface emerged. As Cook is responsible for launching the career of Ed Sheeran, some might say he had it coming. But it’s weird how Trudeau, an ostentatiously woke politician, has survived and thrived, while Cook has limped away in disgrace. You’d think the former had betrayed both his beliefs and his followers far more.

[…]

So how come Trudeau got away with it? It’s part of a broader dodge – what the commentator Daniel Norris calls the Wokescreen. From behind this magical canopy, cliques can rob women of their hard-won private spaces (transgender activists) and enjoy the brutish thrill of racism (Corbynite anti-Semites) and because they’ve ticked the box which says Brotherhood Of Man it doesn’t make them bad people! Those people over there are the bad ones – like Jacob Rees-Mogg’s 12-year-old son.

It’s a mystery. But an even bigger one is why blackface is quite rightly unacceptable while drag gets bigger by the day. You’d have to be living in an Amish community not to have heard of RuPaul’s Drag Race, while Channel 5’s Drag Kids follows a process which we squares call “grooming”. Yet no one turns a hair. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if the Black and White Minstrels are insulting and reactionary, why aren’t drag queens? If someone can explain to me why race-based parody is bad and sex-based parody “a bit of fun”, I’d love to know. Woke me up and tell me why!

September 26, 2019

Titania McGrath reviews The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray

Filed under: Books, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s a corker:

I’ve never reviewed a book before, and I fully intend to follow my editor’s advice and be as impartial as possible. But just to make it clear from the outset, Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds is an abomination. It’s a sustained invective against woke culture, an attempt to reverse all the hard work of passionate civil rights activists such as Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi and Lily Allen.

It’s essentially an Alt-right handbook, and I don’t think it’s too much to suggest that every copy ought to be incinerated. Preferably in a public square or something so that we can all see what happens when fascists try to spread their wicked ideology.

For the best part of 300 pages Murray spews his hateful bile – on white paper, no less – denouncing social justice, identity politics and intersectionality. Even the font has a certain heteronormative quality about it. He rails against “millennial snowflakes” who all “identify as attack helicopters” and how “you can’t say anything anymore” and that “you can go to prison for singing the national anthem these days”. I mean, he doesn’t actually write any of these words, but we all know that’s what he’s thinking.

The book is divided into four sections: “Gay”, “Women”, “Race” and “Trans”. These are all wonderful subjects – coincidentally, they also happen to be the names of my tropical fish – and so it is heart-breaking to see such noble ideas befouled in Murray’s grubby paws.

Needless to say, the last thing the world needs right now is yet another book by a straight white cis male. I’m told that Murray claims to be gay, but as journalist Jim Downs said of gay entrepreneur Peter Thiel after he appeared at the Republican National Convention, he “is an example of a man who has sex with other men, but not a gay man”. The idea that you can be gay and have conservative opinions is absurd. It was the same with Kanye West, who gave up being black once he’d put on that MAGA hat.

Murray seems to believe that, as a society, we have gone “through the crash barrier” (a typically male Top Gear-style analogy) and messed everything up through our supposedly divisive obsessions with race, gender and sexuality. “It is a curiosity of the age,” Murray writes, “that after the situation appears at the very least to be better than it ever was, it is presented as though it has never been worse”. What the hell would he know? As an ecosexual vegan intersectional feminist, I am surely better qualified than anyone to understand that ours is the most oppressive society on earth.

August 24, 2019

Prime Minister Dressup versus the Milk Dud

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Barbara Kay on the most recent pre-campaign attack by the federal Liberals on Andrew “The Milk Dud” Scheer:

Andrew Scheer, paid tool of Big Dairy, chugs some milk during a Press Gallery speech in 2017. I’ve called him the “Milk Dud” ever since.
Screencapture from a CTV video uploaded to YouTube.

The Liberals know they are going into the coming federal election with their leader, Justin Trudeau, weighed down by the heavy baggage of the SNC-Lavalin debacle and the India Tickle Trunk Tour, amongst many other embarrassments. So the Conservatives had to expect some desperation moves to cast their leader, Andrew Scheer, in what the Libs consider an equally bad light.

And right on cue, the Libs unearthed a 2005 video of Andrew Scheer explaining to the House of Commons why he was personally opposed to the legalization of gay marriage.

We would do well to remember that the words Scheer spoke then constituted the belief system of 99% of the planet earth, including Barack Obama, who flipped on the issue when it became politically safe to do so. Gay marriage wasn’t even on the horizon of most countries in the West, nor is it legal yet in many western countries. (And as former NDP leader Thomas Mulcair pointed out in a CTV interview, Canadians would also do well to remember that in 1995 Ralph Goodale didn’t believe gays should even have the right to civil unions, let alone marriage.)

Scheer has no intention of revisiting gay marriage politically. It’s settled law, and he has given no indication that he considers it less than settled. Bringing up what he had to say in 2005 may be politically advantageous as a distraction, but it is unfair, while Conservative attacks on Trudeau for gaffes he has made and is still making as prime minister are perfectly fair comment.

July 17, 2019

Andrew Scheer falls into carefully prepared media trap on “conversion therapy”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Selley explains why federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer is now being pilloried over his stance on banning so-called “conversion therapy”:

Andrew Scheer meets British Prime Minister Theresa May
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The day before Global ran its story, CBC reported it had “obtained” a letter the feds sent to the provinces in June asking them to ramp up efforts to outlaw preposterous and potentially dangerous so-called treatments designed to turn homosexual people into heterosexual people. “The provincial, territorial, municipal and federal governments all have roles to play to protect Canadians from the harms associated with this practice,” read the letter, signed by federal Justice Minister David Lametti among others. “The federal government is committed to doing everything within its jurisdiction to combat conversion therapy” — including, supposedly, amendments to the Criminal Code.

Global took that to Scheer, who had nothing nice to say about conversion therapy: “We will always … stand up for the rights of LGBTQ individuals and protect their rights and … we’re opposed to any type of practice that would forcibly attempt to change someone’s sexual orientation.”

Asked whether he would support a “ban,” Scheer responded precisely as opposition leaders always do in the absence of legislation: “We will wait and see exactly what is being contemplated.” After all, Scheer trenchantly noted, “this is something that this Liberal government is only now recently proposing.”

This entirely reasonable position begat the above-noted headline, and the above-noted headline begat mass outrage — including among commentators who know very well how the game is played. “Why would you allow any ambiguity about where you stand?” Global radio host Charles Adler fumed on Twitter, addressing Scheer. “Why can’t you just say this so-called therapy is peddled by charlatans. It exploits vulnerable people including children. Voluntary or coercive, it’s bogus.”

Now, if you think it’s self-evident that conversion therapy ought to be illegal in Canada, and you hold anyone who doesn’t share and proselytize that opinion in contempt, then Scheer has given you your answer. But if that’s what you think, you should be just as furious with the Liberals — probably more.

Not only is the “plan for (a) conversion therapy ban” referred to in the Global headline nothing of the sort, but rather a hitherto private and suddenly, conveniently, public letter that explicitly leaves open the question of federal jurisdiction. But the letter was sent just a few weeks after the Liberals ruled out exactly what the headline would have us believe they are now proposing!

June 21, 2019

Lies, damned lies, and hate crime statistics

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Fraser Myers explains why the much-remarked-upon British crime statistics showing huge increases in hate crimes are much more a statistical artifact than a true reflection of the state of British society:

Allegedly, England and Wales are in the grip of a “surge” in homophobic and transphobic hate crime. “The rate of LGBT hate crime per capita rose by 144 per cent between 2013-14 and 2017-18”, it reports. Hate-crime hotspots like South Yorkshire and Hampshire experienced even larger surges, it claims, with police-recorded crimes rising by 376 per cent and 189 per cent in the same period, respectively.

To make matters worse, according to LBGT campaigners, this rise in hate crime doesn’t even capture the true extent of the hatred out there. Taz Edwards-White, alliance manager at equalities and diversity organisation Metro, told the Guardian that the hate-crime figures were likely to be “the tip of the iceberg”. She and other campaigners say this rise could be down to the rise of right-wing populism.

The truth is rather different. Every year for the past five years, the release of police-recorded data on hate crime has been accompanied by panicked media reports of a hate-crime surge. But as last year’s Home Office report made abundantly clear, large increases “are due to the improvements made by the police in their identification and recording of hate-crime offences and more people coming forward to report these crimes rather than a genuine increase” (emphasis mine).

What’s more, there is a good reason why the “surge” identified by the Guardian takes off in 2013-2014. 2014 was the year the College of Policing released its Hate Crime Operational Guidance [PDF], which is still used to this day. This guidance actually demands that the numbers increase. “Targets that see success as reducing hate crime are not appropriate”, it says. As part of the drive to record more crime, there has been a slew of public-information campaigns and regular exhortations from police for the public to report hateful incidents, particularly in the wake of major political events like the EU referendum and the 2017 terror attacks.

Police-recorded data has other problems, too. Police are obliged to record not only criminal actions but also all non-crime hate incidents. A non-crime hate incident is literally any event that is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility towards a so-called protected characteristic. The key word here is perceived. As the Operational Guidance makes clear: “The victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of the hostility is not required for an incident or crime to be recorded as a hate crime or hate incidents.”

June 17, 2019

“We’ve reached peak identitarian bollocks”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill follows up on the disturbing story of two lesbians who were physically assaulted on a London bus:

Talk about ungrateful. Brits, and people around the world, offered empathy and solidarity to the two gay women who were battered by thugs on a London bus. And yet now one of the women has turned around and told us we only care about them because they are white. It’s only because they are “two attractive, white, cisgender women” that so many people and organisations gave a damn about them and tweeted about them, apparently. Thanks a bunch. We offer our human concern for your wellbeing and you tell us we’re being racist. We’ve reached peak identitarian bollocks.

The woman in question, who goes only by the name “Chris”, has written a piece for the Guardian. Natch. The intro lets us know what we’re in for: “The photo of me and my date went viral – but only as we’re white, feminine and cisgender.” Translation: you racist, transphobic idiots wouldn’t have cared half as much if this had been two bloodied and bruised black women or trans women. The “commodification” of “my face” came at the “expense of other victims whose constant persecution apparently does not warrant similar moral outrage”, says Chris.

What is most striking about her piece is that she flagellates herself for her privilege. Yes, this woman who last month was badly beaten allegedly on account of her sexuality is now beating herself up in the national press over her privileged identity. She says she has “evaded much of the violence and oppression imposed on so many others by our capitalist, white-supremacist, patriarchal system because of the privileges I enjoy by dint of my race, health, education, and conventional gender presentation”. What a strange, self-hating mindset it must take to be victimised for your sexuality and then to say: “God, I’m SO privileged.”

Chris even does us the service of providing a list of people who are far less privileged than her and who us phoney empathisers should finally start noticing. It is “open season”, she says, on “people of colour, indigenous people, transgender people, disabled people, queer people, poor people, women and migrants”. This is classic virtue-signalling. She is engaging in the Oppression Olympics while making it clear she doesn’t deserve any gold medals in said Olympics because she is white, educated, cisgender, etc. A masterclass in identitarian showboating.

June 14, 2019

QotD: Kink-shaming

Filed under: Britain, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Paradoxically, redrawing the boundaries of what is “acceptable” and “appropriate” in order not to make anyone feel “excluded” actually has the counter-productive effect of literally excluding many groups from both social media and public platforms: ex-Muslims espousing atheism, women querying the rights of the transgendered to play them at sport, and lesbians not attracted to a penis even if it has a frock over it. A whole page of last week’s Sunday Times was entirely composed of items reflecting what I call the Perils Of Inclusivity: “Tax expert fired for saying trans women aren’t women” – “Gallery covers up art after complaints by Muslim viewers” – “Anonymous journal lets academics publish and not be damned”. All in aid of preventing hurty feelz!

And now sexual perverts (among whom, on occasion, I happily count myself) are the latest group to demand “inclusion”. Please! When I was young, we thought nothing more desirable than being An Outsider – why are the young of today so obsessed with getting a tick on the register, rather than playing hooky? There is a happy place between believing that no one should be excluded on the basis of race, sex or social class, and believing that official validation of every life choice any person freely makes are the same. Someone who likes dressing up in a gimp mask is not Rosa Parks, and I find the increasing lack of ability to differentiate between the two in some quarters highly risible at best and downright insulting at worst.

The latest snowflake flutter is “Don’t kink-shame me!”. At a Vancouver university last year, a man insisting he was an “adult baby” pestered a university nurse to change his dirty nappy and perved over his repulsed female classmates. A whistle-blowing workplace-safety director was sacked for standing up for the women. In Wolverhampton a few months back, a tattooist calling himself “Dr Evil” was charged with grievous bodily harm after slicing ears and nipples from paying customers. He was reported as having support from “the body-modification community” who set up a petition in his favour.

Perhaps the most gobsmacking illustration of how mainstream perversion has become is a photograph of a Pride march showing a gaggle of kiddies (whose parents obviously got the memo that Pride is family-friendly) staring in what looks like confused repulsion at a man in front of them who leads a group of men, crawling on all fours and dressed as dogs, on leashes. Personally, I don’t think Pride needs to be family-friendly – it’s about the very adult desire to connect your genitalia to the genitalia of the same sex, which is pretty specific. But neither is it about kinks. Considering its origins, lesbians have far more right to be there than men who pretend to be dogs at weekends. Lesbians are now routinely removed from Pride marches by police due to their insistence that lesbians don’t have penises and the hurty feelz this causes in people who believe they can and do.

I’m a broad-minded broad, so I’m not offended by these people – but I do despise them for being so wimpy that they need their kink validated by straight society. When did perverts start being ashamed to be perverts and need to be a community? “Community” used to be such a jolly word, redolent of cheery singing or a nice place to land on the Monopoly board. Now it just means a bunch of whiners whining about stuff.

Julie Burchill, “The pervert community? Oh please”, Spiked!, 2019-05-08

April 4, 2019

QotD: Anti-masculinity

Filed under: History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the many harms inflicted on us by the hive minded lunatics running our society is the binary world view. Everything is either all good or all bad. As such, everyone must either fully embrace something or completely reject something. Indifference, ambivalence and moderation are not permissible in a world run by zealous fanatics. The only things that matter, that can matter, are those things that require a moral position. Everything else falls outside the set of things that exist, at least to the hive minded.

The most obvious example is homosexuality. Like all normal men, I am mildly intolerant of homosexuals. I get that they cannot help themselves and I get that it is “natural” in the same way schizophrenia is natural. I’m fine with them doing what they must, just as long as they do it in private. Of course, that makes me a monster. In the hive, you must either fully embrace homosexuality and what comes with it, or you are a homophobe and not fit for decent company. There’s no room for indifference or mild intolerance.

Hive mindedness is much more of a female attribute, than a masculine one. That’s not to imply that all women are howling at the moon zealots. It’s just that the fairer sex is much more inclined to deal in absolutes. The reason is that men have ways to arbitrate disputes that do not require a transcendent set of rules. One chimp squares off with the other chimp and the winner is the one who was right about where to find the best bananas. Women don’t have that so they look for a set of rules to figure out winners and losers.

It’s why it was no accident, that as soon as the girls got the vote, and the boys were off fighting the Kaiser, the girls banned alcohol and prostitution. To quote Judge Roy Bean, “Drinking and gambling and whoring were declared unlawful. All those things which come natural to men became crimes.” Morality, at least in the modern age, is the set of rules the girls use to control the boys, which is why the prim-faced moralizers of today are running around trying to stamp out anything that smacks of masculinity.

“The Z Man”, “Pouf-berries”, The Z Blog, 2017-04-08.

March 15, 2019

QotD: Gender correctness

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Five years ago, if someone had told you it would soon become tantamount to a speechcrime to say ‘There are two genders’, you would have thought them mad.

Sure, we live in unforgivably politically correct times. Ours is an era in which the offence-taking mob regularly slams comedians for telling off-colour jokes, demands the expulsion from campus of speakers who might offend students’ sensibilities, and hollers ‘Islamophobe’, ‘homophobe’ or ‘transphobe’ at anyone who transgresses their moral code on anything from same-sex marriage to respecting Islam. (A phobia, we should always remind ourselves, is a mental malaise, a disturbance of the mind. How very Soviet Union to depict your opponents essentially as mentally diseased.)

And yet for all that, surely it would never become a risky business to utter the opinion: ‘There are men and women and that’s all.’ Well, that has now happened. It is now looked upon as hateful, sinful and phobic, of course, to express a view that has guided humanity for millennia: that humankind is divided into two sexes, and they are distinctive, and one cannot become the other.

Say that today in a university lecture room packed with right-on millennials and watch their faces contort with fury. Write it in a newspaper column or blog post and witness the swift formation of a virtual mob yelling for you to be fired. Say it on TV and there will be protests against you, petitions, demands that you and your foul, outdated ideology be denied the oxygen of televisual publicity.

Brendan O’Neill, “It isn’t TERFs who are bigoted – it’s their persecutors”, Spiked, 2019-01-28.

February 28, 2019

QotD: Lawrence of the Arabian Nights

Filed under: Britain, History, Middle East, Quotations, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The everlasting battle stripped from us care of our own lives or of others’. We had ropes about our necks, and on our heads prices which showed that the enemy intended hideous tortures for us if we were caught. Each day some of us passed; and the living knew themselves just sentient puppets on God’s stage: indeed, our taskmaster was merciless, merciless, so long as our bruised feet could stagger forward on the road. The weak envied those tired enough to die; for success looked so remote, and failure a near and certain, if sharp, release from toil. We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling. This impotency was bitter to us, and made us live only for the seen horizon, reckless what spite we inflicted or endured, since physical sensation showed itself meanly transient. Gusts of cruelty, perversions, lusts ran lightly over the surface without troubling us; for the moral laws which had seemed to hedge about these silly accidents must be yet fainter words. We had learned that there were pangs too sharp, griefs too deep, ecstasies too high for our finite selves to register. When emotion reached this pitch the mind choked; and memory went white till the circumstances were humdrum once more.

Such exaltation of thought, while it let adrift the spirit, and gave it licence in strange airs, lost it the old patient rule over the body. The body was too coarse to feel the utmost of our sorrows and of our joys. Therefore, we abandoned it as rubbish: we left it below us to march forward, a breathing simulacrum, on its own unaided level, subject to influences from which in normal times our instincts would have shrunk. The men were young and sturdy; and hot flesh and blood unconsciously claimed a right in them and tormented their bellies with strange longings. Our privations and dangers fanned this virile heat, in a climate as racking as can be conceived. We had no shut places to be alone in, no thick clothes to hide our nature. Man in all things lived candidly with man.

The Arab was by nature continent; and the use of universal marriage had nearly abolished irregular courses in his tribes. The public women of the rare settlements we encountered in our months of wandering would have been nothing to our numbers, even had their raddled meat been palatable to a man of healthy parts. In horror of such sordid commerce our youths began indifferently to slake one another’s few needs in their own clean bodies — a cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed sexless and even pure. Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort. Several, thirsting to punish appetites they could not wholly prevent, took a savage pride in degrading the body, and offered themselves fiercely in any habit which promised physical pain or filth.

T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1926.

February 27, 2019

Transgender athletes

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, Sports — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Barbara Kay explains why she is against allowing transgender athletes to compete with cisgendered women:

Sport is one area where the community­ will resist “social justice” initiatives if they conflict with sport’s bedrock principles of a level playing field and zero tolerance for cheating. Up until about five minutes ago in the long history of sport, that meant women competed against women and men competed against men in all sports where advantage lies in size, power and/or speed.

When a biologically male runner or cyclist who ranks as middle of the pack in men’s races becomes the gold medallist in a Women’s race, he cheats the silver and bronze women athletes beside him on the podium, and especially the woman who came in fourth. But he also cheats people who came out to see a clean race. Joe and Jane Public know unfairness and reality denial when they see it, and it sucks all the joy out of the word “competition” for them.

[…]

Athlete Ally is one of a constellation of LGBT advocacy groups that “are helping sport organizations in Canada become more inclusive.” This quotation is taken from the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport’s most recent policy paper, “Creating Inclusive environments for Trans Participants in Canadian Sport.” Designed as a policy guidance tool for sport organizations, it was developed by the ‘Trans Inclusion in Sport Expert Working Group,’ which I will hereafter refer to as the EWG. If you want to get a flavour of the kind of anti-science Kool-Aid our sports brain trust is drinking, read this document.

It begins factually enough. The paper notes that the vast majority of sport participation in Canada is focused on recreation and development. At this level, trans inclusion is not a big deal, because it’s all about fun and skill building. It is only for the “very small minority” of Canadian athletes who continue into high performance that competitive advantage becomes an issue. Enter the EWG. And here we leave facts behind and enter La La Land.

Sex, the EWG says, “is usually assigned at birth.” No. Sex is established during gestation according to chromosomal development. Sex is observed at birth, not assigned. Gender, the EWG says, “is not inherently connected to one’s physical anatomy.” No. Sex and gender are connected for 99% of humanity, and therefore “inherent” by normal metrics.

The definition of the word “trans,” for sports purposes, according to the EWG, “includes but is not limited to people who identify as transgender, transsexual, cross dressers (adjective) or gender non-conforming (gender diverse or genderqueer).” This is quite a puzzling mashup. Cross-dressing males do not believe they “are” female. Neither do non-conforming males and females who have no wish to transition.

But the document does not address this important inconsistency, nor the alarming imprecision of “not limited to.” From what they state in this definition, EWG is okay with cross-sex competing by biological males who do not believe they are females and females who do not believe they are male, but whose appearance or fetishes are atypical for their sex. We’re off to a very confusing start. Things don’t improve.

Indeed, to be trans can mean almost anything an individual wants it to mean (“not limited to…”), according to this document: “It is important for sports organizations to understand that each individual is different. There is no single transition process and each person will make different choices,” including, significantly, “whether they undertake hormonal or surgical transitions.”

And “[a]n individuals’ personal choice to not use hormones does not make them any less trans nor do these choices change their right to be recognized as the gender with which they identify — man, woman, both or other.” In short, the definition of trans, to be accepted by official governing sports bodies, is left entirely to an individual’s “sense” of gender identity, completely untethered from biology.

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