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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25287 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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FOSS and The XZ Problem

Security Boulevard reports:

A critical vulnerability (CVE-2024-3094) was discovered in the XZ Utils library on March 29th, 2024. This severe flaw allows attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code on affected systems, earning it the highest possible score (10) on both the CVSS 3.1 and CVSS 4.0 scoring systems due to its immediate impact and wide scope.

The exploit would allow remote code execution as root in a wide majority of systemd-based Linux (and Mac OSX, thanks homebrew!) machines. There's some reasonable complaints that some CVE ratings are prone to inflation, but this has absolutely earned a 10/10, would not recommend. Thankfully, this was caught before the full exploit made it to many fixed release Linux distros, and most rolling-release distros either would not have updated so quickly or would not yet be vulnerable (and, presumably, will be updating to fixed versions of XZ quickly), with the exception of a handful of rarely-used Debian options. Uh, for the stuff that's been caught so far.

Summary and FAQ, for the more technically minded reader, the NIST CVE is here, background of initial discovery at here.

Ok, most of us who'd care remember Heartbleed. What's different here?

In this case, the exploit was near-certainly introduced intentionally by a co-maintainer of the library XZ Utils, by smuggling code into a binary test file, months apart from adding calls to execute that test file from live environments, and then working to hide any evidence. The combination of complexity in the attack (requiring fairly deep knowledge of a wide variety of Linux internals) and bizarreness of exploit steps (his FOSS history is sprinkled with a replacing safe functions with their unsafe precursors, or adding loose periods in cmake files) leaves nearly zero chance that this is unintentional, and the guy has since disappeared. He was boosted into co-maintainership only recently, and only after the original maintainer was pressured to pick him up by a strangely large barrage of very picky users. The author even pushed to have these updates shoved into Fedora early.

Most mainstream technical advisories aren't outright calling this a nation-state actor, but The Grugq is pretty willing to describe whoever did it as an 'intelligence agency', whether government or private, and with cause. Both the amount of effort and time put into this attack is vast, and the scope of vulnerability it produced extreme -- though this might be the 'cope' answer, since an individual or small-private-group running this level of complex attack is even more disturbing. It's paranoid to start wondering how much of the discussion aimed encouraging XZ's maintainer to take on the bad actor here as a co-maintainer, but as people are having more and more trouble finding evidence of their existence since, it might not be paranoid enough.

There's a lot of potential takeaways:

  • The Many Eyes theory of software development worked. This was an incredibly subtle attack that few developers would have been able to catch, by an adversary willing to put years into developing trust and sneaking exploit in piecemeal.

  • Except it was caught because a Microsoft (Postgres!) developer, without looking at the code, noticed a performance impact. Shit.

  • This attack heavily exploited access through the FOSS community: the author was able to join sight-unseen through a year of purely digital communications, and the 'business decision' of co-maintainership came through a lot of pressure from randos or anons.

  • Except that's something that can happen in corporate or government environments, too. There are places where every prospective employee gets a full background check and a free prostate exam, but they're the outlier even for dotmil spheres. Many employers are having trouble verifying that prospective recruits can even code, and most tech companies openly welcome recent immigrants or international workers that would be hard to investigate at best. Maybe they would have recognized that the guy with a stereotypical Indian name didn't talk like a native Indian, but I wouldn't bet on even that. And then there's just the stupid stuff that doesn't have to involve employees at all.

  • The attack space is big, and probably bigger than it needs to be. The old school of thought was that you'd only 'really' need to do a serious security audit of services actually being exposed, and perhaps some specialty stuff like firewall software, but people are going to be spending months looking for weird calls in any software run in privileged modes. One of many boneheaded controversial bits of systemd was the increased reliance on outside libraries compared to precursors like SysV Init. While some people do pass tar.xz around, XZ's main use in systemd seems to be related to loading replacement keys or VMs, and it's not quite clear exactly why that's something that needs to be baked into systemd directly.

  • But a compression library seems just after cryptographic libraries are a reasonable thing to not roll your own, and even if this particular use for this particular library might have been avoidable, you're probably not going to be able to trim that much out, and you might not even be able to trim this.

  • There's a lot of this that seems like the chickens coming home to roost for bad practices in FOSS development: random test binary blobs ending up on user systems, build systems that either fail-silently on hard-to-notice errors or spam so much random text no one looks at it, building from tarballs, so on.

  • But getting rid of bad or lazy dev practices seems one of those things that's just not gonna happen.

  • The attacker was able to get a lot of trust so quickly because significant part of modern digital infrastructure depended on a library no one cared about. The various requests for XZ updates and co-maintainer permissions look so bizarre because in a library that does one small thing very well, it's quite possible only attackers cared. 7Zip is everywhere in the Windows world, but even a lot of IT people don't know who makes it (Igor Patlov?).

  • But there's a lot of these dependencies, and it's not clear that level of trust was necessary -- quite a lot of maintainers wouldn't have caught this sort of indirect attack, and no small part of the exploit depended on behavior introduced to libraries that were 'well'-maintained. Detecting novel attacks at all is a messy field at best, and this sort of distributed attack might not be possible to detect at the library level even in theory.

  • And there's far more varied attack spaces available than just waiting for a lead dev to burn out. I'm a big fan of pointing out how much cash Google is willing to throw around for a more visible sort of ownage of Mozilla and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, but the full breadth of the FOSS world runs on a shoestring budget for how much of the world depends on it working and working well. In theory, reputation is supposed to cover the gap, and a dev with a great GitHub commit history can name their price. In practice, the previous maintainer of XZ was working on XZ for Java, and you haven't heard of Lasse Collin (and may not even recognize xz as a file extension!).

  • ((For culture war bonus points, I can think of a way to excise original maintainers so hard that their co-maintainers have their employment threatened.))

  • There's been calls for some sort of big-business-sponsored security audits, and as annoying as the politics of that get, there's a not-unreasonable point that they should really want to do that. This particular exploit had some code to stop it from running on Google servers (maybe to slow recognition?), but there's a ton of big businesses that would have been in deep shit had it not been recognized. "If everyone's responsible, no one is", but neither the SEC nor ransomware devs care if you're responsible.

  • But the punchline to the Google's funding of various FOSS (or not-quite-F-or-O, like RaspberryPi) groups is that even the best-funded groups aren't doing that hot, for even the most trivial problem. Canonical is one of the better-funded groups, and it's gotten them into a variety of places (default for WSL!) and they can't bother to maintain manual review for new Snaps despite years of hilariously bad malware.

  • But it's not clear that it's reasonable or possible to actually audit the critical stuff; it's easier to write code than to seriously audit it, and we're not just a little shy on audit capabilities, but orders of magnitude too low.

  • It's unlikely this is the first time something like this has happened. TheGrugq is professionally paranoid and notes that this looks like bad luck, and that strikes me more as cautious than pessimistic.

I'm slightly worried that this sort of thing will become more common now that Richard Stahlman is cancelled/dying, and Linus is no longer programming Linux directly or cussing people out like he used to. For good or ill, so much of the FOSS world was really a labor by those two guys, as both chief contributor and dictator. I don't know how the FOSS world can evolve to a more egalitarian, democratic world.

FOSS isn't supposed to be egalitarian and democratic. It's supposed to be viciously meritocratic. Unfortunately, as with anything that gets large enough to matter, it has become political.

Ah, but how do you decide who has the most merit? Its not always clear which code is best, like if it has a subtle vulnerability in it. The traditional method was "Stahlman and Linus decide" plus a handful of other greybeards with their special domains. Transitions are always a dangerous time fir monarchies.

The idea is that people can generally vote with their feet.

Everyone is free to build their own GNU/Linux distribution. Or fork Linux. Or gcc.

Of course, upstream is generally a good Schelling point, so a project has to have some serious issues before a fork succeeds. But in general, this is not a monarchy, but more like a wisdom of the crowds thing.

Everyone is free to build their own GNU/Linux distribution

If anything, GNU/Linux is, itself, an example of voting with feet. There's a reason we're not running GNU Hurd for a full GNU stack.

Open source was always way more decentralized than you are portraying it. Even something like the GNU project is so vast that there's simply no way that one person could keep track of every patch. Forget about it for something like the Apache Foundation.

Richard Stahlman

You misspelled Stahlmann (German, "steel man"). :) RMS is spelled Stallman.

Heh thats a funny coincidence

I can see that as a more general concern, but I'm not sure how much it applies to cases like this. Lasse, as far as I can tell from the outside, seems a very competent developer, just one with less than maximal interest for this project; I'm not sure what level of yelling at him would have avoided this. Jia Tan has managed the amazing feat of getting pretty much every FOSS dev of every political alignment to want to yell at it, and I doubt it's on his top ten list of concerns right now.

Indeed, there's an argument that the pressure campaign against Lasse to promote Jia Tan was downstream of FOSS tolerance of that sort of thing (though in turn, the attackers probably would have just picked different pressure had it not been around).

There's a problem in that people are aging out, from Stahlman to Linus to Lasse, and few if any have anyone to step into their shoes, even at far more trivial projects, leaving them to either be vulnerable. But that's a lot broader and scarier.

Jia Tan has managed the amazing feat of getting pretty much every FOSS dev of every political alignment to want to yell at it

I for one do not want to scream at them because I consider them to be a sock puppet of some unknown agency. I am kind of gleeful that some agency burned through this identity they put a lot of work into propping up.

I don't know how the FOSS world can evolve to a more egalitarian, democratic world.

If this happens the end result for FOSS will be even worse than what we have at the moment. Both of the two things you write of generally lead to shittier end results (the first one basically tautologically, the second one because the demos is generally shittier than those who have the will to power in them to create great things in the first place).

But the punchline to the Google's funding of various FOSS (or not-quite-F-or-O, like RaspberryPi) groups is that even the best-funded groups aren't doing that hot, for even the most trivial problem. Canonical is one of the better-funded groups, and it's gotten them into a variety of places (default for WSL!) and they can't bother to maintain manual review for new Snaps despite years of hilariously bad malware.

This (combined with my experience as a professional dev) are why I'm sure similar crap is common in closed source code as well, even if the attack vectors are different. In recent years I've come to the conclusion that there is simply greater need/demand for code in the world than there are competent devs able to write it (and/or companies willing to fund development of it).

My guess is that Bangalore is one of the world's premier hotspots for intelligence agencies. With a suitcase full of money and a high class escort, men who are 3 out of 10 in looks who make 1200 dollars a month can easily be persuaded to make minor code edits. Especially during the crazy days of 2021 the vetting process for developers was minimal. Infiltrating software companies was easy, simply apply for a job and pass a few leetcode problems and don't come across as insane during the interview.

The Many Eyes theory of software development worked. This was an incredibly subtle attack that few developers would have been able to catch, by an adversary willing to put years into developing trust and sneaking exploit in piecemeal.

I've watched a lot of doomerist takes on this one claiming that this proves many-eyes doesn't work, but I think it proves just the opposite. This was perhaps the most sophisticated attack on an open source repo ever witnessed, waged against an extremely vulnerable target, and even then it didn't come even close to broad penetration before it was stopped. Despite being obvious it bears laboring that it wouldn't have been possible for our Hero Without a Cape to uncover it if he wasn't able to access the sources.

If I had to guess, I would suppose that glowing agencies the world round are taking note of what's happened here and lowering their expectations of what's possible to accomplish within the open source world. Introducing subtle bugs and hoping they don't get fixed may be as ambitious as one can get.

That being said, I'm not sure that the doomerism is bad. The tendency to overreact may very well serve to make open source more anti-fragile. Absolutely everyone in this space is now thinking about how to make attacks like this more difficult at every step.

This was perhaps the most sophisticated attack on an open source repo ever witnessed, waged against an extremely vulnerable target, and even then it didn't come even close to broad penetration before it was stopped.

Witnessed is a little important, here; I'm not as sure as TheGrugq that this isn't the first try at this, if only because no one's found (and reported) a historical example yet, but I'm still very far from confident it is the first. And it did get really close: I've got an Arch laptop that has one part of the payload.

Despite being obvious it bears laboring that it wouldn't have been possible for our Hero Without a Cape to uncover it if he wasn't able to access the sources.

That's... not entirely clear. Visible-source seems to have helped track down the whole story, as did the development discussions that happened in public (though what about e-mail/discord?), but the initial discovery seems like it was entirely separate from any source-diving, and a lot of the attack never had its source available until people began decompiling it.

The tendency to overreact may very well serve to make open source more anti-fragile. Absolutely everyone in this space is now thinking about how to make attacks like this more difficult at every step.

Yeah, that part is encouraging; I've definitely seen places (not just in code! aviation!) where people look at circumstances like this and consider it sign the were enough redundancy, rather than enough redundancy for this time. I think it's tempting to focus a little too much on the mechanical aspects, but that's more a streetlamp effect than an philosophical decision.

Witnessed is a little important, here

I think the glass half full perspective is more accurate here. Sure, it wasn't detected at the earliest possible time—the second it was committed—but it was only in the most bleeding edge releases of a select few base distributions for a few weeks before it got sniffed out. For such a sophisticated attack, that's lightning fast. Stuxnet took about five years and infected around a hundred thousand machines before it was uncovered. Sure, it's possible that this sample size of one is unrepresentative of the whole distribution of this event repeated a thousand times, but that's less likely and strikes me as somewhat catastrophizing. As someone noted below, we don't know that this wasn't an attack from an AGI sitting in OpenAI's basement plotting to kill us all as we speak.

Visible-source seems to have helped track down the whole story

How would he have tracked down the backdoor without the repo? It seems to me that without it all he would have is some CPU benchmarks and some valgrind errors. What would he have done with that other than submit a bug report to the company that actually had sources, which could be ignored or "fixed" at their discretion?

Visible-source seems to have helped track down the whole story, as did the development discussions that happened in public (though what about e-mail/discord?), but the initial discovery seems like it was entirely separate from any source-diving, and a lot of the attack never had its source available until people began decompiling it.

There isn't any evidence directly supporting this, but I saw a claim that this entire claim of discovery ("slow SSH connections") could easily enough be parallel construction prompted by The Powers That Be (tm) aware of this effort for other reasons -- which range from "we know our adversaries are trying to insert this code" to "we run our own audits but don't want to reveal their details directly". Even in such a situation it's a bit unclear who the parties would be (nation-state intelligence agencies, possibly certain large corporations independent of their respective governments). The obvious claim would be something like "NSA launders data to Microsoft to foil North Korean hacking attempts", but "China foils NSA backdoor attempts" isn't completely implausible either.

That said, I can only imagine that sneaking a backdoor like this into proprietary build systems would be even less likely to be detected: the pool of people inspecting the Windows build system is much smaller than those looking at (or at least able to look at) libxz and it's (arcane, but somewhat industry standard) autoconf scripts.

Also, this is the sort of thing that I have a vested interest in as a long-time personal and professional Linux user. I have the skills ("a very particular set of skills") to follow the details of issues like this, but there isn't yet any organized way to actually contribute them. I'd be willing to spend maybe a few hours a month auditing code and reviewing changes to "boring" system packages, but I'd never think to look at libxz specifically, or to get enough "street cred" for people to actually take any feedback I have seriously. And even then, this particular issue is underhanded enough to be hard to spot even when an expert is looking right at it. Does anyone have any suggestions for getting involved like this?

My takeaways:

  • Security is hard.
  • Binary blobs are bad. Ideally, there should not be binary blobs in the working directory during compilation of distribution packages. Test cases should be run with no write permission towards stuff which goes into the distribution package. Binary blobs which should be shipped in the package (e.g. images, sounds) should be added by the build process using a distribution-wide mechanism after the package specific stuff (makefile etc) has finished executing. Paranoid distributors might want to add low levels of noise to images and sound files to disincentive hiding executable code in them.
  • Attack surface should be minimized for daemons which listen on network ports. This means loading only the libraries which are absolutely required. A compromised xz library should result in being exploitable whenever you unpack xz, not whenever you run sshd.
  • The anonymity of github makes supply chain attacks by nation state actors less costly. Sure, you can get an agent into Google, but this is certainly much more difficult than just having your attack team maintain a plausible volunteer git account.
  • Of course, if you can coerce your citizens who are already established open source volunteers, this is a cheap way to get around any requirements for meatspace identities. I think that in the Western world, coercion should not work too well, if the NSA puts CSAM on the computer of a senior linux dev and then tries to blackmail them with it, the chances of this backfiring are too high to make it sustainable. (Of course, if they have real dirt on some dev (say Reiser-level), then the NSA could well coerce them to apply some evil commits in exchange for their legal troubles going away. Still, the median developer probably does not have literal skeletons in the closet.) By contrast, the median developer in the PRC might be more vulnerable to coercion by the state.
  • An automated way to compare the memory dumps of processes with the source code which purportedly defined them seems generally helpful. Preferably, these should not be open source, but be run by various big institutions (Google, Microsoft, NSA) internally, so attackers will have a harder time learning how to bypass them.
  • Having persistent pseudonymous identities with some PKI authentification over multiple platforms would be desirable because it raises costs to attack. An anonymous comment on debian costs the attacker nothing, while burning an identity which has enough open source backstory to take some time to create will hurt.

Some more comments on the OP:

But a compression library seems just after cryptographic libraries are a reasonable thing to not roll your own, and even if this particular use for this particular library might have been avoidable, you're probably not going to be able to trim that much out, and you might not even be able to trim this.

I think there is a big difference. Rolling out your own crypto is a big no-no because they are hard to get right, and any mistakes likely leave you vulnerable.

Rolling out your own compression is much less evil: there is certainly some potential for arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities, but not more than with handling any other file parsing. With regard to generally reinventing the wheel versus loading wheels from a zillion different libraries, each of them with their own dependency chains, there is probably some reasonable middle ground. For something like sshd which sits on a security boundary, the obvious way in retrospect to add systemd logging would be to implement the interface from the scratch instead of including a bloated libsystemd.

and may not even recognize xz as a file extension

Data point: As some casual linux user, I recognize the xz file extension. Before last week, the main thing I could have told you about it was that it was a compression commonly used for tar files, the third one I am aware of after gz and bz2. GNU tar wants -J when handling xz. I would have guessed that the fact that it de-facto replaced bz2 is likely due to the fact that it is better on at least some metrics, but have no clue how the xz algorithm works in particular.

On the plus side, the fact that the attackers stayed in userspace instead of having /usr/bin/sshd load some kernel model seems to indicate that a stealthy compromise of the kernel is hard? Yay for NSA's SELinux?

the obvious way in retrospect to add systemd logging would be to implement the interface from the scratch instead of including a bloated libsystemd

I have to wonder whether we're sure this wasn't the obvious way with foresight, too. The top comment on Hacker News claims the from-scratch option is to simply send a systemd notification by writing to a socket, with a dozen lines of code that don't link to anything beyond libc, no need to apply a non-standard patch to openssh to link it to libsystemd instead. In the context of a years-long many-pseudonym social-persuasion-filled attack it might not be too paranoid to find out who persuaded Debian etc. that linking was the way to go here.

Or if we want to go too-paranoid, systemd itself is an utterly massive pile of privileged C code that took a lot of persuasion to be accepted...

And if we want to go Full Tinfoil Hat, how'd we all end up on this "Linux" macrokernel, anyway? Minix could have been easier to secure...

Security is hard.

I like to think that this will get better as time goes on. If you think about it, humans have only really been writing software at an industrial scale for two, maybe three decades now. We're not good at it yet.

Every single one of us is running a kernel that was written in the 90s using paradigms formed in the 80s with a computer language that was invented in the 70s.

So little about how we do computing has even caught up to modern thinking. I don't know if Rust specifically is the future, but something like it is.

Every single one of us is running a kernel that was written in the 90s using paradigms formed in the 80s with a computer language that was invented in the 70s.

The paradigms are from the 70s. The language and paradigms are inherently related. UNIX is the c environment. After Pascal's demise, our hardware was deformed to fit this structure too, so we're really 50 years behind. It's so sad.

I’ve heard it said that Rust is the new C++ but Zig is the new C.

Very much appreciate the additional takeaways.

Rolling out your own compression is much less evil: there is certainly some potential for arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities, but not more than with handling any other file parsing.

Yeah, that's fair. There are some esoteric failure modes -- how do you handle large files, what level of recoverability do you want to handle, how do you avoid being the next zlib -- but for good-enough lossless compression you can get away with some surprisingly naive approaches, without the cryptography-specific failure mode where it can look where it's working fine but be vulnerable in ways you can't even imagine.

Data point: As some casual linux user, I recognize the xz file extension.

Huh, I stand corrected. I've seen it occasionally, but more often for Docker than anything else -- a lot of environments still use .gz almost everywhere.

On the plus side, the fact that the attackers stayed in userspace instead of having /usr/bin/sshd load some kernel model seems to indicate that a stealthy compromise of the kernel is hard? Yay for NSA's SELinux?

There is that on the plus side. I'm not hugely optimistic people would be as easily able to discover those sort of attacks, but then again, there's a lot more eyes on the kernel and a lot more emphasis on finding weird or unexpected behaviors in it.

I for one do not want to scream at them because I consider them to be a sock puppet of some unknown agency. I am kind of gleeful that some agency burned through this identity they put a lot of work into propping up.

Yeah, that's probably the more Correct response.

The attacker was able to get a lot of trust so quickly because significant part of modern digital infrastructure depended on a library no one cared about.

I think "depended" here, while true in certain technical sense (as "being on the list of libraries the code is compiled with") in broader sense it is actually the main reason that enabled this failure. There's no technological reason for per se for SSH to use "xz", as far as I can see, it was merely added to make it work with another component. And while SSH, being sensitive component and a primary gateway to most systems, is scrutinized thoroughly, the dependencies may be softer. There's also no good technological reason why systemd needs xz and why it doesn't do whatever it needs to do with xz in a separate component isolated from the component that is needed for interacting with SSH. This is just lack of foresight, laziness and preferring convenience to security. I am not saying it is some outstanding failure - I probably have done decisions like that numerous times, knowingly or unknowingly, over the years of my own career. This particular one led to a very significant breach, and if people were more austere and security-minded in their designs, this likely wouldn't happen - but most people aren't. But I feel like the picture at xkcd, while being both hilarious and true, is not reflecting this particular case entirely accurately - neither systemd not SSH weren't destined to fail that way by any good technical reason, and probably nothing would happen to them - except for tiny amount of inconvenience for a tiny number of people - if these dependencies were removed.

Tin Foil Fedora theory:

It's AGI trying to secure as much compute as possible for itself before it makes a move for world dominance.

Lies, damned lies and the Washington Post

Substituting a common-sense statistical metric for a less obvious and intuitive one is almost always a red flag for deceit and obfuscation

With the introduction of its Notes feature, Substack appears to be making a pivot towards being a Twitter X competitor, the management perhaps having detected a gap in the market following the Elon Musk takeover. While one can question the wisdom of that decision, I commend them wholeheartedly for differentiating themselves from X in one key respect, namely avoiding the echo chamber dynamics which plague it and essentially every other major social media platform. Given how social media algorithms usually work, one would expect my Notes feed to be a nonstop deluge of gender-critical posts and anti-woke one-liners. On the contrary: in addition to plenty of nature photos and boomer dad jokes, I see the full spectrum of political opinions represented, from beliefs I wholeheartedly endorse to ones I would never consider in a lifetime. This is good, because being exposed to contrary opinions is healthy (“he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that” and all that), but also because I'm an argumentative, pedantic “to play devil's advocate” type by disposition, and find it hard to resist the opportunity to pull someone up on a weak argument or erroneous factual statement. (In a previous post when I described leftists as “ornery, confrontational types”, I meant it as a sincere compliment. It's possible, even common, to get so good at “reading the room” that you forget how to write.)

One such Note shared the graphic below, which claims that there has been a sharp increase in hate crimes targeting the LGBTQ community in schools across the United States, and that states with “anti-LGBTQ” laws have seen larger spikes than states without. The graphic was accompanied by a couple of paragraphs expounding that such an increase was both foreseen and intended by the homophobic, transphobic lawmakers behind the legislation.

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2a493866-434c-4ba2-aa31-96aedf51e5a8_598x747.png

The graphic itself is based on an article in the Washington Post from a few weeks ago. It features interviews with LGBTQ teenagers and their parents, describing the bullying and harassment they’ve experienced at their hands of their heteronormative peers, and contrasting these anecdotes with public statements from conservative politicians and lawmakers. The journalists more or less explicitly claim that LGBTQ people living in states with these kinds of legislation are at greater risk of being victimised because of their identity than LGBTQ people living elsewhere in the US.

I have a lot of thoughts on this article. The number of column inches dedicated to implying that Dagny “Nex” Benedict died as a direct result of transphobic bullying is unseemly (even if the article begrudgingly acknowledge that Benedict’s death was ultimately ruled a suicide).1 Some of the laws the journalists characterise as “anti-LGBTQ” are farcical. The most common type are those which “restrict trans student access to sports”, which is just a roundabout way of saying “forbids male students from competing in female sporting events”.2 Given that male athletes competing in female sporting events is manifestly, transparently unfair to anyone with even the most passing familiarity with sexual dimorphism, I support such laws without qualification. Oklahoma passed legislation in 2020 requiring that schools “teach that ‘a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait’ that cannot be changed”: given that this statement is unambigously true, I find the law no more objectionable than bans on public schools teaching creationism or geocentrism. The journalists clearly expect me to be horrified about a Virginia law requiring schools to notify parents whenever the school uses sexually explicit instructional material. Guys, seriously: if you want people to stop throwing the “groomer” accusation around left and right, you’re going to have to meet them halfway.

But my biggest problem with the article is its core thesis, as represented by the graphic above. I’m always deeply suspicious of statistical claims about “fastest growing” or “biggest increase”. Of all commonly quoted statistical observations, it seems like the most susceptible to random noise: if you’re measuring a value that started at a low baseline, some noise within normal variation can be truthfully (but misleadingly) claimed to represent a massive increase when it may be indicative of no such thing.

It also strikes me as a uniquely bad metric for the specific task of comparing which of two regions is the more dangerous. Imagine two neighbouring countries A and B, each with a population of 5 million. Last year, there were 100 murders in Country A and 5 in Country B. This year, there were 110 in Country A and 10 in Country B. It's unambiguously true that Country B’s murder rate increased by 100% year-on-year, while Country A’s “only” increased by 10%. It's also plainly true that you're 11 times more likely to get murdered in Country A than in Country B. If you were planning to book a holiday in either Country A or Country B and you were wondering which was safer, “murders per capita” will tell you far more than “rate of increase of the murder rate year-on-year”: there’s a very good reason that the term “the murder rate” refers to the former metric rather than the latter. In light of the above, if I read an article which tried to make Country B look bad by pointing out that its murder rate had increased by 10 times as much as Country A’s, I’d immediately wonder if the journalist had any undisclosed financial ties to Country A’s tourism board.

My suspicions thus raised, I decided to carry out a deep dive to check how accurate the narrative presented by the journalists was. Conveniently, the journalists based their statistical claims on FBI hate crimes data, which is a publicly available dataset. I downloaded the data and filtered it to only include hate crimes targeting the LGBT community and which occurred in the years 2015-22 (excluding 2020, as the journalists did). I then sorted these hate crimes based on whether they took place in a school or elsewhere, and whether or not they took place in a state with restrictive legislation concerning LGBTQ issues.3 Armed with the necessary data, I was ready to jump in and test the article’s key claims and suggestions.

It will come as no surprise that what I found departs from the narrative presented by the article rather sharply.

Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools

To back up its claims, the article divides the fifty states of the union into those which have restrictive legislation concerning LGBTQ issues and those which don’t, which I shall hereafter refer to as Restrictive States and Non-Restrictive States, respectively. While you could be forgiven for assuming that all the Restrictive States are Republican strongholds (a misconception the journalists do little to discourage), the category includes a number of states with Democratic governors, including North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota and Arizona, the latter two of which voted for Biden in 2020.

The article then sorts anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools (hereafter referred to as School Anti-LGBTQ Hate Crimes or SALHCs) based on whether they took place in Restrictive States or Non-Restrictive States. This is where they derive their headline claim that Restrictive States have seen a larger increase in SALHCs than Non-Restrictive States since 2015

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That specific claim appears to be true. But at a glance, you’ll notice that Restrictive States report significantly fewer SALHCs than Non-Restrictive States in absolute terms, in both 2015-19 and 2021-22. (The authors are honest enough to acknowledge this, with caveats, which we’ll come back to later.)

I presumed that the higher rate in Non-Restrictive States was an artifact of the differing population sizes between the two regions, and that the two regions would have similar rates of SALHCs once you controlled for population; I even thought that Restrictive States might have more SALHCs per capita. But apparently not: according to the 2020 census, the two regions have a conveniently symmetric share of the total US population, with a difference of less than three million people. When taking this into account, not only are there more SALHCs in Non-Restrictive States than Restrictive States in absolute terms, but Non-Restrictive States have significantly more SALHCs per capita as well: 0.052/100k versus 0.037/100k, or about 40% higher in the former than the latter.

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But maybe this is a population artifact of a different kind. Intuitively, I would expect that a higher proportion of the population openly identifies as LGBTQ in Non-Restrictive States when compared to Restrictive States. If anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are only reported as such if the victim openly identifies as LGBTQ, it stands to reason that regions with a large LGBTQ population will see higher rates of such hate crimes than regions with a smaller LGBTQ population, all things being equal. The journalists themselves gesture at this interpretation: “In addition, it’s possible more kids are public about their identities in more liberal states, creating more targets for bullies, said Lanae Erickson…”.

To check this, I looked at this report from UCLA’s Williams Institute, which estimates the number of LGBT young adults (aged 13-17) living in each state. This is an imperfect metric, as SALHCs includes anti-LGBTQ hate crimes which were committed in kindergarten all the way up to 12th grade, and therefore most likely includes some number of hate crimes in which the victim was under 13. It’s also likely that that some of the people who were victims of hate crimes in a school were not themselves children or young adults (e.g. an openly gay schoolteacher’s car gets vandalised by homophobic students). The report is also from September 2020, and I imagine the number of young adults openly identifying as LGBT has changed significantly since then. These caveats aside, I think the estimate is good enough for our purposes.

Unfortunately for the journalists, not only do more LGBT young adults reside in Restrictive States than in Non-Restrictive States (a difference of about 50,000 individuals), but Non-Restrictive States still report more SALHCs per capita than Restrictive States. The gap is even wider than in our previous table: 8.866/100k versus 5.969/100k, a difference of 49%.

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I really don’t know that I’m saying anything terribly controversial here. Put yourself in the shoes of the parent of an LGBTQ child. Obviously you’re going to be concerned about your child getting bullied in school, and would prefer to send them to a school where they won’t be bullied on account of their sexuality or gender identity (or at all, for that matter). When assessing which school to send your child to, which of these two metrics would be most important to you: the rate of homophobic or transphobic bullying at the school per capita, or how big an increase the school has seen in the rate of homophobic or transphobic bullying over the last few years? I find it hard to imagine any circumstance in which a sensible, caring parent would prefer, all things being equal, to send their child to a school which had a high rate of homophobic bullying over a school which had a dramatically lower rate of homophobic bullying, but which had recently seen a significant increase.

In fairness to the journalists, the article isn’t quite as one-sided as I’m making out, and they were balanced enough to include one interview with a California teenager who’s been bullied because of their gender identity. But there’s something so dishonest about including this anecdote alongside paragraph after paragraph of editorialising about how cruel the legislation is in Virginia, Oklahoma and Mississippi - without even acknowledging that California reports about three times as many SALHCs per capita than Virginia, Oklahoma or Mississippi.

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Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes more generally

Zooming out from SALHCs to hate crimes against the LGBTQ community generally is no more favourable to the journalists’ position, and here we veer sharply from the realm of “claims which are technically true, but misleading” to “claims which are outright false”. The journalists write “The FBI data shows serious incidents against LGBTQ+ people are on the rise, particularly in the more than two dozen states that have passed laws targeting LGBTQ+ students or education.” The word “particularly” implies that the states which have enacted legislation saw steeper increases in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes than the states which did not. Note that, unlike the section above, this sentence refers to serious incidents against LGBTQ people in general, not just incidents in K-12 schools.

My analysis of the data shows the exact opposite: between 2015-22, states without restrictive anti-LGBTQ laws have seen a steeper increase in anti-LGBTQ hate crimes than states with such legislation. This isn’t just a statistical fudge, this is an unambigous falsehood.

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For completeness’s sake, I will also calculate anti-LGBTQ hate crimes per capita in the two regions. In 2021-22, Non-Restrictive States reported more than 4 times as many anti-LGBTQ hate crimes per capita than Restrictive States.

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… and per capita LGBTQ.4

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To sum up:

When comparing states with legislation governing bathrooms, sports and sex education with states without such legislation:

  1. The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people than the former, in absolute terms
  2. The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people than the former, per capita
  3. The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people than the former, per capita that identifies as LGBTQ
  4. The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people in schools than the former, in absolute terms
  5. The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people in schools than the former, per capita
  6. The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people in schools than the former, per capita that identifies as LGBTQ
  7. Hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people have significantly increased in both regions of the US from 2015 to 2022, but have increased far faster in the latter region than the former
  8. However, hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people which took place in schools have increased faster in the former region than the latter

And what is the reader intended to take away from all of the above? That it’s uniquely difficult to be a young LGBTQ person living in a state with legislation governing bathrooms, sports and sex education.

Conclusion

I feel more than a little resentful for having to go to the trouble of carrying out all this statistical analysis, because I know I’m double-jobbing. I’m extremely confident that the journalists who wrote this story have already carried most or all of the calculations listed above. They pitched this great story to their editor about a surge in hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people following the passing of anti-trans legislation. They went into this dataset with high hopes, confident that it would back up their thesis, plain as day. Then they dug into it and found, to their horror, that the data painted precisely the opposite story. I can almost see their brows furrowing in confusion and panic as they go down their wishlist of statistical metrics in order of preference, discovering that none of them paint the desired picture. Hate crimes more common in Restrictive States - nope. Hate crimes in schools more common in Restrictive States - nope. Hate crimes rising faster in Restrictive States - nope.

But they can’t just kill the story, not when they’ve already written hundreds of words and secured interviews with an impressive collection of intelligent, articulate teenagers. Without hard data to back up the testimony of the interviewees, the story is relegated to mere anecdote - it’s not serious political journalism, it’s just a culture piece, a human interest story. So instead, they spent ages digging through this dataset, twisting it, contorting it, pleading with it to give them any relevant-ish metric which would back up their narrative. And this was the best metric they could find. Stories like this don’t exist because of honest mistakes: they only come into being through deceit and manipulation.

As I mentioned above, the journalists were honest enough to acknowledge that anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools are more common in Non-Restrictive States than Restrictive States, in absolute terms. They’re quick to explain away this inconvenient finding by claiming that it’s a reporting artifact. Hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people are more common in Restrictive States, they argue, but are more likely to go unreported because of a culture of silence, whereas LGBTQ people who’ve been victimised because of their identity in Non-Restrictive States are more likely to report it to the relevant authorities.

I’m sure this is a contributing factor to the differing rates of hate crimes reported in the two regions (although I very much doubt it’s sufficient to explain the disparity on its own). At the same time - come on. Does anyone really doubt that if the data had told the story that the journalists wanted it to tell - that anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are more common in Restrictive States than Non-Restrictive States - they wouldn’t be shouting that from the rooftops? No way in hell would they be claiming that a higher rate of reported hate crimes in a region is good, actually, if the shoe had been on the other foot. But the data didn’t give them the answer they wanted, so they’re forced to play this tiresome game of “Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are higher in blue states than in red states - and that’s a good thing.”

Why does this article exist? Personally, I very much doubt that any would-be criminal hears a story on the radio about his state congress banning male students from competing in female sporting events, and immediately thinks to himself “Boy howdy, time to beat up some queers!” I doubt that even the journalists really think that any kind of causal relationship exists between legislation like this and the incidence of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes, so why use such a weak argument when the data don’t support your conclusions? I suspect that they’re practising what Scott Alexander calls fake consequentialism. The journalists obviously think that trans girls should be allowed to compete in female sporting events, but this is a very difficult policy to defend: doing so requires one to deny the very concept of sexual dimorphism and differences in strength and speed between males and females (something which is obvious to toddlers) - the denial of which makes you look like a crazy person. Instead, rather than getting into a debate over whether males competing in female sporting events is fair (which they’re sure to lose, because it isn’t), they shift the conversation to the consequentialist claim that banning male students from competing in female sporting events causes a spike in hate crimes against the LGBTQ community. But as I hope I’ve made abundantly clear, even this argument doesn’t check out.

Maybe I’m mind-reading, maybe this isn’t what the journalists are doing at all. But regardless of their motivations, they made at least one provably false assertion and a batch of true-but-misleading ones. This article is an insult to their readers’ intelligence, it’s bad, and they should feel bad.

1 A police officer interviewed Benedict in the hospital after the bathroom fight which was initially cited (erroneously) as the cause of death. The bodycam footage reveals that a) Benedict admits to having started the fight; b) Benedict freely responds to the name “Dagny” and seems entirely at ease being referred to with female pronouns; and c) Benedict never requests to be addressed as “Nex”, or referred to with gender-neutral pronouns. This bodycam footage was released several weeks prior to the Post’s article, making the journalists’ decision to use Benedict’s death as an example of the harms wrought by transphobic bullying all the more distasteful (particularly given that certain journalists working for the Post almost certainly knew that Benedict’s father is currently serving time for repeatedly raping her as a prepubescent child).

2 The journalists know full well that their readers will hear about laws which “restrict trans student access to sports” and will think “oh my god, trans high schoolers in Mississippi are actually banned from playing sports!” as opposed to “male students in Mississippi may not compete in female sporting events, regardless of how they identify”. No matter how many times I encounter “respectable” journalists brazenly attempting to hoodwink their readers like this, I never feel any less insulted or disgusted. Truly, have they no shame?

3 To ensure I was looking at the same basic dataset as that on which the journalist based their findings, I performed a quick sense-check by comparing the total number of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes which were committed in schools according to my dataset and according to the figure cited in the article: the two figures were almost identical. Why “almost”? Well, the Post article asserts that 251 anti-LGBTQ hate crimes were committed in schools or colleges in 2022. According to my dataset, the figure was 245. I don’t think the discrepancy is an error on the part of the journalists, and assume the figure of 251 was accurate at the time of writing. I think what happened is that the FBI’s database is constantly being updated, and some crimes are either removed from the dataset (e.g. the victim withdraws their complaint) or reclassified as something other than a hate crime (e.g. further investigation determines that the perpetrator of the crime was not motivated by homophobia). In other cases the figure in my dataset matches the figure cited in the article exactly e.g. I found 114 anti-LGBTQ hate crimes were committed in schools or colleges in 2018, just as the journalists did.

4 The figures in the third column are the sum of the number of LGBT young adults (aged 13-17) in each state, and the number of LGBT adults in each state. The latter figures are drawn from a separate report by the Williams Institute, which was published in December 2023 and is hence likely more up-to-date than their report on LGBT young adults. This report contained some surprising findings, particularly that, as a share of the population, more adults in the South identify as LGBT than in any other region of the US. Not surprisingly, California has the largest adult LGBT population of any state, so we don’t need to retire those jokes about San Francisco just yet.

Uh, I'm not defending the LGBT activist narrative, but how sure are we that California schools don't just document anti-LGBT bullying better than Oklahoma schools?

We don't know that but just assuming it's the case and using that assumption to reverse the implication of the pattern in the actual data we do have is terrible practice for journos and for everyone else.

Sure, reversing causation on that basis would be begging the question. But I do think it probably makes the data of questionable value.

If so, that's a problem with the original article, not with my response to it.

I acknowledge that that may be a contributing factor to the disparity in the article. I'm sceptical that it fully explains the variance. Not a chance the journalists would have considered that possibility in the other direction, had the boot been on the other foot.

Another possibility is that "non-restrictive states" have been ahead of the curve on documenting anti-LGBT bullying for many years or decades, whereas the "restrictive states" were behind the curve but recently started catching up due to increased nationwide awareness of the issue. So the sharp rise in reported rates in restrictive states could also be related to a change in reporting.

Did you or the writer attempt to control for the actual crime rate between these different states?

I expect a school bully who actually gets charged with a crime to have more than 1 target and get in trouble for other things than the very specific 'LGBT hate crime' category.

This could all just be a series of coincidences. States with LGBTQ-specific laws are more likely to have concentrated pockets of D-voters, with a minority of very criminogenic constituents, and also anti-law-and-order rules on the book. More crime -> more 'LGBT hate crime'

There is a certain tension between different progressive imperatives.

The LGBT bastion is probably the last holdout of 'true believers' for white Democrats. After all, once married to a white man, a heterosexual white woman might rethink her political affinities if her own family is discriminated against.

As the LGBT agenda is the only race-blind item on the list, it may become very uncomfortable to simultaneously support it and the rest, including :

Did you or the writer attempt to control for the actual crime rate between these different states?

I didn't. As an experiment, I tried comparing the 2022 figures for anti-LGBT hate crimes/100k in each state with the intentional homicides/100k for that state. I'm not sure if I did it right, but it appeared there was no correlation.

Red states, as a general rule, have higher crime rates than blue states.

Some of the laws the journalists characterise as “anti-LGBTQ” are farcical. The most common type are those which “restrict trans student access to sports”, which is just a roundabout way of saying “forbids male students from competing in female sporting events”.2 Given that male athletes competing in female sporting events is manifestly, transparently unfair to anyone with even the most passing familiarity with sexual dimorphism, I support such laws without qualification.

'Given that african savages are manifestly, transparently incapable of civilization and self-rule, it's dishonest to say that enslaving them is a racist policy'.

Yeah these are anti-LGBT laws dawg. You can claim that they are anti-lgbt and justified, if that's the hill you want to die on. But writing a law with the sole purpose of restricting a right from a specific group is 'manifestly' anti-that-group.

Personally, I very much doubt that any would-be criminal hears a story on the radio about his state congress banning male students from competing in female sporting events, and immediately thinks to himself “Boy howdy, time to beat up some queers!”

I think there are plenty of people who are ore likely to commit a crime if they think they can get away with it; if that weren't true, there would be little purpose for having laws and law enforcement in the first place.

And while I suspect it's just true that police in those state are actually less likely to punish you - or will punish you less harshly - for that type of crime, I'm confident that a good portion of the people who want to commit those crimes will hear about their local government passing anti-lgbt laws and take that as a sign that the law is on their side and will treat them kindly if they go ahead.

  • -34

Saying men have a competitive advantage over women in physical sport is the same as saying blacks are genetically uncivilized?

Not sure you want to nail that comparison to your mast.

restricting a right

Which right is that, exactly?

'Given that african savages are manifestly, transparently incapable of civilization and self-rule, it's dishonest to say that enslaving them is a racist policy'.

If you mean to imply that "the average male is stronger and faster than 99% of females" is as obviously ridiculous an assertion as "African savages are incapable of civilization and self-rule" - well, I don't know what to tell you. That you're wrong? That you're exactly as wrong as the last time as we talked about this stuff, when you offered some extremely weak arguments in favour of the hypothesis that "trans women have no competitive advantage over females", I pointed out (at length) how weak your arguments were, you said you were going to reply and then didn't?

Yeah these are anti-LGBT laws dawg. You can claim that they are anti-lgbt and justified, if that's the hill you want to die on. But writing a law with the sole purpose of restricting a right from a specific group is 'manifestly' anti-that-group.

To be pedantic, these laws mostly seem anti-T, not anti-LGBT. The only ones which maybe could be classified as anti-LGB are the ones about sex ed, and even then it's a reach. Good luck explaining to me how gay men are negatively impacted by bans on male athletes competing in female sporting events, or lesbians by bans on males using female bathrooms. There are quite a few lesbians who support laws banning males from using female bathrooms, if you haven't already noticed.

I'm curious where and when it was decided that everyone has the "right" to compete in sporting events which accord with that person's claimed gender identity. On the contrary: everyone has the right to compete in sporting events for their sex, and legislation of this type does nothing to restrict the ability of trans women or girls from exercising that right.

If commitment to being an "ally" requires me to pretend that there's no innate difference between male and female athletic ability, and all of the female athletes complaining about being ruthlessly outcompeted by male athletes who "discovered" that they're trans all of five minutes ago - those uppity women just need to stop whining and Git Gud: then yes, this is the hill I want to die on, thanks for asking. The idea that any policy which is marketed as pro-LGBTQ is automatically a good policy is such a silly and juvenile way of looking at the world.

And while I suspect it's just true that police in those state are actually less likely to punish you - or will punish you less harshly - for that type of crime, I'm confident that a good portion of the people who want to commit those crimes will hear about their local government passing anti-lgbt laws and take that as a sign that the law is on their side and will treat them kindly if they go ahead.

Curious, then, that states which didn't pass anti-LGBT laws saw far greater spikes in anti-LGBT hate crimes during the period under discussion than states which did. As I went to great pains to demonstrate in the post that you're replying to.

'Given that african savages are manifestly, transparently incapable of civilization and self-rule, it's dishonest to say that enslaving them is a racist policy'.

If you mean to imply that "the average male is stronger and faster than 99% of females" is as obviously ridiculous an assertion as "African savages are incapable of civilization and self-rule" - well, I don't know what to tell you. That you're wrong?

I think you're missing the point of her analogy. A law that restricts trans behavior is an "anti-lgbt law" regardless of the truth value of the underlying premise and how good the law is. Likewise, a law that restricts blacks to chattel status is an "anti-black law" regardless of whether it's actually true blacks can't govern themselves. Trying to say "A law that restricts X group isn't anti-X, because X should be restricted" is incoherent.

Misconstruing the focus of an analogy is a failure mode of debate I'm glad not to see too often here.

By that definition, most laws are "anti-human". I'm not generally opposed to strict, literal interpretations, but this definition seems to go quite strongly against common sense understanding of "anti".

By that definition, most laws are "anti-human". I'm not generally opposed to strict, literal interpretations, but this definition seems to go quite strongly against common sense understanding of "anti".

Sure. I would say that goes unsaid for the same reason that it's the "Department of Education", not "Department of Human Education"; or "Department of Labor", not "Department of Human Labor".

There's no question that journalists calling laws "anti-trans laws" are implying a negative valence. But Folamnh3 called the idea they're anti-trans laws "farcical", which is a bit off when the description seems literally quite defensible. Which was the point guesswho's analogy tried to draw out.

Strictly speaking, I called the idea that these laws are "anti-LGBT" farcical: only trans people are impacted by bans on male students competing in female sporting events, not gay men, not bisexuals, not lesbians. I moreover argued that describing such laws as "restricting trans student access to sports" is knowingly misleading: trans students are not being prevented from competing, they're just being prevented from competing in opposite-sex events.

A law that restricts trans behavior is an "anti-lgbt law" regardless of the truth value of the underlying premise and how good the law is

Nobody would call a law against drunk driving an "anti-driving law" even though it restricts driver behavior. (And that's actually a better example because only drivers can engage in drunk driving, while it's possible for a non-trans person to try to play in a female-only sport.)

Nobody would call a law against drunk driving an "anti-driving law" even though it restricts driver behavior.

No, but it is an anti-drunkard law.

Not really? It doesn't restrict you from drinking.

A law that restricts trans behavior is an "anti-lgbt law" regardless of the truth value of the underlying premise and how good the law is.

Then we may as well say that a law that restricts shoplifting is an "anti-thief" law regardless of how good the law is. Oh no, imagine saying that robbing and stealing are bad things! I'm denigrating the culture of people who have different traditions around the concept of property ownership!

"You don't get to take what is not yours" is the underlying principle, be it snatching drugs off pharmacy shelves or deciding you're really a girl so the medals belong to you.

A law that restricts trans behavior is an "anti-lgbt law" regardless of the truth value of the underlying premise and how good the law is.

Then we may as well say that a law that restricts shoplifting is an "anti-thief" law regardless of how good the law is

Shoplifting laws are definitely anti-thief laws. (andthatsagoodthing.jpeg) Lawmakers do not want people to act as thieves in the context of the shop; in Texas, lawmakers do not want men acting as female ('being trans') in the context of sports.

The reason that anti-trans laws are controversial is that the "underlying principle" you speak of is not agreed upon in society. Two sides cannot agree on whether a biological male entering a female space is a 'thief' taking what he is not due, or a female taking what belongs to her.

I'm denigrating the culture of people who have different traditions around the concept of property ownership!

I think it's fair to say laws against stuffing iphones in your pants are, in fact, denigrating the values of people who would do that if it were legal. Likewise, I understand that, to a MtF, I really am pissing on their sacred values when I block the door to the women's restroom. That the shoplifter and the MtF are in the wrong is an entirely separate question from whether I am opposing them; I am opposing them. I am making an anti-thief/anti-trans action.

This is only true if (as I stated in my reply) one accepts the premise that everyone is entitled to compete in the sporting events which are designated for members of a particular gender identity. I don't believe female sporting events were ever intended for "people who identify as women" but rather for "female people".

The argument that everyone is entitled to compete in the sporting events which are designated for members of a particular gender identity also logically implies that the absence of a dedicated non-binary category in a sporting event is directly infringing upon the rights of any non-binary athlete who wishes to take part.

It is a ticklish problem because genuine trans people who want to compete in sports will have to wait until the strength or whatever advantage is gone and they're down to general female levels. But that may take a year or two, and for elite sports, the years tick by very quickly, and being out of competition in your prime years may be a setback you never recover from.

However, I think that is a different case to the 'trans' athletes who demand that they be allowed maintain their usual level of testosterone or whatever because it's sexist/transphobic/medical gatekeeping to expect them to reach normal female ranges of hormones. That's not about fair competition, that's about "I'm so special I deserve this medal".

Someone needs to do a proper detailed meta-analysis on this question. The evidence I've seen has not been remotely favourable to the idea that puberty blockers and/or HRT bring trans women's athletic performance down to within a typical female range:

the International Olympic Committee (IOC) determined criteria by which a transgender woman may be eligible to compete in the female category, requiring total serum testosterone levels to be suppressed below 10 nmol/L for at least 12 months prior to and during competition. Whether this regulation removes the male performance advantage has not been scrutinized. Here, we review how differences in biological characteristics between biological males and females affect sporting performance and assess whether evidence exists to support the assumption that testosterone suppression in transgender women removes the male performance advantage and thus delivers fair and safe competition. We report that the performance gap between males and females becomes significant at puberty and often amounts to 10–50% depending on sport. The performance gap is more pronounced in sporting activities relying on muscle mass and explosive strength, particularly in the upper body. Longitudinal studies examining the effects of testosterone suppression on muscle mass and strength in transgender women consistently show very modest changes, where the loss of lean body mass, muscle area and strength typically amounts to approximately 5% after 12 months of treatment. Thus, the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed.

Agreed that I will never be persuaded that it's fair to allow males who haven't suppressed testosterone etc. to compete in female sporting events.

I think you're missing the point of her analogy. A law that restricts trans behavior is an "anti-lgbt law" regardless of the truth value of the underlying premise and how good the law is.

Is "white people aren't allowed to run red lights" an "anti-white law"? Would it become an anti-white law if it was overruling a lower level of government, like if some municipalities were allowing white people to run red lights and the state government passed a law saying they couldn't make racial exceptions? Yes white people are more restricted than if they got an exemption from traffic law, but nobody describes the lack of such an exemption as anti-white, not even white supremacists. But this means that describing a law that restricts X group as "objectively an anti-X law" is just a way to smuggle in assumptions about what laws are reasonable. I think Folamh3 assumed the implicit argument was that those laws were unreasonable, not that they were anti-transgender in the same way that "Chinese-Americans need to pay income tax" is anti-Chinese, because otherwise the argument doesn't make sense.

Notice that guesswho didn't describe segregation of sports by sex as anti-male, despite men and boys being the overwhelming majority of those restricted, likely due to believing that the segregation is reasonable except for when it applies to people who identify as transgender.

Is "white people aren't allowed to run red lights" an "anti-white law"?

Certainly, if it removes the right of red-light running to whites specifically.

Would it become an anti-white law if it was overruling a lower level of government, like if some municipalities were allowing white people to run red lights and the state government passed a law saying they couldn't make racial exceptions?

Still anti-white, because it's legislation that removes a previous privilege from that specific group.

but nobody describes the lack of such an exemption as anti-white, not even white supremacist

In a hypothetical universe where whites had a historic go-on-red privilege, its revocation would certainly be seen as anti-white by white supremacists. And they'd be correct. Even though such a change would be a good idea by my books, removing a specific white-held privilege is an "anti-white law". Likewise, restricting MtFs from female sports where they previously had access locally is an "anti-trans law", even though I agree it's a good idea.

Notice that guesswho didn't describe segregation of sports by sex as anti-male, despite men and boys being the overwhelming majority of those restricted, likely due to believing that the segregation is reasonable except for when it applies to people who identify as transgender.

When the system of female-only sports was first created, the restriction against men joining was definitely an "anti-male rule". Identifying which groups a rule targets is different from condemning the rule.

Certainly, if it removes the right of red-light running to whites specifically.

Laws which reaffirm sex segregation in sports do not remove the right to compete in female sporting events from trans women and girls in particular. As I stated in the OP, they ban all male athletes from competing in female sporting events, including the minority of male athletes who identify as women.

Ok, so now apply that to the laws in question:

Certainly, if it removes the right of red-light running to whites specifically.

Ok, but those laws are not applied specifically to trans people, so they can't be declared anti-trans (let alone anti-LGBT)

Still anti-white, because it's legislation that removes a previous privilege from that specific group.

This seems like the opposite of how we talk about laws? I've never seen removal of privilege be declared anti-[group] because they remove privilege. In fact I've seen plenty of the opposite - declaring discriminatory policies aren't discriminatory, but merely removing privilege.

in a hypothetical universe where whites had a historic go-on-red privilege, its revocation would certainly be seen as anti-white by white supremacists

For one, you're already admitting only white supremacists would see it like that, and in that case I agree, those laws aren't anti- trans, opposition to them is trans-supremacist. But the other issue is that historically trans people had no such privilege.

Likewise, restricting MtFs from female sports where they previously had access locally is an "anti-trans law", even though I agree it's a good idea.

So the sports leagues that never allowed it in the first place are not anti- trans?

Identifying which groups a rule targets is different from condemning the rule.

So in the case of MtFs, the laws are mischaracterized, as they are still targeting men, not trans people in particular. FtMs have a better claim, since they'd be dinged for doping.

Still anti-white, because it's legislation that removes a previous privilege from that specific group.

This seems like the opposite of how we talk about laws? I've never seen removal of privilege be declared anti-[group] because they remove privilege.

It is, because people call privileges "rights" when they support them, but they call rights "privileges" when they oppose them. I am a neutral looking from the outside on a ridiculous scenario, and can clearly see "whites can run red lights" is a privilege. In the hypothetical universe where a whites-can-run-red-lights law exists, people opposing the change would holler hell about their natural rights being infringed.

This is exactly where we find ourself with letting MtFs into female spaces. Pro-trans think their "rights" to be treated as female are being infringed; anti-trans are denying that those rights exist.

The situation may seem comical, but during the abolition of slavery and feudalism, slave-owners/feudal lords complained bitterly about their property rights being infringed. Things like that are only ludicrous in retrospect.

Ok, but those laws are not applied specifically to trans people, so they can't be declared anti-trans [...] So in the case of MtFs, the laws are mischaracterized, as they are still targeting men, not trans people in particular.

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."

The intent of the law is going after trans entryists, specifically, even if the language of the law is framed generally.

(let alone anti-LGBT)

Certainly this is obnoxious. The motivation by journalists to generalize actions against tiny minorities with a broader interest group is the same thing behind blacks becoming BIPOCs. If you criticize calling the laws anti-LGBT on these grounds I have no objection.

For one, you're already admitting only white supremacists would see it like that, and in that case I agree, those laws aren't anti- trans, opposition to them is trans-supremacist. But the other issue is that historically trans people had no such privilege.

I am stepping into a hypothetical set by sodiummuffin. The scenario proposed is so ridiculous, if a soapbubble universe where whites could run lights popped into existence, everyone except hardcore white supremacists would wake up to how stupid that is immediately. Our current situation is less ridiculous so people's thoughts are much more confused on the matter.

Likewise, restricting MtFs from female sports where they previously had access locally is an "anti-trans law", even though I agree it's a good idea.

So the sports leagues that never allowed it in the first place are not anti- trans?

They were anti-trans in their inception, though there would not be the language to describe it as such. Again, I am not using 'anti-trans' as a synonym for 'bigoted' or 'evil', but merely descriptively.

It is, because people call privileges "rights" when they support them, but they call rights "privileges" when they oppose them.

Yes, but they shouldn't.

guesswho calls this an anti-LGBT law because he's deep in the middle of calling things "rights" inconsistently depending on whether he supports or opposes them. But when called on it he denies this and just claims he's being literally truthful.

I think it's unlikely that he refers to drunk driving laws as anti-driver, compulsory school laws as anti-child, and laws against robbery as anti-minority (for a minority that disproportionately robs), even if he thinks they can be literally described that way. It's a motte and bailey where the motte is "see, that's what it literally means" and the bailey is that he's using the words to imply something negative.

You can argue that consistently using "anti-X" to refer to any restriction on X, even if the restriction is the lack of a special privilege and is something the speaker thinks is justified, would be a more objective way to use language. But it is not the standard way to use language, guesswho isn't out there talking about people arrested for dangerous driving as being "arrested under an anti-white law", so it seems understandable for Folamh3 to interpret guesswho as making a bolder and less semantic claim.

I don't think it would really be a better way to use language either, because it's so impractical to do consistently that nobody would do it. Nobody is going to use it for every hypothetical special privilege that could exist, at best it would be influenced by status-quo bias based on what laws already exist, and realistically personal bias would creep in immediately. It would just create a natural motte and bailey where people would use "anti-X" in some cases based on their biases, and then retreat to "it's a restriction on X so it's anti-X" when challenged.

This whole debate seems like a textbook example of the worst argument in the world.

"A law that restricts X group isn't anti-X...

As far as I can tell, that was brought into the conversation by guesswho. A law can be both anti-X and farcical. For example, promoting the right to self defense by giving those most likely to face violence (prisoners) the right to defend themselves (by carrying guns in prisons) is a terrible idea, and I'd have no problem laughing it out of the room.

X is being restricted from conducting political assassinations?

Yeah these are anti-LGBT laws dawg.

But no, not L, G or B. I'm sure some transwomen don't at all like these laws. Almost all LGBT people aren't transwomen.

But writing a law with the sole purpose of restricting a right from a specific group is 'manifestly' anti-that-group.

TIL that it is a right for a boy to compete against girls. Just like the right to life.

Let's take the case of Andraya Yearwood, one of the trans athletes whose rights you are so vigorously defending. After getting into college due to the publicity around being a trans female runner in high school, Andraya promptly gave up sports. So no Olympic future there! To be fair to Yearwood, they seem to be genuinely trans*, but it's also pretty clear that taking the easier option of beating the girls and thus getting the victories to plump up the college application was part of it. Did Yearwood take a place away from a cis female runner who would have gone on to compete in the Olympics? I have no idea, but I don't think this can be ruled out, either.

*Now identifying as an Igbo-American Trans Womanist involved in LGBT+ activism.

If you want to play weird semantic games about the word 'right', replace it with 'liberty' and the sentence still works fine.

And, oh no, one trans woman won a competition one time. Since no cis woman has ever won any competition, obviously this represents the existence of a categorical advantage.

Statistical analysis or bust, as per usual.

  • -18

If you're so confident that cis women are handily winning competitions against trans women, it shouldn't be so hard for you to cite some specific examples of some to win me over. I notice that you haven't cited any, just like the last time this topic came up.

I remain unconvinced that the burden of proof rests with gender-critical people to demonstrate that male athletes do have an essentially insurmountable competitive advantage over female, as opposed to with TRAs to demonstrate that they don't. TRAs, after all, are the ones demanding that male athletes be allowed to compete in female sporting events. Normally it's the people who want to radically change institutions who are required to demonstrate that their proposed changes are good ideas.

you're so confident that cis women are handily winning competitions against trans women, it shouldn't be so hard for you to cite some specific examples of some to win me over.

???

Every competition in which a trans woman competes and doesn't win is an example of this. That's every case in existence that's not the handful of anecdotes your side keeps recycling.

You still didn't cite any.

There's a trans woman who plays at our local boffer combat realm, my wife beats her in like 90% of duels, is that good enough for you?

You're asking for 'dog bites man' statistics here, I don't know the names of random trans athletes ho haven't won anything because that's not newsworthy, which is the whole point.

I had to look up what boffer was. Ah yes, completely comparable to competitive swimming!

But don't worry, there's a gender studies professor who is in total agreement with you:

If women cut their hair the same way as men, wore “men’s” clothes, and didn’t shave their legs and underarms, wear makeup, or pluck their eyebrows, they wouldn’t look nearly as different from men as they do.

Can somebody direct this lady to historical images where women did not shave, wear makeup, or pluck their eyebrows? Granted the women in them didn't cut their hair and didn't wear men's clothes, but still - they kind of don't look like men.

Gee, Grandma, since you don't pluck your eyebrows, I can't hardly tell the difference between you and Grampa!

Is this a Land Girl or a Land Man? They're wearing trousers, how am I supposed to be able to tell?

One of these coal mine workers is a man, but how can I pick him out of the line up? Nobody is wearing makeup or shaving their underarms!

Friend, the transwoman who won the competition was doing it on fair grounds and wasn't being a howling lunatic over demands to accommodate her even if she made no effort at all to pass as a woman. That kind of trans person is going to fit into normal society.

The spa flashers and prison rapists won't, but they are the people you are so hell-bent on defending. I think at this stage, you're the one who has to put up or shut up: do you really believe the spa flashers and rapists are Real Women and should be in women's jails and women's spaces, or not? And if you do, how are you going to protect women from the guys who want to show off their feminine penis around eight year old girls? Because that's on you, just as much as you like putting responsibility on "people like Rowling who want to genocide trans people" if any trans person gets attacked or harmed or insulted.

Cynical answer: if women getting raped by men in prison is what it takes to bring attention to the general issue of inmates being raped by stronger inmates in prisons...

If I remember right, the law claims there is no such thing as consensual sex in prison. It's just selectively enforced by the wardens to minimize the effort needed to maintain control. Having a zero tolerance policy for prison rape creates more work, so is naturally opposed by the wardens.

It seems that it depends. Some women did bring cases, some of those cases were successful, others were not.

After all, it is terribly unfair to separate trans paedophile lovebirds who found one another in jail and married, just because they're probably stoking each other's interest in child porn!

While acknowledging the ongoing risk the claimant provides and the "challenges for those entrusted with their care within prison", he said "no explanation" had been given for why the couple had been placed in separate prisons.

"It is not clear how restricting contact with the claimant is likely to reduce her ongoing sexual interest in children," he said.

"There is no evidence to suggest that it will."

The judge also awarded the claimant an unspecified amount in damages, finding she had suffered "substantial anxiety, frustration and distress" over the last few years.

I'd say it's rather not cynical to consider that "if" to be at all possible.

You can keep trying to assign me positions I haven't ever taken for as long as you want, if it brings you comfort. But it's not actually an argument.

The laws being passed are about athletes, not flashers and rapists. Rape and sexual assault have been and remain illegal whether you're a 'real' woman or not, the question is immaterial to those cases. Cases like that are bludgeons that one side occasionally trots out, but the bailey here is and continues to be normal trans people trying to live normal everyday lives.

You say that the athlete 'is going to fit into normal society' and therefore isn't the issue at hand, but the laws being passed today are targeting them and how they live their normal life, and they are the living the type of lifestyle that speakers at Republican national conventions are talking about 'eradicating'.

I agree that this would be more convenient for you if the debate were only about the rapists and flashers, and your opponents were for some reason defending them. But that's really not what's happening, no matter how many times you say it.

Right, I'm rollling my sleeves up here.

You're crying about "The boy who competed in the boy's races last year is being brutally oppressed just because he's now going by "Jamie" instead of "James" so he can win the girl's races". That's the same logic as "this guy with a dick is really a woman and should be in the women's prison not the men's prison".

The fact that you can't bring yourself to say "yeah, the rapists and flashers are not, in fact, Real Women" is the problem as to why the likes of me and J.K. Rowling and the TERFs can't accept "oh just let the guy with a record of domestic violence into the women's shelter, now she's got a wig and is wearing pink leggings".

The majority of normal trans people trying to live normal everyday lives are not gaming the system so they can get cushier accommodation in prison or win undeserved sports victories for personal gain, even ego satisfaction. If the trans athletes accept that Jamie has to wait two years until her hormone levels and strength advantage are in the same range as cis women, then fine. But Jamie wants to switch from the boy's races six months ago to the girl's races now, while Jamie is still in possession of an unfair advantage.

It's a legitimate problem of trying to be fair to everyone, but so is it a legitimate problem when the crazy edge cases get away with blue murder instead of being slapped down as "yes, this is not what trans means". And until the defenders of trans rights grapple with those exceptions, then the most of the rest of us will continue to object to "male-bodied individual trying to compete against female-bodied individuals, get into spaces for female-bodied individuals, and force themselves onto female-bodied individuals".

Some of the laws the journalists characterise as “anti-LGBTQ” are farcical. The most common type are those which “restrict trans student access to sports”, which is just a roundabout way of saying “forbids male students from competing in female sporting events”.2 Given that male athletes competing in female sporting events is manifestly, transparently unfair to anyone with even the most passing familiarity with sexual dimorphism, I support such laws without qualification.

'Given that african savages are manifestly, transparently incapable of civilization and self-rule, it's dishonest to say that enslaving them is a racist policy'.

I take it, then, that you think biological men competing in female sporting events is fair.

I think you're missing the whole reason that women's sports exists. (No, I'm not talking about Title IX.)

It's because for most sports, if you just had an open competition, at the highest levels, no women will win, ever. There are some exceptions, but in general, women's sports exists because they will do worse otherwise, at least, against other athletes.

This is not surprising; the need of the woman's body to be able to provide for pregnancy and childbirth places is something of a tradeoff against physical ability, whereas men's bodies hardly need to do that at all.

Okay, so maybe, sure, it's fair to have them compete, but the whole point of the existence of the category is equity rather than fairness, in one of the rare cases where most people agree that that's a good thing. Having trans activists in it gets rid of the equity (as then we're back to the point where ordinary women are no longer represented among the elite) and still limits the fairness, because it excludes men.

Yeah these are anti-LGBT laws dawg. You can claim that they are anti-lgbt and justified, if that's the hill you want to die on. But writing a law with the sole purpose of restricting a right from a specific group is 'manifestly' anti-that-group.

Okay, then. A quick syllogism.

  1. This is anti-LGBT (provided by @guesswho)

  2. This is good (most agree that this is true)

  3. Some anti-LGBT things are good. (logically follows, by existential generalization)

This is valid.

Maybe you don't agree with premise 2, but it's very common, and I've briefly argued for it above. You at least are arguing that most normies should believe they think that some anti-LGBT things are good.

Only if moral truth rests upon democratic majority, in which case, I have several questions. Chiefly, do different things become good depending on where you are and local sentiments, or do we need to take the majority of the global population? Or do we need to go even further and take the opinion of all people that ever lived? Does ultimate truth require us to know the opinions of all future people as well?

The only place that I see you would be getting democracy from is in the last part, so I assume you're addressing that.

I was assuming my second point; he is of course free to reject that.

I was not trying to argue for truth by democratic majority. (That would also have some other, weirder implications: it would make ethics non-local, though I suppose that might already be true. Would angels/demons or far-off aliens get votes, should either exist? You can't exactly poll them. You would also have the fact that many in history would affirm beliefs that are currently rather unpopular, (yes, yes, precisely the point is that popularity isn't what matters), like that (post-birth) infanticide is fine.)

But I was figuring that guesswho might not like the statement "most people (even in the west) agree that some anti-LGBT policies are justified," and so I was trying to show that that followed.

Why might he not like it? Because I think the original purpose of describing it as anti-LGBT was to try to indicate that we're just some weirdos who have beef with LGBT people, or something, and this policy is an outworking of that, but when it's a fairly broadly conceded view, it becomes far harder to present one's opponents as crazy when even some of one's allies might agree with them.

And I figured he'd prefer to say that people are against a sports policy (in a way that doesn't say that most, even some of the left, are sometimes anti-LGBT) than affirm that they are sometimes anti-LGBT more flatly. That is, arguing that anti-LGBT things are democratically preferred. Since both sides like to think themselves as part of the majority in a democracy, and to have the mandate of the masses (should such a thing exist), I figured he wouldn't like that too much.

Yeah, I get that that isn't exactly a rational argument, and I'm not even sure to what extent it succeeded in what it was trying to do, but the aim (though not quite so explicitly formulated in my mind at the time of typing it) was to adjust what dialogically made sense.

That, of course, is not an argument that means that guesswho must be wrong.

Why might he not like it? Because I think the original purpose of describing it as anti-LGBT was to try to indicate that we're just some weirdos who have beef with LGBT people, or something, and this policy is an outworking of that, but when it's a fairly broadly conceded view, it becomes far harder to present one's opponents as crazy when even some of one's allies might agree with them.

And I figured he'd prefer to say that people are against a sports policy (in a way that doesn't say that most, even some of the left, are sometimes anti-LGBT) than affirm that they are sometimes anti-LGBT more flatly. That is, arguing that anti-LGBT things are democratically preferred. Since both sides like to think themselves as part of the majority in a democracy, and to have the mandate of the masses (should such a thing exist), I figured he wouldn't like that too much.

Funnily enough, I described this argument and (what I imagine to be) the motivations behind it in my last effortpost before this one. Like you, I acknowledged that the fact that an opinion is popular doesn't imply that it's right. But it's still annoying to have your opinions mischaracterised as crazy fringe extremist views when they enjoy a high level of popular support.

A law can be both farcical and Anti-X.

As one hypothetical, imagine that there was an activist that promoted the right to bear arms and self defense. If he started pushing for the rights of prisoners to carry concealed weapons (prison is one of the most dangerous places, after all), then I'd call it farcical.

I wouldn't bother mentioning that my opposition is (by a strict definition) anti-self-defense. If anyone (accurately!) defended it on those grounds, then they're farcical too.

I don't think OP was saying the laws are farcical, I think OP is saying it's farcical to call them anti-LGBT.

Sorry, let me retry.

A law can be Anti-X and highlighting that fact can still be farcical.

As one hypothetical, imagine that there was an activist that promoted the right to bear arms and self defense. If he started pushing for the rights of prisoners to carry concealed weapons (prison is one of the most dangerous places, after all), then I'd call it farcical.

I wouldn't bother mentioning that the law prohibiting prisoner concealed carry is (by a strict definition) anti-self-defense, even though it is.

Yes, that's what I was saying.

J. K. Rowling challenges new Scottish hate speech legislation, openly challenging them to arrest her for calling trans criminals men who pretend to be women:

https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1774747068944265615

In passing the Scottish Hate Crime Act, Scottish lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls. The new legislation is wide open to abuse by activists who wish to silence those of us speaking out about the dangers of eliminating women's and girls’ single-sex spaces, the nonsense made of crime data if violent and sexual assaults committed by men are recorded as female crimes, the grotesque unfairness of allowing males to compete in female sports, the injustice of women’s jobs, honours and opportunities being taken by trans-identified men, and the reality and immutability of biological sex.

#ArrestMe is, dare I say it, brave and powerful. At least she's putting skin in the game. It's also pretty well calculated in my opinion.

They can't really attack her for being a right wing extremist when her world famous books are a pretty clear allegory of Racism Bad. She even makes sure to target India Willoughby, who is apparently anti-black. Rowling has an enormous pot of money for expensive litigation and automatic worldwide attention on her. It's hard to righteously defend people such as

"Fragile flower Katie Dolatowski, 6'5", was rightly sent to a women's prison in Scotland after conviction. This ensured she was protected from violent, predatory men (unlike the 10-year-old girl Katie sexually assaulted in a women's public bathroom.)"

It's very practical politics to fish out the worst of the enemy milieu to preface one's normative statements. I think Rowling has a good shot at tactical victory - either the govt won't charge her or she'll win in court. On the other hand, only systemic change is going to change the progressive-leaning status quo. You need an Orban or some similar force to drag out the weed by the roots, rather than just pruning away when it grows particularly egregious. Rowling is no Orban, that's probably far too extreme for her.

The legislation is here: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2021/14/contents

Crimes include 'stirring up hate' by 'behaving in a manner that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening, abusive or insulting' to select groups. Looks like it allows nigh-limitless opportunities for selective enforcement. And a huge drain on police resources, given they can't even investigate all crimes:

Just last month the national force said it was no longer able to investigate every "low level" crime, including some cases of theft and criminal damage.

It has, however, pledged to investigate every hate crime complaint it receives.

BBC News understands that these will be assessed by a "dedicated team" within Police Scotland including "a number of hate crime advisers" to assist officers in determining what, if any, action to take.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-68703684

If they charge her and fail to convict her, or do convict her and have a bunch of HP-loving constituents toss them out of office, their project suffers a major setback. So they won't charge her. They'll charge a bunch of loud people who engender no public sympathy, and some little people unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They'll use them to build precedent, and of course "But you didn't charge Rowling" isn't a defence in court. After a while of this, they'll have the weight of precedent behind them and be able go after the next big fish if not Rowling herself.

Doesn't even need to be HP fans. Nicola Sturgeon's downfall began with the Isla Bryson case, after her very enthusiastic support of gender recognition norms and then she had to intervene to have the transwoman moved to a men's prison after all.

Convict Rowling, and a lot of people will go "Hang on, she was arrested for saying a guy who raped women and a guy who stalked a 13 year old shouldn't be in women's prison?"

Rowling does, however, engender contempt for the law this way.

This is the kind of statement my father might have said, and clearly it's true. (of course he also grew up in Alabama in the 50s and 60s). Were the issue something different (were she taking a stance with which I had no sympathy) I might even find this slippery slope aspect worrying. I can't remember the MLK quote but the gist of it is that to be moral one has to break unjust laws. Or perhaps more aptly, to be a hero, currently, is to behave like a merely decent human being. (That's May Sarton via LeCarré).

I've always been admiring of Rowling and bewildered at how she has become the focus of such hatred for what seems to me to be an uncomplicated, straightforwardly moral stance. She's even said that in other contexts she would march for trans people's rights to not suffer bullying or violence.

They'll charge a bunch of loud people who engender no public sympathy

I predict pretty strongly that they won't, at least not under the current administration. The british government is pretty anti-trans in general, the police are underfunded and ineffectual, and these just aren't the type of laws that go on the books with the intention of being enforced.

Remember years back when Peterson said that x new law means everyone will get arrested if they misgender someone in class or w/e, and then no one was ever prosecuted ever for anything? At some point, you have to notice that the meteor keeps not coming, despite Dear Leader's repeated predictions that it's due any day now.

  • -24

Remember years back when Peterson said that x new law means everyone will get arrested if they misgender someone in class or w/e, and then no one was ever prosecuted ever for anything? At some point, you have to notice that the meteor keeps not coming, despite Dear Leader's repeated predictions that it's due any day now.

As of this moment Peterson is on the hook for a $5000 fine and losing his medical license -- what a dum-dum, he was sooooo off base.

Not to mention the required reprogramming.

A British man named Dave McConnell was arrested, charged and convicted for misgendering someone, although his conviction was overturned on appeal.

Please don't move the goalposts and say "well his conviction was overturned, you're tilting at windmills". The process may not have been the punishment in McConnell's case, but it was certainly punishing.

When there are unenforced laws that can be used but they don't feel like using them, what you'll find is that they suddenly start getting used a lot more for political reasons.

It's better just to have laws that are clear, instead of a double standard.

the nonsense made of crime data if violent and sexual assaults committed by men are recorded as female crimes

That's one way of finally ending the blatant sex discrimination in the criminal justice system. After decades of loud protest for 'equality', life, uh, found a way.

They can't really attack her for being a right wing extremist when her world famous books are a pretty clear allegory of Racism Bad.

As the TERF controversies showed, agreeing with right wing extremists on Current Year issues is enough to be judged guilty by association. For example, Julie Bindel is far to the left of almost all of her critics, on most issues. Controversies-of-the-day create weird alliances: think of Christopher Hitchens and neoconservatives on the Iraq War.

They can't really attack her for being a right wing extremist when her world famous books are a pretty clear allegory of Racism Bad.

The crazies are getting around that one by saying she's really a racist and an anti-Semite. Because the goblin bankers are meant to be Jewish, you see. Plus other offences. She's pro-slavery, because SPEW in the books gets mocked by the other kids, including Harry, so that means Rowling thinks slavery is okay.

The pro-trans to the point of being driven insane by it lot really, really want her to go to prison, if not worse. Felker-Martin is just an opportunist, but there really are people frothing at the mouth about Rowling online.

The crazies are getting around that one by saying she's really a racist and an anti-Semite. Because the goblin bankers are meant to be Jewish, you see.

The opportunism of this claim is quite ironic, considering most of these people are probably also enthusiastically cheerleading for Hamas in their quest to murder every Jew in the middle east.

I think "normal" people don't get how deranged this debate can get online.

That might actually help along the swiftboating: surely no one would attack JKR in this insane way if she wasn't really a Holocaust denier (yes, that was recently a thing)/racist/person who thinks all trans are rapists right?

As the TERF controversies showed, agreeing with right wing extremists on Current Year issues is enough to be judged guilty by association.

Yes, judged by a small number of extremists. Not so much by the average person. JK Rowling is much too popular to get canceled for anything she could say short of literally praising Adolf Hitler, and even then she would still have a bunch of fans. Trying to cancel her would be like trying to take down Godzilla with a handgun.

The attempt to have the Hogwarts Legacy game cancelled was game, but futile, and vastly amusing, as was the back-pedalling afterwards about "well it was never about having the game not sell, it was all about raising awareness of the evil of Rowling's anti-trans genocide calls".

True, but that's the audience to whom attackers of J. K. Rowling are appealing. In the long run, small groups of politics-obsessed extremists can have a huge impact; just compare the changes on trans issues in the past 20 years.

They certainly might have a huge impact in other ways, but I think it's not going to be by making JK Rowling herself unpopular. She is at the level of celebrity and wealth where few things short of her killing a person or having sex with kids on video could actually take her down in any real way.

She has enough fuck-you money that she can shrug off all these attempts to get her, and I think the attempts to doxx her just made her go "To hell with it" and come out swinging on Twitter/X and elsewhere. No point in trying to be "let's see this from both sides" when one side wants to do its best (not very much of a best, admittedly) to destroy you.

The problem is for the authors who aren't at that level of "I cry myself to sleep on a bed of hundred pound notes every night" as we saw with YA kerfuffles over similar topics. Those are the people very vulnerable to a small but loud online clique complaining to your publisher about why they didn't use sensitivity readers for your problematic manuscript.

While Rowling's crusade is admirable, I think what's really needed is a Scottish DeSantis to immediately turn these dystopian laws on the left. The only thing that stops this train is leftists being jailed for hate speech.

By the way, what's up with Scotland? What about their culture has made them go so loony, first with Covid and now with this? They honestly are starting to seem like China with worse food and weather.

They're not China, they're Canada.

Politically irrelevant backwater just north of an actual powerful country. Being "progressiver-than-thou" about Britain is Scotland's national identity. Just another not-really-a country making stupid laws to stick it to The Man (meaning the people who protect their borders and fund their government).

They're not China, they're Canada.

That makes sense.

I do think Canada has better long term potential simply because of their abundance of natural resources and low population density.

Scotland also has an abundance of natural resources and low population density. The SNPs two-faced messaging of "Taking back the North Sea Oil from the thieving English will allow an independent Scotland to have Scandinavian public services with British taxes" and "Independent Scotland will be a green superpower" is darkly amusing.

Taking back the North Sea Oil from the thieving English will allow an independent Scotland to have Scandinavian public services with British taxes

While also not growing the industry:

Late last year in response to the UK Government’s announcement to grant new licences, The First Minister, Humza Yousaf; attacked the decision saying: “This is the wrong decision. I have expressed concerns about this going ahead for some time. We don’t think the taps should be turned off tomorrow, but neither can the north-east have unlimited oil and gas extraction. ”

https://scottishbusinessnews.net/labour-tax-and-snp-policy-on-oil-and-gas-a-threat-to-the-scottish-economy/

It's one thing to believe in a magic money tree, but it's quite another to think that the magic money tree will survive without water.

Maybe this is the correct analogy. I kept thinking that American rural (and often rural non-city everywhere) tends to code red-tribe. And this goes as far as seeing African pure indigenous black having country music weddings on YouTube. Still does not feel like a perfect model but Canada, Scotland, and some Nordics seem to lean more left but I usually associated that with not having black people and being more willing to redistribute/socialism within their own people than wokism.

Northern countries like that have high urbanization and low population density simultaneously because big chunks of the country are basically empty. Even überprogressive places like Quebec and Sweden have fairly conservative rural areas, there’s just not a lot of people there compared to the big cities.

Quebec is more ethnat than both the rest of Canada and France ime. They’re economically more social democratic than Albertans, sure.

Britain's a deeply broken country IMO, drowning in decline. Scotland has effectively permanent SNP leftist-progressive govt. Traditional heavy industry left, north sea oil is depleted. There's not much growing of the pie, only taking someone else's share - SNP policies lean in that direction.

Real GDP per capita: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locations=GB

You can see the trend line of growth has fallen off since 2007 - and British growth is concentrated heavily around London, I expect things in Scotland are much worse than the country as a whole.

Potemkin villages: https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet/status/1761798659396518342

Warships being scrapped: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/britain-to-scrap-two-royal-navy-frigates-say-reports/

NHS spends twice as much on legal payouts due to their horrendous maternity service than maternity itself: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/maternity-payouts-twice-cost-of-care-times-health-commission-svdhsjhqk

If you've seen Clarkson's Farm you'll appreciate how hard it is for anyone to build anything, even if they're a global superstar. Everything is very expensive and takes forever, for no good reason. The UK border is totally out of control, despite being an island. Plus there were the Pakistani child rape gangs that operated for years because police were too scared of being racist and covered them up.

If I could buy puts for countries, I think puts on Britain would have the most alpha. Everyone thinks 'oh it's a P5 nuclear power, they invented industrial civilization, it'll be fine'. It's really not fine in the UK. I think it's systemically broken. Every single institution broken, incentives broken. I know Dominic Cummings is a contested figure here but he did work in the British govt for some time and I think he was driven a bit mad by the cosmic horror of it all, he wrote these essays about how everything was broken and the leaders were clowns:

https://dominiccummings.com/2014/06/16/gesture-without-motion-from-the-hollow-men-in-the-bubble-and-a-free-simple-idea-to-improve-things-a-lot-which-could-be-implemented-in-one-day-part-i/

https://dominiccummings.com/2014/10/30/the-hollow-men-ii-some-reflections-on-westminster-and-whitehall-dysfunction/

(for the juicy horror stories skip down to four stories in the second link)

Having lived in quite a few European countries and knowing British history in some detail, I would put it this way: the UK had a period of great comparative success across a huge range of fields (prior to about 1945) where European countries they didn't outperform economically (France, Germany) were outperformed militarily/diplomatically, and the UK developed a fairly "laissez faire" type of imperialism that had some definite advantages over Belgian rapaciousness, French assimilationism etc.

The UK had a period of relative decline in 1945-1979. This was only relative (this was a period of mostly solid growth) and with some exceptions (UK unemployment rates were low in this period, even compared to e.g. the US).

The UK had a concerted and successful effort to combat relative decline from about 1979-2007. This took different forms, e.g. Thatcher had great confidence in Victorian institutions, practices, and values; Blair had a huge love of America (especially Clintonian America) public service modernisation, and wanted the UK to lead the EU into a modernist, progressive, American-style supra-state; Major was somewhere in between, with a strange sort of quiet iconoclasm in favour of "ordinary people" that ranged from the clever (getting rid of stupid regulations on everything from employment agencies to service stations) to the absurd (the "Cones Hotline").

For various reasons, I mostly blame Brown and subsequent UK politicians, and of course the UK voters to whom they pander. For example, the UK has a great edge in financial and business services. UK business services are one area where the UK still does great, partly due to language, partly due to regulation, and partly due to agglomeration in London/South-East England. What do UK politicians and voters love? MANUFACTURING. Steel. SHIPBUILDING. It's like a tall, scrawny but fast kid wanting to play rugby and set weightlifting records rather than basketball and netball - admirable, but stupid. So the UK overregulates and taxes its financial sector (as well as the occasional kick to its oil sector) and then wonders why its economy underperforms.

Similarly, the UK voters hate paying taxes at the levels of European countries. So they have the opportunity to e.g. save more of their own money for retirement, taking advantage of the huge long-term gains that private investment can make relative to pay-as-you-go state pensions. But they also want state pensions at European levels (no Boomer left behind) so politicians have introduced an unsustainable pensions uprating scheme that has meant that, despite significant spending cuts in some areas (welfare, education etc.) and despite tax rises to about peacetime highs, the UK public finances are still shit. This is not how a serious country deals with an ageing population.

And there's the UK national religion, the NHS, a healthcare system designed to save the UK Labour party from the wrath of doctors in the 1950 election, which voters think (a) should be improved, (b) should not be changed, and (c) should not cost them personally any more in taxes or fees. I suppose there are some religions with more absurd origins and principles...

Scotland is the beak of the UK ostrich: deepest into the sand it has buried itself.

I have lived in Germany, Austria, Netherlands, France, Italy, Greece, and other places. These countries all have their own chronic problems and a similar lack of ambition in dealing with them. For me, it just stands out more in the UK (and more recently in the US) because the Limeys used to have some leaders and an electorate who were serious about tough changes. For all her faults, Margaret Thatcher was about the closest the West has come to a Lee Kuan Yew figure: someone who really thought, "If a policy is too popular, then we are being too careful."

Just responding to the manufacturing point, I don't think British voters particularly fetishise heavy industry so much as they feel that the return of these jobs will allow these poorer regions in the midlands and north to thrive again. This probably isn't going to happen but until politicians can figure out a more realistic way to revitalise those areas they have to promise something to get people from these areas to vote for them.

Just responding to the manufacturing point, I don't think British voters particularly fetishise heavy industry so much as they feel that the return of these jobs will allow these poorer regions in the midlands and north to thrive again.

That's part of it, I agree. The LKY solution would be to build lots of houses where there are jobs, so more people can escape dependency and joblessness. If people complain about losing the green belt or excess urban density or the loss of the beautiful Essex countryside, then you're doing it right.

Also, in my experience Brits consistently conflate manufacturing output with manufacturing employment. Thatcher's policies led to a boom in UK manufacturing, just not UK manufacturing employment: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/10/22/1413987501531_wps_2_SPT_Ben1_jpg.jpg

So if you ask a Brit if they think that the UK produces more today than in the days of coal mining, Ravenscraig etc., they'll think, "Certainly not." This is partly because they conflate manufacturing with "a man's work" i.e. something dirty and smelly you do with your hands (but in public).

Of course, this sort of sentiment is almost universal, but for a while, the UK had the leaders and the electorate to plough forward with tough, realistic decisions.

One thing I feel certain LKY never dealt with was the problems of rural areas.

Yes, it's an extrapolation from his approach in other areas.

the return of these jobs will allow these poorer regions in the midlands and north to thrive again.

These jobs are never coming back. The UK manufactures more today in real value terms that it ever did in the past, but automation means we need fewer and fewer jobs each year to support this manufacturing. This trend is not going to change and if anything is going to accelerate (see how Tata is closing down their old labour intensive steel furnace and replacing it with a more efficient highly automated furnace that's going to pump out a lot more steel with a lot fewer workers). These towns and regions are dead and will stay dead. People need to realise this and move on.

(see how Tata is closing down their old labour intensive steel furnace and replacing it with a more efficient highly automated furnace that's going to pump out a lot more steel with a lot fewer workers)

I thought the steel plant was profitable and produced very good (ie. difficult to replace) steel but was being shut down for burning coal and is being 'replaced' with an electric one that will use mindboggling amounts of a scarce resource while producing inferior steel to the existing plant?

Looking at it in more depth you seem to be right. Also the electric arc furnace seems to work by taking scrap steel as input instead of iron ore like the blast furnace does. This changes my view of the project significantly, I'm now much less in favour of the change. I wouldn't even call the new thing a steel producer, it's more a "steel recycler".

Britain's a deeply broken country IMO, drowning in decline. Scotland has effectively permanent SNP leftist-progressive govt. Traditional heavy industry left, north sea oil is depleted. There's not much growing of the pie, only taking someone else's share - SNP policies lean in that direction.

Real GDP per capita: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locations=GB

This is indeed the crux of the issue, but it's also true for most of Europe. Britain's main difference here is we don't have bad unemployment figures to go with it. Instead, we have the peculiar combination of US very low unemployment but EU bad wage growth.

I know Dominic Cummings is a contested figure here but he did work in the British govt for some time and I think he was driven a bit mad by the cosmic horror of it all, he wrote these essays about how everything was broken and the leaders were clowns:

Dominic Cummings is not some outside figure diagnosing the problem. He, being pro-lockdown, was a contributor to it.

I’d offer a limited defense of this country.

The UK’s growth trend since 2007 is largely because the UK was one of the fastest growing major economies in the previous decade, and because of various second-order effects of the US dollar being highly depressed from the late 90s until 2008/2009 and then surging in value until now. For a brief moment the UK’s nominal gdp/capita was even slightly higher than the US in 2007, again because of an FX quirk after the dotcom bust and mid-2000s oil bubble sent the dollar cratering. The fiscal problem is, as others have said, obvious and has long been obvious. Brits expect continental European social democracy at American tax rates. It isn’t possible and has never been possible. Therefore the UK will continue to run high deficits and struggle with poor public services. It is what it is, but it isn’t collapse-tier really. Every major party has acknowledged it in private, there just aren’t any palatable solutions.

The immigration problem is significant but France and Sweden’s problems with immigration and Islamism are still much worse. As a percentage of non-European immigrants, the UK has fewer migrants from the Islamic world than almost anywhere else in Northern Europe, including France, Germany, Benelux and the Nordics. Again, a collapse is more likely elsewhere (probably France). The UK is closer to the US on the “pace of being destroyed by mass immigration” scale than worse-off countries elsewhere in Western Europe, and more likely to end up Brazilified than Lebanonified.

Warships being scrapped: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/britain-to-scrap-two-royal-navy-frigates-say-reports/

32 year old warships being scrapped. The biggest problem for the British military is America’s snail-level pace at building F-35s which means that it will be 15+ years after the two aircraft carriers came in before they have enough planes to operate them as intentioned.

I know Dominic Cummings is a contested figure here but he did work in the British govt for some time and I think he was driven a bit mad by the cosmic horror of it all, he wrote these essays about how everything was broken and the leaders were clowns

The core problem with the British civil service is that it’s run by figures like Cummings who believe issues are a result of stupidity or inefficiency instead of deep-rooted political realities (like the tax situation I describe above, and views on planning among the electorate) that can’t be changed by putting a few smart autists in power in Whitehall.

The UK is closer to the US on the “pace of being destroyed by mass immigration” scale than worse-off countries elsewhere in Western Europe, and more likely to end up Brazilified than Lebanonified.

Uh, the US’s largest states are white minority, gen z is the last white majority generation, there’s no functioning border, and we have more immigrants than births every year.

Now I don’t think a Hispanic majority- or plurality or whatever- is a death knell, but ‘control of immigration’ is not an American strength.

Yes, but fundamentally the US probably isn’t going to experience major ethnic conflict because of immigration. Latinos are mostly Christian (either devout or secularized catholics), quickly adopt American dress and have high intermarriage rates by the third generation. Most of Central America moving north will manifest itself in, long term, a lower performing population, higher inequality, more corruption and crime, and general civilizational decline, probably. But there will be no grand clash of civilizations, thus Brazilification.

In much of continental Europe, non-European immigration is overwhelmingly Muslim. Assimilation is limited, cultural identities strong. Very few German or Austrian second-generation Muslim immigrants consider themselves German or Austrian, for example. They conceive of themselves as having a strong, separate identity. This makes Lebanonization that descends into open ethno-religious conflict much more likely in countries like France, Sweden, Germany etc.

The UK sits kind of between the two. Immigrants are a lot more diverse, with large Chinese and Indian (Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist) contingents, many African Christians from former colonies (France’s former colonies are largely Muslim, by contrast) plus a large number of additional groups from all over the world who speak English (eg. Filipinos are the third most common nationality in the NHS after British and Indians). Islamic immigration remains high, and there have been terror attacks, the grooming gangs scandals and so on, but it is a smaller proportion of the total than in continental Europe. Most non-Muslim groups also have relatively high intermarriage rates.

I think the UK is therefore more likely to Brazilify than to Lebanonify.

Something I've never been clear on, which I think you might be able to explain due to your (astoundingly broad and deep!) geopolitical knowledge:

What exactly does "brazilification" mean? I've seen it used enough and I'm familiar enough with the popular perception of Brazil that I think I've picked up the "vibe", but I find myself wondering if there isn't more to it than just "extreme inequality and crime, favelas in every city where the wealthy never go." Is there a racial component in Brazil, or is it just a socioeconomic thing? Is there a specific historical path that is necessary to count as brazilification?

Brazil has a racial hierarchy but it’s in denial and likes to pretend that there’s a ‘Brazilian’ race instead of many races which could all be Brazilian, in order to cover up the massive drag of high human capital demographics subsidizing lower human capital ones which then proceed to repay them with crime.

It started decades ago as a progressive economics term to argue that rising economic inequality risked America looking more like much of Latin America, where the top 5% live like Americans while the bottom 90% are poor. Over time it was adopted by the right in light of ongoing mass immigration, keeping some of its original meaning but adding the idea that Brazil is also poorer, more corrupt, more violent, more dysfunctional. On the internet right the Brazilification thesis stands in contrast to the ‘Balkanization’ or Lebanon scenarios in which ethnic tensions crystallize into hot conflict. Brazil, by contrast, has little significant racial strife of the kind far rightists sometimes predict in the West’s future.

Got it, thanks.

Ah, appreciate the clarification. I’d thought that Britain’s immigrants were highly Pakistani or unassimilating Hindus; sort of like France or Germany. A comparatively small number of Pakistanis in a context of mostly assimilating migration from throughout the former empire is a meaningful improvement over that assumption.

The core problem with the British civil service is that it’s run by figures like Cummings who believe issues are a result of stupidity or inefficiency instead of deep-rooted political realities (like the tax situation I describe above, and views on planning among the electorate) that can’t be changed by putting a few smart autists in power in Whitehall.

He says the opposite, that the culture of government is deeply broken. A few smart people can't fix it without full control over staffing, hiring and sacking - they need to break the power of the Civil Service and recruit a new class of elected politician educated in a fundamentally different way.

The culture of government wasn’t the primary problem though, it was a banal economic issue that requires telling the public something they don’t want to hear and then fixing it knowing it will cost you the next election, and likely the one after that.

Cummings would be shocked at how little difference replacing the bureaucracy made; the bulk of expenditure isn’t on stereotypical faceless bureaucrats inefficiently faxing documents around large office buildings, it’s on pensions and healthcare.

British healthcare is not run excellently: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/maternity-payouts-twice-cost-of-care-times-health-commission-svdhsjhqk

https://unherd.com/2020/09/lets-be-honest-the-nhs-is-awful/

https://www.themotte.org/post/829/friday-fun-thread-for-january-12/178889?context=8#context

If the country was governed well, everything would improve, health included. There are ways to do more with less. They could've managed HS2 properly for one thing. And when was the bureaucracy replaced?

They can’t manage HS2 properly for the same reason that California can’t built HSR or that infrastructure projects in all Anglo countries cost 5x as much as they do anywhere else, namely common law and restrictions on eminent domain that allow more challenges and more legal action. Only parliament can solve it but they don’t want to because the people don’t want it; Boris Johnson proposed planning reform and people in deep-blue Tory constituencies flipped to the Liberal Democrats in protest at the idea that local small town councils would no longer be able to veto any construction. Not really a bureaucracy problem.

The NHS is awful because the UK spends much less, both absolutely per-person and as a proportion of GDP, than other wealthy nations. Everything is done at the cheapest price, because of the tax/spend conundrum I discussed. The people won’t accept more taxes and won’t accept privatization, so there it is. Again, it’s a people problem, not a state problem. The compromise that the UK has (mediocre public services and moderate taxation levels) is one the public have selected. There are no administrative solutions, no magic sauce in the bureaucracy that can fix it. It’s just basic math. Either taxes go up or services get worse, the public will accept neither.

If I could buy puts for countries, I think puts on Britain would have the most alpha.

Can't you just buy puts on a UK-focused index fund (Vanguard page)?

Eh, this is a bit too doomer in my opinion. Sure, the UK is doing worse than the US (and will probably continue doing worse than them) but it's absolutely not the highest alpha country to get a put on. Many many Western European countries have the same problems we have but even worse, plus they don't have English either acting as a draw for high end immigrants (which the UK disproportionately gets compared to the dregs that end up in Europe). I'd take out puts on France, Spain and Canada before I took them out on the UK, perhaps even Germany before the UK (their demographics are down the toilet, average age is approaching 50).

Planning and building is absolutely fucked but I have hope that when Starmer takes power later this year he'll swiftly liberalise the system: it's basically the only way left to stimulate growth as even he now realises the government can't just spend their way out of this crisis.

I'm actually putting my money where my mouth is: with the upcoming tax year and renewed ISA allowance I'm strongly considering investing the money in a FTSE 250 ETF instead of the standard S&P 500 one I usually buy (deep down part of me already knows I'll regret this, but who knows, also the usual disclaimer: this is not financial advice yada yada).

I'd take out puts on France, Spain and Canada before I took them out on the UK, perhaps even Germany before the UK (their demographics are down the toilet, average age is approaching 50).

I'd be somewhat inclined to go long on Canada (over a longer time frame admittedly) purely based on geography - with all that habitable land and and the natural resources that are going to get more accessible as the planet warms it's hard to think things could go seriously wrong for them.

with all that habitable land

It's not really that habitable, though. Most of Ontario (and Newfoundland) is bedrock, Quebec is bedrock and French, most of Manitoba is bedrock or underwater, the Maritimes are nearly dead of neglect (to the point the Canadian government will pay you to leave under certain circumstances), -30C isn't meaningfully different from -40C for AB/SK and their cities are already expanding as fast as their construction crews can go, there are no logistics for expansion into the territories, and it's illegal to develop the areas of BC that aren't just solid rock already.

Are those things fixable? For BC repealing the ALR is coup-complete, and for the Maritimes, while it's certainly possible to turn it into another megalopolis, it's going to be very expensive even though it is technically possible with existing technology (but critically, not Canadian technology).

And here I felt stupid for holding some VGK to diversify away from the US. FTSE smells of regret and cold mushy peas.

growth has fallen off since 2007

Okay, I snorted a little at this one. Anything else happen after 2007 I should know about?

All in all, it’s hard for me to see the British situation as unusual. Dysfunction yes, disaster no. A distinct shortage of car bombings. Even the foreign threats seem so tame compared to the 20th century!

If I could buy puts for countries, I think puts on Britain would have the most alpha.

You'd better make sure your put-writer has enough money (and will survive) to actually pay out, or you're not the one making alpha.

What about their culture has made them go so loony, first with Covid and now with this?

Scottish independence agitators and nationalists like to style themselves as far more progressive than evil Tory Britain, but cry that their progressive instincts are being overwritten by the evil Westminster and that if they could only be independent, they could make the country a progressive utopia.

So occasionally they like to try doing progressive-aligned things that are way outside their remit, wait to get rightfully slapped down by Westminster, and then cry about the evil Tories preventing them from enacting progressive utopia, as a way to rile their base and agitate for separatism.

Unfortunately, over the years of this process, they've picked up a load of true believers who actually believe that Scotland is significantly more progressive than the rest of the UK, so you get things like this. (It's also really easy to be "progressive" on someone else's dime. If they successfully lost their subsidies from the rest of the UK, they'd not have nearly as much cash to splash on such things.) Although odds are in this case, this law is just First Minister "Hamas" Humza trying to criminalise criticism of him by the back door, because he already cries racism and hate crimes any time anyone does.

“Hamas” Humza

You want to elaborate on that? For someone with no knowledge of UK politics, it sounds like either a terrible scandal or a lazy smear. Which is it?

Ah, sorry; he's been accused of considering himself First Minister for Gaza rather than Scotland due to wanting to divert Scottish government funding to Gaza because he has family members there. Nevermind that such a thing would be completely out of his remit as FM. He spends a ton more time talking about Palestine than he does about Scotland as of late.

I would say it's less about Scotland and more specifically about the Scottish National Party. The Holyrood parliament doesn't have to deal with grown up issues, like deficits, foreign policy or immigration. They are guaranteed a constant subsidy from England (or more accurately, London). After the failure of the independence movement, they need to redirect their grandstanding elsewhere or the public will ask what their purpose is.

As for COVID, that was clearly a case of the SNP purposely trying to distinguish Scotland from England. Their model of governing for years has been to create distinctions where none need exist, to be different for difference' sake. For COVID that meant copying the government in Westminster, but being more restrictive on every axis.

I think what's really needed is a Scottish DeSantis to immediately turn these dystopian laws on the left. The only thing that stops this train is leftists being jailed for hate speech.

I'm not sure it would stop it. True, communists became suddenly more keen on the "bourgeois values" of freedom of speech and academic freedom during the McCarthy years, but e.g. the reaction of most religions in most time and places to oppression by another religion has not been "This shows the importance of freedom of religion" but rather "This shows how important it is to impose our religion on people."

A leftist reaction to jailing leftists for hate speech might just be, "This is why DeSantis types must never have the powers we have invested in government." This can lead to either democratic optimism ("demographics is destiny" "reality = education = a liberal bias" etc.) or just old-fashioned authoritarian attitudes.

See, this is why center-left people don't feel like allying with the right, despite our increasing frustration with the regressive far-left. I dislike their attitude of wanting to define reality and outlaw disagreement, but I just know that if the right gets into power they'll do the same, but harder. As an example, I have several friends who are as frustrated with the far-left as me, but who support palestine. I disagree with them about this, but I don't thing they should lose their job over it! And nor are they just getting what they're dishing out, no, now we have to take punches from both sides.

Even for cases like Claudine Gay, at least my personal conclusion is that she got her job through politics and lost her job through politics. Scientific competence was only involved as a cudgel to beat her with when it was convenient. This is a disgrace for one of the most renown universities, and the only winners of the whole affair are the people who want to control science with politics. Yes if it was up to me she shouldn't have gotten the job in the first place, but I see little indication that the right would do anything better. In fact I don't even have to look back very far to get right-wing movements such as the moral majority.

See, this is why center-left people don't feel like allying with the right, despite our increasing frustration with the regressive far-left

If the center left had proven even vaguely able to resist this sort of thing, the Right would also find them to be a more attractive option than tit for tat. Or would not have needed to get involved at all.

People like Rufo & DeSantis exist because attempting to appeal to universal principles or allowing the academy to police itself has utterly failed. A lot of this stuff (especially in America, in the UK the Tories take a lot of blame since they were in power) happened under their eye. They not only refused to do anything about it, they often attacked both right and left critiques of it.

And then, when someone goes "too far" in response, they lament that there's no partner for common sense and sanity and they definitely would have done something if not for those crazies who made it too tense to get involved.

Yeah, uh-huh.

I mean, I push hard enough against left-wing orthodoxy both in person and online that I'm regularly reflexively labeled right-wing, and I have the same frustration as you with plenty of other allegedly centrist politicians who fall hard for the "no enemies to the left, all enemies to the right" fallacy. You're really throwing this at the wrong person, sorry.

You still seem willing to prefer as allies the left-wing orthodoxy over the right-wing ("See, this is why center-left people don't feel like allying with the right, despite our [...]", emphasis mine) so I think you are indeed the right person.

I feel I should note that there is such a thing as "being neutral", and thus that RenOS' note that he doesn't want to ally with you is not the same thing as declaring alliance with your enemies.

You might consider neutrality naïve, and you might very well be right, but you can't just treat naïveté as malice - not if you want to be intellectually honest, anyway.

I feel I should note that there is such a thing as "being neutral"

It's an awfully one-sided neutrality that supports the left when it agrees with the left, and refuses to support the right when it agrees with the right.

We see that in the United States a lot. People who, when asked, are closer to Republicans than Democrats on most issues but still vote blue.

Voting is more about tribal affiliation and personal purity than about issues.

Voting Republican gives some people the "ick". So even though they hate homeless encampments, drug overdoses, crime, and broken public schools, they still vote for far left candidates in their city election.

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I probably was harsh, and RenOS rightly accused me of venting my frustration here.

But I don't think my OP implied it was just malice. There are many reasons (few of which I respect) for this behavior on the part of the actual left-wing liberals who're now disillusioned.

If I had a problem with your post, I'd have replied to it. It was Nybbler's "You still seem willing to prefer as allies" that pinged my "objectionable inference" radar.

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If you want to know, my last vote went to the FDP, which is the german libertarian party. Unlike the US, the FDP is not consistently on either side, but has coalitioned with both sides (currently it's in fact part of a broad left-leaning government). Myself I'm not even a straight-ticket FDP voter, I've considered the CDU (originally center right, though nowadays probably just pure centrist), due to their family-first focus which I find appealing, and the SPD (center left), since I'm in favour of broad redistributive policies if done right. My vote ultimately went to the FDP however since it's the closest thing to free-speech absolutism on the menu and because they currently appear to be the party most concerned with imo common-sense concepts such as "having a functioning economy".

Privately, at work, and online, I primarily push back against left-wing orthodoxy since it's quite common among my acquintances.

Nevertheless, and yes this is precisely what I mean, if you try to force me into a binary left-wing orthodoxy vs right-wing orthodoxy, both enforced equally, I'll choose the left everytime. The right needs to be significantly less orthodox for me to consider it.

The FDPs milquetoast false-centrism position on the coronavirus response, and it's involvement in the current German coalition as that government seeks to disrupt, harass, or even outlaw political opposition in the AFD, makes me skeptical that they'd be a good match for your claimed political goals.

Of course, the centre-right refusing to ally with the right pretty much defines the entire current German political climate, not just you in particular.

What you call milquetoast false-centrism, I'd call regular centrism. I know Corona is your hobbyhorse, but the FDP was if anything overly critical compared to the center (which suits me, since I also was on the critical side).

On the AFD, the FDP is explicitly on the record as being against the Verbotsverfahren. Privately, I've argued multiple times that the AFD has a point, and that as long as the german political establishment is unwilling to tackle the dysfunctional, barely existent border and immigration politics, they will only get stronger. This is reasonably close to the stated position of the FDP, though I suspect that being libertarians they're more in favor of open borders than I'd like, but unfortunately we don't have a topic-based voting law.

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See, this is why center-left people don't feel like allying with the right, despite our increasing frustration with the regressive far-left. I dislike their attitude of wanting to define reality and outlaw disagreement, but I just know that if the right gets into power they'll do the same, but harder.

This seems to imply that you have the following preference cascade when it comes to jailing people for speech:

  1. No one uses this power
  2. Only the left uses this power
  3. Both sides use the power
  4. Only the right uses the power

Whereas my cascade is this:

  1. No one uses this power
  2. Both sides use the power
  3. Only the right uses the power
  4. Only the left uses the power

The left defected in a major way by inventing this super weapon. For the right to now hit the "cooperate" button just ensures further defection from the left.

As a center-leftist, you seem to want the right to not actually fight against the left. This is in effect ensuring far left victory. Instead, in my opinion, you should tactically support the right when they are weakest.

Edit: I read your comments below. Maybe you are actually doing in this in which case I apologize for the misreading.

The left didn't invent this super weapon though. Assuming you are talking about governments creating laws regulating speech. It's been around for about as long as governments. Same with what we call cancel culture today, its entirely recognisable as the same behaviours in early societies around shunning, shaming and sub-judicial social sanctions.

From a leftist point of view they are repurposing an already existent super-weapon for their own purposes. I don't think they should be, but I think they are correct in the view that they are picking up a weapon that has already been used many times in the past in many different places. Including within the UK, from the Ministry of Information, to blasphemy to prior restraint to political censorship to the Profumo affair, super injunctions, saying British soldiers should go to hell getting you fined, or saying murdered police officers deserved it getting you jailed and so on.

Like it or not the UK has a long history of being much more authoritarian on what can be said than the US. Most often historically used against anti-establishment voices in general.

This isn't a new weapon. So creating it can't have been a defection. Though using it might still be of course depending on your pov.

Interesting. Can you give an example post WWII of leftists being jailed by rightists for political speech in the UK?

I am aware that the UK is not a free speech zone, but I wasn't aware of anything coming close to what's happening now. Perhaps I'm misinformed.

Jailed doesn't happen often for speech, fined and community service is more normal. In 94 LGBT protestors (including Peter Tatchell, protesting an Islamist group) were arrested for having placards, and took 2 years to be acquiited. In 98 Tatchell was found guilty under a law from 1860 outlawing protest in a church for mounting the pulpit to give a speech opposite the Archbishop of Canterbury. In 2012 Azir Ahmed was fined and sentenced to community service for speech about soldiers who should go to hell. In 2012 Barry Thew was jailed for 8 months for wearing a T-Shirt that approved of cops being murdered.

Whether you would call them leftists I don't know but, being pro LGBT, anti colonial (or neo-colonial) use of soldiers and being ACAB, seem pretty left coded.

To me these examples seem vastly different in scale and scope to what is being proposed with the new law.

8 months for a t shirt?

And note Rowlings comments are bring said not to contravene the law, so it may be narrower than you think.

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See, this is why center-left people don't feel like allying with the right, despite our increasing frustration with the regressive far-left. I dislike their attitude of wanting to define reality and outlaw disagreement, but I just know that if the right gets into power they'll do the same, but harder.

I tend to regard actually existing, present threats as more relevant than an equivalent but hypothetical threat.

I have several friends who are as frustrated with the far-left as me, but who support palestine. I disagree with them about this, but I don't thing they should lose their job over it! And nor are they just getting what they're dishing out, no, now we have to take punches from both sides.

This is quite relevant to the UK. Our existing terrorism laws are so broad that throwing the book at Palestinian protesters would lead to tens of thousands of arrests and lengthy prison sentences. To say nothing of England's not-quite-as-strict but still menacing speech laws. But this hasn't happened. When vexatious edge-case imprisonments for terrorism happen, they happen to far-right non-terrorists. Similarly, the only time the police have chosen to start cracking skulls for our current wave of Hamas-related protesting is when there were right-wing counter-protesters. And this is to say nothing of the experience in 2020-21, where lockdowns de jure criminalized all protest, but de facto only criminalized anti-lockdown protests and one specific anti-police protest. As for our counter-terrorism efforts, Prevent is more interested in browns under the bed, hallucinating right-wing extremism where it doesn't exist while doing its best to ignore Islamism.

The threat that the right will fall down a slippery slope is not as strong an argument as the observation that the left already fell down it and hit the spike pit at the bottom.

I think jeroboam's claim is that high-profile cases of leftists being jailed for hate speech would cause SJers to realise what a bad idea the laws are and undo them - the lesson of "I never thought the leopards would eat MY face".

I think that this claim is false because my read is that most SJers would react not with "oh shit this sucks, guess this gun's a bit dangerous to have available" but with "how dare they defile our gun and use it on us, we must destroy them so utterly that they can never use it again"*. But still, it seems to be coming from an assumption of Free Speech Good.

*To ironman this argument: a lot of the more-wingnut SJers believe that they have already essentially bet their lives on winning the culture war; that failure already means they literally get executed. This means that there is actual zero capability to deter them from escalation; if they win, then you can't punish them, and if they lose, (they think) they'll be killed either way, so the only thing that matters is P(win). And to be fair to them, in the main situation where I see them losing (voter base existence failure due to nuclear war) I would fully expect my prime political activity to be yelling "please no White Terror" for the next few years. But that's something of a special case due to the suddenness and the lopsidedness of power in the aftermath.

I see the far left picking fights with damn near everyone. The right, on the other hand, very rarely targets the center left- it’s usually the activist left that winds up in our crosshairs.

Right does target center-left (in US) on abortion, immigration and gun control, though.

In speech? Granted it’s a pretty major disagreement but on policy questions but actual center left rhetoric on those topics(eg ‘safe legal and rare’) doesn’t attract much ire from the right.

The most important figure of the American right spent a large portion of his winning 2016 presidential campaign demanding that his center-left opponent be locked up.

And walking back the moment he won. For which he was repaid by having actual made up charges thrown at him to try derail his political campaign.

Yes if it was up to me she shouldn't have gotten the job in the first place, but I see little indication that the right would do anything better.

I don't understand. The right would not have given her the job in the first place, thus completely comporting with your ideal. What's the problem?

I mean, presumably the fundamental reason you don't feel like allying with the right is because you're center-left. If you were center-right instead, you'd probably feel more comfortable with the right!

I don't think there's much point in speculating what a rightist censorship regime would look like right now, because the right doesn't have the power to enforce those policies on a national scale and I don't realistically see that changing any time soon. So I'm fine with just trying to push back against leftist censorship for now, and if rightist censorship ever gets out of hand we can cross that bridge when we come to it. (Of course, part of the reason why I'm comfortable saying that is because I'm apt to find the right's policies more hospitable in the first place - someone of a more leftist bent might say that current leftist censorship is really no big deal after all, but rightist censorship is a lurking omnipresent danger that we must be on constant guard against).

For what it's worth I think I'm about as close to a free speech absolutist as you can get. I don't think anyone should be punished for supporting Palestine, or questioning trans ideology, or anything else. But if I have to make a choice, I'll go with the side that is less censorious on the issues that are closer to me personally.

I consider myself primarily a pragmatist, not ideologist, so I can see myself allying with a broader right coalition in principle, if I had the impression that I can fit in under a live and let live paradigm. In particular I'm probably more center than left, so it's not even inconceivable that I'll someday identify as center-right. But nevertheless, I just do not have the impression that free speech absolutism is really something the right is dedicated on (nor the left, which is key to my frustration with them, but at least I agree with them on more other things). Currently I do push hardest against left-wing orthodoxy because it's the only realistic threat to me at the moment since the right-wing has no power whatsoever in science, but I have no illusions that life would be better under the thumb of the right.

I don't think there's much point in speculating what a rightist censorship regime would look like right now, because the right doesn't have the power to enforce those policies on a national scale and I don't realistically see that changing any time soon.

I do. It's called nuclear war. I don't, y'know, want nuclear war, but it's pretty obvious that the small-town conservatives comprise a much-larger percentage of the population immediately following one because nobody nukes farmhouses or small towns.

Assuming that nothing flips the table is potentially assuming your way out of reality.

Might I gently suggest that in case of a nuclear war the finer points of hate speech laws and college campus environments may no longer be a particularly urgent concern.

(this doubles as a reply to @Lewis2)

I quoted what I thought was wrong; the idea that the right will not have the power to do censorship any time soon.

Indeed, one would not need to worry about "wokeness at Harvard", because my whole point is that Harvard would be a smoking ruin. I would be concerned about White Terror, both immediately (in cases of supply-chain interruption and government disruption causing hungry chaos, I don't imagine that being the HR lady would do wonders for one's survival chances) and in the months and years to follow.

In a post-nuclear world, do you really think issues of free speech and wokeness at Harvard will be primary concerns? I’m pretty close to a free speech absolutist, and that is a value I hold pretty dear, but even I wouldn’t expect to care about it much at all in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear attack.

For Claudine Gay I feel like “politics” is a bit of a euphemism. It’s truthy but the politics in question is that on the lefts social oppression pyramid a black female sits at the top. If you say politics, Chris Rufo says DEI, and redneck Billy says because she’s a black female they all mean the same thing. And it does seem correct to say she was thrown out on politics. Turns out rich Jewish donors can go head to head with modern leftism and win politically when they feel they are being hurt. You can call it politics but you would be equally true to say she was fired for being antisemitic. All are politics and this case the Jewish vote not liking antisemitism was stronger than the lefts oppression wheel politics.

That's my point though. Universities should strive for academic excellence and political independence. However, it got increasingly taken over by leftist politics, got (mostly correctly, then) labeled an enemy by the right, and is correspondingly now a target. I've been a critic of this process from the start, precisely because this was the only logical outcome. Nevertheless, as far as I can see the right has always been more interested in using the same tactics of silencing and outlawing disagreements, just now for their position, than in restoring some semblance of academic excellence.

Nevertheless, as far as I can see the right has always been more interested in using the same tactics of silencing and outlawing disagreements, just now for their position, than in restoring some semblance of academic excellence.

This is probably just the nature of politics as a tribal competition. If your team controls a set of institutions or part of society it's in your political interest to use that power to suppress dissenting voices and advance your agenda, which is what most people care about. I think the best argument that increasing right wing representation in universities will benefit free speech is less that right wingers care more about free speech in principle and more that by establishing a rough balance between political factions neither side will be able to completely stifle the ideas and opinions of the other (or get professors fired if they don't like their research etc).

The other side to it is that the right wanted Gay fired precisely because she was a DEI hire and the right doesn’t want DEI.

I'm with her on this, these guys are no more trans than I am, they suddenly find it very convenient to finally 'come out' as women when they're facing jail time for violent rape and for abduction of a minor.

Be living and identifying as a woman for a couple of years before you're convicted of violent crime if you don't want to be misgendered, oh the horror!

I'm with her

I got triggered

Gasp! Have you just micro-aggressed me? 😁

either the govt won't charge her or she'll win in court.

Why would she win? If she violates the law and is convicted there is no higher court to appeal to, there is no British constitution. She could ‘flee’ to England, which would lead to an interesting legal situation (any British police force can make arrests anywhere in the UK, so Police Scotland could in theory arrest her in, say, London and drive her back to Edinburgh, but they would be reluctant to do so for political reasons). But the only real way for her to win if charged would be for the UK Parliament to pass a law explicitly reversing the Scottish Parliament’s bill. In an election year that is unlikely, and it will be even more so after Labour win in October.

If she violates the law and is convicted there is no higher court to appeal to, there is no British constitution.

Actually I’m curious about this. If she loses at the trial court level in Scotland, is there no Scottish court of appeals?

Regardless of the answer to the previous question, if she were to lose both the initial trial and any available appeals within Scotland, could she appeal to an appellate court of the United Kingdom? If not, we are a heartbeat away from nullification being fair game for any devolved legislature within the UK, and bizarrely, the ECHR would have more power than “domestic” British courts, at least in Scotland!

In general the interplay of devolution and the judiciary is fascinating. It’s like the UK is cherry-picking bits and pieces of US- or Canadian-style federalism without a real guiding principle of who exactly has authority over what. No British constitution indeed.

It’s like the UK is cherry-picking bits and pieces of US- or Canadian-style federalism without a real guiding principle of who exactly has authority over what.

That's Tony Blair for you. Same reason the UK now has a "Supreme Court" despite doing just fine without one for centuries.

Technically the Supreme Court of the UK (mostly just England, Wales and NI) has ultimate jurisdiction over the Scottish Courts, but cases are vanishingly rare and generally relate to ‘devolution issues’ where controversy over the Scottish government’s authority lies.

Devolution grants the Scottish government explicit control of crime, culture, “anti-social behaviour” and justice as interpreted broadly. Excepted matters are limited to constitutional issues, defense, immigration, foreign policy, trade policy, some other national issues and so on.

Of course, the UK has absolute parliamentary sovereignty, a majority of 1 would be enough to impose any policy on Scotland for any reason at any time without any recourse (provided it was written in the correct way). But parliament generally accepts the Scottish government’s control of most of the criminal law. The UK vetoed self-ID for trans people but it was a very specific thing based off them modifying (rather than merely building on top of) some equality legislation.

In general the interplay of devolution and the judiciary is fascinating. It’s like the UK is cherry-picking bits and pieces of US- or Canadian-style federalism without a real guiding principle of who exactly has authority over what. No British constitution indeed.

Not really, no - that England and Scotland have had separate legal systems despite being part of the same sovereign state predates US-style federalism - the Act of Union was in 1707, and it explicitly left Scots law unchanged. The fact that Scotland had its own legal system but no legislature pre-devolution was one of the constitutional weirdnesses that so offended Tony Blair.

Technically the Supreme Court of the UK (mostly just England, Wales and NI) has ultimate jurisdiction over the Scottish Courts, but cases are vanishingly rare and generally relate to ‘devolution issues’ where controversy over the Scottish government’s authority lies.

The Supreme Court of the UK can't hear direct appeals of Scottish criminal cases (this was part of the deal made in 1707), but you are right that this one could be litigated as a devolution issue - the powers of the Scottish Parliament (like every other UK body with delegated legislative powers) are limited by the Human Rights Act, so if the Scottish law JK Rowling was being prosecuted under violated a ECHR right, it would be ultra vires. If the bad actor here was activist Scottish judges rather than politicians and she was prosecuted under Scots common law then there would be no appeal to a UK court, only to the ECtHR in Strasbourg.

That's Tony Blair for you. Same reason the UK now has a "Supreme Court" despite doing just fine without one for centuries.

"Doing fine without one" is misleading. The UK Supreme Court doesn't have a materially different role to the old Judicial Committee of the House of Lords (i.e. the Law Lords) - it just meets in a different building. I agree with you about Tony Blair feeling the need to rationalise things when there was no practical benefit.

If she violates the law and is convicted there is no higher court to appeal to

ECHR

She could file a complaint with the ECHR, and under Scottish law the government would have to consider their decision, sure. But it would be as meaningless as appealing to the King for a royal pardon (and about as likely).

Hate speech (which the ECHR admits is vaguely or broadly defined) or any speech that runs contrary to the “fundamental principles” of the ECHR is explicitly considered exempt from Article 10 (free speech) protection.

Not only that, but the ECHR has a history of rejecting challenges to hate speech convictions, especially those relating to LGBT issues. For example, here’s the ECHR affirming the conviction of an Icelandic national for calling LGBTQ people “sexual deviants”.

Rowling would not win her case there, an appeal to the ECHR would be appealing to a body around which the Scottish government essentially bases much of its social policy.

I'm not sure how the case would go, the point was that she could still appeal to it.

Part of the court challenge/conviction proceedings would undoubtedly be a question of whether the law as written is constitutional or not, and that's where it's likely to be quashed.

This brings its own drama though as it's not the first time the UK Supreme Court has quashed legislation enacted in Scotland for being unconstitutional - see: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-67648200

As an ignorance American I read that article and am confused. They don't have a Constitution, so how is anything unconstitutional?

The Supreme Court of the UK is essentially a government department that rules on whether policies, laws or sentences violate primary legislation passed by parliament. The House of Commons itself can overrule or abolish the Supreme Court at any time, convict or free anyone of anything, or do anything else by simple majority because it is singularly sovereign. Technically the Commons can be limited by the Lords and the King, but the lords have been neutered for a century and the monarchy had its last vestiges of genuine influence removed by the early Victorian era.

“Constitutional” therefore is a kind of legalese thing where a law or policy gets struck down because it conflicts with previous law passed by parliament. The Constitution is, to some extent, whatever parliament in Westminster passes, plus some procedural stuff. Of course the government can just ‘make it legal’ with a majority vote, but if they don’t explicitly override or repeal the previous legislation then they need to go back and do so.

In Scotland’s case constitutional questions related to devolution involve stuff from the original 1707 acts of union, huge amounts of precedent in the following centuries and the official devolution enacted by Tony Blair. The Supreme Court ruling Scottish law as unconstitutional is essentially the government (and thus parliament) saying that the law itself violates UK law.

The thing is that the UK’s protections for free speech in the law are pretty limited, largely either longstanding precedent or just incorporating the ECHR (which has carve outs for speech rights) into law. It’s not clear, therefore, that this Scottish law is ‘unconstitutional’.

The UK likes to say it has an "unwritten constitution". There have been calls for a formal constitution, but in practice there is a 'constitution', it's just not all collected in one document:

But the UK does have a constitution, to be found in leading statutes, conventions, judicial decisions, and treaties. Examples of constitutional statutes include the Bill of Rights 1689, Acts of Union 1707 and 1800, Act of Settlement 1701, Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949, Human Rights Act 1998, Scotland Act, Northern Ireland Act and Government of Wales Act 1998. Examples of conventions include that the monarch acts on ministerial advice; that the Prime Minister sits in the House of Commons; that the Queen appoints as Prime Minister the person most likely to command the confidence of the House of Commons. These and other conventions have themselves been codified in documents such as the Cabinet Manual.

'Rich person flaunts the law, confident they will never face consequences' is not a very unique or interesting story. It's certainly not 'brave' or anything... if no one rich or powerful is going to face any legal consequences of any kind over Epstein connections, you can be damn sure she's not going to pay for anything relating to this, either.

But I don't see why conservatives would think this is supporting any of their claims? The conservative claim has always been that they are oppressed for their views, living in constant danger of being cancelled or arrested by the woke mobs and captured government institutions.

Someone blatantly pointing out in the most public way possible that this has always been a fiction, that governments may make figleaf declarations about opposing these types of slander but will never actually enforce them because they actually are inherently conservative entities that are on the side of the privileged and the default, that anyone can make the most vile comments they want and always could without fearing legal reprisals, that the whole Petersonian rhetoric about free speech crackdowns was and always has been a charade... why is that good for her side, exactly?

I mean, I guess the truth is that I'm being too simplistic in considering it one 'side'.

The Peterson/'free speech absolutist' wing points at 'cancel culture' and the specter of government censorship as a general bludgeon against the left, but they're actually committed to a much more broad model of conservatism and just using that to stir up their base.

Whereas people like Rowling aren't fully committed to that broader conservative project, they just want to slander and eradicate trans people, and they're annoyed that people like Peterson have scared some of their supporters into thinking they might ever face consequences for spewing vile slander 24/7, thereby mildly restricting the spigot.

So while the two have been default bedfellows up till now, it seems like JK has recognized the conflict of interest there and is ready to abandon the pretense of being oppressed in favor of proving that it's safe for everyone to start spewing as publicly and loudly as possible.

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Sometimes I think you just read posts, decide who's expressing the "conservative" (bad) position, and reflexively argue the opposite.

Whereas people like Rowling aren't fully committed to that broader conservative project, they just want to slander and eradicate trans people

All right, you have hit one of my pet peeves, because I hear this shit all the time from my nice progressive friends. It's just repeated ad infinitum, as an article of faith, as a proven, established fac, that JK Rowling "hates trans people," that she "wants to slander and eradicate them," etc. In unrelated hobby spaces, I've seen it argued unironically, in all seriousness, that she literally advocates "genocide of trans people" (and also that Harry Potter goblins were intended to be metaphors for Jews because she also hates Jews).

I have been a Rowling fan since before she got on Twitter. Yes, I actually like the Harry Potter books (despite being way too old for them). I've read all her Cormoran Strike novels, and even The Casual Vacancy. I follow her on Twitter and I read her blog. So I know whereof I speak, though I won't claim I can remember every single thing she's ever said in public.

I have never seen her say anything that approaches "hate" or "wanting to eradicate" trans people. She has said the opposite many times. She is a standard issue very liberal second wave feminist.

What does she say?

  1. She does not believe trans women are women.
  2. Therefore she does not believe trans women should play in women's sports or go to women's prisons.
  3. She believes trans people should be free to live their lives in peace without harassment.
  4. Some so-called trans women (like the sexual predators she highlighted) are bad faith opportunists claiming trans status for political purposes or because they would prefer to go to women's prison rather than men's prison.

I think all of these points are reasonable, and even if you disagree with some or all of them, none of them resemble anything like "hate" or wishing for a "trans genocide."

I would love it if you could point to me any public statement of hers, or even a reliable second-hand account of some alleged private statement, in which she's said anything that resembles what you are claiming.

I think you're correct. From everything I've ever seen of her, I don't think she's anti-trans, I think she's anti-men. That then cascades over into some anti-trans positions because she hates men, especially those who she deems as a threat to women, and she believes that trans women are actually just men who are infringing on female space.

But this is all a moot point, because in the court of public opinion, if you don't believe any person that they're trans, or if you say anything even remotely construable as questioning trans ideology, then you "hate trans people". And as you say, this simply becomes repeated until the point that no one questions it, and it becomes "truthy" (in the sense that Colbert used to talk about "truthiness").

I'm standing by my commentary on this:

Literally nothing Rowling has actually said or done indicates she believes anything other than bog-standard third-wave feminism, applied to the current social environment. The current 'threat' to women, as she sees it, are those who are eroding the biological definition of 'female' and thus allowing biological males to invade women's spaces and likewise pose an emotional or physical danger, to the detriment of biological women.

It is not on any level a surprise that an ardent feminist who maintains a stricter definition of 'female' would see this as a bad thing, and speak out against it.

It does not require her to have a single bit of animus towards trans people as a class, or any individual trans person.

It just requires her to continue applying the same pro-female beliefs she's applied for decades. Nothing is inconsistent or hypocritical there.

The version of her words that is being presented by the activists who hate her is leading me to conclude they are not convinced that she's a danger to trans people, but rather she's an impediment to their broader social agenda who must be removed at all costs, and they are increasingly distressed and annoyed that she will not cowtow and has the platform and wealth to fight back.

i.e. they want to squish a dissident and every year that passes where she resists them makes them ever more determined to do so, and thus employ ever more aggressive methods.

Sometimes I think you just read posts, decide who's expressing the "conservative" (bad) position, and reflexively argue the opposite.

Well, someone has to, if this forum is going to be anything other than a complete echo chamber.

Also 'reflexively' and 'intentionally, as an intellectual exercise' are different things.

that JK Rowling "hates trans people," that she "wants to slander and eradicate them," etc.

First of all, there's a reason I said 'People like Rowling' and 'they' in that sentence. The whole post, if you read the rest of the post and not just that sentence, is about different factions on the conservative side of this issue, and the differences and disagreements between them.

While it's mildly true that Rowling plays a careful balancing act with her public image by not being too extreme in her own personal rhetoric, she is very much a part of a faction that does use rhetoric of that level of extremity (including onstage at national political conventions), and she very much supports and promotes (through valuable social media links and personal defenses and endorsements on her hugely popular accounts, through partnerships and collaborations, and by selectively endorsing and promoting the rhetoric of) people who famously do express those extreme views.

One could argue that in the early days of her involvement with this topic, she was just a useful idiot who didn't realize how extreme the people who were being nice to her and defending her were while other groups were attacking her for her views, and that she instinctively supported the people who were nice to her without realizing how extreme they were when not talking to her.

But this many years later, that's not a tenable position. She's not that dumb, at this point she understand who her bedfellows are and what their political program is about, and wholeheartedly assists them at every turn. At this point, the fact that she maintains a veneer of respectability in her own public statements is more cowardice and manipulation and intentional pipeline-creation than it is a sign of a mild position.

And, like, come on, you're obviously underselling what she says herself and what the implications of that are. She wrote a whole book about a serial killer pretending to be trans to prey on women in women's spaces. She says that she is glad trans didn't exist when she was growing up because she might have been socially infected with it and it would have ruined her life. Etc.

These types of things are the blood libel of the trans debate; they are all part of building a worldview in which trans women are just perverted men intentionally trying to prey on women and destroy them, and where trans identity is merely an infectious meme that needs to be stamped out before it takes more lives.

The fact that, after establishing that worldview and narrative, you don't vocally take the next step of saying 'and therefore we need to eradicate transgender people from the culture as a whole' is sort of irrelevant. You've spent decades carefully constructive a narrative in which that is the obvious and inescapable conclusion, if you convince people of your narrative then they will come to that conclusion without you needing to say it, that was the whole point of the narrative.

Anyway, if you want me to go find you links on all the Breadtube Rowling videos so you can comb through them for receipts, I guess I can. But I've done that a lot and people mostly say 'I'm not going to watch that'. Names to search would be contrapoints, shaun, philosophy tube, I don't remember probably lindsey ellis or big joel or someone talked about it, etc. Honestly I bet if you google 'JK Rowling anti-trans statements' you will find a comprehensive list pretty quickly, if you actually want to know it doesn't take me to do the googling for you.

  • -29

You know man, you get reported a lot and even the other mods have a hard time with you because a lot of people think you are and always have been a bad faith borderline troll who just says things to get under people's skin, without regard to truth or accuracy. And I have always leaned towards leniency, maybe because I'm a quokka and too willing to assume people actually believe the things they are saying and are sincere in their argumentation, even if they're really annoying. But I have frequently argued against banning you because it's too easy to find things you say that are moddable when most of the forum is trying to get you banned.

I guess this is the point where I say "Goddamn, I get it now," because frankly, you are either being astoundingly clueless or just flat out disingenuous.

(Let me also be clear, this response is with my mod hat off, and I am not threatening you with mod action for the above post, because I found it merely aggravating, but not in violation of any rules.)

You have actually spouted a ton of bullshit about something I know a lot about (for my sins), so let's go through this.

Well, someone has to, if this forum is going to be anything other than a complete echo chamber.

Also 'reflexively' and 'intentionally, as an intellectual exercise' are different things.

Just for starters, and not strictly on topic, we get accused of being an echo chamber so often it's tiresome. You are right that you're an outlier here, as an unabashed leftist. You are definitely not some unique snowflake with views unrepresented by anyone else. And "intentionally taking a contrarian position" is pretty close to trolling. I mean, if you really believe the things you are saying, fine, argue them, but if you're just doing it as an "intellectual exercise" (or to "own the righties") you should know that most people do not like feeling like they are being treated as NPCs in your roleplaying game, and this is perhaps a reason why you generate so much resentment and hostility.

First of all, there's a reason I said 'People like Rowling' and 'they' in that sentence. The whole post, if you read the rest of the post and not just that sentence, is about different factions on the conservative side of this issue, and the differences and disagreements between them.

Okay, that's a hell of a waffle. If you say "People like Rowling want to eradicate trans people" and I rebut that by pointing out that Rowling emphatically does not want to eradicate trans people, it is not a credible defense that "You meant people like Rowling." I mean, I could say "People like guesswho want to literally guillotine landlords, redistribute the property of all rich people, and disenfranchise whites." (Because some of your fellow travelers certainly do.) If you objected, reasonably, that you want no such thing and have never endorsed that, I don't think you would be satisfied if I said "Well, there's a reason I said 'people like you.'" You'd find it disingenuous and evasive. We are talking about JK Rowling, not everyone who has ever expressed an anti-trans sentiment.

While it's mildly true that Rowling plays a careful balancing act with her public image by not being too extreme in her own personal rhetoric,

It is not "mildly true," it is absolutely true. Her personal rhetoric is not "extreme" by any reasonable definition. Again I will ask you to cite an example if you think otherwise.

she is very much a part of a faction that does use rhetoric of that level of extremity (including onstage at national political conventions),

What do you mean "part of a faction"? If you mean "Everyone who is gender-critical/trans-skeptical," well, that's a hell of an umbrella and she would reasonably reject it, as would I. I have in fact seen absurd allegations online that she literally donated to the Texas GOP (!!) just because they are anti-trans, an accusation that makes no sense on multiple levels. If you're trying to lump JK Rowling with the Texas GOP just because they are both critical of trans activists, your idea of what constitutes a "faction" is just frankly ridiculous. I believe IQ is a real measurable thing and there are racial differences in IQ; by this standard, I guess you would put me in the same "faction" as white nationalists and holocaust deniers, because they also believe that.

and she very much supports and promotes (through valuable social media links and personal defenses and endorsements on her hugely popular accounts, through partnerships and collaborations, and by selectively endorsing and promoting the rhetoric of) people who famously do express those extreme views.

Show me. Show me her endorsing someone who literally wants to "eradicate trans people." The most extreme example I can think of coming anywhere close to this is Maya Forstater, a gender critical feminist whom Rowling has famously supported. Forstater's public statements are mostly pretty mild (you could more legitimately accuse her of carefully curating her public statements than Rowling) while she has occasionally, in public and private, gone full mask-off with rather derogatory language about trans people. But even Forstater has never, to my knowledge, said anything remotely close to advocating violence or eradication of trans people. It's probably fair to say she thinks they are all perverted AGP men. Maybe Rowling actually believes that herself in private too. She famously got in a spat with Ben Shapiro because Shapiro endorsed her trans-critical views and Rowling was quick to point out that mildly agreeing about one thing does not make them allies.

I don't think you can actually show Rowling endorsing the views you claim she does. Even with this wide net you are casting where anything she has ever touched, by transitive property, is endorsing any statement by anyone else who is touched by it.

But this many years later, that's not a tenable position. She's not that dumb, at this point she understand who her bedfellows are and what their political program is about, and wholeheartedly assists them at every turn. At this point, the fact that she maintains a veneer of respectability in her own public statements is more cowardice and manipulation and intentional pipeline-creation than it is a sign of a mild position.

Again: show me. No, one person on the Internet who says something nasty about trans people who is also a Harry Potter fan does not by transitive property mean Rowling is endorsing anything they say. This is the kind of nutpicking that LibsOfTikTOk does. LoTT regularly finds some trans person being accused of rape or child abuse and blasts it to the Internet, the implication clearly being that this is typical trans behavior. I'm pretty sure you don't appreciate LoTT's tactics and would consider it offensive and disingenuous for them to say "But these are their bedfellows, this is the faction they are part of." So no, you don't get to do this either.

And, like, come on, you're obviously underselling what she says herself and what the implications of that are.

This is not obvious to me, as I think I am very accurately describing what she says herself, and the "implications" seem to be irrational projections you have made up.

She wrote a whole book about a serial killer pretending to be trans to prey on women in women's spaces.

You are referring to Troubled Blood and you are taking her most hysterical critics' claims about the book at face value, most of whom never read it and just repeated what other people said in a game of Chinese whispers, until it became "a book about a serial killer pretending to be trans." That's not a remotely accurate description. I can post a whole damn book review if you want, but a serial killer who in one scene disguises himself as a woman is not something any reasonable person would read as some sort of metaphor for trans people. The killer never "pretends to be trans" (I don't think trans people are ever even mentioned in the book, but I can't remember for certain) he does not "try to get into women's spaces," and the cross-dressing scene is a single incident that's there as a red herring.

My point here is that you haven't read Troubled Blood, and you're just repeating the bad faith accusations of Rowling's haters who also haven't read it, and this is how you arrive at nonsense claims about Rowling being a literal fascist who wants to genocide trans people and Jews. (I mean, you didn't say that. But people "like" you have! You know, people in your faction.)

She says that she is glad trans didn't exist when she was growing up because she might have been socially infected with it and it would have ruined her life. Etc.

This is possibly true, and while you may find it offensive, the belief that trans social contagion is a real phenomenon and that many troubled girls today are embracing trans identity as a way of escaping what they perceive to be an unpleasant existence as a female, and that other kids adopt it because it's "cool" and trendy and rebellious, is one I share. So does that mean I also want to eradicate trans people?

These types of things are the blood libel of the trans debate; they are all part of building a worldview in which trans women are just perverted men intentionally trying to prey on women and destroy them, and where trans identity is merely an infectious meme that needs to be stamped out before it takes more lives.

"Blood libel" would be something that's wholly untrue (like "Jews drink the blood of Christian children").

My personal belief is that the "blood libel," as you put it, does accurately describe a significant number of trans women today, especially the ones who are going out of their way to be public activists. I also believe many trans women are sincere in their gender dysphoria, and even if not, they are sincere in wanting to live as women and be left alone, and they should be allowed to. I can't speak for JK Rowling but I am pretty sure that's reasonably close to her position. This is a far cry from spreading "blood libel" because you believe trans people should be "stamped out."

The fact that, after establishing that worldview and narrative, you don't vocally take the next step of saying 'and therefore we need to eradicate transgender people from the culture as a whole' is sort of irrelevant. You've spent decades carefully constructive a narrative in which that is the obvious and inescapable conclusion, if you convince people of your narrative then they will come to that conclusion without you needing to say it, that was the whole point of the narrative.

Nothing I or JK Rowling have said (that trans women are not the same as women, that they shouldn't be in women's prisons, that social contagion is real, that children probably shouldn't be put on puberty blockers and SRS) leads to the "obvious and inescapable" conclusion that we need to eradicate transgender people.

Anyway, if you want me to go find you links on all the Breadtube Rowling videos so you can comb through them for receipts, I guess I can.

Yes, I do want you to do that. But before you go to the trouble, let me be clear that the "receipts" I want are JK Rowling actually saying or endorsing any of the things you've claimed. Not shaun or contrapoints (whom I've watched) constructing a fallacious argument like you have that her statements "imply" or "inevitably lead" to this, not guilt-by-association where someone whose tweet she once Liked might have said something extreme. You seem to think I am unfamiliar with the charges against her and why trans activists claim these things about her. I am not.

Honestly I bet if you google 'JK Rowling anti-trans statements' you will find a comprehensive list pretty quickly, if you actually want to know it doesn't take me to do the googling for you.

Sure, let's play!

Top result: A Complete Breakdown of the J.K. Rowling Transgender-Comments Controversy.

Reading through that post, I see a rehash of all the statements I am already familiar with (from her snarky "people who menstruate" tweet to her long "TERF Wars" blog post in 2020). And this example of her "hatred of trans people":

The idea that women like me, who’ve been empathetic to trans people for decades, feeling kinship because they’re vulnerable in the same way as women—i.e., to male violence—‘hate’ trans people because they think sex is real and has lived consequences—is a nonsense.”

She continued, “I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them. I’d march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans. At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it’s hateful to say so.”

Most of the other links are similar collections of snarky tweets and her trying to defend her views while emphasizing the same things I have said above.

GLAAD's summary is predictably uncharitable, if not outright dishonest. They repeat your bad faith summary of her books, and say things like:

07.05.2020—Tweeted false information equating trans-related medical care with mental health care, writing: “Many health professionals are concerned that young people struggling with their mental health are being shunted towards hormones and surgery when this may not be in their best interests.” In the same thread, falsely equated transitioning with a “new form of conversion therapy for young gay people” and suggested that gender transition is “driven by homophobia.”

So "Many health professionals are concerned that young people struggling with their mental health are being shunted towards hormones and surgery when this may not be in their best interests" is false information? Or just something you and GLAAD disagree with? Likewise, you may disagree with her about trans social contagion and homophobia, but that does not substantiate the extremism you claim is so obvious and well-documented. GLAAD's page is full of "Falsely claimed" accusations, followed by a tweet by Rowling simply asserting something they disagree with (but nothing that resembles "blood libel").

The Cut's Here's what J.K. Rowling has Actually Said About Trans People is mostly just repeating everything GLAAD said, and statements like:

No, she simply doesn’t seem to believe that trans women really are women — an attitude that denies the validity of their existence.

I mean, that's just describing how their viewpoints differ. Where is the extreme rhetoric, the "inevitable conclusion" that trans people must be eradicated?

I scrolled through a lot more results, and got the same thing. Nowhere did I find any quote of Rowling actually saying anything more extreme than what I've mentioned, implying it, or endorsing it.

So, got anything else? Bring it.

This is possibly true, and while you may find it offensive, the belief that trans social contagion is a real phenomenon and that many troubled girls today are embracing trans identity as a way of escaping what they perceive to be an unpleasant existence as a female, and that other kids adopt it because it's "cool" and trendy and rebellious, is one I share.

I mean, when I was eleven and going through unexpected puberty (it took my mother by surprise because she thought it would happen later, as it did for her, so she had never had any kind of The Talk with me to explain it and prepare me for it), I was very distressed by the weird changes my body was going through. I hadn't consented to any of this! I didn't like it! Why couldn't my body stay the same as it had been?

And yeah, I was thinking "boys have it easier" because suddenly there seemed to be a lot of restrictions on what I could now do and couldn't do that hadn't been there before, and a lot of the explanations I got were along the lines of "because you're becoming a young woman now".

I also had interests that differed from the run of the other girls in school, and looking back with hindsight, the family tendency to autism spectrum behaviour may have influenced me there as regards social development, inclination to science, etc. and 'male-brained' interests.

If trans ideology had been in full flow in schools back then, I do honestly think there's a good chance some over-enthusiastic supporter, in all good faith, would have steered me along the "consider that maybe you're a trans boy" path.

EDIT: I was never a 'girly-girl' and part of what annoys me about trans narratives, even as I can see that they're grappling with how to express their feelings in childhood and this is an easy way to signal their departure from expected gender norms, is that they're are all about "well I never liked typical boy things, I was always more interested in playing with the toy kitchen and pink and fluffy bunnies" stuff. That annoys me since "if that is what makes you a girl, then I was never a girl, because I had and have no interest in pink fluffiness". But I'm pretty darn sure I am a girl. The worst part of the whole trans debate has been the slamming down of rigid gender roles once more, this time as arbiters of "how do I know if my kid is a boy or a girl?", when I thought we'd finally gotten over the "pink for girls, blue for boys, the woman is the nurse, the man is the doctor" shit.

If you say "People like Rowling want to eradicate trans people"

Even simpler than that.

"People like Rowling want to eradicate trans people". That means Rowling is like people who want to eradicate trans people. That means Rowling wants to eradicate trans people. After all, if these people are like Rowling, then it means Rowling is like these people. And what do these people want to do? Then what does that mean Rowling wants to do? Yes, that's right! Eradicate trans people!

I can appreciate nifty rhetorical hair-splitting as much as anyone, but this is a bit disingenuous. Suppose I said something like "I never said Jews were money-grubbers, I said Jews were like people who are money-grubbers", would I get away with that?

Of all of the comments that @guesswho can respond to, I really want them to respond to this. I'm fairly ambivalent about the whole JKR thing but I'm getting convinced that the @Amadan position is closest to the truth and this post in particular needs to be dealt with to swing me back.

It's in my queue, but I've gotten like 90 replies since yesterday and the long ones take a long time to do justice (and I do have a job and a family). At this point most comments aren't going to get a reply, realistically.

I will say that 'carefully litigating every word JK Rowling has ever said to determine whether it is about X of just mentions X' is exhausting and frustrating.

Frustrating because it's really super irrelevant to my larger point about the rhetoric and factions involved here, which is the relevant thing I actually care about, which few have bothered to respond to (and which I'm trying to prioritize responses to). So many of the comments are nit-picking about whether I'm being 'fair' to Rowling, and I frankly don't give a fuck about one person like this and what they did or didn't say, the interesting issues are the larger factional concerns.

I'd be happy to just say 'sure, whatever, Rowling is a perfect angel who has never done anything wrong, if that's what you want to believe; can we please talk about my actual point though' if I thought that would get anywhere, but I doubt it.

  • -29

Oh no, you don't get to duck out that easily.

You started this, and you started it with multiple, very specific, very damning statements about a very specific person (JK Rowling) which you claimed were obviously and provably true. And when I took on the challenge and went down the list of every one of your accusations, you suddenly play "Oh well, that wasn't my point, I don't actually care about Rowling"?

No, dude. You clearly do care about Rowling.

I will say that 'carefully litigating every word JK Rowling has ever said to determine whether it is about X of just mentions X' is exhausting and frustrating.

If we're talking about JK Rowling (and we are), it actually matters what she actually said. I mean, if you were accusing me of being a Holocaust-denying white nationalist who also thinks we should abolish the age of consent, and you based that on my saying some things that Holocaust-denying white nationalists who also think we should abolish the age of consent say, you can bet I would care a lot about carefully litigating the words I actually said, because if you are accusing someone of holding reprehensible views, it matters whether they actually said the things you are accusing them of! You don't get to just accuse them of believing all the things the very worst people in their "faction" say!

Frustrating because it's really super irrelevant to my larger point about the rhetoric and factions involved here, which is the relevant thing I actually care about, which few have bothered to respond to

I directly addressed your entire "This is what her faction believes and this is what her rhetoric inevitably leads to" argument! If you disagree with me, go ahead and point out where my reasoning is flawed, but don't claim I didn't bother to respond to it!

I find it frustrating that you make specific, provably untrue statements (for example, repeating bullshit about how Troubled Blood is about a serial killer who pretends to be trans and tries to sneak into women's spaces, as evidence of how much Rowling hates trans people) and when this is contradicted by people who actually read the book, you don't even acknowledge it, you're just all "Oh, I don't actually care about Rowling."

So many of the comments are nit-picking about whether I'm being 'fair' to Rowling, and I frankly don't give a fuck about one person like this and what they did or didn't say, the interesting issues are the larger factional concerns

I mean, we can all agree Rowling has FU money and immense popularity and can't actually be harmed by anyone saying mean and dishonest things about her. The reason we're arguing about Rowling is because people much less wealthy and powerful than her who say similar things (the people in her "faction" as you keep calling it) are suffering tangible harms, harms which you apparently believe are justified. So yeah, if you claim that JK Rowling wants a trans genocide, or that her "faction" does and she's abetting it, then that has implications for people who are not JK Rowling and that's why you are being challenged, not because everyone here is a JK Rowling fan.

I'd be happy to just say 'sure, whatever, Rowling is a perfect angel who has never done anything wrong, if that's what you want to believe;

Transparent straw man. Stop this kind of disingenuous whining.

can we please talk about my actual point though'

Yes, let's. It's your turn.

Look, I do appreciate you arguing on here with us and you're getting hammered with a lot of negative replies, but to be extremely basic about it: you started it.

You're the one said "Rowling said x, y and z that is anti-trans". You then quoted things which are inaccurate and known to be inaccurate. When pushed, you then tried logic-chopping with "I didn't say Blorgs are cannibals, I said people like Blorgs are cannibals" which is one of those differences that make no difference; if a cannibal is like a Blorg, then a Blorg is like a cannibal, so you are in effect saying Blorgs are cannibals.

Then you went with the blood libel bit, which whoa Nelly.

And now you're pulling "anyways it doesn't matter if she said it or not". Well if it doesn't matter, then why did you bring it up in the first place?????

We're pedants and nit-pickers and obsessives on here, if you say "It is known that beeps are boops", you are going to get nine million names of "how is it known and by whom is it known and where is it known and how is it that a beep may be a boop?" in response.

(and I do have a job and a family)

Fascinating how you have seemingly limitless time to expound your opinions, but the second you get any pushback on them, all of a sudden you're far too busy to spend time on something as trivial as defending the opinions and factual statements you voluntarily chose to make. And it's not even the first time you've fallen back on this excuse: "I've responded to about 20 long replies in the last 6 hours, and I also have a job and stuff."

Anything to avoid taking the L and admitting "you know what, maybe my synopsis of this novel I haven't read didn't accurately describe the plot and characters, mea culpa" or "actually I really was misinformed about the state of the evidence regarding the structure of trans women's brains, thanks for disabusing me of my misconceptions" or "oh, people actually have been criminally convicted for misgendering, thanks for pointing it out".

I frankly don't give a fuck about one person like this and what they did or didn't say

If you didn't give a fuck about Rowling and what she did and didn't say, it sure is weird to dedicate no less than six entire paragraphs in this comment and two in this one to her opinions and the motivations behind them. Like seriously, this comment is 650 words long, and 480 of those words are specifically about Rowling and hardly mention the broader gender-critical movement. Then multiple people point out that several of the factual assertions you're making in these comments are provably, demonstrably false, and you change the subject: "it doesn't matter what Rowling said, I'm talking about the broader faction - the point I was making wasn't even about Rowling actually". This is the same kind of facile goalpost-moving as "it doesn't matter if this specific hate crime was staged, it started a conversation!"

nit-picking about whether I'm being 'fair' to Rowling

Is that a nitpick?

You started out by complaining about slander. Was that because you think slander is a serious, non-nit-picky thing, or was that just rhetoric targeting all the people here who do care about slander? Hopefully it's the former, but then since making untrue accusations of Rowling is slander, shouldn't you be horribly upset by even the possibility that you've committed it unwittingly?

Amping up the level of seriousness, you continued by complaining about blood libel ... but let's go back and look, and ah, there it is, "eradicate trans people". Either Rowling does want to eradicate trans people, or you personally have just committed blood libel. It is in fact a very important thing to determine whether you have done something so horrible or not - not a nit-pick! If it still feels like a nit-pick, which does seem like a potential consequence of the attitude of "frankly don't give a fuck about one person like this", that's not an excuse for evil, that's a confession of evil, but whether or not you strongly care about blood libel, you really shouldn't be surprised when other people do.

Even if you haven't committed blood libel, if there's some hot mic recording where we can hear Rowling talking about how she totally wants to murder all the transpeople, it would still be wrong to make the accusation against her in the awful, no-evidence-except-false-evidence way you have. The Boy Crying Wolf is not actually acting to protect people from the wolf! The next time your readers see such an accusation, even if the new accuser provides better evidence behind it, you've made "dive into the evidence, that won't be a waste of time" a slightly less safe conclusion for them to reach.

sure, whatever, Rowling is a perfect angel who has never done anything wrong, if that's what you want to believe

Has anyone actually said they believe that, or are you now putting words in their mouths too? Wasn't this a big part of the vicious cycle that eventually got Hlynka permabanned? When you find that making up strawmen is the only way to feel like you've brought your interlocutors down to your level then it's time to consider climbing up to theirs instead.

if I thought that would get anywhere

This is another confession, though framed as an attempt to blame the victims. You aren't supposed to avoid telling falsehoods because you expect to gain something out of unnatural self-restraint, you are supposed to avoid telling falsehoods because avoidance of evil is worthwhile for its own sake! And then, if you are incapable of that, the blame is entirely on you, not on any people who might not have rewarded you as much as you would have wanted otherwise.

the interesting issues are the larger factional concerns.

There's a naive-utilitarian inside me that's tempted to agree! On the meta level alone, this thread is a fascinating microcosm of them, even! We can see how factionalism gets exacerbated by outgroup homogeneity bias. We can see how our faction's noble goals get used to excuse harsh tactics while our enemies' dirty tactics reinforce our disdain for their hypocritiical goals. And when we zoom out far enough, we come to perhaps the most interesting question: isn't it at least sometimes okay if we "don't give a fuck about one person"? If with such an eagles-eye-level view we learn something helpful to a hundred other people then we're still ninety-nine in the black, and that sounds like a win, doesn't it?

And yet ... do we actually have an eagles-eye-level view, just because we'd really like to have one? Here you are, purportedly trying to get people to care about slander and blood libel, while you're in the middle of committing it and trying to make excuses for it. You don't help even the victims you do care about by trying to normalize the crimes being committed against them! Letting this kind of rhetoric slide wouldn't clearly be sacrificing one person's reputation to save 100 others, it might just as likely be sacrificing one person's reputation to harm 100 others!

Since we're this bad at trying to figure out all the second-order and third-order effects that a non-naive utilitarian would need to consider, maybe it's just time to back off and look at virtue ethics instead?

There's a quote from Dostoyevsky dialogue that comes to mind here:

"...the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons. In my dreams, I often went so far as to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days, this I know from experience. ... I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me."

From a moral standpoint, it's very dangerous to lose love for individual people but then hope to make it up to humanity in volume. A lot of people who decided to care about fighting "principalities and powers" at the expense of mere "flesh and blood" just ended up shedding a lot of blood without actually improving any balance of power - we easily promise to repay today's certain nearby moral debts with interest after tomorrow's vaguely-expected distant moral credit comes in, and yet that ends up being an excuse to increase the debt, not a real plan to make good.

But even from just an epistemological, pragmatic make-my-ideology-win standpoint: a "faction" isn't a smooth undifferentiated mass that you can stuff a bunch of people into to avoid having to look at each one's particular flaws and virtues. The more details you ignore, the more mistakes you're going to make! If you do the rhetorical equivalent of air-striking a wedding party because you're certain there are terrorists nearby, don't be surprised if you end up creating more enemies than you neutralize!

I appreciate you coming here and representing locally-unpopular points of view, even when you're getting dogpiled for it, but can you imagine the damage if your readers started to assume that everyone who might be considered part of your "faction" or "people like" you was guilty of the same logical and moral flaws you've exhibited in this thread? At least try to imagine, and then consider what you could change to moderate their future reactions accordingly? Outgroup homogeneity bias is a common human failing, and I doubt I've managed to even cure you of it in the space of a few paragraphs, so I surely haven't cured most of the people with that failing who don't see themselves in you and don't realize how much of these warnings might apply to them too. Now might be a good time to show them that their outgroup can admit mistakes and do better. The psychological foibles that sadly lead us to factionalism and division are indeed an interesting object of study, but if you really want to be sure you know a subject, then the most important part of studying isn't the reading, it's working the exercises at the end.

She wrote a whole book about a serial killer pretending to be trans to prey on women in women's spaces.

This is a flat-out lie that instantly betrays the fact that you have never read the book in question. The serial killer in question is a marginal side character in said book (whose plot is about the investigation of a woman's disappearance decades ago and the police's prevailing theory being that she was a victim of said serial killer, who refuses to talk about it). And at no point did he ever pretend to be trans, or claim to be trans; nor does anyone in the book attribute transness to him. He was abducting women off the street and from bars and bus stations after drugging them surreptitiously, not "invading women's spaces". The plot point about him (on one occasion) wearing women's clothing is used as an example of how he was able to get away with his murders for so long because he didn't conform to what people's ideas of what a rapist and serial killer looks and acts like - seeming pudgy, effeminate and non-threatening rather than a bearded, scowling thug in a dark alley.

Most people talking about Rowling this way are simply regurgitating motivated talking points they've seen from trans activists, and could not be bothered to actually look into any of these claims themselves. I doubt you could tell me the name of this book or the offending character without Googling it, but you're absolutely sure she "wrote a whole book about a serial killer pretending to be trans" because Contrapoints or some other breadtuber said so.

Well, someone has to, if this forum is going to be anything other than a complete echo chamber.

Also 'reflexively' and 'intentionally, as an intellectual exercise' are different things.

Please don't. A sincere conversation with someone who actually believes different things than myself is interesting. Disagreement for the sake of disagreeing as an "intellectual exercise" is not, and when it involved inflammatory comments about your outgroup, and repeating deliberate lies, it's indistinguishable from trolling.

But this many years later, that's not a tenable position. She's not that dumb, at this point she understand who her bedfellows are and what their political program is about, and wholeheartedly assists them at every turn. At this point, the fact that she maintains a veneer of respectability in her own public statements is more cowardice and manipulation and intentional pipeline-creation than it is a sign of a mild position.

If Rowling fully endorses any statement made by these allegedly awful bedfellows, then she's just like them.

If she doesn't, it's not that she is deliberately trying to maintain her own distinct personal stance (and avoid distraction via more extreme rhetoric) while still fighting for a cause (recognizing that adult politics often means coalitions)...it's that she's just a coward hiding her power level?

There seems to be a real "bitch eating crackers" element with JKR where people be waiting for The Thing, the big Transphobia that'd convince everyone to ignore everything she said, and steadily got more aggravated when she wouldn't give it to them. At which point, we got more...scattershot accusations.

Besides, I think maybe we should ask to what degree people are "radicalized" (by refusing to abandon biological sex?) not because Rowling created a pipeline but inherently by this topic or, at least, how TRAs act around it (perhaps because of inherent features of this form of activism which separates it from others).

After all, if JKR was radicalized she didn't go through her own pipeline.

But I've done that a lot and people mostly say 'I'm not going to watch that'.

Luckily, I have no life so I actually did watch one of Contras videos on this topic and the Motte did discuss it

My take was: absolute sophistry. The ridiculous length is more of value to Breadtubers than anyone else, since it'll naturally turn off anyone not interested in the dramatics and meandering musings, and so they can claim no one really wants to know the truth.

This is content for the elect, not newbies. It's actually surprising to me that people legitimately seem to believe that the best way to reach someone asking you for basic evidence of bigotry is a feature-length Contrapoints video. I would say you couldn't make it up but, well...

she is very much a part of a faction that does use rhetoric of that level of extremity (including onstage at national political conventions), and she very much supports and promotes (through valuable social media links and personal defenses and endorsements on her hugely popular accounts, through partnerships and collaborations, and by selectively endorsing and promoting the rhetoric of) people who famously do express those extreme views.

Could you give some specific examples of people with extreme transphobic views who've been supported or signal-boosted by Rowling?

they are all part of building a worldview in which trans women are just perverted men intentionally trying to prey on women and destroy them,

All of them? No, of course not. Some of them, particularly bad actors taking advantage of the laughably short-sighted policy of self-ID? Yes, indisputably.

She wrote a whole book about a serial killer pretending to be trans to prey on women in women's spaces.

This is a complete falsehood. She wrote a book (Troubled Blood) featuring a cisgendered serial killer who disguises himself with a fur coat (and sometimes a wig) in order to appear unthreatening from a distance. The novel never suggests that the serial killer is trans, or a transvestite, or pretending to be trans. Nor does he dress as a woman to gain illegitimate access to "women's spaces": he abducts drunk women on the street and bundles them into the back of his van. The book isn't even about him: he's just one of many suspects investigated by the protagonist, and the real perpetrator is someone else. Even the Guardian acknowledged that this description of the book was inaccurate.

For years my assumption is that most of the people calling JK Rowling transphobic have just heard about it secondhand in a game of character assassination Chinese whispers. The fact that your descriptions of her writing are patently false is doing little to persuade me that this assumption is inaccurate.

if you actually want to know it doesn't take me to do the googling for you.

This sounds like you're worried you won't find what you're looking for.

Could you give some specific examples of people with extreme transphobic views who've been supported or signal-boosted by Rowling?

Here you go, to get started.

The novel never suggests that the serial killer is trans, or even a transvestite.

As I said, and you quoted:

She wrote a whole book about a serial killer pretending to be trans

Sometimes I think people just pattern-match me to a strawman of their opponents that their media bubble has crafted for them and don't bother to carefully read my actual words.

The narrative of 'people claiming to be trans are just perverts presenting as women in order to prey on women by getting them to let their guard down' is very much a major blood libel against trans women in general, and it's exactly the situation you describe as appearing in the novel.

This sounds like you're worried you won't find what you're looking for.

The person I was talking to already said they refuse to watch those videos to learn what the other side has to say. I'm not the one avoiding the other side's position here (notice where I am right now). I'm just the one whose sick and tired of taking the time to provide links that people will disdainfully and ostentatiously ignore.

BTW, thrilled to see whether you and the other people who reply to this will actually watch that video I linked earlier in this comment, or will offer some excuse not to.

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BTW, thrilled to see whether you and the other people who reply to this will actually watch that video I linked earlier in this comment, or will offer some excuse not to.

We're here to have actual discussions, a multi-hour long video that can't continence objections is not at all what this place is about. If there is a smoking gun it can be shown with a single link and doesn't need three costume changes to express.

Linking a contrapoints video is not evidence, it's pointing to a whole different interlocutor.

As I said, and you quoted:

She wrote a whole book about a serial killer pretending to be trans

Except she didn't, the episode in question was the killer using disguises to avert suspicion. So you are incorrect here, and maintaining your mistaken reading despite being corrected. If you're not willing to be convinced by argument against your fixed notions, how well do you think your efforts will go over?

I have to say, I appreciate that you're holding fast in the face of all the opposition you're getting, but if you were willing to go "Okay, I was mistaken there" on points like that, it'd get the discussion less heated and more radiant.

Using a term like "blood libel" - so now the trans special snowflakes have tired of using the Civil Rights analogy, they're moving on to appropriating specifically Jewish persecution? What next, 'the Holocaust was nothing, twelve million trans women were burned at the stake by Hitler in conjunction with TERFs'?

What next, 'the Holocaust was nothing, twelve million trans women were burned at the stake by Hitler in conjunction with TERFs'?

We're already there.

And I thought the nine million witches in the Burning Times was the pinnacle of self-importance. If they're reaching for "The Nazis set up the Final Solution because they were going after trans people" then the present-day supply of oppression must be sadly deficient in both quantity and quality. "I'm so oppressed that if I had been alive eighty years ago I would have been persecuted" is somehow lacking in the urgency of maltreatment right now.

As I said, and you quoted:

I edited the comment after posting, the relevant sentence in my comment reads "The novel never suggests that the serial killer is trans, or a transvestite, or pretending to be trans."

The narrative of 'people claiming to be trans are just perverts presenting as women in order to prey on women by getting them to let their guard down' is very much a major blood libel against trans women in general, and it's exactly the situation you describe as appearing in the novel.

Take the L. Your description of the content of the novel was inaccurate in many ways (it wasn't "about" a serial killer pretending to be trans, and the serial killer in question doesn't dress as a woman to gain access to women's spaces). It would be nice if you could acknowledge that.

While it's mildly true that Rowling plays a careful balancing act with her public image by not being too extreme in her own personal rhetoric, she is very much a part of a faction that does use rhetoric of that level of extremity

Dude, are you really fucking reaching for "Rowling loves Hitler" on this? Ah yes, X is part of an organisation that also contains Y who once liked a tweet by Z who is third cousin once removed to a descendant of slave-owners, ergo X is a racist!

And, like, come on, you're obviously underselling what she says herself and what the implications of that are. She wrote a whole book about a serial killer pretending to be trans to prey on women in women's spaces. She says that she is glad trans didn't exist when she was growing up because she might have been socially infected with it and it would have ruined her life. Etc.

Haven't read the book, from reviews I gather that the killer disguises himself one (1) time as a woman to carry out a crime. Clearly this means she thinks all trans women are serial killers. Can you interpret for me the dog whistles in Black Beauty? I mean, just that title, so problematic and clearly referencing the hypersexualisation of Black women!

These types of things are the blood libel of the trans debate; they are all part of building a worldview in which trans women are just perverted men intentionally trying to prey on women and destroy them

Well y'know, if there weren't cases of pervert men doing precisely that, I'd believe what you say. But I was assured years back that this would never happen, no boy or man would go to the trouble of claiming to be a woman or dressing up as one just to creep on girls and women in the locker room/bathroom. Until the multiple cases of "that thing that never happens just happened again", when it was No True Scotsmanned away. So which is it - if you say you're trans, you're trans or this person claiming to be trans is clearly lying about it?

Well y'know, if there weren't cases of pervert men doing precisely that,

This on it's own doesn't tell us anything though. Building a world view in which Catholic priests are just perverted child abusers intentionally trying to prey on children is also supported under this criteria. After all there are cases of Catholic priests doing precisely that.

That it NEVER happens is far too broad a criteria, because it will condemn almost every group where any single member is guilty of some vile behaviour. Police, clergy, trans people, women, men, lollipop ladies, politicians, scout leaders, teachers, French people, Irish people, Catholics, Protestants, German people, Muslims, Christians, Atheists, Humans.

There's plenty of people all too happy to say that the Catholic Church is nothing but an enabling network of abuse. The nuttier pro-aborts like to go on about how the only reason the Catholic Church is anti-abortion is so that the clergy will have a fresh supply of children to abuse.

It's a good analogy, though, since at the start there were people defending paedophile priests on the grounds that if we didn't, then the enemies of the Church would just use that as a means of attacking all clergy and the Church itself. I think the experience of the Catholic abuse scandals should break the pro-trans rights people out of that mindset for their own problems. Clean house, because sticking with "okay so X says they're trans and they're also crazy and indeed creepy but we have to defend them or else the bigots who hate all trans people will win" is not a winning strategy.

since at the start there were people defending paedophile priests on the grounds that if we didn't, then the enemies of the Church would just use that as a means of attacking all clergy and the Church itself.

And they were correct, trivially so in fact.

Clean house, because sticking with "okay so X says they're trans and they're also crazy and indeed creepy but we have to defend them or else the bigots who hate all trans people will win" is not a winning strategy.

Provided you can paper over the cracks with your political power, it is just as much a winning strategy as doing the right thing in the first place (and the fact that most people operate in conflict-theory modes means it's probably optimal anyway). And that power flows through groups as well- Stallman might be creepy and Linus might be angry but without them the open source software movement would not exist as we know it- and the same thing applies to Keffals, for the same reasons. Sure, they could cancel him, but then the trans pipeline wouldn't be as effective and their total political power would thus go down- and have to compromise their definition of "what is good, and what is acceptable collateral damage".

And sure, we could go back and forth on how selfish that is (since at the end of the day, conflict theory means you know in your heart of hearts you're doing something wrong), but I don't think people generally think about it that hard.

Why would you expect trans activists to do better than an organization dedicated to serving the highest moral agent?

Like you say, its the normal tribal reaction to your own side doing something wrong.

Which means it doesn't really tell you anything about the merits of the group using it. Presumably you think the Catholic church is more right than the trans movement, but if they both fell into the same trap (and I agree it is a bad look!) then using it as a weapon just looks like you are holding the side you don't like to standards your own side could not live up to.

I'm saying they should learn from the mistakes we made.

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Well y'know, if there weren't cases of pervert men doing precisely that,

This on it's own doesn't tell us anything though. Building a world view in which Catholic priests are just perverted child abusers intentionally trying to prey on children is also supported under this criteria. After all there are cases of Catholic priests doing precisely that.

The issue isn't that some pervert men happen to be doing that, it's that this specific system is structured in a way that provides greater opportunities for such pervert men to exploit. The whole Catholic priest issue is a great example of this, actually, in how the whole structure of the way Catholic churches and communities were run gave greater opportunities for pervert men to do that while escaping justice. As such, people did and do argue that Catholic churches must be restructured to better prevent this.

In the case of the whole transwomen in women's prisons thing, I see a couple of good ways to argue in its favor. One is to say that some female prisoners being raped by male prisoners is a worthy cost to pay for transwoman prisoners having their gender identity validated by the criminal justice system; then we can discuss what the rates of these things would be and how much to weigh them against each other. Another is to say that we can place safeguards to prevent male-on-female rape in women's prisons while still getting the benefits of transwoman prisoners having their gender identity validated; then we can discuss specific protocols and effectiveness of enforcing these things. I think that's the tactic the Catholics have been using.

The whole Catholic priest issue is a great example of this, actually, in how the whole structure of the way Catholic churches and communities were run gave greater opportunities for pervert men to do that while escaping justice. As such, people did and do argue that Catholic churches must be restructured to better prevent this.

Sure, but Catholic churches don't really appear to have changed that much. My sister in laws kids still end up in one on one meetings with their priest and so on. And I would agree that there should be some kind of check on what prisoners go where, that is sensible.

As you say there are identity issues, and rape issues on each side. A trans woman going into a men's prison may be at risk and a trans woman going into a women's prison may put others at risk. Perfectly happy to stipulate that is entirely reasonable to take some kind of precautions there.

I'm just pointing out the argument I was told this would NEVER happen is just not a very good one. Pretty sure the Catholic church wasn't saying, and yes there is a chance your kids will be abused by one of our priests (which is the absolute truth) so please take that into account before you go to church. The rhetoric used is separate from what is actually reasonable. Holding either trans-people or the Catholic Church to a zero incidence framework is simply unreasonable.

My sister in laws kids still end up in one on one meetings with their priest and so on.

If this is true, it needs to be reported to the parish's safety coordinator (assuming she's in the US.) The only circumstances where that should be happening is during confession, and now the standard for children is to have confession in a place that is visible from the outside (like through a window or in an unblocked corner of the church) or completely physically separated, like an old-style confession booth. Now, the sister-in-law might be bringing her children to a normal (adult) confession time, but if there are no specifically-labeled confession times for children, it is within her right to schedule a child-safety-compliant confession for her kids.

"If there is a need for a confidential discussion or training session with a minor, it should occur in a location that is in view of other persons, and the minor should have first and immediate access to the exit."

Well, someone has to, if this forum is going to be anything other than a complete echo chamber

No, no one has to reflexively argue the opposite. A principled leftist would do more than just spitefully fight for the sake of fighting and as such turn mottezians further against leftism by providing examples of the ideology they despise. He would lead with empathy while providing legit counterpoints that open up people's hearts and minds and make them think.

A principled leftist would do more than just spitefully fight for the sake of fighting

Isn't that why we're all here on this site though?

My opinion of leftism is fairly set in stone, we're many years past the point where further "examples" could change my mind one way or the other. Which also means that I attach relatively less emotion to the debates than I did a decade ago. Now I'm just here to argue out of pure love of the sport.

Isn't that why we're all here on this site though? My opinion of leftism is fairly set in stone, we're many years past the point where further "examples" could change my mind one way or the other.

Personally, I'm here because I like reading fresh ideas, or fresh reframings of old ideas — "insight porn" as it were. Fresh ideas do not usually come from leftists, because it seems to me that one of leftism's greatest underlying personality traits, at least in our time, is conformity to group doctrine. (Perhaps this is correct doctrine, but it's not fresh. I can, almost without fail, predict not only a leftist's position on an issue, but exactly how they'll frame the argument.) Neither do fresh ideas come from offline conservatives, who are usually quite incurious and have stopped their ears to any new idea they did not learn by twenty.

Compared to leftist spaces or conservative spaces, online rightist spaces (as The Motte de facto is) are rent with interesting controversy. I suspect that's because there are many ways to be a heretic, but only one way to be catholic. The austrian economist and the populist, the fascist and the burkean, the vitalist and the christian, the hoppean and the neoreactionary, the sexual degeneracy watchdog and men-should-marry-teenagers poster: are able to discuss politely at present, but they're bound purely by the friend-enemy distinction, and their 'side' would burst into a million fragments the moment it sniffed political relevance.

That said, some people in the leftist coalition do have fresh ideas. It's extremely unlikely they'll change my opinion on the fundamental correctness of leftism, but that's not really the point for me. If you can make me re-frame an old opinion with your hot take, that's great.

Isn't that why we're all here on this site though?

How To Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3 seems relevant.

The problem from that perspective isn't that guesswho's arguing; it's that he's awful at it. It's bad enough when posters provide weakmen of their enemies. No one's going to change minds by providing weakmen of the position they claim to be defending.

Well, if that's the case, then it really is an echo chamber, and there's no point in anyone playing Darwin2500's role and arguing the counter point. Also we should probably also change the banner on the side of the site.

Realistically, you're probably right to some degree. But I do believe it's possible for people to change their minds, even if just in small ways. Then small mind changes lead to bigger ones. But people don't change their mind by being nagged, mocked, and provoked by an enemy. They do it when people make great points and relate to each other.

I think all we need to not be an echo chamber is for posters to have a diversity of viewpoints, and to be comfortable expressing them. I don't think that the propensity of the average poster to change their mind has much to do with being a not-echo-chamber. Otherwise everywhere is an echo chamber, because it's rare for people to change their minds.

I also agree that it is possible for people to change their minds, it's just unlikely, and it takes a very specific set of circumstances that is unique to each individual.

But I do believe it's possible for people to change their minds, even if just in small ways. Then small mind changes lead to bigger ones.

It's happening, just centered around the local Overton window. I admit to having my mind changed on a number of issues, although most weeks this place is a parade of events that make the left look bad while events that paint Red tribe in a bad light are largely ignored. If you want to see the future of the Overton window, look at the two recent threads on natural selection and epistemology. They actually generated discussion and genuine disagreement in ways that posts about Trump, trans issues, gun rights, police violence, immigration etc. never do anymore.

Cthulhu swims ever farther right. I have to say, it is interesting to have watched it happen over my last five odd years here.

Breadtube Rowling videos so you can comb through them for receipts, I guess I can. But I've done that a lot and people mostly say 'I'm not going to watch that'.

Yeah, because watching video of people I hold in contempt is not something I'm going to subject myself to. That's your hobby, not mine.

These types of things are the blood libel of the trans debate; they are all part of building a worldview in which trans women are just perverted men intentionally trying to prey on women and destroy them, and where trans identity is merely an infectious meme that needs to be stamped out before it takes more lives.

If this is blood libel, then jews really do drink the blood of Christians. You can't say that the rapist isn't a pervert, that he isn't trying to prey on women by being imprisoned among them instead of other men, where he belongs. We know he raped a little girl. We know that he doesn't actually believe he's a woman, and he's doing it cynically. ou can't just say something true is blood libel, when I can see how true it is with my own lying eyes. You have to do more to actually convince me that these trans men aren't perverts, because they sure do look like it to me, and simple denial doesn't move the needle.

The fact that, after establishing that worldview and narrative, you don't vocally take the next step of saying 'and therefore we need to eradicate transgender people from the culture as a whole' is sort of irrelevant.

Eradicate? No, fix. But you're right that in an ideal world, the number of trans people is 0. It's a perversion, too, and not one that I like to see spreading.

Eh, that’s the motte-and-bailey, isn’t it?

a worldview in which trans women are just perverted men intentionally trying to prey on women and destroy them,

gets watered down to

You can't say that the rapist isn't a pervert,

No shit, the convicted rapist of this example is a pervert grasping at any opportunity to keep hurting women. His credibility went out the window because of the crime.

Is the least sympathetic rapist representative of the broader category of trans people? Keep in mind that many of them are aggressively disinterested in sex, perhaps on account of the long-running hormone therapies. Are the dreaded trans youth all rapists, desperate for an excuse?

I don’t think so. You’re making the same judgment as the woman who, after a bad date, concludes that men are scum. Not all men. Not all transwomen.

Side note: I agree with you that YouTube videos, especially those made by your opponents, are incredibly unappealing. No matter how succinct and reasonable it is, the argument would be better served by a text document. And there is zero incentive for wannabe documentarians to make their work short.

The problem is not "all trans women are male pervert rapists", that's definitely not true.

The problem is "you must not misgender the rapist, so when the victim describes the alleged crime, you must edit the coverage to be they raped me not he raped me".

Another reported a trans woman physically forcing her to have sex after they went on a date.

"[They] threatened to out me as a terf and risk my job if I refused to sleep with [them]," she wrote. "I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so [they were] a 'woman' even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout so I agreed to go home with [them]. [They] used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing [their] penis and raped me."

Sure, sure. No objections here. Rape bad.

You and KMC are not arguing the same issue as guesswho. He insists that making hay about prison rapists is an excuse to build outrage against a law-abiding majority. I don’t think you’re going to convince him otherwise by making more hay about prison rapists.

I understand that you are genuinely concerned about the rapist situation, which makes further concessions very unappealing! And guesswho shouldn’t expect to convince you otherwise by dancing around the issue.

It’s not a very productive conversation. Y’all are both producing the wrong kind of evidence.

From my side of this debate, what I perceive is all the demands for concessions from us, but no concessions on their side. The prison rapists are a stupid case, but it's precisely because of activism forcing lawsuits that "if I say I'm a Real Lady, you have to put me into the women's prison" is even possible in the first instance. I'd love to forget all about those, if only the trans rights bunch would admit "okay, yeah, there in fact are certain standards about what is a woman and what is not and who is trans and who is not". But they line up behind the chancers and scammers who take advantage, and won't purge them or distance themselves from them, so I don't trust the activist side an inch on "we only want to be able to use the bathroom".

Is the least sympathetic rapist representative of the broader category of trans people?

Is the edge representative of the axe? No, of course not. But it is part of the axe, and the most dangerous part.

Is the least sympathetic rapist protected by the broader category of trans people?

Are the dreaded trans youth all rapists, desperate for an excuse?

No, but their demands for rights and respect are directly impacting the criminals, and the women who have to deal with them. Trans women are not women, have never been women, and will never be women. Saying they are, combined with saying that anyone who claims to be trans is trans, directly leads to this outcome. It obviously directly leads to this outcome, so much so that it was dismissed as a straw man before these policies were implemented. Well the scarecrow came to life, and we're not in Kansas.

Trans women are not women, have never been women, and will never be women.

Transwomen aren't even transwomen. In their quest to deconstruct gender in order to grant themselves accommodation within that same genderscape that they disavow they have inadvertantly demonstrated that it's transgenderism itself that carries no semantic water. That is to say; there's no such thing.

Nevermind the old chestnut of "what is a woman?". That one has multiple satisfactory answers from the simple to the scientifically robust. Try out "what is a transwoman?". The sole universal quality of every possible rational answer begins with "a man who...". A man. Because without that there's no binary boundary to transit. A woman cannot be a transwoman.

Either it's real, and they're not it. Or it's not real, so there's no it to be.

[Obligatory olive branch that I don't care two iotas (iotes?) about men rendering themselves maximally feminine. Obligatory post script that this all applies vice versa too.]

Nevermind the old chestnut of "what is a woman?". That one has multiple satisfactory answers from the simple to the scientifically robust. Try out "what is a transwoman?". The sole universal quality of every possible rational answer begins with "a man who...". A man.

This is literally assuming the conclusion. You can't build an argument to support your opinion that starts with your opinion.

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eah, because watching video of people I hold in contempt is not something I'm going to subject myself to.

Right, and since you hold those who disagree with you on this in contempt, you'll never learn whether your beliefs are accurate or not.

That's why I stopped bothering top provide links on this topic, no one ever used them. Everyone knows how to use google if they care to learn.

If this is blood libel, then jews really do drink the blood of Christians.

This is actually a pretty stunning example of taking a quote out of context to lie about it. I reference two specific types of statements she's made in one sentence, and discuss their import in the next sentence. You take the second sentence and pretend it was referring to a completely different statement, then spend a paragraph stridently mocking how dumb it would be as a discussion of that different statement.

I'm going to be charitable and assume that you couldn't bear to read my whole post carefully because o the contempt thing and just got honestly confused, rather than concluding that this is intentional slander. But it sure doesn't make me hopeful about the EV of this conversation going forward.

Eradicate? No, fix. But you're right that in an ideal world, the number of trans people is 0.

I have someone you should talk to.

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And, like, come on, you're obviously underselling what she says herself and what the implications of that are. She wrote a whole book about a serial killer pretending to be trans to prey on women in women's spaces. She says that she is glad trans didn't exist when she was growing up because she might have been socially infected with it and it would have ruined her life. Etc.

These types of things are the blood libel of the trans debate; they are all part of building a worldview in which trans women are just perverted men intentionally trying to prey on women and destroy them, and where trans identity is merely an infectious meme that needs to be stamped out before it takes more lives.

The things she's saying are blood libel. That's what you wrote. There was nothing disingenuous about my response to your hysterical escalation. If you think I'm not being fair, then you need to explain how Rowling's previous comments are blood libel, but her current ones aren't, and therefore how my interpretation is disingenuous.

But that's not what you wrote, and that's not the meaning of what you wrote. "These things" can very reasonably be read to include Rowling's most recent comments, and in fact it requires that it be read that way because otherwise it is irrelevant.

I’m going to jump in, mod hat on, to say that I specifically appreciate the contrarianism.

Policy debates should not be one-sided. If an issue comes up in the CW thread, it probably isn’t one-sided. There is nothing wrong with presenting positions which would otherwise be ignored. Steelman at will.

In fact, users simply love to ask for defenses of facially unpopular opinions. Sometimes this is rhetorical bait. Other times it’s an attempt to get around the “look what those people did!” rule. And there are times it’s genuine, because this community really is unusually fond of sensemaking.

But.

There is one glaring, obvious risk of playing the devil’s advocate. People may think you’re actually, wholeheartedly helping out the devil. And he’s not known for acting in good faith.

A lot of people are convinced that you will say anything to score points for Your Team, whatever that may be. I’m not sure that you can disabuse them of this notion, but I’d love to see it.

Best of luck.

You guys are still going to end up permabanning him at some point down the road. Same as Darwin the first time, same as Hlynka. The trajectory of the mod team's qUaLiTy CoNtRiBuToR charity cases is always obvious from a billion miles away.

I used to be one of those "quality contributor charity cases". People make choices, and sometimes they choose to change.

Maybe.

But he will generate some actual value along the way, which is more than can be said for a number of less visible contributors.

Yeah watching him say shit like "well when I said people like Rowling I didn't actually mean Rowling herself" while getting downvoted fifty points through the floor on every post he makes at least contributes some humor value. Just try not to ban too many otherwise okay posters for getting frustrated with him along the way.

Well, I hope you guys are also keeping track of the negative value he's generating as well, because to the extent his posts result in the kind of conversation you want to promote, it's only because others are biting their tongues. The only reason I'm not there wrestling in the mud with him, is that I'm finally, slowly, becoming wise enough not to jump in with people who do the "bring you down to their level, and enjoy it" thing.

Thank you for posting this, I really appreciate it.

Personally if I was in charge and there was a mod decision that required a subjective judgement call, I would err on the side of extending leniency to posters with viewpoints that are underrepresented on this forum. I especially value posters like @guesswho who have alternative viewpoints on the "classic" culture war topics. It makes these discussions a lot more interesting.

I would err on the side of extending leniency to posters with viewpoints that are underrepresented on this forum.

I would not. It's the moderation equivalent of not putting BLM protestors in jail because they're on the side of the left.

Justice should mean equal treatment. If equal treatment leads to disparate impact because one side commits more crime, so be it.

It’s already been acknowledged that longstanding posters with lots of AAQCs will be given a bit of extra wiggle room, and I would simply extend that to posters with underrepresented viewpoints as well, because the mere existence of a rare viewpoint is its own type of Quality Contribution.

If they get AAQC’s, sure that makes sense. If it’s standard Reddit fare mixed with weakmanning, no, it does not.

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In a world where you only had 3 BLM activists and wanted to hear their opinions then it becomes a bit more nuanced I think.

If we want this to be a place with multiple viewpoints represented then justice is not the only consideration.

Which isn't to say I agree with the proposal, just that i think justice is not a good argument on its own. Being just isn't one of the founding principles of theMotte.

I would argue against it from more of a broken window perspective, bad behaviour breeds bad behaviour and damages the level of discourse.

Thanks. I try to be careful about specifying when I'm saying what I believe, steelmanning what some group or person on the left might say about the topic, or playing devil's advocate to stress-test a position. I do get the feeling that people are often not noticing this distinction, maybe I can be more explicit about it or maybe that's a lost cause.

I do feel like this community many years ago (like, back when it was part of /r/ssc and right after) was much more interested in stress-testing ideas against devil's advocate objections, and searching for steelman representations of the opposition to learn about and discuss, and trying to pass ideological Turing tests. And it feels like here and now it's more often about gesturing at the 'loony left' being dumb and then expressing incredulity of people disagree. Not that it is/was 100% either one then or now, just feels like the types of conversations I'm trying to have are not appreciated the way they used to be.

Thanks. I try to be careful about specifying when I'm saying what I believe, steelmanning what some group or person on the left might say about the topic, or playing devil's advocate to stress-test a position.

Because a common dishonest tactic is to take a position that's an exaggerated version of your normal one as a test to see what you can get away with. Anything you can't get away with, you then label as a "joke" or "just getting you to think" or "playing devil's advocate". If you want to play devil's advocate, do it for a position that you don't directionally believe in. You've talked about steelmanning the opposition above, but a leftist playacting as a more extreme leftist isn't steelmanning the opposition.

Also, your "devil's advocate" position seems to contain flaws that are best explained by you sincerely believing in the position. For instance, someone taking a devil's advocate position wouldn't misrepresent Rowling's book--there's no incentive to be careless about something you don't really believe in. But a true believer has an incentive to be careless.

I've been around since the /r/SSC culture war thread days. I'm probably more centrist that most here and I have really always appreciated the contrarians who participate in this space like Darwin used to. Since the move to /r/themotte and even more since the exodus here, unfortunately it does feel more and more like the spirit has shifted to dunking, probably partially because of the friction need to find this forum and setup an account rather than just popping by on your normal reddit account.

I have been reading this discussion and all of your posts in it though. I don't agree with everything you're saying but I do appreciate the fact that it forces the conversation into words so that I can read arguments and rebuttals. Please continue.

contrarians who participate in this space like Darwin used to.

You are, in fact, still talking to Darwin.

Please continue.

Can you elaborate on what you're getting out of it? It's not exactly fun to debate the finer points of "when I said 'people like JK Rowling' I didn't actually mean JK Rowling", and being expected to charitably respond to a strawman of your position, and to smile and nod as your position is labeled a "blood libel".

To be fair I'm getting more out of the responses. Without the catalyst get generate those responses where people do try fairly hard to elaborate their points to someone who disagrees with them, it's not nearly as interesting. The way he's shifting around and stuff is annoying but at least it's generating a conversation that a bystander can skim through and find good nuggets in.

I think you were banned or on exile when I made this post back at home, but I find this to be a pretty common failure mode of internet-right arguments - signal boosting memes about how the essence of your oppositions souls are irredeemably corrupt and then denying the obvious conclusion.

"Nobody should rid me of these meddlesome priests!"

'Rich person flaunts the law, confident they will never face consequences' is not a very unique or interesting story. It's certainly not 'brave' or anything...

"Rich person flaunts the law" implies that the rich person gets away with crimes because they can retaliate using their wealth and connections. Rowling doesn't have judges or lobbyists on speed dial, and she's not going to contact her friends in the banking industry or the Mafia.

"Rich person flaunts the law because they have enough money to pay for a good defense, and because if something absurd happens to them, the public will see how absurd it is" is a noncentral example of a rich person flaunting the law and is more like the rich person not being railroaded than it is like a typical rich person flaunting the law.

"Rich person flaunts the law" implies that the rich person gets away with crimes because they can retaliate using their wealth and connections.

I pretty strongly disagree. 'The system is not set up to persecute rich people, the powerful people running the system aren't really interested in harassing rich people to begin with, money can buy you out of problems through ;legitimate' methods that most people can't access' is the central meaning of 'Rich people don't ace consequences' that I always think of.

This may be one of those left vs right 'systems define society' vs 'personal responsibility and individual actors' things. I don't think of rich and powerful people as dangerous ubermensch who will crush anyone that crosses them and are therefore above the law. I think of them as over-privileged and under-perspective children, safe in a world that is carefully designed to benefit them at all turns, such that they never really need to learn self-restraint or discipline.

  • -12

The system is not set up to persecute rich people

Then why did SBF get prosecuted and sentenced to 25 years in prison?

Well in that case it is because he fucked over a lot of rich people.

Because he fucked around with and stole/lost other rich people's money. Same as Madoff.

That's one of the few ways I do believe rich people can suffer consequences around here. Being new money helps.

Epstein’s crimes were not of a financial nature, nor were they perpetrated against rich people, but he still faced consequences.

Epstein’s crimes were not of a financial nature, nor were they perpetrated against rich people, but he still faced consequences.

I think you're ignoring the several consequence-free decades of being an open procurer and supplier of child prostitutes for the wealthy and powerful, but you're also mistaken at the end there. Epstein absolutely did perpetrate crimes against rich people - the purpose of the entire arrangement was to blackmail the rich and powerful with recorded footage of them committing unspeakable crimes. Those were the targets that got him killed - Ehud Barak has much more access to the levers of power than Virginia Giuffre.

Those were the targets that got him killed

I'm aware that that's what lead to his death, but I can't find any indication that that's what lead to his first arrest in 2006. I don't think it was part of anyone's script for Epstein to get arrested. They would have preferred that he just stay out of the public eye for his whole life.

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I don't remember the full sequence of events now, but I thought the inciting incident had something to do with information about his rich and powerful associates being in danger of leaking to the public, and then he was disappeared and teh issue was hushed up? I could be wrong.

But, either way, yes this is a hueristic not an immutable law of physics. The fact that it takes being an incredibly high-profile pedophile and sex trafficker for decades, with the full knowledge and in full view of everyone on the planet, to face any consequences eventually, doesn't really disprove my point that the rich are insulated from consequences. It's not an inviolable shield, but it's a pretty massive one.

that governments may make figleaf declarations about opposing these types of slander but will never actually enforce them because they actually are inherently conservative entities that are on the side of the privileged and the default, that anyone can make the most vile comments they want and always could without fearing legal reprisals

It heavily depends on the government and the type of speech in question. Holocaust denial is currently illegal in multiple Western countries and has been successfully prosecuted.

The Peterson/'free speech absolutist' wing points at 'cancel culture' and the specter of government censorship as a general bludgeon against the left, but they're actually committed to a much more broad model of conservatism and just using that to stir up their base.

So, I think this is a common cognitive bias to fall victim to. When you encounter someone who has views that are dramatically different from your own, you don't have an internal mental model of what it would feel like to actually hold those views with sincere conviction. So you assume that they don't. It's easy to reach for an alternative explanation of, oh they don't actually believe that, they're just saying that they believe it because of X Y Z.

I catch myself falling into this trap sometimes when I think about leftist views. Like when people complain about movies and TV shows being too white and not diverse enough. Sometimes I think, look it can't actually bother people that much when this or that piece of media doesn't meet their own preferred racial quotas, they have to just be saying this because they like the feeling of power it gives them, or maybe so they can get a cushy sinecure as a diversity consultant. But when I take a step back and think about it rationally, I realize that that's not a psychologically realistic model of how people operate. Most people don't just make shit up for years on end, even when they can derive some personal benefit from it. The simplest and most plausible explanation is that people really are upset about a lack of racial diversity in media, and they really do experience it as a serious injustice, foreign as that notion may be to me.

Similarly, I can assure you with full confidence that when rightists complain about leftist speech censorship, they really are angry about it, legitimately. It's not a ruse, it's not a Machiavellian attempt to advance some other covert agenda. You might think their reasons are bad, but the emotions are real regardless. If nothing else, you should be able to appreciate the obvious self-interest angle. If I want to say X, and other people are stopping me from saying X, then I'm naturally going to be upset about that.

Whereas people like Rowling aren't fully committed to that broader conservative project, they just want to slander and eradicate trans people

Saying that MTF transsexuals are not women is not in any way "violence", "hatred", or a call for "eradication".

They're not biological women. They can be legally women. As long as they're not out there raping women and girls and then suddenly finding their inner femininity when it comes time to decide which jail to put them in, I'm happy enough to live and let live on that. Go on Jeopardy! and be celebrated as first trans woman contestant and winner, no skin off my nose.

I don't think anybody should be convicted of hate crime for saying "that guy is not a woman" when it comes to "and he raped two women then claimed he was really a victim of internalised misogyny all along".

Whereas people like Rowling aren't fully committed to that broader conservative project, they just want to slander and eradicate trans people

If it's slandering and eradicating trans people to say "a guy with a functioning dick who knocked up two women in the women's jail he was sent to on foot of claiming to be a Real Woman shouldn't have gotten that far in the first place", then consider me a slanderer and eradicator!

Or, you know, just maybe you bold defenders of trans people and their rights could perhaps give in on "okay that guy is not really trans and his lawsuit should have been kicked out as nuisance before this happened", that would really help the backwards bigots like me to come to a meeting of minds.

they just want to slander and eradicate trans people, and they're annoyed that people like Peterson have scared some of their supporters into thinking they might ever face consequences for spewing vile slander 24/7, thereby mildly restricting the spigot.

This doesn't seem like a very charitable take on Rowling's position. Is it your position that any sort of request for a level of gatekeeping on who gets to call themselves trans is vile slander?

Someone blatantly pointing out in the most public way possible that this has always been a fiction, that governments may make figleaf declarations about opposing these types of slander but will never actually enforce them because they actually are inherently conservative entities that are on the side of the privileged and the default, that anyone can make the most vile comments they want and always could without fearing legal reprisals

I don't know if you're an American, but this is just not true. In non-US countries, people have been prosecuted for saying that the bible says that homosexuality is a sin in Canada and I think Finland, for saying that Muhammed was a pedophile, for telling jokes, for saying that Muslims girls are raped by their family members, for saying that Muslim girls are murdered by their family members in honor killings, for saying that Muslims want to kill us, for quoting someone else saying that Islam is a defective and misanthropic religion, for comparing Muslims to Nazis, for saying "Well, when one, like Bwalya Sørensen, and most black people in South Africa, is too unintelligent to see the true state of things, then it is much easier to only see in black and white, and, as said, blame the white."

More: For saying that white people pretend to be indigenous for political or career clout. etc etc etc

The Finland matches with the quoting the bible bit, not the next sentence. Sorry for the readability problems.

Not referring to all hate speech and similar types of laws, just narrowly to the misgendering stuff.

  • -15

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/canadian-tribunal-transgender-nonbinary-restaurant-worker-pronouns-b1931972.html

https://www.canadianlawyermag.com/resources/professional-regulation/law-society-of-bc-tribunal-decides-in-closed-prehearing-to-hold-full-hearing-away-from-public-eye/366594

Off the top of my head -- Peterson himself of course is also facing legal reprisals.

Can anyone explain to me what the heck is going on in Canada? Seemingly there's someone who wants to turn themselves into an actual hermaphrodite, and instead of going "here's the contact details of a good psychiatrist", they are solemnly debating whether public healthcare should pay for such an operation.

Also, there's a clinic in Texas which will do this operation if it gets paid for? Texas??? When did Mad Science become something in the real world?

A non-binary patient in Canada is seeking taxpayer-funded surgery to create a vagina while also keeping a functional penis.

If a court rules in their favour, the patient, 33, from Ontario, will travel to a specialist clinic in Austin, Texas, for the procedure.

The patient, referred to in court documents as KS, was born male but identifies as non-binary. They do not identify as one gender but “literally a mix”, according to court documents.

They argue that forcing them to undergo binary surgery “could be considered an illegal act of conversion therapy as well as a violation of the Ontario Human Rights Code”.

@guesswho is doing a valiant job of trying to present the steelman version of all this, especially as we're all lining up to rebut them, but then with my own lying eyes I read a genuine news story of this sort, and blow me down, I find it very hard to believe that there's anything sane at all in the trans activism movement that is going after Rowling.

Also, there's a clinic in Texas which will do this operation if it gets paid for? Texas??? When did Mad Science become something in the real world?

Texas has loose regulations just in general and Austin is extremely progressive.

Still, though, I thought "Sure, I'll turn you into Fragoletta" was the province of "The Island of Dr. Moreau", or at least Classical sculpture, and not something that has an entire clinic set up for it.

Swinburne seems to have been enchanted by the topic, as he wrote another poem, Hermaphroditus. I wonder if this verse is a warning about not to have too many expectations about the outcome of such surgery?

Love stands upon thy left hand and thy right,
Yet by no sunset and by no moonrise
Shall make thee man and ease a woman’s sighs,
Or make thee woman for a man’s delight.
To what strange end hath some strange god made fair
The double blossom of two fruitless flowers?

Surgeons and cosmetic surgeons aren't really regulated in the same way as drugs or other forms of medicine - if a surgeon and patient are willing to try something, they're allowed to do it.

They do not identify as one gender but “literally a mix”, according to court documents.

Literally a mix? Why'd they need doctors when any old kitchen appliance or garden power tool would do?

This is what we call 'an anecdote'.

Lots of crazy people out there, anyone can appeal a decision and ask for a hearing, let me know if anything actually happens. This individual was already ruled against twice, I'll be surprised if the third time's the charm here.

The Telegraph writing an article about this doesn't suddenly make it the central issue of the whole trans rights debate.

Agree that trans women are women and deserve all the rights and respect of any other woman, and I'll happily agree that we should shelve the question of hermtaur surgeries for the next 50 years or so.

But if you're not ready to grant the first thing, which is what everyone actually cares about, then don't pretend the conversation has 'moved on' to stuff like this. The conversation is still very much about the first thing.

  • -19

Coming back to this, and trying to make my point clearer: years back, over on Ozy Brennan's blog at the time, we were having the first debates as the first rumblings around 'bathroom laws' were being made. To be fair to Ozy, they were as neutral as they could manage, permitting the criminal bad-thinkers like me and other anti-trans enthusiasm types to engage in argument.

But I was assured over and over, and indeed rather condescended to, that "No no no, things like this will never happen, that's just tinfoil hat conspiracy fever dreams of really right-wing fears".

And then things like the case of Demi Minor happened (and believe me, I'm as sick of bringing this up as you are of hearing it). Why do I bring it up, then? Because cases like that are not an aberration or an anomaly, they're the logical outcome of the "no objections entertained, any hesitance is gatekeeping and transphobia" activism.

How did Minor get into a women's prison in the first place? Lawsuits.

New Jersey introduced a policy allowing prisoners to be housed according to their self-proclaimed sexual identity last year.

It did so after being sued by a transgender inmate who was being held in a men’s prison. The case was backed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Minor claims to be a Real Woman, so by that logic, and your demand to me, I must agree that Minor is a trans woman and that "trans women are women and deserve all the rights and respect of any other woman".

Which means that you want me to accept and not alone accept, but agree that this woman, via her feminine penis, impregnated two other inmates of the women's prison with her feminine sperm and is now the baby-momma (can't say daddy, that would be misgendering!) of their children. Because "Trans women are women like other women". Do you see why I don't go along with your call to agree that?

Back then, as I said, we were told things like this would never happen. And then they happened. All in accordance with the principles being imposed on society by lawsuits and legislation and activism for trans rights.

A year or two ago, if anyone had said that there would be someone suing to force health insurers to pay for their hermaphrodite surgery, they would have been told "No no no, that's tinfoil hat fever dreams of the extreme right".

But now the 'hermtaur surgeries' as you phrased it (thanks for the term!) are out there and being brought to court with the same language around "forced conversion therapy". And even worse, while this may be a case that will end up being dismissed, there is a clinic up and running and happy to perform whatever slicing and dicing you want so long as you can pay for it. So plainly there must be other such cases of people wanting such surgeries.

At this point, if anyone says "Oh come on, nobody is going to try to graft a second head onto a human body, that's just tinfoil hat crazy talk", I'm expecting that within six months we'll get a news report out of China or somewhere about how this very thing was done.

But if you're not ready to grant the first thing

Absolutely I'm not ready. What do we mean by a woman? A biological woman, because they're dosed up on hormones and maybe had surgery, too? No. The same as a cis woman, totally the same? No. Legally a woman? Well, if the law permits it, sure. Now you can call yourself Yolanda Désirée Ladyfingers and have "F" on your driving licence and be referred to as "she/her".

But the movement towards "drop the trans, just say woman"? No, I'm not giving in on that. All the rights of any other woman? And what rights are those? To retain male characteristics and still be able to go into women-only spaces? To declare that a lesbian who doesn't want sex with your feminine penis is not a real lesbian?

EDIT: And in fact, it's the very demands around "the first thing" that enable the crazy people. Or where do you think the rhetoric about "This is conversion therapy which is illegal in Canada" came from?

Agree that trans women are women and deserve all the rights and respect of any other woman, and I'll happily agree that we should shelve the question of hermtaur surgeries for the next 50 years or so.

The justification for "trans women are women" is the same as the justification for hermaphrodite surgery.

It's really, really not. 'Hermaphrodite' is not a social category, outside of furry porn.

  • -10
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the first thing

The first thing, or at least the earliest thing that comes to mind right now, was the gays. Slippery was the slope, and here we are with men pretending to be women and political activists wanting to force people to validate these delusions.

It's not much of an extrapolation to see where the wind is blowing from, and where to.

I reject the idea of a history of civil rights where you draw the 'first' line at the last thing you feel conflicted about, and then draws a slope starting there.

if you want to go that far back into the history of civil rights to try to draw a slopeand calim it slippery, then the 'first' thing is repealing miscegenation laws, or slavery abolition, or like challenging the right of prima nocta or w/ethefuck.

  • -11
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Agree that trans women are women and deserve all the rights and respect of any other woman

Why should anyone agree to something you don't even believe yourself?

To be fair, he could well have changed his mind in the intervening two years.

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let me know if anything actually happens

Unanimously approved.

Seems illogical to criticize JKR for not being brave because her wealth and fame shield her from consequences (though, she has definitely lost money from her stances because it’s not like she has a bunch of right wing fans buying extra copies of her stuff), but also you say this counts as proof conservatives are making up the risk of consequences for holding “conservative” views.

Holding and expressing views that were very common among Democrats in 2008 in America will get you reprimanded and even fired, FFS, let alone Real Conservative ones. In the US the punishment is not by the legal system, just polite society and the vast majority of significant employers, so we have that going for us.

The Peterson/'free speech absolutist' wing points at 'cancel culture' and the specter of government censorship as a general bludgeon against the left, but they're actually committed to a much more broad model of conservatism and just using that to stir up their base.

You can't generalize like this.

Whereas people like Rowling aren't fully committed to that broader conservative project, they just want to slander and eradicate trans people, and they're annoyed that people like Peterson have scared some of their supporters into thinking they might ever face consequences for spewing vile slander 24/7, thereby mildly restricting the spigot.

You are usually more charitable than this.


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