Politics and Culture
The Onion have form here. In February 2023 they did an Exclusive Interview with JK Rowling.
For instance
Onion: “Would you tell us about a time that you were personally victimized by a trans person”
Rowling: “Yes, I remember it like it was yesterday: you see, I was personally advocating for their total annihilation and then a few of them said some mean words to me on the internet.”
Hilarious. Boy, these guys can really do that satire shit…
The situation began during what should have been a standard team meeting. In the informal chat before proceedings began, Karen, in response to another colleague, expressed support for the Olympic Committee’s decision to exclude male athletes from women’s sporting categories. Within minutes, she received a private message from the Trust’s Head of Equality and Inclusion, informing her that she had “upset a lot of people”.
The following day, she was told that her “attitude” towards transgender individuals needed to be discussed.
Three months later, Karen was called to a formal meeting with senior figures at Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, where she was questioned about her views on trans people and her ability to provide them with compassionate care.
Believing the matter to have been resolved, Karen was then contacted by the Queen’s Institute of Community Nursing (QICN), which informed her that it had received a complaint about alleged “transphobia” and “bigotry”. She was instructed to delete her social media posts or risk losing her honorary title. The experience caused her significant and understandable distress.
At that point, Karen turned to the Free Speech Union for support.
The FSU wrote to QICN on her behalf, setting out her legally protected right to hold and express gender-critical beliefs under the Equality Act 2010. Shortly thereafter, QICN dropped its investigation and issued a full apology, acknowledging that there was “no case to answer” and that Karen had “done nothing wrong”.
Following a Subject Access Request (SAR), it emerged that the complaint had been made by a senior activist colleague, who had also disclosed information from a confidential internal process – despite that matter having been closed without any disciplinary action. This disclosure appeared to be a malicious attempt to damage Karen’s professional reputation and facilitate the removal of her honorary title.
Any repercussions for this nasty “senior activist colleague” who disclosed confidential information? If not, why not?
Maarten Boudry again.
….and disgraceful charade surrounding the honorary doctorate of Francesca Albanese.
“After fifty years living in Antwerp and forty years at the University of Antwerp as student, assistant and professor, I’m leaving. I no longer feel at home in the city and feel completely estranged from my university that has become a hotbed of radicalism and has completely lost its sense of academic values of critical thinking, discussion and genuine diversity of viewpoints. I fear that the student generation that – with the support of the university authorities – has now become indoctrinated and brainwashed to a point of no return. My son who was born and raised in Antwerp and who wears a kippa, has been called a child murderer on the street by a Flemish person and was told to “get out of here”. At the university the students are shouting that Jews should get out of Palestine. He and his family are leaving too. It just became a bad place for Jews.”
This is on you, rectors. You have made universities into hostile places for Jews (unless they ritually denounce zionism and Israel). They will abandon you and take all their learning, knowledge and wisdom with them.
And don’t worry, @UGent, you have scarcely any Jewish professors left to begin with. The great Jewish linguist and classicist Julien Klener has long since retired. When I met him recently, he told me how relieved he is not to have to endure this ideological madness anymore.
Belgian philosopher Maarten Boudry revisits the 1971 debate between these two philosophical titans of the left, on the subject “Is there such a thing as ‘innate’ human nature independent of our experiences and external influences?” The difference between the two was that one, Chomsky, was an heir of the enlightenment, whereas Foucault’s project was to destroy enlightenment thinking. In a nutshell, modernism vs postmodernism.
What is this gulf that separates them? Noam Chomsky rose to prominence in the late 1950s with his groundbreaking critique of behaviorism. This school of psychology, founded by John Watson and developed by B. F. Skinner, holds that human behavior can be explained entirely in terms of learning through conditioning. At birth, the mind is little more than an undifferentiated lump of clay, gradually molded over the course of our lives. Rubbish, said Chomsky. As a linguist, he argued that the mind of a newborn is already equipped with a battery of innate capacities. How else could a child acquire a spoken language so effortlessly, on the basis of such remarkably sparse input? These innate structures — not only for language acquisition, but for other domains of social life as well — are shared across all of humanity.…
Foucault’s perspective could hardly be more different, as quickly becomes apparent in Eindhoven. The French maître-penseur harbors a deep suspicion of Chomsky’s notion of a universal human nature, quoting the Chinese revolutionary leader with approval: “Mao Zedong spoke of bourgeois human nature and proletarian human nature, and for him, they were not the same” (this was 1971, with the bloody Cultural Revolution still raging). For Foucault, concepts like “truth” and “knowledge” are inextricably bound up with prevailing structures of power. From which vantage point, he asks pointedly, does a professor at the renowned MIT speak when he invokes a universal human nature? What power structures lurk behind such a claim?
Foucault also dismisses Chomsky’s faith in moral progress as naïve. What is hailed as progress, he argues, often amounts to subtler and more insidious forms of oppression. He sets about puncturing Chomsky’s vision of an ideal society: even if we succeeded in reorganizing society in accordance with this supposed human nature, new forms of oppression would simply emerge, in a different guise and with different victims. Chomsky doesn’t buy that — but he concedes that, if Foucault were right, he could no longer support the anarchist revolution. By the same token, any decent person should now distance themselves from the communist revolutions in Russia and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, which produced little beyond bloodshed and misery.
Hmm. Chomsky’s principled opposition to the Vietnam war later became a fixation on the evils of American society, and the west in general, with a concomitant blindness to the faults of revolutionary movements – none more so than the Khmer Rouge. He refused to countenance the genocide stories until they became undeniable. Anyway…
Then Foucault delivers a retort that visibly startles the linguist. Why, my dear Chomsky, should that come as a shock? Surely it is no reason to abandon the revolution. For the first time in history, the proletariat has an opportunity to seize the reins of power after centuries of oppression under feudal and capitalist systems. It is only to be expected that they might resort to “violent, dictatorial, and even bloody power.” High-minded ideals like justice and equality, Foucault explains, are typically a cover for power: “I can’t see what objection one could make to this,” he replies, genuinely puzzled. For Foucault, moral principles are not objective, but exist only within specific configurations of power — a view that seems to preclude the very idea of moral progress.
Chomsky would later reflect that Foucault was the “most amoral person” he had ever met — not immoral, but amoral: someone deeply skeptical of any standards of right and wrong.
Amoral and immoral, given the posthumous stories of Foucault’s sexual abuse of young boys in Tunisia.
The chasm that opened up that evening in Eindhoven was more than a quarrel between two intellectuals. It marked a fault line running through the modern world. Let’s give names to the two continents on which Chomsky and Foucault reside — the intellectual Arctic and Antarctic: modernity and postmodernism. A modernist believes in the Enlightenment project of continual human betterment through scientific knowledge and free debate. A postmodernist, by contrast, is deeply suspicious of these very ideas.
Or, to put it another way, all bad ideas come from France.
At The Hill this morning:
From Jewish News – The Medical Practitioner Tribunal Service rules that tweets previously described by a judge as having ‘supported, justified and even glorified terrorist violence by Hamas’ were not even to be deemed ‘grossly offensive’
The Medical Practitioner Tribunal Service has let off an NHS doctor accused of posting objectively antisemitic and grossly offensive comments on social media on 7 October 2023, saying it “did not find that…[her]conduct constituted misconduct which was serious.”
.On 7 October 2023, Dr Menatalla Elwan shared video footage of people fleeing the Nova festival, which Hamas had attacked earlier that day. Alongside the footage, Elwan wrote: “If it was ur home, u would stay and fight. U wouldn’t just run away”, alongside a blushing smiling emoji.
In a second post a few hours later, Dr Elwan said: “Israel was never a country. They illegally occupied Palestine. Would u support Russia invading Ukraine? Israel kill Palestinians everyday, didn’t see anyone caring. Also there are no civilians in Israel.”…
In a judgement made late last month which has now been published, an MPTS panel considered that “whilst Dr Elwan’s posts had been found to be inappropriate, insensitive in their timing and in shockingly bad taste, they were nonetheless permitted as political free speech within the boundaries of Dr Elwan’s Article 10 rights, as they were not found to be grossly offensive or antisemitic.”…
Following Dr Elwan’s October 2023 comments, the Home Office attempted to remove her temporary right to remain in the UK, but Dr Elwan, an Egyptian who has lived in the country legally since 2016, challenged the decision and was backed by an immigration tribunal judge.….
A spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “This is yet another inexplicable decision by the MPTS, which is now plainly no longer fit for purpose. For a doctor to react to the murder of 1,200 Jews by a proscribed terrorist organisation by saying that none of them were civilians…is unfathomably abhorrent.
”How could Jewish people, or any vulnerable person, allow themselves to be put in her care? What, according to the MPTS, would a doctor need to say about Jewish people in order to be sanctioned? We will be examining legal options in relation to this decision. Profound reform to the medical regulatory system is desperately needed.”
That Finnish study should surely put the last nail in the “gender-affirming care” coffin. It also confirms what we already knew: that the puberty blocker trial is an unethical disaster that should never happen. Jo Bartosch at Spiked:
Some ideas are so bonkers they ought never to be put to the test. Big-cat obsessives may believe they have a mystical affinity with lions, but no sane zookeeper would indulge them by opening the enclosure. And yet, it has taken researchers in Finland to confirm what anyone with a functioning brain already knew: telling children that their bodies are wrong does not improve their mental health. It makes it worse….
This research should prompt some soul-searching among the professionals who pushed the claim that ‘gender-affirming care’ – including everything from hormone treatment to puberty blockers – saves lives and reduces mental suffering. And that includes the charities and lobby groups that told parents they faced a stark choice: sterilise your child with drugs or bury them.
Had a study found the reverse, you can bet trans-activist outfits like Mermaids, Stonewall and the Good Law Project would be crowing about it. Yet oddly, they’ve kept schtum. It is tempting to conclude that they only ‘follow the science’ when they already agree with it. If this were about macrobiotic diets or juice cleanses, it would be harmless nonsense. But it isn’t. It is about children – distressed, suggestible children who were handed over to an ideology that promised relief and delivered the opposite. To gamble with their bodies for political vanity, and perhaps profit, is not just wrong. It is also contemptible.
Now that the promise of ‘gender affirmation’ is unravelling, why is the UK government still behaving as though there is substance to trans medicine? That question hangs squarely over health secretary Wes Streeting, who has signed off on a new clinical trial of puberty blockers, even as the evidential basis for such interventions remains, at best, uncertain.
It was precisely this absence of robust evidence that paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass identified in her landmark 2024 review of NHS gender-identity services for children. As she put it plainly, ‘there is no evidence that puberty blockers buy time to think’.
And yet, on the back of that finding, the controversial puberty-blockers trial – the so-called Pathways Trial – was still approved by Streeting last year. The plan was to enrol at least 200 children, affirm them in a cross-sex identity, and place them on puberty blockers within a research setting. It was presented as a way to gather the very evidence that had hitherto been lacking.
That trial has now run into serious difficulty. It is currently paused after the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency raised concerns about whether it is ethical to enrol children as young as 14 in a study, whose foreseeable consequences include infertility.
Cass was right about the absence of evidence. But absence of evidence is not a licence to go in search of it via experiments on children. Now the data have arrived from Finland, and they point in precisely the direction common sense would predict.
What the Finnish researchers have shown is hardly revelatory. It is the scientific equivalent of discovering that tiger enthusiasts are mauled when they step into the cage. But if stating the obvious is what it takes to bring this grotesque experiment to a halt, then so be it.
That activists refuse to shift under the weight of data is no surprise. Their authority, and often their sense of themselves as good parents, rests on their commitment to gender ideology. The Department for Health, however, is supposed to answer to evidence. It now faces a choice: abandon a failing model, or continue an unnecessary experiment on children to placate gender fanatics. The Finnish study must mark the end of the road for Pathways, and for the dangerous fiction of gender-affirming care.
Good to see the old gender-binary-as-a-colonial-imposition line is still going strong:
Mick Hartley 