Good for him – so eloquent – but he’s wasting his breath. “No debate” is all they know.
Mick Hartley
Politics and Culture
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In full:
From the start, a key tactic of the gender identitarians has been linguistic prescription, and it’s proved shockingly successful. Trans activists’ shibboleths and euphemisms have been allowed to penetrate the upper echelons of our culture with devastating consequences to freedom of speech and belief. Huge swathes of liberal media, the arts, academia and publishing have thrown themselves with gusto into the defence of a quasi-religious belief causing provable real world harm, and in their arrogance they’ve been outraged when people they assumed were part of their In Group have refused to march meekly along in lock step.
Time and again, I’ve seen and heard well-educated people who consider themselves critical thinkers and bold truth-tellers squirm when put on the spot. ‘Well, yes, maybe there’s something in what you’re saying, but it’s hateful/provocative/rude not to use the approved language/pretend people can literally change sex/keep drawing attention to medical malpractice or opportunistic sexual predators. Why can’t you be nice? Why won’t you pretend? We thought you were one of us! Don’t you realise we have sophisticated new words and phrases these days that obviate the necessity of thinking any of this through?’
As the vibe shifts, and a lot of people in the elite professions start trying to reposition themselves, the obvious place to start is, ‘it’s not that I couldn’t see your point, but did you have to say it that way?’ We dissenters were supposed to find a way of questioning the chemical castration of children while calling it ‘gender affirming care.’ We were meant to defend the rights of vulnerable women while also using female pronouns for male rapists. We should have found a way to discuss fairness for women and girls in sport, while pretending that the ineradicable physical advantage men have over women doesn’t exist.
Either a man can be a woman, or he can’t. Either women deserve rights, or they don’t. Either there’s a provable medical benefit to transitioning children, or there isn’t. Either you’re on the side of a totalitarian ideology that seeks to impose falsehoods on society through the threat of ostracisation, shaming and violence, or you’re not. The alternative to being ‘blunt’ – using accurate, factual language to describe what was going on – was to surrender freedom of speech and espouse ideological jargon that obfuscated the issues and the harms caused. We’ve always needed blunt people, but we need them most of all when being asked to bow down to a naked emperor.
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Stella O’Malley at Spiked on how male journalists, broadcasters and comedians have been the biggest cowards in the gender wars.
British satire showed the pattern clearly. Have I Got News For You studiously avoided the trans topic for years, ignoring a national scandal involving children, medicine, prisons, law and safeguarding. Ian Hislop, Paul Merton and a rotating cast of panellists joked about everything else while pretending this was not happening.
Private Eye did the same. Sharp and confident, it should have led the charge. Instead it barely touched the story until very late. It’s doing better now, but it should never have taken so long.
The media men, whose job was to spot danger early, now feel exposed and afraid. Most minimised the trans issue because it unsettled them and they did not know how to engage with it.…
Many are now scrubbing old social-media posts, deleting the jokes and eye-rolls that reveal their complacency. Some are mortified they mocked the women who tried to warn them. Others have remained silent.…
A few, like James O’Brien, continue like the Japanese holdouts who stayed hidden in the jungle long after the war had ended. They cannot admit defeat now, because that would require admitting they were catastrophically wrong. So they cling to the position they took years ago, even as the evidence overwhelms them.
Graham Linehan had a few things to say about Ian Hislop, who, when approached by Linehan about gender issues, replied smugly that “the Trans/TERF debate is not quite as important as those involved in it believe”, and later, in the Eye, referred to Linehan’s “unhinged Twitter presence”.
He, Hislop, was too busy pulling in the money as the BBC’s establishment “contrarian” on “Have I Got News For You”.
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The North Korean Kim cult has always had a strong religious feel – and it’s getting stronger. The comparison here with Islamic glorification of martyrdom in the service of Allah is hard to ignore:
North Korea’s military is using stories of soldiers who detonated themselves in the Russia-Ukraine war as indoctrination material, telling troops “if you give your life, you’ll live forever.”
According to a Daily NK source in the North Korean military recently, the North Korean army has emphasized the “heroic services” of North Korean soldiers who chose to blow themselves up in the war against Ukraine during political classes held at least twice a week.
At their heart, the lessons emphasize the loyalty of the soldiers who gave their lives to carry out North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s orders. They also promote the propaganda message that the soldiers “achieved a record of distinction unmatched even by the Russian soldiers.”
In particular, the North Korean army openly highlights the soldiers’ sacrifices with the message, “If you give your life, you live forever.” A new slogan has even emerged — “Let’s learn from the warriors who blew themselves up.”
It’s a hard sell, getting young men to get killed in the service of Russia’s quasi-fascist war on Ukraine so that Kim can get more of the high-tech military fix he needs to survive. Desperate measures are required. Desperate propaganda. At least they haven’t got to the 76 virgins awaiting in paradise stage.yet.
In particular, the slogan, “If you give your life, you’ll live forever,” is along the same lines as North Korea’s longstanding doctrine that its leadership lives forever, an idea that has continued since the Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il era. By elevating North Korea’s former leaders to transcendent status and packaging the loyalty that binds them to the public as a religious concept of “eternal life,” North Korea has emphasized personal sacrifice as a virtue.
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Another powerful demolition of the puberty blocker trial, here from Andy Lewis at Reality’s Last Stand (via):
Ethical trials require a clear intent to answer a scientific and clinical question that can inform future treatment decisions. It is hard to see what that question is. The trial is formally to test a treatment for “gender incongruence.” But this is not a clinical diagnosis. Activists insist this means the child is “trans,” that they possess an internal gender essence incompatible with their body, and that the only “remedy” is to alter the body to somehow match this ineffable feeling. There is no scientific evidence that such an intrinsic thing called a “gender” exists. This is postmodernist claptrap: the reification of abstract ideas about the sexes in society.
Gender is a social concept built on sex stereotypes: boys must be tough and sporty, girls must be pretty and gentle, and both must be heterosexual. Many (if not most) adolescents feel they fall short of these stereotypes; some feel it acutely. Puberty sharpens the discomfort. In the overwhelming majority the discomfort resolves without any intervention as puberty progresses. To pathologize this entirely normal process, label it a medical condition, and treat it with powerful endocrine disruptors is not progressive healthcare; it is regressive, cruel, and inherently unscientific.…
So what sort of results can we expect? Allow me to take a punt. The children who receive blockers immediately will, on the whole, report being “happy.” The children forced to wait a year for the treatment they have been told is life-saving will, on the whole, report being “sad.” The headline conclusion will be that puberty blockers must be offered as early as possible because they improve wellbeing. The two-year follow-up is conveniently too short for the serious skeletal, sexual, and fertility harms to become undeniable, so the treatment will be declared “safe and well-tolerated.” Critics who point out the blindingly obvious methodological flaws will be dismissed as bigoted, hateful, or “anti-trans.” This trial could not have been better designed if the brief had been: “Produce the most quack-friendly trial methodology possible while retaining a veneer of scientific respectability.”
Surely by now it’s clear that this trial has been set up with only one result in mind: to show that puberty blockers are really just fine, and make all these sad “gender incongruent” children happy.
It’s a national scandal.
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Ben Appel grew up in a cult in Baltimore, the Christian Lamb of God. It was particularly uncomfortable for a somewhat effeminate boy. Later, after realising he was gay, he enrolled at Columbia University to study writing. He found the same problem, in a different guise.
Julie Bindel talks to him, in the Telegraph:
But later, in the “Cult of the Progressives”, he encountered a new form of gender orthodoxy. Gender-nonconforming individuals were now assumed to be trapped in the wrong body. “We now chemically castrate boys displaying femininity,” he says….
In the three-and-a-half years he spent there, Appel saw fellow students becoming indoctrinated with pseudoscientific, anti-Western dogma sold to them as progressiveness. He began to see that what was happening was cult-like and “in many ways worse than Lamb of God”.
Any slight digression from the “trans women are women”, “death to the West” type politics was severely punished, he says. “Intelligent young people bent over backwards to be anti-racist, against imperialism and even embracing Islamic jihadists in the process.”
Social justice warriordom morphed into the cult of queer, and punishments meted out for failure to adhere to the creed were severe, involving bullying and ostracisation.
He had been indoctrinated in the view that sees white cis men (gays included) as the enemy. For these new puritans, the airing of grievances was the preferred blood sport, and there was an obsession with identifying the oppressor, rather than the victim.
He had the experience to recognise that he was dealing with a cult. Unlike the other poor saps.
Now a full-time writer, and non-aligned politically, Appel says: “You have to keep in mind that arguing with these people is like trying to argue with a biblical literalist, in that they believe that holding certain views makes them a good person and protects them from going to hell.
“Now I can say, there’s no third gamete, men should not be in women’s prisons, children are never in the wrong body, and not all white people are racist. I will be saying this even if they bring back the guillotine, right before the blade falls.”
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This morning:
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Twisting the yellow star is just the next step in their sick ideology.
Weaponizing the Holocaust against Jews and Israel is Holocaust inversion. It is an act of hate, that does nothing for Palestinians.
For far too many, “Free Palestine” is an excuse for loud, proud and public antisemitism.
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Today, the city of Dublin voted to remove the name Chaim Herzog Park and change it to the Free Palestine Park.
There is nothing progressive about the Free Palestine cause. It is an old hate with a new flag.
Update: the motion to rename Herzog Park has been withdrawn.
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A benefit concert for Jolyon Maugham, no less.
Ian McKellen? I wonder how many of these people know what the Good Law Project is really about – ie, wealthy lawyer Maugham’s deranged obsession with trans. And how many are actually booked, and will make an appearance. Probably about the same as the Good Law Project’s success rate in court: very few.
Mick Hartley 