[mysterious circle of robed figures] JK Rowling: hello children Rowling: I was just thinking about how transs people should be eliminated from ssociety Jonathan Chait: whoa whoa whoa! joanne! Chait: you can't say it like THAT Chait: so uncouth Chait: you have to say it with your pinky finger extended

Elon Musk: si! issa no good! Musk: issa too mucha trans genocide Musk: you shoulda only post the right amount offa da trans geocide Musk: lookita me, i lika da trans genocide Musk: but i also like many other genocides Rowling: oh MY GOD Rowling: my empire is crumbling!

Chait: we're not saying you can't still be transphobic Chait: you just have to, you know, cool it a bit Chait: be genteel about it Jesse Singal: mommy mommy i have concerns mommy! Chait: see? just like that

Chait: maybe put a little disclaimer Chait: "this transphobia is for entertainment purposes only" Rowling: do you not know who I am?? I'm JK Rowling! Rowling: JK FUCKING ROWLING!!! Rowling: I MADE YOUR CHILDHOOD MAGICAL!

Rowling: no one tellss me to cool it! Rowling: i own the courtss! Chait: joanne Rowling: and another thing!!! Rowling: SSTOP CALLING ME JOANNE!

[midnight society] JK Rowling: hello children Barker: oh look who it is Barker: what are you doing here joanne? Barker: did your terfs tell you to cool it again? Rowling: Rowling: why doess everyone call me joanne

Rowling: i'm extremely mad about thiss transs football referee Barker: what? Rowling: this transs football referee Barker: Barker: what?

Rowling: there's a transs football referee and i'm really mad about it! Rowling: what, haven't you heard? Barker: joanne, why are you here Rowling: and another thing! Rowling: sstop calling me joanne!!

Rowling: people are alwayss all "joanne this" and joanne that! Rowling: wah wah wah joanne joanne joanne! Barker: do you not like your name Barker: you could change it Poe: clive Poe: just let her tire herself out Barker: no no I've got something here

Rowling: people are alwayss "oh wah wah wah joanne, how can you ssay that! your bookss are all about tolerance and love wah wah wah!" Rowling: bitch i think i know what my booksss are about! Rowling: i fuckin wrote them after all!

Rowling: blah blah blah ohh joanne Rowling: i hate when people call me joanne!! Rowling: they should fear to say my true name! Barker: oh damn look at that Barker: looks like we're having a good ol' fashioned mothers day meltdown Poe: clive don't encourage this

King: but joanne! how can you say that? King: after all the lessons of harry potter? King: you made our childhoods magical!

Rowling: people are all "blah blah blah joanne how can you like naziss now when you ssaid they were bad in harry potter" Rowling: first of all, harry potter iss fiction! Rowling: secondly, the death eaters are actually a ssinister coalition of evil transs, sspooniess, fat people, free masonss, and diane duane Rowling: always have been! Rowling: thiss iss NOT a retcon!

Rowling: that sshould be obviouss if you've read the book Rowling: UNLESSS Rowling: you're a fake potterhead, ssteve King: no of course not! i love harry potter

Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic:

To describe Donald Trump as a corrupt aspiring authoritarian is not to conclude that he should be murdered. This ought to be a simple point to understand. Yet it is lost on a large swath of the American right, who insist that calling Trump what he is causes at least some of his opponents—among them, the accused shooter Cole Tomas Allen—to believe that violence is justified against the president. In an interview with CBS following the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, Trump blamed the most recent attempt on his life on “the hate speech of the Democrats,” which he called “very dangerous.”

The New York Post asked on Sunday, “Where did Allen get such ideas about Trump and the need to remove him, via murder?” It answered the question like so: “Almost certainly from the left, including from Democrats in positions of power. Barely a day goes by without some Dem calling Trump an autocrat, a king, a dictator, Hitler.” Also on Sunday, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Representative Jamie Raskin to engage with the premise. “You and many of your fellow Democrats have used some heated rhetoric against the president,” she said. “Do you think twice about that when something like this happens?” And yesterday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt charged, “Those who constantly falsely label and slander the president as a fascist, as a threat to democracy, and compare him to Hitler to score political points are fueling this kind of violence.”

This claim suffers three serious defects. First, it assumes that violence is the only logical response to an attempt to undermine democracy. In reality, Trump’s assault on democratic norms can be—and in fact, is being—successfully resisted through democratic means. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán had carried out a more advanced version of the same power-consolidation strategy that Trump is attempting now, and voters defeated him through peaceful organizing.

The second problem with a moratorium on calling your opponents authoritarian is that Trump himself routinely violates it. The president has spent a decade calling his rivals communists and traitors, among other hyperbolic insults. He has specifically claimed that Democrats rig elections as a matter of course. Taking violent steps to stop undemocratic political leaders follows much more closely from Trump’s rhetoric than from anything Democrats have said about him.

And third, the conservative principle would seem to rule out any criticism of authoritarian tendencies, however real they may be. If calling a politician an aspiring authoritarian is tantamount to inciting their murder, then doing so is irresponsible even if the charge is true. Republicans could nominate the reanimated corpse of Benito Mussolini for president, and Democrats couldn’t question his commitment to democracy without being accused of ginning up violence.

Ideally, critics of Trump’s threat to democracy would recognize that authoritarianism is on a dimmer switch, not an on-off switch, and that his opponents have ample space to oppose him through democratic channels. They would likewise acknowledge that even most dictators fall far short of the horrors of Hitlerism. That distinction is widely, if not universally, understood, which is why the rallies are called “No Kings,” not “No Führers.” The ruling as out of bounds any discussion of Trump’s contempt for democracy is not merely some unfortunate by-product of the right’s rhetorical gambit, but its central purpose. Trump has been glorifying and stoking violence since he entered politics. He has urged his rally-goers to “kick the crap out of” counterprotesters; has fantasized about unleashing the brute strength of his supporters (“I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad”); and, of course, mass-pardoned the insurrectionists who did precisely that on January 6, 2021.

It is true that, in addition to fomenting violence, Trump has been the target of it. Conservatives appear to be correct to attribute an ideological motive to the recent shooting attempt. The most chilling aspect of Allen’s radicalization, judging from the information available so far, is that it did not spring from either a mental breakdown or some anarchist sectarian plot, but instead relatively banal Democratic partisanship. Allen seems to have posted on Bluesky and attended a No Kings rally.

[...] Resorting to violence merely strengthens the forces of illiberalism and sense of disorder upon which Trumpism feeds. The official Democratic Party has understood this, which is why not a single elected Democrat at any level has condoned murder attempts on the president or his allies. Allen apparently believes that if you conclude that Trump is an authoritarian, then violence against him is justified. By conflating antiauthoritarian arguments with incitement, conservatives are making the same error but following it to the opposite conclusion. The norm that many Trump-supporting conservatives seek to enforce is not a prohibition on violent rhetoric or even limits on attacking politicians who are seen as threats to democracy, but a one-sided ban imposed on Trump’s critics so that the president can do as he wishes. Defining political violence as something that is being wielded primarily or exclusively against Trump is to condone his behavior.

Trump’s first 100 days have set the country on an unsustainable course. The clash between the president’s determination to rule and his inability to govern has generated two opposing forces: a weaponized, illiberal state, and a smoldering political backlash. One of them will have to break. »

— Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic. (archived)

It's our democratic duty to encourage backlash. Speak in short sentences and with words people don't have to look up in the dictionary. There are far more people with HS diplomas than with doctoral degrees.

It's not necessary to stand on a milk crate and harangue the crowd in a Target parking lot. But if somebody in the checkout line refers to high prices, just nod and say, "Yeah, the Trump tariffs".

People who complain about the devastation to them caused by Trump policies should politely be asked, "What do you plan to do about it?". If they seek guidance from you, refer to the Republican senators or Republican House member – if your state or district are represented by the GOP on Capitol Hill. Add mention that every member of both chambers of Congress has one or more home offices back in their state or district. A visit to such an office carries a thousand times more weight than a phone call or email.

In the New York Magazine article, “The Future of Trumpism: The greatest threat to Donald Trump’s hold on the GOP comes from Ron DeSantis, who may be more MAGA than the MAGA king himself,” Jonathan Chait discusses some of Ron DeSantis’s more disturbing beliefs about the U.S. Constitution and wealth.

Basically, DeSantis seems to believe that the Constitution was designed to protect elite wealth from being redistributed to the working classes. If DeSantis were to be elected president, there’s a good chance he would try to undo every progressive social safety net program we have created since the New Deal, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA, SNAP, and TANF.

Below are some excerpts from DeSantis’s 2011 book Dreams From Our Founding Fathers: First principles in the age of Obama:

[Benjamin] Franklin and other Founding Fathers believed that respect for individual property rights was the sine qua non of a free society, and regarded the so-called “leveling spirit,” which seeks to equalize property through government action, as a danger that American institutions needed to check…. How to craft a government based on popular consent that did not devolve into popular majorities voting themselves the property of others was one of the main concerns for Madison and his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention. [...] Madison pulled no punches about specifying the particular types of faction that a republican form of government needed to guard against. “A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project”…. Madison…also viewed these “wicked projects” as inimical to fundamental notions of justice and individual liberty. As a matter of first principle, the republic needed to be constructed to prevent such projects from ever coming into being.

[emphasis added]

--Ron DeSantis (2011, pp. 123, 128-129)

If Ron DeSantis wins the White House in 2024 and has a GOP Congress, and a Federalist Society dominated Supreme Court, he will be able to dismantle the social safety net in the U.S. with impunity. We cannot let that happen.

[edited]

____________________

By: Leor Sapir

Published: Mar 21, 2024

Both critics and supporters of so-called “gender-affirming care” appreciated the candor of transgender activist and author Andrea Long Chu’s recent cover story for New York magazine.

Chu’s piece, titled “Freedom of Sex: The Moral Case for Letting Trans Kids Change Their Bodies,” makes a principled case for letting children dictate their own hormonal and surgical treatments. Chu believes that “trans kids” shouldn’t have to get a mental-health assessment before initiating hormones, and that, “in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history.” Remarkably, Chu does not deny that biological sex is binary and determined at conception but argues that humans have no ethical obligation to come to terms with reality, calling this purported duty “a fine definition of nihilism.”

While trans activists often pretend that only “right-wing reactionaries” and “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (“TERFs”) oppose their claims, Chu refreshingly observes that this isn’t true. The most “insidious” pushback, Chu says, has come from “TARLs,” or “trans-agnostic reactionary liberals.” Indeed, polling has shown that Americans with liberal views largely reject such policies as schools keeping students’ gender “transition” secret from their parents and allowing trans-identified males to compete in female sports.

Chu’s essay went viral, prompting New York staff writer Jonathan Chait to pen a “Liberal Response.” Chait has a history of opposing trans activists’ censoriousness, particularly about medical transition for youth. Last December, for example, he responded to transgender advocacy groups’ fury that the New York Times had acknowledged the ongoing scientific debate over how best to treat gender-distressed minors, which they claimed had abetted state-level Republican efforts to ban pediatric transition. Chait called for “carefully following the evidence,” and observed that “the whole reason leftists try to associate reporters at the Times with Republican-backed laws is precisely that their targets do not agree with the conservative position on transgender care.”

Chait’s December piece correctly identified the tribalist logic informing elite discussions of gender medicine in the United States, and progressive journalists’ efforts to banish from the liberal tribe those who raise questions about this controversial area of medicine. His response to Chu’s essay, however, fails to extend to conservatives the charity he expects trans activists to extend to liberals like himself. If Chait is worried about tribalism obscuring the pursuit of truth, he might consider how his own writing may contribute to this problem.

Consider his characterization of the debate over “trans rights.” Chait claims that “[c]onservatives dismiss trans rights altogether, while liberals completely support trans rights as it pertains to employment, housing, public spaces, and other adult matters, disagreeing mainly in how it is applied to children (as well as, in limited cases, addressing the problems raised by trans female athletes competing in women’s sports).”

Whether this is true, of course, depends entirely on what Chait means by “trans rights.” “Rights talk,” to borrow Mary Ann Glendon’s term, obscures the hard trade-offs and real-world costs that unavoidably confront those entrusted to make policy choices. Chait should have spelled out what “trans rights” mean in practice, but he doesn’t. His failure is especially puzzling considering two claims he makes in his essay. Chait claims, first, that “Trans-rights activists and their allies have relentlessly presented their entire agenda as a take-it-or-leave-it block, attacking anybody who criticizes any piece of it as a transphobe.” Second, he argues that rights claims generally render empirical questions irrelevant. As Chait puts it, “if, say, you consider firearm ownership an absolute right, then no evidence about how many lives any particular gun-control reform is likely to save is going to make you support it.”

Whatever Chait means by “trans rights,” the notion that all liberals support permissive trans policies outside the pediatric medicine and athletic contexts is unfounded, according to the data. Partisan affiliations are not a perfect proxy for voter ideology, but it’s telling that a 2022 PRRI poll found 31 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of Independents favor laws that require people to use bathrooms that accord with their biological sex. A more recent YouGov poll found that 26 percent of surveyed Democrats backed such laws, with 22 percent unsure.

Assuming the “liberal” position on public accommodations is that people should be legally allowed to use bathrooms that accord with their subjective definition of being male or female (and many liberals would dispute that this is in fact a liberal position), and if the “conservative” position is that no such law should exist or even that laws should require bathroom access based on sex, then almost half of Democratic Party voters appear to hold views about bathroom access that could qualify as “conservative” under Chait’s scheme.

Liberal opinion similarly divides on the issue of trans-identifying inmates’ prison placements. According to the same YouGov poll, most Democratic voters either supported (35 percent) or weren’t sure about (33 percent) laws requiring prisons to house inmates according to their biological sex. In this case, support for “trans rights,” here defined as a legally protected right to be housed according to “gender identity,” appears to be a minority position within the Democratic Party.

Has Chait accurately characterized the conservative position in this debate? Despite his claim that “[c]onservatives dismiss trans rights altogether,” there’s no evidence that the standard “conservative” position on, say, employment is to allow adverse action against trans-identified people tout court. The YouGov poll found that 44 percent of Republican respondents said they support “banning employers from firing employees on the basis of their transgender identity.” Fifty-seven percent of Independents, which presumably includes some conservatives, answered the same way. Recalling the abstract nature of “rights talk,” what is framed as “employment non-discrimination” often comes down to policy questions about how employers should treat trans-identified employees or candidates in circumstances where sex presumably matters, for instance access to workplace bathrooms.

When asked whether there should be specific provisions for “transgender people in hate crime laws,” 42 percent of Republicans and 57 percent of Independents agreed that transgender status merits special protection, while 24 percent and 27 percent, respectively, said they weren’t sure.

In short, it is highly misleading to say that liberals support trans rights while conservatives do not. When the abstraction “trans rights” is broken down into concrete policy questions, as inevitably it must be, many liberals seem to disagree with policies favored by trans rights activists while many conservatives agree with them. Chait himself recognizes the uselessness of abstract rights talk when he turns his attention to Chu’s argument for “freedom of sex.”

Chait’s response to Chu’s arguments about pediatric medical “transitions” admirably makes the case that “empiricism” must be part of the liberal position on trans rights. However, his commitment to political “rights” seems to constrain his commitment to empiricism and evidence in crucial ways.

First, Chait notes that the supposed consensus that “gender-affirming care” is “settled science” is the result of “a power struggle between advocates of unmediated gender-affirming care and their more cautious colleagues,” but he doesn’t really explain what makes these colleagues “cautious” or whether there are divides within the “cautious” group. By this point he must know that there are three main positions in the debate: those, like Chu and parts of the gender medicine industry, who support unrestricted access to hormones and surgeries; those who support medical transition but call for rigorous mental health assessments; and those who believe that “gender-affirming” hormones and surgeries are inappropriate for minors regardless of circumstances. Those, like myself, who belong to the third group make evidence-based arguments. We regard members of the second group, many of whom are well intentioned, as cautious compared with the first group but overall misguided in their support for harmful practices.

While Chait mentions systematic evidence reviews from Europe and Canada, he fails to disclose that these reviews found no credible evidence of benefits for any pediatric cohort, including those treated under the “gold standard” and more “cautious” Dutch approach, which Chait notes involves “extensive evaluation and screening for mental health.” Left unstated is his apparent hope that after “extensive evaluation and screening,” some kids will benefit from early medicalization.

If liberals like Chait are truly committed to empirical medicine, they must at some point read and respond to the most important scholarly paper on pediatric gender medicine in recent years: “The Myth of ‘Reliable Research’ in Pediatric Gender Medicine: A critical evaluation of the Dutch studies—and research that has followed,” published last year. It’s hard to read this paper and come away with any impression other than that this entire medical field is based on fraud.

More fundamentally, Chait needs to grapple with a problem that runs deeper than the empirical questions discussed in clinical studies. Empirical debates about medical evidence generally presuppose a coherent conceptual framework of health and disease. We can debate, for example, whether a new drug for treating cancer is “safe and effective” because we agree that there is a condition to be treated (cancer), that it constitutes illness, and that doctors have an objective diagnosis to confirm its presence in humans.

Gender medicine, by contrast, lacks a coherent conceptual framework. The discipline is riddled with deep and abiding contradictions. Advocates argue that “gender incongruence” is not a pathology but a normal variation of human development, but they also insist that this phenomenon is a potentially life-threatening medical condition that requires “medically necessary” hormonal or surgical interventions. Advocates argue that “gender identity”—a term whose definition is either circular or reliant on stereotypes—is fixed, immutable, and infallibly knowable from early childhood, but they also say that “gender identity” is fluid and a “journey.”

Above all, thoughtful discussion of youth gender transition is not possible unless one is willing to interrogate the very notion of the “transgender child.” And this, I think, is still a bridge too far for liberals like Chait. What does it mean to say that a child “is transgender”? That she was “born in the wrong body”? That’s metaphysical talk, and absurd. It’s also dangerous to suggest such a thing to vulnerable teenagers who are going through the throes of puberty. Nor is there evidence for the transgender brain hypothesis—and even if there were, gender clinicians (even the “cautious”) ones are not calling for, and most would actively oppose, brain scans as part of the diagnostic process.

Liberal journalists who continue to use the term “trans kids,” as if it’s obvious what this means, without trying to define the term and defend it against rational, good faith criticism, are not truly interested in an empirical debate about youth gender medicine. They care about evidence and research, but only within limits.

A final note on Chait’s piece. He mentions the National Health Service of England’s recent decision to decommission puberty blockers as routine care for gender dysphoric youth. Chait should keep in mind that the Dutch first proposed using puberty blockers as part of the diagnostic process—halting puberty to create a window of time for the adolescent to sort out his feelings and decide whether to proceed with transition. We now know that these drugs do not provide neutral “time to think” (the title of a book about the Tavistock clinic) but more likely lock in a child’s incongruent gender feelings and make further “transition” all but a foregone conclusion. Chait seems to have read the Tavistock book and should at least be open to the possibility that the NHS’s decision is a step toward an eventual full national ban on medical transition for minors—similar to the restrictions enacted in two dozen Republican states that Chait presumably believes are extreme.

To his credit, Chait recognizes the potential for golden mean fallacies in the debate over youth gender medicine. He argues that we should not assume that “ideas located at the extreme at any given moment are always wrong.” I agree. But Chait should acknowledge the possibility that empirically minded, principled liberals like himself are still getting pediatric gender medicine wrong. He should be open to the possibility that one day in the not-too-distant future, he will find himself among the “conservatives.”

==

"Sex is real… But the belief that we have a moral duty to accept reality just because it is real is, I think, a fine definition of nihilism." -- Andrea Long Chu, 2024

"The facts may tell you one thing. But, God is not limited by the facts. Choose faith in spite of the facts." -- Joel Osteen, 2014

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA.

Last week, Rachel Shabi, a left-of-center British journalist, warned American progressives that anti-Semitism could one day tear apart Democrats just as it is now doing to the Labour Party. When I read her essay, just ten days ago, it seemed fantastical. Today, after watching progressives floundering about in the wake of Ilhan Omar’s smearing of pro-Israel activism as a form of dual loyalty, Shabi’s diagnosis looks prescient. It can happen here.

Shabi’s argument is that three conditions exist to help spread anti-Semitism among even progressives who are not inherently predisposed to it. The first is the right uses hyperbolic accusations of anti-Semitism to close off legitimate criticism of Israel. Second, the right is comprehensively more bigoted than the left. And third, the left itself is divided, so that when a member of the more radical faction is identified with it, “anti-Semitism quickly became part of an ongoing factional battle.”

All these conditions drive many leftists to form a protective cordon around their allies who promote anti-Semitic tropes. Only the most hard-core members actually defend anti-Semitic ideas on the merits. Most of them instead are driven into this position by polarization, defending anti-Semitism as an act of defiance against political enemies inside and outside the party.

The source of their ire at the moment is a new resolution by House Democrats denouncing anti-Semitism. It defines the term. In an implicit rebuke to Omar, to include ‘‘accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.”

If Omar merely spoke clumsily and didn’t intend to question the legitimacy of Jewish participation in the foreign policy debate, they could happily endorse the measure. It does not censure Omar, or even name her. The resolution also cites “the post-9/11 conditions faced by Muslim-Americans in the United States, including unfounded, vicious attacks on and threats to Muslim-American Members of Congress” as a form of unacceptable bigotry.

So, what is it about the resolution they object to? They resent a rebuke of their political ally. One viral tweet scolds Democrats for proposing a resolution against anti-Semitism while ignoring the much worse racism of Steve King. In fact, two months ago, Democrats also introduced a resolution denouncing King (by name, unlike Omar.)

The main theme of the defenses of Omar is deflection. Mehdi Hasan’s pro-Omar column lists all the anti-Semitism on the Republican side that has gone unpunished, and devotes not a single word to defending or even minimizing her offense. This has been a running theme of pro-Omar commentary on social media...

All these people are making the same argument: We must choose between condemning the greater evil of the opposing side and condemning the lesser evil of our own. We cannot do both. Obviously, this kind of logic is not peculiar to arguments from the left or arguments about anti-Semitism. It is a broadly popular form of deflection.

Daou’s phrase — “the problem,” which is also sometimes expressed as “the real problem” — is usually a tip-off that this kind of deflection is being employed. The very term “the problem” primes you into thinking there can only be one kind of problem. And since we know the other side is worse, it follows that our side cannot be the problem. Therefore, to criticize one’s own side is to ignore “the problem” (or “the real problem”). To rule out the possibility of multiple problems is to preclude internal criticism altogether.

In the Israel debate, like most issues, there are multiple problems. One is anti-Semites smuggling their biases into criticisms of Israel. Another is Israel supporters using hyperbolic accusations of anti-Semitism to shut down criticism of Israel. (Progressives sometimes use hyperbolic accusations of racism and sexism to shut down criticism also.) The trick is to navigate a middle ground that allows both calling out real bigotry and permitting open debate.

...Whether or not the United States should treat Israel as that kind of ally is a completely legitimate subject of political dispute. The place to make the argument is in the facts of the case — specifically, whether Israel merits such a level of support. Over the last decade and a half, as Israel’s rejectionist right has cemented almost permanent control of its foreign policy, I have grown more skeptical of the merits of the alliance. There is plenty of room to be much more critical than I am without falling into the trap of anti-Semitism.

Shabi’s advice analyzes the dilemma from the perspective of a party in a much more advanced stage of crisis. “Viewing American progressive politics today is like seeing the beginnings of a slow-motion car crash, one we’ve already been through,” she writes. As the Labour Party has embraced Jeremy Corbyn, acceptance of left-wing anti-Semitism has become a kind of totem of ideological virtue. The addictive pull of factional partisanship has produced an outbreak of anti-Semitism so deep and wide, the Jewish community is abandoning the party en masse.

...Progressives are right to object to bad-faith charges of anti-Semitism closing down questions about Israel. But defending anti-Semitism as “just asking questions about Israel” is not a solution. It is the opposite of a solution. Casting harsh condemnation of Israel as a stalking horse for anti-Semitism is easier if anti-Semitic insinuations are routinely smuggled into the debate.