According to the ancient Greeks, social upheavals are marked by changes in fundamental beliefs. Metanoia was their word for it. People’s understanding of right and wrong is changed and of how the universe works and everything. It’s all changed.

There was an example which hit me between the eyes in a story (George Packer, “Caught in the Crossfire,” New Yorker, 2004-05-17) about an Iraqi doctor during the US war there in the early Aughts. He was showing Packer around his hospital and noted how deserted the virginity-checking floor was. This virginity checking was applied only to women, of course, and according to him its passing was a source of the destruction of his country.

It seems, from a distance, like blaming an assault on the position of tea leaves in a cup. That is the biggest problem with other ways of defining right and wrong. They always seem incomprehensible at best, or insane. And, really, they are incomprehensible by our usual ways of grasping things. You can’t consider them, see whether they fit with known rules, and decide whether they make sense.

They don’t make sense. But you can try to find an explanation that follows its own internal logic based on the bizarre assumptions. That’s never a satisfying process because nothing that contradicts one’s own sense of which end is up can ever feel right. It’s a purely intellectual exercise whose value lies in becoming able to predict how people with those views will feel and behave.

An analogy from the physical world would be the quantum behavior of matter at the smallest scales. It makes no sense in everyday human-scale experience. If you try to tunnel back in time you will merely land on your bottom. And yet quantum interactions are vital to photosynthesis. Without them plants wouldn’t sustain much life on earth and there’d be no humans to even have everyday experiences. Just because we don’t know something doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Neither does it mean that it is true. Not every counter-common-sense explanation is valid. The test is whether the explanations work in reality. In the case of quantum mechanics, whether the predictions based on it hold good. Or, in the case of social factors, whether they have the predicted effect on human behavior.

Quantum mechanics checks out. It may be incomprehensible to nearly everyone, but it works.

Virginity tests of women as a means of staving off disaster seem a much iffier idea. There is not noticeably more war and destruction in places that don’t care much about female virginity. If anything, there’s less. But as I tried to understand the Baghdad doctor’s frame of mind, it struck me the internal logic was based on the feeling that sex really was a source of evil. It wasn’t just a story invented to suppress women. He felt it to be literally true. In that case, if you gave up one inch in that fight who knew what demons might be unleashed? Possibly even the Americans.

It’s a fundamentally different way of deciding what is and isn’t good. Different, that is, from my Western concepts of right and wrong. Those, since the days of the Enlightenment in the 1600s and 1700s, rest on an assumption of equality among people. Evil comes from violating that equality, from exploiting or harming others to gain advantage over them.

Obviously, there are all kinds of weeds to get into, definitions to specify, and edge cases to ponder. But having done that, one approximates a set of principles that can be applied equally. And when rules against exploitation and harm are applied, they reduce harm, surprisingly enough. That definition of evil actually helps to prevent problems, so it would seem to be a Good Thing and one to pursue.

Instead, there’s now a movement sweeping the world to try a completely different set of rules. But it’s not articulated as different. People seem to think they’re all operating on the same understanding, but in fact the meanings have changed even while some words, such as justice, are the same.

I first noticed it in the arguments about trans rights where they collided with women’s rights. I didn’t see how that could be a problem. We’d take a careful look, decide how to minimize harm for all parties, and carry on dismantling the patriarchy. Except it didn’t work that way.

The new rules established axes of oppression. White men without any other problems oppress everybody else and are the worst. A close second are white women who have no problems except, presumably, white men. At the other end, who is most oppressed and deserving of the most solidarity varies. Depending on the situation it’s trans people, or blacks, or non-whites, or any member of groups who’d suffered from whites, such as Middle Easterners or Muslims. An individual belonging to more of these classes is therefore more oppressed and it follows that they’re more deserving of respect and solidarity. So, in the trans and women example, trans people as a group are more oppressed than women so accommodation must always flow from women to trans people.

The point, to me, isn’t whether they got the groups right. The point is that they think membership in a group matters. That members of one group are worthy and nonmembers are … less so. Individuals can’t be good in some ways, not-so-good in others. They are tainted or they aren’t. There are plenty of examples of people who expressed wrongthink in something so minor as liking a “bad” tweet who then had a pile-on to prevent their books being published, to prevent venues from hosting their speeches or songs or art. This despite the person, usually a woman, being otherwise staunch in supporting the group.

When worth depends on group membership then worthiness is judged by adequate allegiance or accidents of birth. There can be no universally applicable rules in such a system because the rules depend on which group you belong to. People can’t be treated as equals. It’s like being thrown back to a medieval village where outsiders were wrong and only your own group was good. It’s “my country, right or wrong” all over again.

It’s surprising how fast adopting a medieval mindset has led to medieval politics. Antidemocratic “populism” and autocrats are popping up everywhere. China (Xi), India (Modi), Russia (Putin), USA (Trump). Even in Europe, origin and bastion of Enlightment values, far right authoritarian and fascist parties are gaining followers everywhere. [Update 2024-07-05, post-UK election: then again maybe not everywhere. Farage’s Reform Party had a weak showing. And another update, 2024-07-07: The UK has been joined by the French!] The rule of law is viewed as a quaint luxury by too many, no longer tough enough to handle times with real troubles. Meanwhile, the same serious thinkers carefully avoid noticing that most of the troubles are self-inflicted by ignoring justice. The less justice the more pollution, the more war, more crime, more billionaires. Less justice is very tough, but it’s the problem, not the solution.

So the effects of going back to identity-based value systems are the opposite of harmless. They go beyond harming women or trans people or blacks or Muslims. They’re making space for strongmen to pull everyone back into a vortex of tribalism and war.

Xenophobia has never created peace and prosperity because the harm people do depends on what they do as individuals, not on which group they belong to. This is true even when the group is billionaires. So targeting a group cannot reduce people’s viciousness against each other. Going back to identity-based morality is not an improvement over rules based on equality and fairness formulated to address the harm itself. It would be smarter not to repeat old mistakes, but we’ve fallen into this new+old morality without even articulating it.

The worst effect of deciding evil lurks within given groups is that it has to end in removing the group. The French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions decided the rich were the problem and did what they could to eliminate them. Exploitation and greed somehow persisted anyway. (Current proponents of “eat the rich” take note. “Tax the rich” is another matter.) Jews and women generally have been favorite representatives of moral decay, but there again, no matter how many are burned, inhumanity persists. Rebranding the groups as Zionists or terfs won’t work any better than previous attempts. Although people, being slow learners, are on the path of trying again anyway.

The current changing of the gods has just started. People aren’t demanding the death of witches except out at the extremer edges. There it’s already a regular occurrence to call for the death of women who deviate from transactivist dogma. Or, among some in the Gaza and Palestinian protests, to call for death to “Zionists.” I’m not sure how they plan to accomplish that without another wholesale slaughter of Jews, but despite that they reject accusations of antisemitism. They feel they’re not against Jews. They’re against oppressors. And since, to them, Israelis are white Westerners by definition (itself not true of many Israelis), it follows that they bear group guilt.

Except that group guilt can’t exist. The idea comes from the same place of confusion as corporate personhood. Only individuals can perform actions. Only individuals can be guilty of bad actions. They can argue they were following orders, but it is always individual people who carry them out. Only individuals can save others or kill them.

And that’s the biggest barrier to trying, once again, to live by equal rules. It means we have to admit anyone can do wrong. We can’t wrap ourselves in any group or wave its virtuous flags. It means that every one of us, individually, bears the ability to hurt people and has the duty to do what’s right. That’s no fun.

He said you keep going. Yulia, who’s as lionhearted as he was, is doing that, somehow.

For those of us who are nothing special, it’s hard.

Remember the beginning of the abortion fight?

Sorry. Stupid question. Anything older than two weeks is Not Memorable in the Mediacene.

The abortion fight geared up in the 1970s after the widespread use of birth control. Before that, even fully patriarchal white evangelicals didn’t have a big problem with it. Then the shocked realization descended. Women couldn’t be controlled by fear of pregnancy. This could not stand. At that rate who knew how much male control they might flip off next.

The next thing we knew fetuses had become “babies” and here we are. Women can be stopped from leaving Texas in a throwback to the days of escaping slaves. Totally appropriate, of course, for the current three fifths humans who might be trying to evade their primary function as incubators.

The things is, definitions are important. Vital. Critical. Essential. Do I need to put it in bold all caps?

That’s not a new thought. Socrates pointed it out a few years ago. So let’s start by defining who’s human, in the sense that matters to being a legal person, and who isn’t.

Corpses have rights. Organs cannot be removed from a corpse, even to save someone’s life, without prior permission. Compulsory organ donation is not a thing. People are not allowed to use other people’s bodies for their own benefit, even to save lives.

But wait, you say. Forcing women to carry pregnancies is compulsory life support on a grand scale. And it’s done all the time. It’s different.

Yes, it is different. Only women can do pregnancy. Corpses and organ donors might be male. That’s the only difference between whose body can be used by others and whose can’t. There’s no other difference in principle between forcing some people to provide life support but not others.

That train of reasoning shows it doesn’t matter whether you think a fetus is a legal person or not. It’s irrelevant to the question of why women, and only women, are forced to provide organ donation to save lives.

For the sake of completeness, though, let’s see whether fetuses are legally persons. Again, it doesn’t matter if they are. No legal person, except if they’re women, can be sacrificed for another. But, legally, fetal personhood does not extend to, for instance, counting as a second occupant of a car driven by a pregnant woman in an High Occupancy Vehicle commuter lane on a highway. Fetuses don’t inherit if their mothers die intestate, as children would. Birthdays don’t count from conception (except in Korea) but from, well, birth. I could go on.

The longer one goes on, the clearer it becomes that the only situation in which fetuses are persons — and not only persons but ones with more rights than anyone else: the right to take over someone else’s body — is when the body in question is female. That quiet part was even said out loud in an Alabama case.

Alabama’s new blanket ban on abortion “protects the sanctity of unborn life,” with one curious exception: The law deems only fertilized eggs inside a womb worthy of protection, not ones routinely destroyed in the process of fertility treatment.
“The egg in the lab doesn’t apply,” Clyde Chambliss, state senator and sponsor of the abortion bill, said during the Alabama legislative debate. “It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.”

If it’s all about the “babies,” this makes no sense.

So, in the abortion power grab we’ve seen what happens when we don’t bother to define which rights are involved or who is a legal person. Abortion is not about a right to privacy (although privacy is important). Nor is it about health care (although that’s important, too.) It’s about something more basic than that. It’s about the right to control your own body, the right not to be the property of the state or anyone else.

By not seeing that clearly — by still not seeing that clearly — we’ve fallen back into a situation where women are deprived of their most basic rights. And people barely notice. It’s about “health care,” isn’t it? Lots of people can’t get the health care they need. What’s the big deal?

Now we’re falling down the cliff of the same type of error in the fight over sex, gender, trans rights, and women’s rights.

The main defense, the only(?) defense that’s been consistently applied so far, is in the UK. Beliefs that womanhood is a sex-based category are as worthy of free speech protections as the belief that womanhood is gender-based according to one’s own sense of gender.

And that’s where I start screaming.

Hello? Have you all gone mad? This is not like being a flat-earther. Without any other knowledge, our eyes tell us we do live on a flat earth. This is worse.

Going by the evidence of your own everyday eyes, without any knowledge of math or science, the existence of female and male sexes is an absolute bedrock FACT. It is not a belief. The essence of facts is they go on being facts no matter what you think. You can believe babies are picked up in a cabbage patch. It doesn’t matter. In mammals like humans, they will still arise by a combination of egg and sperm and subsequent pregnancy ending in birth. That’s what a fact looks like.

In contrast, the statement that we have a gendered essence of masculinity or femininity is a belief. It’s a similar concept to the soul. There is no physical, material evidence anyone can point to of, say, a little nugget buried perhaps near the pineal gland which is the locus of a gendered essence.

That’s not to say the belief is wrong. Giordano Bruno believed there were thousands of peopled worlds. He was judged insane (and a heretic). Recently, the probabilities are turning toward his view, although we still have no proof. We have no factual proof of the existence of God, which just means we don’t _know_. A strong feeling that God does or does not exist is not proof. A strong feeling that a gendered essence exists is not proof. It’s meaningful to the believer; not necessarily to anyone else.

Pretending that a fact is somehow equivalent to a belief is nonsense. Facts remain, whether they’re believed or not. Facts will have consequences whether they’re believed or not. Facts must be accommodated so that their consequences aren’t damaging.

Beliefs, on the other hand, just have to be kept to oneself and one’s co-believers. Nobody is under an obligation to participate in someone’s beliefs. Pretending they’re facts to live by just ends in instant absurdity. Imagine a religion (I’m sure there are none like that) which considers nonbelievers subhuman, while the nonbelievers believe the same of the religionists. Since there are no verifiable facts involved, nothing exists to agree on even if they wanted to. The only way out of the absurdity is if one side can annihilate the other. Unless you want eternal war, beliefs can’t be forced on others.

Pretending they’re equivalent also implies facts are optional. We don’t have to live by someone else’s beliefs, so we also don’t have to live by any facts they point out. Except that facts go on having consequences no matter what we believe. Eventually, facts can be stubborn enough to kill people if we’re stupid enough to ignore them.

That’s the once and current disaster with the abortion issue. That’s the train we’re on with the trans issue.

Trans civil rights must be respected the same as everyone else’s. One of those rights is to believe what they like. That’s everyone’s right. The UK is making a start by pointing out that beliefs can’t be imposed on others.

The next step is to acknowledge the existence of facts. One of them is the existence of biological sexes.

I know. I know. There’s too much going on, starting with the planet running a fever to shake off this weird infestation of primates who are out of control. (Admittedly, we are doing almost everything we can to help.) But I can’t stand to think about those things so I’m going for distractions like everybody else.

This one whacked me between the eyes. (Paywalled version here.)

So much for the plaintive cry of But-we-just-want-to-pla-a-a-a-y.

I guess it’s no fun unless you coast to victory among people in a different league. They could be worried about pushback if they tried to horn in on the children’s prizes.

I wonder if people will ever start listening to those of us getting the short end — we’ve been pointing this out for dogs’ years. There are plenty of ways to participate in sport without taking anything away from women.

I can’t think of any other group where the law can simply say, “You? Why should we protect you? Who do you think you are?”

With any other group, people may think that, but you don’t say it. Not in national media of record.

From The Times. (Original ref here.)

Making misogyny a crime would waste our time, police say

Plans to criminalise misogyny to ensure women in Scotland “live free from abuse and denigration” risks overwhelming officers and cutting into the time they need to investigate other offences, police representatives have said. …

“If it is a priority then we will make it a priority but it may mean that, as a result, we can’t do some other things — for example deal with other kinds of reported crime — as quickly as we currently do.”

Nice little orderly society you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it because someone told us to waste time on frills.

And in the US, of course, women have been turned back into breeders without all those rights which really aren’t appropriate for creatures like that anyway. I mean, bodily autonomy? That would interfere with their function!

There’s a gradual awakening to how much hate speech can influence people. Except when it’s porn. I have it on good authority (Gail Dines) that heterosexual porn has moved so far from erotica at this point, it has nothing to do with it. It’s a solid mass of degradation and pain. For women. Because that’s a high and of no concern to anyone. Women don’t feel pain like human beings do, you know.

Meanwhile, millenials and Gen Z say in polls that women’s rights have gone too far. Women make funny wittering noises when people say that, but you never know what they want. It’s not easy to dial rights further back than losing bodily autonomy — that’s the definition of slavery — but no doubt they’ll think of something. Time to end all those extravagances we indulged in. We have real problems now.

My God. The ink isn’t even dry on Sturgeon’s silly — and I do mean silly — trans Self ID bill. It hasn’t even gone into effect yet. The echoes of how bigoted it is to worry about predatory men taking advantage of Self ID haven’t even died away in Holyrood. Just about mid-sentence in blathering about how it’s just a bit of admin and won’t make any difference, the first thug is already trying to work the system.

Adam Graham / Isla Bryson, convicted of two rapes, suddenly discovers he’s trans and needs to be in a women’s jail.

And — this is the part that beggars belief — the authorities were all set to send him to one AFTER THEIR RISK ASSESSMENT.

After the risk assessment. After that.

If there’s a louder way to say women don’t count for shit (shit, after all, can’t be completely ignored), I don’t know what it is.

After two days of shock among the public, Sturgeon decides that maybe inflicting this by now well known rapist on women will be bad publicity. She apparently still plans on inflicting other stalkers and assaulters on women, just not this one.

Yvette Cooper, a UK Labour MP who’s been submerged in the trans tank forever, suddenly says it’s just common sense not to put sex criminals in women’s jails.

O rly? Hoodathunkit?

Now transfer out Karen White/Stephen T. Wood and all the other predators you’ve foisted on female prisoners before feminists forced enough media to notice this crime against humanity.

In my secret heart I’ve always hoped that greater inclusion of women in running things — schools, businesses, corporations, governments, worlds — would mean it raised the tone of the place.

Which means I’ve always harbored a secret conviction that women are somehow, somewhere, better than men.

Well, Liz Truss has been as much proof as even I need that mediocre women can now rise to the heights, just like mediocre men. Maybe not in quite the same overwhelming numbers, but still, they’re starting to pop through.

And now we have Nicola Sturgeon distinguishing herself. She is not mediocre. But why does her role model have to be Machiavelli?

What’s she done? She’s spent way too long pushing through gender identity laws that basically allow easy self-ID. Women, who’ve had too much experience of male predation, object to being made even more vulnerable. Parents object to the lack of thought given to safeguarding minors. (The issue in both cases is not transness as such but opening the door to pervy males. I mean, Boy Scouts, anyone?) England objects to having different definitions of women depending which side of the Scottish border you’re on.

Polling says 59% of the Scottish population is against having males in women’s spaces or girls’ sports or all the rest of the usual examples. Thirty eight percent think it’s a good idea.

Yet in the face of such opposition, Sturgeon, with her politician’s sixth sense for following the crowd, has instead been ramming through this grossly unpopular bill. Because it’s so important to help trans people, she says.

Really?

It didn’t fit. She’s never had principles before. Why now? Why this?

She’s been pro-Scottish independence since way back, and that is a popular stand. Just shy of popular enough to win referendums, at least so far, but fairly close to 50%.

So it looks like she’s forced the trans issue to create a heads-I-win tails-you-lose situation. The UK government in London either has to let her ignore the UK-wide Equality Act, which guarantees women rights that self-ID steps on, or they have to say UK law supersedes Scottish law, which will inflame Scottish nationalism and fracture the UK even more.

Either way, she wins. She can either preen about being the wildly progressiive First Minister who gave trans people everything they want, or she can be an icon of Scottish Self-Rule leading the nation out of its chains.

Machiavelli couldn’t have set it up better. And he would have been just as happy to use a minority as mere gunpowder. If she’s a friend to trans people, they don’t need enemies.

 
That’s the title of an article in today’s London Times and, really, it says it all.

Only women are asked to put trans rights first.

You’d think that would be enough to red flag the issue for anyone. But no. Misogyny is a hell of a drug.

Women count for so little, any male’s passing malaise is worth any and all damage to women.

And there are millions of women who’ve swallowed that, hook, line, and sinker. The misogyny comes wrapped in a cookie labelled Cool Girl. Which is all it takes.

Headlines about how behind the kids are after lockdown and not going to school. How in-person school is essential.

I actually know something about this so I’m a-going to hold forth. Brace yourselves.

For me, it started in the late 1990s at the dawn of the widespread web. I’m a major hermit. People are okay but not very necessary, y’know? So I thought online teaching and learning would solve all our problems. I won’t bore you with the whole process. Here are the take home lessons after decades:

• Fully online learning without a specialized online-adapted curriculum is only suitable for advanced students who already have considerable knowledge of their subject.
• Online learning is significantly facilitated if the participants meet and get to know each other in person. Australians have spent decades teaching children by correspondence and now online. (It’s that far-flung outback with hundreds of miles between houses.) At some point(s) in the school term, the kids travel all the way to a boarding-type school for a week or so and have classes together. Without this, there is just not enough engagement.
• Online learning at basic levels takes more, more, much more tailored curriculum and teacher time and specialized training in some of the teaching skills than in-person. It takes more time and costs more money to achieve the same level of learning. Not less.

It never works when some educrat expects the real world can magically go virtual. It especially doesn’t work when the educrats decide it’s a great time to save money on teachers and materials. After all, they’re just sitting at home on their butts doing nothing, amirite? None of the tools, time, or money were applied. What you get then is this:

You can’t really say it’s the children who’ve fallen behind. They learned what they were taught, which wasn’t much. Especially when, also magically, parents without any teacher training were somehow expected to fill in for teachers. Early in the pandemic lockdowns there was some recognition of the gap. It seems to be gone now.

There’s one other giant massive awful fact that goes unmentioned and has nothing to do with online-ularity. A huge number of children lost parents and people dear to them because of covid. Even with the best in-person schools and the kindest teachers, grief and stress set children back. That’s not news. That’s a reason to approach pandemics more rationally and usefully.

My personal hopelessly cynical take on this all-in-person-all-the-time-damn-the-viruses-full-speed-ahead business?

People have already forgotten that teachers are a essential component. They cost money, after all. It makes it harder to cut costs if you recognize what they do.

No, the real motivation is to get the kids out of the house and off the parents’ hands to where somebody can babysit them for a while. The “think of the children learning!” is just a BS cover story. If they were really concerned about learning they’d be lobbying for small class sizes. Also for lighter teaching loads to enable individual attention to the students. Because if you let teachers do their jobs, children learn. It’s right there in the name of the profession.

Actually, just one thought. There’s so much talk about how Ukraine has its own language and culture and history and therefore “deserves” to be independent.

To me, this is bollocks.

I speak English and live in an English-speaking country but we’re not part of Britain.

The culture where I am is next to indistinguishable from our nearest neighbor. We were even, for a while, going to be one country with that neighbor. But we’re not, and nobody here or there feels an overwhelming urge to charge in and reunite the two by force.

The point is: you don’t need a distinct language or culture to be a separate nation. You just need a group with a desire for self-determination. Ideally, it’s a big enough group to be an economically viable entity, but that’s a practical side issue. The main point, the principle of the thing, is that a group of people who want to be independent have the same right, and to the same extent, as any other to self-determination.

Ukraine needs no other justification. It’s not something you “deserve.” It’s something you are.

I just had a gobsmacking experience. A glimpse into another way of thinking that I didn’t even know existed.

There was an interminable thread discussing among other things the validity of self-ID with regard to gender. (I came upon it via brilliant Rebecca Reilly-Cooper.)

This exchange cropped up:

Unavailable to the Mortal Man @EdwinDroom Dec 29, 2021
Nope, you’re misunderstanding the difference between the categories existing, and them being recognised and given a name. Hydrogen and Helium really exist as separate elements, and did within a very short time of the Big Bang. They didn’t have those names, sure.

Mary @xmarylawrence Dec 29, 2021
Nope, those categories don’t exist separate from humans categorizing them.

Unavailable to the Mortal Man @EdwinDroom Dec 29, 2021
Nope. Hydrogen really exists. So does helium. They existed with all their properties long before life, let alone humans, evolved. This isn’t a debate, Mary. You’re simply wrong.

Gem @_____Gem Dec 29, 2021
It is AMAZING what people are prepared to argue in the service of gender ideology.

Mary @xmarylawrence Dec 29, 2021
Yeah how dare people recognize what a social construct is

The Iron Labia @TheIronLabia Dec 29, 2021
Hydrogen isn’t a social construct.

Mary @xmarylawrence Dec 29, 2021
Oh I’m sorry, when we discovered hydrogen was it wearing a name tag? Did it introduced itself [by] name? [emphasis added]

Unavailable to the Mortal Man @EdwinDroom Dec 29, 2021
Something existing and having clear, distinctive properties and something having a name are not the same thing, Mary. How are you still struggling with this?

Mary @xmarylawrence Dec 29, 2021
But you’re avoiding the whole entire point. How was helium classifying itself prior to humans doing it? Did it have a name prior to our existence? Did it have noble-gas parties were they all got together and shot the shit?

Unavailable to the Mortal Man @EdwinDroom Dec 29, 2021
That’s not the whole entire point, Mary. Either you know this, and it’s pointless continuing, or you’re so far from knowing it … it’s pointless continuing.

This exchange is like finding out that babies don’t have object permanence. When Mother hides behind a cupboard, she’s gone.

Mary apparently can’t imagine a situation where anything has objective existence outside of its name. To her, the naming of a thing really is “the entire point.” (She’s right, of course, that names don’t exist outside of human constructs. But, really?, she thinks the name is the same as the thing in itself? Mother disappears when she has no name?)

How could she possibly have avoided noticing that facts are those things that continue existing whether you believe them or not? I mean, in my world, even when I believe everything in the laundry bins is clean, it stays whiffy. But in her world, presto!, she never has to do laundry?

Amazing.

It’s a way of thinking with no relation to reality. But, as I think about it, there’s nothing unusual about that. Humanity has spent most of its millenia believing bizarre legends. So just because in the last few hundred years we’ve found a much more effective method based on paying attention to facts, that doesn’t mean the fantasists will necessarily come to their senses.

Scary.

People have lost their fear of disease. It only took about two generations without major deadly infections. That comes as a surprise to me. I thought people understood cause and effect. But, no. Apparently, if you’re not in immediate and personal danger of dying, it’s Somebody Else’s Problem. And a SEP field, as Douglas Adams astutely pointed out, is the only proven way to make anything invisible.

Years ago, 1990s?, I read an article about attitudes to vaccination. In places like Bangladesh, where they actually had to contend with actual disease, people were overwhelmingly in favor of it. More than 85% of the respondents were incredulous you could have any other attitude. (This was before extremists started spreading paranoia about Western contamination.) It was only in well-to-do parts of the wealthier countries that people had the luxury of fantasizing about what vaccines would do to their precious bodily fluids.

The loss of healthy fear towards something that can kill you has made too many people incapable of understanding where a lethal threat fits into the scheme of things. You see sentences like, “But the extent of the European lurch toward mandatory measures has also prompted unease and questioning over loss of freedom.”

The mind reels. Do they not understand that your freedom ends where your threat to my life begins?

(Rights, unlike people, are not all equal. Some depend on others. Some are a precondition for everything else. There is not one single freedom that can be enjoyed if you’re dead. Of course it’s more complicated than one right always being first. The link goes on about the intricacies.)

Public health measures to prevent the spread of disease take precedence over people’s convenience every single time.

Mask wearing, social distancing, and temporary lockdowns are all merely inconvenient. There is no, absolutely no, rights-based argument to make against them.

Contact tracing does raise privacy issues. But there again: you can’t enjoy privacy when you’re dead. Privacy is a secondary consideration. It must be respected to the extent possible while the primary public health priorities are achieved. For instance, we’re horrified the government could be using our cell phones for location data to track covid contacts, as they did in South Korea. That is nonsense. Location tracking to save your life is a Good Thing. It should be done from the start to the end of a pandemic. After that the data should be expunged.

What should not be done is using that data to sell us fast food, or to store it forever to target political ads at us, or to deny us jobs based on some AI bullshit model of who we are based on where we’ve been. And yet, we put up calmly with the latter while throwing fits about lifesaving temporary public health tracking. Commercial tracking, which should be illegal, has made us allergic to lifesaving tracking. It’s insane. And I suspect it’s all because we feel powerless against corporations but not the government.

Vaccination is the third major public health measure, and it does intersect with the basic right to control your own body. When two foundational rights conflict — the right not to be harmed and the right to control your own body — then the scale of the harm on each side is important.

Vaccines can cause nanoscale harm. Things like sore arms, a day of lethargy, or even super-rare blood clots which can be effectively dealt with if doctors know they should look for that. Compared to the megascale harm from disease — death, long term disability, sickness for millions — there is no contest at all . The greatest good of the greatest number is the right criterion to apply when the difference is so stark. Vaccine mandates are justified to bring the cost of non-vaccination home to anti-vaxxers. As are mandates that limit them from any place where they could potentially spread the disease they’ve refused to prevent.

There is zero place for any “unease and questioning over the loss of freedom.” [Ed. note: idiots.]

We’re doomed, aren’t we.

ConocoPhillips’ oil project in Alaska calls for inserting giant “chillers” into the melting permafrost, so the ground is stable enough to drill for oil.

I don’t subscribe to the Financial Times, so I can’t read the article, but the front page shows this:

US women consider parenting alone after coronavirus. By Patti Waldmeir.

And a couple of days ago I saw that the patriarchal fossils running China are so frantic about similar thoughts they are nabbing women and punishing them (how, I don’t know and hate to think) for having such ideas.

The whole point of stuffing women into the sex caste is to use their bodies. For sex, certainly. But also for producing children.

It’ll be hilarious when, after centuries of pretending having families was a terrible burden foisted on them by women, a “ball and chain,” and so forth and so on, suddenly men find themselves on the outside, looking in.

Everything human beings actually care about is on the other side of that glass. And I’m not sure another smash and grab wreckage will be tolerated a second time around. Been there, done that.

There’s an easy sense that internet violence is just some fantasy. Just cosplaying. Just nothing.

I’ve long thought that was a mistake when it came to the vicious threats thrown at women. That regularly bleeds over into real life.

But I wrote off the radical right wing yammering about destroying the government as stupid fantasists full of cosplay.

That’s the transformative power of not being the target.

Well, these goonies with their GoPros and gear and internet messages asking for the snacks are obviously cosplayers. The part I missed was that doesn’t stop it from bleeding over into reality.

Just because they’re clowns doesn’t mean they can’t kill real people.

They believed the stuff about this being the beginning of the real war which would put them on top. (evidence: all over Parler)

They had a President telling them to go to it. Jenn Budd:

They had collaborators inside the Capitol Police (and elsewhere no doubt?). The “Pentagon” (i.e. Trump’s very recently installed Acting Secretary of Defense, Chris Miller) put significant restrictions on D.C. Guard ahead of pro-Trump protests.

The rioters constructed hangmen’s platforms with rope nooses near the Capitol.

Their fantasy included the execution of the “enemies of the people.” (evidence: all over Parler)

Some of them carried zipties to handcuff people.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see the people, “enemies,” being led off to those newly constructed gallows.

The President who told them to go to it had a tent with video feeds and drinks and food and cronies where they could all watch the progress of the Glorious Victory.

Their grip on reality was so pathetic they couldn’t see that their Klown Kar Koup was never going anywhere. But that changes nothing.

They were hoping for a coup.

It won’t be enough to laugh and move on. They were hoping for a coup. It has to be treated like one. The whole mentality that led to it has to be rooted out. That has to start with evicting Trump from the Presidency now. Yesterday. Anything less shows stupidity about the scope of the disaster.

Otherwise this is our last warning. Next time the Klowns will have more than cosplayers. They’ll have a planner or two.

Update Jan10: Something heartening: Igor Bobic filmed a quick thinking Capitol Police officer, by himself, as he eggs on a mob to chase him (toward his backup…) instead of charging in to the Senate room with Senators still inside.

So the only thing Trump and McConnell and the gang are doing now is trying to make sure that Social Security and the Post Office and Federal lands and the Arctic and cybersecurity and the economy and all international relations and the pandemic and, well, Absolutely Everything, are as awful as possible so Biden starts out with massive failures everywhere.

Which they’ll then try to blame him for and try to use to worm their way back into power in all of Congress in 2022.

There’s only one thing to say and Jeff Tiedrich said it.

holy fucking shit, the president of the united states is up late at night plotting a military coup to overturn the election and I guess what I want to know is, why do we even have a 25th amendment if we’re not going to use it on this fucking unhinged raving anti-American lunatic