#Quillette

[sweetlittleroses]

The Newcomers

Pairing: Paul Lahote x Hispanic fem!reader

Warnings: none

Summary: The arrival of new people was unique but now one knew how much they were going to throw the lives of many for a spin.

Author’s Note: Different works like this will be part of the same plot unless it’s said otherwise.Sorry again for uploading late but college is slowly killing me.

You watched as the water droplets hit the window. It brought you some peace from the war you deal with each day. Under the calm demeanor you showed, you couldn’t help but feel excited for being able to finally see your family but at the same time felt fear for what could happen when letting your guard down.

On your left you could see your brother driving both of you to your destination. “We’re almost there”,he said.You finally took in mind of where you were and looked up in time to see the sign saying “Welcome to Forks”. It felt weird for you to be coming to a new home and leaving your memories behind in Texas.

As you passed by you couldn’t help but feel happy for seeing some Christmas decorations which helped bring a small pop of color to this small wet town.

“How far are we?”you asked. “We’re 30 minutes away”,he said simply .

“Remember don’t take your glasses off.No matter what”you said sternly. “ We can’t risk it”

“What about you?Are you going to wear yours all the time?”

“I can’t .They’ll ask if we both wear them. After what happened we lost control but I still have mine”you sadly smiled at him.

With 20 minutes remaining to get to your destination ,you decided to put some music to uplift both of your souls.The urge to sing along won the both of y’all over. Both singing at the top of your lungs and with happiness filling your body ,time passed by and before you knew it ,you finally got to the place you would call your new home.La Push.

By what your mom told you it was a reservation for the Quilete Tribe and was only for them but something about your parents allowed them to live on their land. You couldn’t help but feel grateful that strangers would help your family within a heart beat. You couldn’t help but feel happy with the thought of being reunited and spending the whole month of December with them.

Your parents had always wanted to live the dream and move to Washington to start new and you couldn’t blame them for moving at the first opportunity that made it possible.The closer you got to your parents land ,the clearer the humongous house built in the middle stood out to you .

It was much bigger that what they previously owned back home and you could help but feel pride for their success. Danny decided to park the car and step out and as he looked around he turned to you and nodded. That was your sign to finally step out of the car.

Feeling the crunch of snow at the bottom of your feet caught your attention. You always wanted to see snow like this . As you both walked further near the entrance your attention was caught by some voices.

When you got closer you saw a cop car at the front with a man with a mustache and another man with long hair .It put you on high alert of what could have happened until you saw your dad stepping out with his fishing gear.

At that moment you wanted to cry of joy of finally seeing him but all you did was run towards him and hug him with a tight grip.

“Hi dad” you smiled proudly .He returned the hug with the same tight grip and didn’t let you go for a couple of minutes .As he finally let you go ,he turned to Danny and gave him a hug as well.

Absorbed by the feelings of joy ,you forgot their were others around until the guy in the mustache said “ hey d/n ,who are these young folk?”

“My kids” he said

As you made eye contact with the dude driving he mentioned his name .”Charlie Swan”. “ And this grumpy man next to me is Billy”

When you moved your eyes to Billy it seemed like he was observing your movements and almost analyzing both you and Danny.Once he snapped out of it he said, “Hey kids , my names Billy “ and offered it with a welcoming smile.

Danny and you both nodded but to put a nicer front you gave them both a small smile.

“Well it was nice meeting you but we are going to head out .Oh ,and before I forget d/n don’t forget next week is another trip” and like that he drove off in his cruiser.

When they disappeared from sight you turned to your dad chuckling “¿Quien son ellos?”

“ Son unos amigos” he said chuckling back and headed inside the house.

“Let’s get our bags Danny and say hi to everyone”as you laughed with Danny.

After getting all your stuff from the car Danny headed in first while you locked the car.But as you were heading towards the door you quickly turned around looking at the wooded area to see if something could be visible.

It felt like something or someone was watching your every movement.

With one last look you went inside closing the door screaming “Did you miss me?!”

~

“They don’t seem out of the ordinary just a bit quiet “ Jacob said . “Why did you want me to check up on them dad?”

“I don’t know son but something about them gave me a weird feeling”,Billy said

______________________________________________

Quien so ellos- who are they

Son unos amigos - they’re friends

#paul lahote #Paul lahote angst #paul lahote fluff #paul lahote x reader #paul lahote x you #paul lahote x y/n #la push #twilight #twilight saga #twilight aesthetic #imprint #quillette

[sh0rtins0mniac]

UNRWA’s enablement of terrorism is a feature of the agency, not a bug. Indeed, reports of UNRWA’s complicity in terror activity go back years. Media reports have exposed Hamas terror tunnels next to or under UNRWA facilities, and UNRWA schools have been used as rocket-launching platforms, with rockets even stored inside those schools.

On the problems with UNRWA and why it has to be dismantled.

This was my drafts yesterday and today we found this out

#unrwa #israel #palestine #gaza #free gaza from hamas #quillette #articles #post

[paintydeerest]

✨️MERRY CHRISTMAS✨️

Gonna be on hiatus till new years^^

#happy tree friends #htf #my art #htf oc #htfoc #art #htf splendont #splendont #Quillette

[arcticdementor]

At the American university where I teach, one of my assigned tasks is to advise undergraduates—mostly freshmen and sophomores. This essay describes a conversation I had in 2017 with one of those advisees. I will call him Daniel.

Daniel was a sophomore at the time. He had been an advisee of mine for a year already, and I’d come to understand that he was a prodigy. I’d also formed a hypothesis, based on a certain bluntness and lack of social tact he exhibited, that Daniel might be on the autism/Asperger’s spectrum. He seemed weak on interpersonal skills and narrowly, even obsessively, focused on math and science. During his first year of university studies, Daniel had taken a number of upper-level math and physics courses that none of my other advisees had taken, and had earned flat As in almost all of them. His GPA probably would have been a perfect 4.0 if the university had allowed him to take only math and science courses. As it was, it was a 3.85.

At the end of his freshman year, Daniel applied for admission to a competitive honors program that our university runs, but he was rejected. He came to my office to discuss this—or, rather, to complain about it. I soon realized that he was not just disappointed; he was angry. Daniel believed he’d been treated unfairly. He believed he was the victim of reverse racism.

I told Daniel that I understood why he was upset, but I reminded him that the program he’d applied to is highly competitive. The admissions committee presumably received many strong applications. There is always some subjectivity in admissions decisions, I noted, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Subjectivity isn’t the same as unfairness.

Daniel said he wouldn’t be upset if he believed that the applicants who’d been admitted to the program were as strong as him, or stronger. But he said he had reason to believe they were not.

I asked him what he meant by that. He then pulled a laptop out of his backpack and opened up a spreadsheet.

Daniel proceeded to explain that he and a friend had both applied to the same honors program and had both been rejected. Afterwards, they wondered who had been accepted. They scrutinized the social-media accounts of fellow students and found several dozen applicants who’d posted about being accepted. A lot of them, they noticed, were either African American or Hispanic. Daniel and his friend then asked around and identified several dozen students who had been rejected, many of whom were Caucasian or Asian. This made Daniel and his friend suspicious. They decided to create a spreadsheet—the one Daniel was showing me—to organize the data they’d collected; and then they decided to gather more.

Daniel explained that he and his friend wanted to find a measure of academic achievement that they could track statistically. A student’s GPA is not public information, but the Dean’s List is; so they were able to use that as a discrete variable—Dean’s List, yes or no—as a rough proxy for achievement. Daniel explained to me that it would have been better to use a continuous variable (like GPA), but he and his friend had to work with what they had.

Daniel explained that he and his friend had performed various kinds of statistical analysis on the data, and had concluded that admission to the honors program was closely related to Dean’s List status within certain groups. However, there were large differences in acceptance rates across those groups. Overall, he told me, the factor that explained the most variance in admissions outcomes was (as he’d suspected) the race or ethnicity of the applicant. The patterns were quite stark. African Americans who weren’t on the Dean’s List had a better overall chance of being admitted to the honors program than whites or Asians who were on the Dean’s List.

At this point, I got up and closed the door to my office.

Daniel went on talking. He told me he was thinking of filing a protest with the admissions committee and challenging them with the data he’d gathered. He was also thinking about sending his data to the university newspaper as a way of exposing the unfairness of the committee’s decisions.

As I listened, I began to think about what I might tell Daniel once he stopped talking.

Should I tell him what I thought—that he might well be right about why he was not admitted to the honors program?

Should I tell him that I had heard some talk among the faculty that seemed to confirm his suspicions? A few months earlier, I’d heard a dean saying that the honors program was too “traditional” in its make-up. What the university needed to do, this dean said, was “make the program look more like America as a whole.” Having been in academia for several years, I had a pretty good idea what that might mean.

Should I try to make the case for affirmative action, explaining that the policies are well-intentioned and designed to make up for real injustices, including slavery, segregation, and racism?

Should I tell Daniel that sometimes in life one just has to accept this kind of unfortunate outcome as part of a larger process of social transformation?

Should I introduce him to the concept of “taking one for the team”?

Should I mention any of my own experiences with affirmative action?

Should I tell him about the time when I applied for an internal position at our university, only to learn that it was actually a “targeted” search? I came to understand that the faculty members doing the hiring were determined to hire a candidate from an under-represented minority. This meant that I, as a white male, had almost no chance of being selected.

Should I tell Daniel about the time when I interviewed with a small college, and the woman I was interviewing with came right out and told me that she and her colleagues were really hoping to hire an African-American candidate—but, unfortunately, there were not all that many African-American candidates in the applicant pool, so she wasn’t convinced that her school would be able to achieve this goal?

Should I tell him about what happened afterwards, when I spoke to some other graduate students about this interview? One of the graduate students said that what the interviewer had done was wrong: she shouldn’t have said what she did.

Wait a minute, I said. What is it that upsets you about this whole thing? Are you upset that the committee members are so focused on the race of the applicants? Or are you upset that this woman was honest enough to tell me the truth? (That turned out to be an awkward conversation.)

Should I tell Daniel about the colleague I’d spoken with just a few weeks earlier, who’d told me, with much frustration and a touch of anger in his voice, that he was getting out of academia because he’d concluded that it is now virtually impossible for a white male to get a tenure-track position in his field? This young man had finished his PhD and published a book. He had applied for scores of tenure-track jobs, but had finally concluded he was not likely to get one. “Picking me,” he explained, “won’t do anyone any good. It won’t help the institution show that it is combatting racism, and it won’t allow any of the members of the hiring committee to assuage their white liberal guilt.” Shortly thereafter, this colleague took a non-academic job as a computer programmer.

Should I tell Daniel that, over the years, I had grown more and more frustrated with the way in which the academics I work among approach hiring? I’d seen plenty of searches in which members of the hiring committee went out of their way to try to hire persons of color, or members of under-represented minority groups, but nobody would ever admit publicly that this is what was going on. Nor did anyone want to admit that their efforts to boost minority candidates made job-seeking more difficult for members of other, non-preferred groups. Over and over, we were encouraged to celebrate the hiring of a minority candidate, but nobody ever said anything about the persons who were passed over as a result. Everybody seemed to look at these hiring decisions with one eye open and one eye strategically closed. To me, this seemed dishonest.

In the end, I didn’t tell Daniel about any of my own experiences.

I told him that I thought he might be right about why he hadn’t been accepted into the program. It looked to me like the push for diversity might have been the cause, or at least a key factor, in regard to the decision—though it was impossible to be certain. I then briefly (and perhaps half-heartedly) outlined the usual justification for affirmative-action programs.

But what I emphasized most was that I thought it would be unwise for Daniel to launch a campaign against the admissions committee, even if his data was as strong as he seemed to think it was. I told him that a campaign of the sort he was considering would almost certainly fail. He might get some catharsis out of it in the short run, but it would probably do no good in the long run. The committee was unlikely to revisit its decisions or change its procedures going forward. Support for affirmative action is almost universal among academics. Very few are even willing to express hesitations or second thoughts on this issue, lest they be deemed racists. The people who make these decisions feel good about the people who benefit from affirmative action, and they avert their gaze, as much as possible, from the people who are harmed by it. They might be embarrassed by Daniel and his friend’s data, but they would probably not abandon their approach.

I warned Daniel that I thought his plan might end up doing him a lot of harm. If he chose to make his exposé public, the most likely outcome would be that some student or faculty member would accuse him of being a racist. Publishing his data would probably end up hurting him rather than helping him.

When Daniel heard me use the word “racist,” even in this conjectural, non-accusatory way, he responded angrily. He told me that he was not a racist. He had voted for Democrats in the 2016 election and hated Donald Trump. And as it happens, I had reason to believe this was true. The morning after that election, Daniel had come to visit me in my office, deeply troubled by what a Trump presidency might mean for scientific research and funding.

Daniel told me that he believed affirmative-action policies were justified for college admissions, but he did not think they should be used to filter out qualified applicants to honors programs and graduate programs.

He then spoke for several minutes about his own ethnic background. He reminded me that he was Jewish, and told me that both of his parents had put up with a lot of antisemitic discrimination in their universities and workplaces. Back then, they were regarded as “non-white” and were discriminated against as a result; now (ironically) he was considered “white” and was being discriminated against on that basis.

I listened with real sympathy. The situation seemed unfair to me, too. To be honest, I’ve never been quite clear on how we’re supposed to get over centuries of judging people by their skin color or ethnicity by paying more and more attention to skin color and ethnicity.

In the past few years, in fact, I’ve increasingly had the sense that affirmative action may be backfiring. Policies meant to correct historical iniquities seem to be stoking racial resentment. Like Daniel, I dislike Trump intensely. I don’t have much in common with his followers, and I certainly don’t think of myself as one of them. But I do, increasingly, understand some of the grievances that motivate them. I wish I didn’t, but I do.

In the end, as I’ve mentioned, I didn’t tell Daniel about any of my personal experiences or private thoughts. I assured myself that doing so might be counterproductive: after all, my goal was to calm Daniel down, not rile him up.

I told Daniel that he could still succeed at our university, and get accepted by a top graduate school, even if he never made it into the honors program—as long as he just kept on taking challenging math and science classes and posting good grades. That would carry the day. He would move ahead, while the unqualified would fall by the wayside, unable to do the heavy intellectual lifting that advanced courses required.

Daniel must not have been entirely convinced by my arguments, because he proceeded to tell me about a “plan” he had come up with to ensure he would be accepted by a good graduate school. He told me that two of his four grandparents were descended from Sephardic Jews who’d fled Spain in the 1500s. This, he said, made him “technically, part Hispanic”—and thus eligible for preferential admission to graduate-school programs.

I tried to discourage Daniel from putting this plan into action. I told him I thought it was deceptive and dishonest. He might be accepted by a university, but eventually the faculty members would learn that he was not the sort of Hispanic they’d intended to admit. As with his idea of publishing his data, I thought this idea would probably end up hurting him rather than helping.

Daniel eventually calmed down and left my office. He went on with his studies and did not publish his numbers.

In some ways, I think I gave Daniel good advice. Publishing the data he collected would probably not have helped him in the long run. Neither would presenting himself as Hispanic for the sake of graduate admissions. Those actions would probably have led to some unpleasant consequences.

On the other hand, maybe it would have done some good to let the world know just how far the admissions committee was willing to go to admit under-represented minorities and make that honors program “look more like America as a whole.” By the same token, maybe there is something cowardly about not challenging current practices because it’s not in one’s own self-interest to make trouble. Maybe the world would be a better place if some people did challenge these preferential policies.

So what do you think, reader? Did I give Daniel good advice? Or would you have told him something different?

#quillette #affirmative action

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: The Quillette Editorial Board

Published: Dec 23, 2023

The Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was founded in 1971 with a mission to fight poverty and racial discrimination. Its early litigation campaigns, which targeted the Ku Klux Klan and other overtly racist organizations, met with success, and the group soon came to be seen as an authoritative source in regard to right-wing extremism more generally. 

Another form of expertise the organization developed was in the area of marketing—especially when the market in question consisted of deep-pocketed urban liberals. As former SPLC staffer Bob Moser reported in a 2019 New Yorker article, the group has consistently taken on attention-grabbing urgent-seeming causes that its leaders knew could be leveraged as a means to gain publicity and—more importantly—donations. It’s no coincidence that the SPLC’s co-founder and long-time fundraising guru, Morris Dees, had previously operated a direct-mail business that sold cookbooks and tchotchkes. “Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same,” Dees told a journalist in 1988.

Dees’ big fundraising break at the SPLC came when he got access to the direct-mail list from the 1972 presidential campaign of Democrat George McGovern. The SPLC co-founder went on to maximize the SPLC’s revenues through what would now be known as targeted methods. According to one former legal colleague, for instance, Dees rarely used his middle name—Seligman—in SPLC mailings, except when it came to “Jewish zip codes.”

Thanks to Dees’ slick marketing expertise, the SPLC was eventually taking in more money than it paid out in operational expenses. (As of October 2022, its endowment fund was valued at almost US$640 million.) But over time, his hard-sell tactics began to alienate co-workers, as there was an obvious disconnect between the real class-based problems they observed in society and the fixations of the naïve northern donors whose wallets Dees was seeking to pry open.

“I felt that [Dees] was on the Klan kick because it was such an easy target—easy to beat in court, easy to raise big money on,” former SPLC attorney Deborah Ellis told Progressive writer John Egerton. “The Klan is no longer one of the South’s biggest problems—not because racism has gone away, but because the racists simply can’t get away with terrorism any more.”

On March 14, 2019, Dees—by now 82 years old, but still listed as the SPLC’s chief trial lawyer—was fired amid widespread rumors that he’d been the subject of internal sexual-harassment accusations. His affiliation was scrubbed from the group’s web site; and the organization’s president, Richard Cohen, cryptically (but damningly) declared that, “when one of our own fails to meet [SPLC] standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action.” (Less than two weeks later, Cohen himself left the organization, casting his resignation as part of a transition “to a new generation of leaders.”)

In describing his tenure at the SPLC during the early 2000s, Moser argued that the very structure of the organization betrayed its hypocrisy: Here was an entity dedicated to social justice (as we would now call it), yet which was run by an extremely well-paid, almost exclusively white, corps of lawyers, administrators, and fund-raisers who ruled over a mixed-race corps of junior staff. As far back as the 1980s, Dees was openly admitting that he saw the fight against poverty as passé, and admitted that the “P” in SPLC was an anachronism. Jaded staff began ruefully referring to their own flashy headquarters as the “Poverty Palace.”

Dees and Cohen may have left the Poverty Palace, but the SPLC’s tendency to betray its founding principles clearly remains a problem, as illustrated by a new SPLC report released under the auspices of what the group dubs “Combating Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Informative Narratives.” (This verbal clunker seems to have been reverse-engineered in order to yield the acronym, “CAPTAIN.”)

The report purports to demonstrate “the perils of anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience” and “anti-trans narratives and extremism.” Much like the dramatically worded hard-sell direct-mail campaigns that the SPLC started up under Dees, it’s marketed as a matter of life and death: According to the deputy director of research for the SPLC’s “Intelligence Project,” the “anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience” uncovered by the SPLC has “real-life, often life-threatening consequences for trans and non-binary people.”

At this point, it should be stressed that there is certainly nothing wrong with the SPLC—or anyone else—campaigning for the legitimate rights of people who are transgender. Such a campaign would be entirely in keeping with the SPLC’s original liberal ethos. Just as no one should be denied, say, an apartment, a marriage license, or the right to vote based on his or her race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation, no trans person should be denied these rights and amenities simply because he or she experiences gender dysphoria.

But the SPLC’s report hardly confines itself to such unassailable liberal principles. The real point of the project, it seems, was to catalogue and denounce public figures who’ve expressed dissent from the most extreme demands of trans-rights activists—specifically, (1) the demand that children and adolescents who present as transgender must instantly be “affirmed” in their dysphoric beliefs, even if such affirmation leads to a life of sterility, surgical disfigurement, drug dependence, and medical complications; and (2) the demand that biological men who self-identify as women must be permitted unfettered access to protected women’s spaces and sports leagues.

The SPLC’s authors seek to cast their ideological enemies as hate-addled reactionaries whose nefarious activities must “be understood as part of the historical legacy of white supremacy and the political aims of the religious right.” And it is absolutely true that some of the organizations they name-check are hard-right, socially conservative outfits that endorse truly transphobic (and homophobic) beliefs.

But many of the supposed transphobes targeted by the report aren’t even conservative—let alone members of the religious right. In a multitude of cases, they’re simply parents, therapists, and activists who argue the obvious fact that human sexual biology doesn’t evanesce into rainbow dust the moment that a child—or middle-aged man—asserts that he or she was “born in the wrong body.”

It’s also interesting to note who gets left out of the SPLC’s analysis. The most influential figures leading the backlash against (what some call) “gender ideology” are women such as author J.K. Rowling and tennis legend Martina Navratilova, both of whom come at the issue from explicitly feminist perspectives. Being successful public figures, neither woman needs a cent from the conservative think tanks that the SPLC presents as being back-office puppet-masters of the alleged anti-trans conspiracy outlined in the CAPTAIN report.

In keeping with the conspiracist motif that runs through the document, the authors have provided spider-web diagrams that set out the connections binding this (apparently) shadowy cabal. In this regard, it seems that Quillette itself served as one of the SPLC’s sources: In a section titled, “Group Dynamics and Division of Labor within the Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Network,” the authors footnote “an August 23, 2023 podcast for Quillette,” wherein

it was revealed that [Colin] Wright is in a relationsihp [sic] with journalist Christina Buttons, who is an advisoary [sic] board member of [the Gender Dysphoria Alliance] with Drs. Lisa Littman and Ray Blanchard, an editoral [sic] board member of Springer’s Archives of Sexual Research [a mistaken reference to the Archives of Sexual Behavior] with J. Michael Bailey. Notably, Buttons and Wright are interviewed by host Jonathan Kay. In addition to hosting Quillette’s podcast, Kay serves on FAIR’s board of advisors.

We’ve chosen to highlight this particular (typo-riddled) text from the report not just because of the absurd suggestion that our publication has enlisted in an imaginary “anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience network,” but also because the above-quoted roll call of supposed gender villains illustrates the intellectual dishonesty that suffuses the whole report.

Let’s go through the references one by one, in the order in which they are presented. The Gender Dysphoria Alliance (GDA) is a group led by people who are themselves transgender, and who are “concerned about the direction that gender medicine and activism has taken.” Are we to imagine that its members are directing transphobia—against themselves? Lisa Littman, formerly of Brown University, is a respected academic who’s published a peer-reviewed analysis of Rapid Onset Gender Disorder. Ray Blanchard is a well-known University of Toronto psychiatrist. The Archives of Sexual Behavior is a peer-reviewed academic journal in sexology. Michael Bailey is a specialist in sexual orientation and gender nonconformity at Northwestern University. Colin Wright is a widely published writer (including at Quillette) with a PhD in evolutionary biology from UC Santa Barbara. (The SPLC’s claim that he is in a relationship with journalist Christina Buttons, who also writes about gender issues, is completely true. But the fact that the group saw fit to report this fact as if it were evidence of sinister machinations says far more about the report’s authors than it does about either Wright or Buttons.) FAIR, the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, is a classically liberal group led by a Harvard Law School graduate named Monica Harris. Do any of these people or groups sound like extremists?

The fact that the SPLC is attempting to market its report as a blow against the “anti-LGBTQ+” movement, writ large, is itself quite laughable, since many of the activists who’ve been arguing for a more balanced approach to gender rights are themselves either gay (as with Navratilova and Julie Bindel) or (as with the founders of the GDA) transgender.

Others on the SPLC gender-enemies list are author Abigail Shrier, and therapists Sasha Ayad, and Stella O’Malley. These women openly broadcast their views in best-selling books, as well as mainstream magazines and newspapers. The idea that the SPLC has successfully “exposed” these women through some kind of investigation, as suggested by the title that’s been slapped on the CAPTAIN report, would be ludicrous even if they’d said anything scandalous (which they haven’t).

And what course of future action does the SPLC endorse? For one, it concludes that educators should stigmatize gender-critical views as analogous to “racism, sexism, and heteronormativity.” The report's authors also want academic journals to sniff out groups that “espouse an anti-LGBTQ+ ideology” (as that latter term is speciously defined by the SPLC). And in a final flourish, the group urges reporters to “be aware of the narrative manipulation strategies and the cooptation of scientific credentials and language by anti-trans researchers when sourcing stories about trans experiences.”

With this last point, we get to the real nub: The apparent goal is for this report to be read as a catalogue of people, ideas, and groups that must be shunned. Indeed, the authors explicitly cite the work of one Andrea James, a once-respected arts producer who, as Jesse Singal has documented, now runs a creepy (“stalker” is the word Singal uses) web site called Transgender Map, which lists personal details of anyone whom James deems a gender heretic. When it comes to one-on-one communication, James’ manner of dealing with critics is exemplified by an email sent to bioethicist Alice Dreger, in which James referred to Dreger’s then-five-year-old son as a “womb turd.”

One way to describe the CAPTAIN report is as an SPLC-branded rehash of the information contained on Transgender Map. And one can understand why the authors thought that such a gambit might work. The SPLC already publishes other curated lists of hatemongers—e.g., its “Hatewatch” service, “Hate Map,” and “Intelligence Report.” It wasn’t such a long shot to imagine that this new report might convince readers to treat the listed “Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Network” acolytes as equally disreputable.

But if that was the authors’ goal, it doesn’t seem to have been achieved. The SPLC report landed with something of a thud—and has attracted little attention on social media except insofar as it was mocked by its intended targets.

This may have something to do with the report’s timing. For several years now, a backlash against this kind of gender agitprop has been building within many of the same liberal and progressive circles that the SPLC has traditionally targeted for donations. The trend is reflected by the rise of such groups as the LGB Alliance, a coalition of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people who are fed up with the ideological takeover of LGBT groups by a militant subset of trans activists.

The same trend is playing out internationally. While the SPLC does its best to heap blame on America’s conservative Christians, many of western Europe’s governments (none of which are in thrall to the Heritage Foundation or the Charles Koch Foundation) have been following a more gender-critical path for years.

Just a week after the SPLC put out its report, in fact, the UK government published new guidelines advising teachers that they have no duty to automatically “affirm” a child’s assertion that he or she is transgender; and that, in considering such situations, teachers should speak with a child’s parents and consider whether the child is under undue influence from social media or peers. Sweden, Finland, and Norway—hardly bastions of Christian conservatism—have also rolled back policies that rush children into transition. In Canada, several provinces have recently enacted rules that require parents to be notified when a child seeks to transition, even in the face of a sustained media campaign that repeats lurid claims to the effect that such policies will cause an epidemic of trans suicides. Are all of these foreign governments also complicit in the vast “junk-science and disinformation campaign” against trans people that the SPLC claims to have “exposed”?

The SPLC would hardly be the first progressive organization whose reputation has suffered by going all-in on the gender issue. The American Civil Liberties Union, which also was rooted in traditional liberal values before succumbing to more faddish progressive tendencies, has attracted ridicule due to its parroting of slogans such as “men who get their periods are men,” and the claim that males have no “unfair advantage” over females in sports.

These organizations have never been shy about angering conservatives and reactionaries; indeed, they wear such anger as a badge of pride. But their cultish refusal to engage with the reality of biological sex also antagonizes progressive feminists seeking to protect female spaces from biological men, and LGB activists who see the attempted erasure of sex-based attraction as a species of progressive homophobia.

Which is to say that the SPLC’s report seems not only intellectually dishonest, but also self-destructive. While the SPLC leaders who green-lit this project once may have been able to bank on the popularity of pronoun checks and esoteric gender identities among the wealthy white coastal progressives who comprise the bulk of their donors, this is an ideological movement that’s decidedly past its peak. It’s a marketing error that the savvy Dees likely never would have made.

The SPLC obviously does a lot more than lend its name to sloppily edited gender propaganda: A review of its press feed shows that it still has staff working traditional legal beats such as voters’ rights, police accountability, and humane treatment for prisoners. But when an organization publishes misleading materials in regard to one issue, the natural effect is to raise serious questions about the group’s values and credibility more generally—questions that SPLC supporters will want to think about the next time one of the group’s fundraisers hits them up for a donation.

==

This is what institutional capture looks like.

#Quillette #Southern Poverty Law Center #SPLC #ACLU #American Civil Liberties Union #ideological capture #ideological corruption #gender ideology #queer theory #conspiracy theories #conspiracy theorists #institutional capture #biological sex #biology denialism #sex denialism #gender heretic #gender heresy #religion is a mental illness #Youtube

[sumpix]

Liberal When We Can; Conservative When We Must Don’t expect the politics of tomorrow to be any less turbulent than the politics of today.

Stephen Martin Fritz and Denise Morel https://quillette.com/2022/08/09/liberal-when-we-can-conservative-when-we-must/

In reply c.d.eastmannagle wrote

It is going to be tough as we try to rebuild and re-calibrate our civilizational norms. It will almost certainly mean war.

What is there to lament in this?

I hate to say it, but I just don’t take this negative line at all. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty about “Indulgence Capitalism” that I don’t like. But more has gone on in the past 100 years than a simple revival of cultural selfishness and greed. As a long time resident of China, I often remind myself, and others, that for centuries… literal centuries countless millions of women had bound feet with their bones broken from childhood and wrapped into an odd, clothing-iron shaped shoe. Sure, the women of China today are a mindless lot staring into their smartphones, but they aren’t literal slaves.

All across the planet, the “Indulgence Capitalism” that is so often derided has also brought meaning and value into the lives of millions upon millions of people who, in centuries past, were just the peasant pawns in an imperial game of “who can fuck the queen.” Capitalism has given power to the everyman in a manner previously unheard of and unexpected. But it is unfair to deride that power, or the everyman for his efforts at grasping for it.

I, for one, much prefer the anarchy of a spoiled mass of malcontents than the silent order of teeming throngs of “subjects” to a despicable throne, a hemophiliac family or in-bred retards or any other thing that empires and dynasties from Europe to Asia, to Africa called “culture”. I’ll take a Ford F-150 and a fucking handgun any day over that mess.

What has happened merely illustrates that now the everyman must learn how to harness the privilege and power that capitalism has brought to his doorstep. But it is not worth begrudging the process…

You are right. It will be tough. And there may be war.

But I have much more faith in the stable efforts of common people over time. They have, and will continue to show that their common sense can prevail, even under circumstances such as these. They aren’t mindless fish after all…

#capitalism #socialsim #quillette

[thearbourist]

Canadian Parents (Finally) Push Back Against Gender Cultism

Jonathan Kay writes on Canadians finally waking up to the harms of gender ideology and how it is in our institutions.  It is a quick necessary read, go to the Quillette and read the whole thing.   “The most obvious answer is that this movement does real, observable harm, by forcing women to share prisons, rape-crisis centres, athletic leagues, locker rooms, and other vulnerable spaces with men.…

View On WordPress

#Canada #Gender Ideolgy #Jonathan Kay #Parents #Quillette

[nando161mando]

"While working as an editor for Quillette, Andy Ngo helped “extremism researcher” Eion Lenihan (a racist troll who made a video with David Duke) compile a list of journalists with “Antifa ties.”

Said article became the basis of a kill list for Atomwaffen (literal Nazis)"

https://bird.makeup/users/divestspd/statuses/1687947305000067072

#quillette #atomwaffen andy #andy ngô #andy ngo #ngô #Eion Lenihan #david duke #atomwaffen #keep punching nazis #punch nazis #nazisploitation #nazis #any and every sumbitch we find wearing a nazi uniform they gon die #nazi #fascists #fuck fascism #the gop are fascists #fascism #fascist #neofascism #neonazi #neonazis #neofascist #ausgov #politas #auspol #tasgov #taspol #antinazism #antinationalism

[vavandeveresfan]

"I Was Told to Approve All Teen Gender Transitions. I Refused."

Via The Free Press:

Perhaps you read the long investigation about detransitioners published in this weekend’s New York Times. It is comprehensive and sober and we highly recommend it.

It’s also a piece we are confident would never have made it into the paper were it not for independent publications like ours taking the journalistic and reputational risk over the past few years to pursue the subject of “gender-affirming” care and the subsequent harms inflicted on vulnerable young people. In this, we are proud to stand alongside Hannah Barnes, Lisa Selin Davis, Hadley Freeman, Helen Joyce, Leor Sapir, Abigail Shrier, Jesse Singal, Kathleen Stock, Quillette and others, who took the arrows so that the mainstream press could finally start reporting on what’s really happening. 

What is immensely clear is that individual testimonies—whistleblower accounts like those we’ve published by Jamie Reed and Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala—have made the change we are now beginning to see. 

And that change is now impossible to deny: witness the arrival of lawsuits from young people who say they have suffered the consequences of these life-altering treatments. 

Today, therapist Tamara Pietzke adds her voice to those of our other whistleblowers, and tells how she could no longer go along with the pressure to transition her patients.

By Tamara Pietzke

February 5, 2024

For six years I worked at a hospital that said all teenagers with gender dysphoria must be affirmed. I quit my job to blow the whistle.

I know from firsthand experience what hard times are. Though I had a happy childhood, raised as the middle child by working-class parents in Washington State, my mom died of ovarian cancer when I was 22.

After that, my family fell apart. I felt lost and alone.

I  decided to become a therapist because I didn’t want anyone to go through what I had, feeling like no one on this planet cares about them. At least they can say their therapist does.

I earned my master’s in social work from the University of Washington in 2012, and I have worked as a therapist for over a decade in the Puget Sound area. Most recently, I was employed by MultiCare, one of the largest hospital systems in the state.

For the six years I was there, I worked with hundreds of clients. But in mid-January, I left my job because of what I will go on to describe.

The therapeutic relationship is a special one. We are the original “safe space,” where people are able to explore their darker feelings and painful experiences. The job of the therapist is to guide a patient to self-understanding and sound mental health. This is a process that requires careful assessment and time, not snap judgments and confirmation of a patient’s worldview.

But in the past year I noticed a concerning new trend in my field. I was getting the message from my supervisors that when a young person I was seeing expressed discomfort with their gender—the diagnostic term is gender dysphoria—I should throw out all my training. No matter the patient’s history or other mental health conditions that could be complicating the situation, I was simply to affirm that the patient was transgender, and even approve the start of a medical transition.

I believe this rise of “affirmative care” for young people with gender dysphoria challenges the very fundamentals of what therapy is supposed to provide.

I am a 36-year-old single mother of three young kids all under the age of six. I am terrified of speaking out, but that fear pales in comparison to my strong belief that we can no longer medicalize youth and cause them potentially irreversible harm. The three patients I describe below explain why I am taking the risk of coming forward.

Last spring, I started seeing a new client, who at 13 years old had one of the most extreme and heartbreaking life stories I’ve ever heard. (For the sake of clarity, I am referring to all patients by their biological sex.)

My patient’s mother has bipolar disorder and was so abusive to my patient that the mother was given a restraining order. My patient was sexually assaulted by an older cousin, by one of her mother’s boyfriends, and also once at school by a classmate. Her diagnoses include depression, PTSD, anxiety, intermittent explosive disorder, and autism. She is being raised by her mother’s ex-boyfriend (not the one who assaulted her).

The year before I started seeing her, when she was 11, she was hospitalized for talking about committing suicide. Later that year, a pediatrician diagnosed her with gender dysphoria after she started to question her gender. The pediatrician referred her to Mary Bridge Children’s Gender Health Clinic, whose clinicians recommended she take medicine to suppress her periods and that she think about starting testosterone.

Mary Bridge, MultiCare’s pediatric hospital, runs the gender clinic for minors and employs nurses, social workers, dietitians, and endocrinologists, who provide gender-affirming care, which includes prescribing hormones to young patients who question their gender. In order to get that prescription, patients first need a recommendation letter from a therapist. Because Mary Bridge is a part of MultiCare, their patients were often referred to therapists like me who were in their system.

In an April 2022 blog post, a Mary Bridge social worker wrote that the gender clinic’s referrals increased from less than five a month in 2019 to more than 35 a month in 2022. In May 2022, the clinic received a $100,000 donation from Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute “to study health care disparities” in transgender youth.

The clinic operates in Washington, one of the states with some of the most lenient legislation on gender transition for youth. In May 2023, the state legislature passed a law guaranteeing that youth seeking a medical gender transition can stay at Washington shelters—and the shelters are not required to notify their parents.

Because of my patient’s autism, it was difficult for us to engage in introspective conversations. During our first visit, she came over to my desk to show me extremely sadistic and graphic pornographic videos on her phone. She stood next to me, hunched over, hyper-fixated on the videos as she rocked back and forth. She told me during one session that she watched horror and porn movies growing up because they were the only ones available in her house.

She showed up to our therapy sessions in disheveled, loose-fitting clothes, her hair greasy, her eyes staring down at the ground, her face covered by a Covid mask almost like a protective layer. She went by a boy’s name, but she never raised gender dysphoria with me directly—though one time she told me she would get mad at the sound of her own voice because “it sounds too girly.” When I asked her how she felt about an upcoming appointment at the gender clinic, she told me she didn’t know she had one.

In between scrolling through videos on her phone, she told me how she cried every night in bed and felt “insane.” She described a time when she was eight years old and her mother nearly killed her sister. She remembered her mother being taken away. At times, she would “age-regress,” she told me, by watching Teletubbies and sucking on pacifiers.

When she started seeing me, she had recently threatened to “blow up the school,” which resulted in her expulsion.

I knew I couldn’t solve all of her problems, or make her feel better in just a few therapy sessions. My initial goal was to make her feel comfortable opening up to me, to make the therapy room a place where she was heard and felt safe. I also wanted to try to protect her from falling prey to outside influences from social media, her peers, or even the adults in her life.

With a patient like this, with so many intersecting and overwhelming problems, and with such a tragic history of abuse, it took our first three sessions to get her feeling more comfortable to even talk to me, and to understand the dimensions of her problems. But when I called her guardian last fall to schedule a fourth appointment, he asked me to write her a letter of recommendation for cross-sex hormone treatment. That is, at age 13, she was to start taking testosterone. Such a letter from me begins the process of medical transition for a patient.

In Washington State, that’s all it takes—a few visits with a therapist and a letter, often written using a template provided by one’s superiors—for minors to undergo the irreversible treatments that patients must take for a lifetime.

I was scared for this patient. She had so many overlapping problems that needed addressing it seemed like malpractice to abruptly begin her on a medical gender transition that could quickly produce permanent changes.

The MultiCare recommendation letter Tamara was given for approving the medical treatment of minors with gender dysphoria. I emailed a program manager in my department at MultiCare and outlined my concerns. She wrote back that my client’s trauma history has no bearing on whether or not she should receive hormone treatment.

“There is not valid, evidenced-based, peer-reviewed research that would indicate that gender dysphoria arises from anything other than gender (including trauma, autism, other mental health conditions, etc.),” she wrote.

She also warned that “there is the potential in causing harm to a client’s mental health when restricting access to gender-affirming care” and suggested I “examine [my] personal beliefs and biases about trans kids.”

When Tamara outlined her concerns about giving a patient testosterone to her manager at MultiCare, she was told to “examine your personal beliefs and biases about trans kids.” She then reported me to MultiCare’s risk management team, who removed my client from my care and placed her with a new therapist.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. Just a few months earlier, in September of last year, I was one of over 100 therapists and behavioral specialists at the MultiCare hospital system required to attend mandatory training on “gender-affirming care.”

As hard as it is to believe given my work, I hadn’t heard about gender-affirming care before that moment. I needed to know more. So each night in the week leading up to the training, I searched online for information about gender-affirming care. After putting my kids to bed, I sat glued to my computer screen, losing sleep, horrified at what I found.

I discovered that neither puberty blockers nor cross-sex hormones (testosterone or estrogen) were approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for gender dysphoria. In fact, prescribing these treatments to kids can have drastic side effects, including infertility, loss of sexual function, increased risk of heart attack, stroke, cardiovascular disease, cancer, bone density problems, blood clots, liver toxicity, cataracts, brain swelling, and even death.

While gender clinicians claim hormonal treatment improved their patients’ psychological health, the studies on this are few and highly disputed.

I found that those experiencing gender dysphoria are up to six times more likely to also be autistic, and they are also more likely to suffer from schizophrenia, trauma, and abuse.

A risk manager’s job is to minimize the hospital’s liability, but in my case, they deemed that my concerns posed a greater risk to my client than giving her a life-altering procedure with no proven long-term benefit.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. Just a few months earlier, in September of last year, I was one of over 100 therapists and behavioral specialists at the MultiCare hospital system required to attend mandatory training on “gender-affirming care.”

As hard as it is to believe given my work, I hadn’t heard about gender-affirming care before that moment. I needed to know more. So each night in the week leading up to the training, I searched online for information about gender-affirming care. After putting my kids to bed, I sat glued to my computer screen, losing sleep, horrified at what I found.

I discovered that neither puberty blockers nor cross-sex hormones (testosterone or estrogen) were approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for gender dysphoria. In fact, prescribing these treatments to kids can have drastic side effects, including infertility, loss of sexual function, increased risk of heart attack, stroke, cardiovascular disease, cancer, bone density problems, blood clots, liver toxicity, cataracts, brain swelling, and even death.

While gender clinicians claim hormonal treatment improved their patients’ psychological health, the studies on this are few and highly disputed.

I found that those experiencing gender dysphoria are up to six times more likely to also be autistic, and they are also more likely to suffer from schizophrenia, trauma, and abuse.

The research also implies that the dramatic rise in these diagnoses across the West likely have a strong element of social contagion. In children ages 6 to 17, there was a 70 percent increase in diagnoses of gender dysphoria in the U.S. from 2020 to 2021. In Sweden there was a 1,500 percent increase in these diagnoses among girls 13–17 from 2008 to 2018.

Yet, countries that were once the pioneers of gender transition medicine are now starting to backtrack. In 2022, England announced it will close its only gender clinic after an investigation uncovered subpar medical care, including findings that some patients were rushed toward gender transitions. Sweden and Finland undertook comprehensive analyses of the state of gender medicine and recommended restrictions on transition of minors.

I decided—though it was potentially dangerous to my career and to me—to ask questions about the findings I discovered.

The training I attended laid out an affirming model of gender care—from pronouns and “social transition” to hormone treatments and surgical intervention. In order for children to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria, the training stated, patients must meet six of eight characteristics, ranging from “a strong desire/insistence of being another gender” to “strong preference for cross-gender toys and games.”

Tamara and her MultiCare colleagues were trained to diagnose gender dysphoria among their young patients when they met six of the eight above characteristics. It was made abundantly clear to all in attendance that these recommendations were “best practice” at MultiCare, and that the hospital would not tolerate anything less.

When the leader of the training brought up hormone treatments, I shakily tapped the unmute button on Zoom and asked why 70 to 80 percent of female adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria have prior mental health diagnoses.

She flashed a look of disgust as she warned me against spreading “misinformation on trans kids.” Soon the chat box started blowing up with comments directed at me. One colleague stated it was not “appropriate to bring politics into this” and another wrote that I was “demonstrating a hostility toward trans folks which is [a] direct violation of the Hippocratic Oath,” and recommended I “seek additional support and information so as not to harm trans clients.”

In the training, gender-affirming treatment is presented as “suicide prevention.” As soon as I closed my laptop, I burst into tears. I care so deeply about my clients that even thinking about this now makes me cry. I couldn’t understand how my colleagues, who are supposed to be my teammates, could be so quick to villainize me. I also wondered if maybe my colleagues were right, and if I had gone insane.

Later, my boss reached out to me and told me it was “inappropriate” of me to raise these questions, telling me that a training session was not the proper forum. When I tried to present the evidence that caused me concern—the lack of long-term studies, the devastating side effects—she told me she didn’t have time to read it.

“I am speaking out because nothing will change unless people like me blow the whistle,” Tamara writes. “I am desperate to help my patients.” In retrospect, this ideology had been growing in power for a long time.

I remember in 2019 seeing signs of how gender dysphoria arose among many of my most vulnerable female clients, all of whom struggled with previous psychological problems.

In 2019, I started seeing a 16-year-old client after her pediatrician referred her to me for anxiety, depression, and ADHD. When I first met her, she had long blonde hair covering her eyes, to the point you could barely see her face. It was like she was going through the world trying to be invisible.

In 2020, during the pandemic, she told me she had started reading online a lot about gender, and said she started feeling like she wasn’t a girl anymore.

Around this time, her anxiety became so debilitating she couldn’t leave her house—not even to go to school. After taking a year off school during the pandemic, she enrolled in an alternative school for kids struggling with mental health. I was relieved that she was making friends for the first time, and seemed to be feeling a lot better.

Then she started using they/he pronouns, identified as pansexual, and replaced the skirts and fishnet stockings she often wore with disheveled and baggy clothes. Her long hair became shorter and shorter. She started wearing a binder to flatten her breasts. She tried out a few different names before settling on one that’s gender neutral.

The official diagnosis I gave her was “adjustment disorder”—an umbrella term often applied to young people who are having a hard time coping with difficult and stressful circumstances. It’s the type of diagnosis that doesn’t follow a child forever—it implies that mental distress among kids is often transient.

She came out as transgender to her family in 2021. Her mother was supportive, but her dad wasn’t. Regardless, she went to her pediatrician seeking a referral to a gender clinic.

In 2022, she went to Mary Bridge Children’s Gender Health Clinic for the first time, where the clinicians informed her and her parents that if she didn’t receive hormone replacement therapy, she could be “at increased risk for anxiety, depression, and worsening of mental health/psychological trauma,” according to her patient records. Her dad refused to start his daughter on testosterone, and so all the clinic could do was prescribe birth control to stop her period due to her “menstrual dysphoria,” or distress over getting her period. Which is something I thought all teenage girls experienced.

Five months later, she swallowed a bottle of pills and her mother had to rush her to the emergency room.

By early 2023, my client logged on to our weekly session, which we started doing by Zoom, and she told me she identified as a “wounded male dog.” She explained to me that this was her “xenogender,” a concept she had discovered online, which references gender identities that go “beyond the human understanding of gender.” She said she felt she didn’t have all of the right appendages, and that she wanted to start wearing ears and a tail to truly feel like herself.

I was stunned. All I could do was silently nod along.

After the session, I emailed my colleagues looking for advice. “I want to be accepting and inclusive and all of that,” I wrote, but “I guess I just don’t understand at what point, if ever, a person’s gender identity is indicative of a bigger issue.”

I asked them: “Is there ever a time where acceptance of a person’s identity isn’t freely given?”

The consensus from my colleagues was that it wasn’t a big deal.

“It sounds like this isn’t something that’s ‘broken,’ ” one colleague wrote me back, “so let’s not try to ‘fix’ it.”

“If someone told me they use a litterbox instead of a toilet and they were happy with it and it’s part of their life that brings them fulfillment, then great!” she continued. “I might think it’s weird, but then again, not my life.”

After learning that one of Tamara’s patients identified as “a wounded male dog,” a colleague replied: “If someone told me they use a litterbox instead of a toilet and they were happy with it and it’s part of their life that brings them fulfillment, then great!” I was baffled and alarmed by her unquestioning affirmation. At what point does a change in identity represent a mental health concern, and not something to be celebrated and affirmed? Fortunately, my client never brought up her “xenogender” again. She also isn’t on testosterone due to her father’s disapproval. So I kept these thoughts to myself, and ultimately, in order to keep my job, I let it go.

Another female patient, who transitioned as a teen, serves as a warning of what happens when we passively accept the idea that gender transition will entirely resolve a patient’s mental health issues.

This client, who I started seeing in 2022, is now 23 and rarely leaves the house, spends most of the day in bed playing video games, and envisions no path to working or functioning in the outside world due to a variety of mental health problems. In 2016, this patient was diagnosed with autism, anxiety, and gender dysphoria. Later the diagnoses grew to include depression, Tourette syndrome, and a conversion disorder. In 2018, at age 17, the Mary Bridge Gender Health Clinic prescribed testosterone, despite the fact that this patient is diabetic and one of the hormone’s side effects is that it might increase insulin resistance. The patient’s mother, who has another transgender child, strongly encouraged it.

This patient now has a wispy mustache and a deepened voice, but does not pass as male. It turns out that testosterone, which will be prescribed for life, did not relieve the patient’s other mental illnesses.

My biggest fear about the gender-affirming practices my industry has blindly adopted is that they are causing irreversible damage to our clients. Especially as they are vulnerable people who come to us at their lowest moments in life, and who entrust us with their health and safety. And yet, instead of treating them as we would patients with any other mental health condition, we have been instructed—and even bullied—to abandon our professional judgment and training in favor of unquestioning affirmation.

I am speaking out because nothing will change unless people like me—who know the risks of medicalizing troubled young people—blow the whistle. I am desperate to help my patients.

And I believe, if I don’t speak out, I will have betrayed them.

(note: previously posted this with a lot of repetition because of copy/pasting. This is the fixed version. But if you see any repetition or mistakes please let me know!)

#trans #whistle blower #sex not gender #gender critical #lgb #speaking out #long post #long article #gender affirming madness #trans madness #trans and autism

[grandhotelabyss]

Do you have any "must-read" literary magazines/book publishers/blogs, etc.?

I think the best literary coverage in magazines these days is in Compact and Tablet, because whoever's putting up the money and whatever their agenda has evidently and wisely decided to keep the cultural coverage much more free of overt politics than other venues. I'm not only talking about "wokeness" here but also the nonsense we find in the "anti-woke" venues, like, just to give an example, this tacky "Zombie Reagan" complaint in Quillette that English departments are dying because they teach, and I quote, "Foucault, Judith Butler, Kant, and Gloria Anzaldúa," yes, I repeat, Kant. Whereas Compact gives Gasda free rein to take it to the Oxfordians (not least Yarvin), and let the tech-adjacent neoreactionary politics fall where they may, just as Tablet lets Blake Smith chart the uncharted middle course in subtle essay after subtle essay on queer theory and politics, the very subtlety itself guaranteed to offend activists of all camps. Not to mention that both venues publish interesting free agents like Valerie Stivers and Naomi Tanakia. In the same vein, Unherd is good for political and cultural commentary—pretty unpredictable, if convergent upon what we might call the new center. The Mars Review of Books also seems interesting, but it's too soon to tell. There's still good material in the usual places like LRB, NYRB, The Nation and Harper's—Will Self almost (almost!) persuading me to read a book I've privately been calling Adenoid, for example—but it's been more mixed since the commanding heights crudely tried to requisition the whole of humane culture in reaction to Trump. (Full disclosure: I've written for Tablet a time or two myself.)

In our agitated and ever-shifting media environment, one would have to cover Twitter accounts, Substack and other newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube channels too, across the cultural and political spectrum, so I have both too much and not enough to recommend. I've always thought Katherine Dee had her finger on the pulse of the culture, so her work in various venues is a longstanding recommendation. The renegade and provocateur Justin Murphy is always interesting if often silly or willfully offensive. The aforementioned Matt Gasda's Substack "Writer's Diary" is always compelling. Lately I've been admiring Emmalea Russo's tour of the Divide Comedy with reference to cinema and astrology and modernism and theory and what have you, also on Substack. The collected 1990s-era YouTube lectures on great books and intellectual history by Michael Sugrue and Darren Staloff are also recommendations of long standing, and Sugrue and Staloff also now produce new material, if more casual. My favorite podcasts specifically for literature and the arts are Manifesto! and Art of Darkness.

Favorite book publishers? Not exactly. The go-to answer is NYRB Classics; they publish a lot of stuff that interests me, including things I didn't know would interest me until they published it, especially their nonfiction catalogue, whether Simon Leys's collected essays or Simone Weil on the Iliad or Gillian Rose's incomparable Love's Work, and their attention to major world fiction neglected by other publishers (Platonov, Jünger, Salih). But as I believe Ann Manov once Tweeted, some of those midcentury novels might have been deservedly forgotten; hate me if you must, but I never did finish Stoner. They should reprint the whole of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, though who knows what the copyright situation is there. Another publisher recommendation: you'll rarely go wrong reading a classic in the Norton Critical Edition.

#literary criticism #literature #magazines #podcasts #substack #blogs #tablet magazine #compact magazine #nyrbclassics

[sh0rtins0mniac]

#israel #october 7 #quillette #articles #post

[paintydeerest]

Some htf oc sketches in my new sketchbook^^

#htf giggles #htf petunia #htf oc #htf Quillette #htf #happy tree friends #htf flaky #sketches #my art

[arcticdementor]

On October 17th, the New York Times published an op-ed celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Million Man March that neglected to mention the anti-Semitic history of its organizer, Louis Farrakhan. In response, former Times editorial board member Bari Weiss tweeted that the institution had adopted “a worldview in which Jew hate does not count.” The author of the Times op-ed, Howard University professor Natalie Hopkinson, replied that “ppl who have become white”—that is, Jews like Weiss—“should not be lecturing Black ppl about oppression.”

…

Exposing and objecting to racial disparities became the purpose of the New York Times around August 2019, when executive editor Dean Baquet called a town hall meeting attended by the paper’s staff. He announced that, with the Mueller probe winding down, the paper needed to “regroup, and shift resources and emphasis” from Russiagate to the story of “race and class” and “what it means to be an American.” A few months later, the Times published “The 1619 Project” which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, and the paper’s editorial and ideological focus has been consistent ever since.

When Weiss left the Times in July 2020, she published a resignation letter on her blog in which she claimed that management indifference to harassment from progressive staffers had created an intolerable work environment. She has since argued that progressive ideology is increasingly hostile to Jews and other successful minorities because they undermine the narrative of systemic racism pushed by antiracist activists.

…

In September, the Times published an interactive feature exploring the “Faces of Power” in the United States. The idea, the creators announced, was to look into the demographics of the people who “pass our laws, control Hollywood’s studios and head the most prestigious universities… [who] own pro sports teams and determine who goes to jail and who goes to war.” These powerful individuals were divided up by the institutions they control: who sits in Congress, who holds cabinet seats in the Trump administration, who runs giant companies, prestigious universities, movie studios, glossy magazines, fashion houses, and police departments. A photo of each person is included, and if the person is black, Hispanic, Native American, or Asian, their portrait is superimposed on a yellow background. Move the mouse pointer over a photograph, and the subject’s name appears. For each category, the Times included a count of members of underrepresented groups. Of 922 total individuals identified, 180 are people of color. The population of the United States is about 60 percent white, which means that whites are about 33 percent more common among the “faces of power” than they are among Americans overall.

The progressives at the New York Times aren’t the only ideological faction interested in the demographics of America’s “Faces of Power.” Although it was more slickly designed and presented, the Times’s package looked similar to the kind of anti-Semitic memes that routinely circulate on far-Right Twitter:

…

The far-Right believes that the mechanisms of power have been seized by a sinister Jewish cabal, while the far-Left believes that institutions are jealously guarded by white heterosexual males. Both the Times package and the far-Right’s memes hope to communicate the same message to their respective audiences—they believe that depicting the institutions they hope to disrupt as rows of similar-looking faces will convince others that the system is unfair and needs to be corrected. Overall, the Times‘s project indicates that whites are overrepresented by about 30 percent among the figures pictured compared to their share of the general population.

The Times doesn’t identify Jews in their images, but these faces are disproportionately the faces of successful Jewish Americans. Nor does the Times explicitly argue that Jews wield an unfair degree of American power, or that they have acquired that power through illegitimate means. However, its graphics certainly imply that Jewish success must be dismantled to rebalance ethnic distribution. Jews only comprise about two percent of the US population. However, of the nine US Supreme Court Justices, three were Jewish prior to the recent death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. When Barack Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the Court in 2010, the paleoconservative writer and former politician Pat Buchanan complained that if Kagan were confirmed, Jews would hold “33 percent of the Supreme Court seats. Is this the Democrats’ idea of diversity?”

Jews are overrepresented in other categories of the Times‘s feature as well—of the presidents of the top 25 universities, nine are Jewish. Of the 15 people directing major news organizations, five are Jewish. Of the 100 US Senators and the 435 members of the House of Representatives, nine Senators and 27 representatives are Jewish. In other words, Jewish representation on the Supreme Court, in elite academia, and in media is about 15 times their demographic share of the general population. Proportionately, there are four times as many Jews in Congress as there are in the country as a whole.

Diversity, equity, inclusion, and the “Jewish Question”

Jews are overrepresented not by mere percentages but by multiples of their demographic representation in academia, media, law, finance, medicine, publishing, and entertainment. At dozens of the most selective and elite colleges, Jews are represented among undergraduates in proportions greater than five times their overall share of the population. The 15 million living Jews represent only two-tenths of one percent of the human population, but Jews have won nearly a third of all Nobel prizes awarded since the year 2000. Forty percent of American adults overall have completed postsecondary degrees, but three-quarters of Jews in North America are college graduates. As a result, Jews out-earn other groups on average, with more than four in 10 American Jews living in households that earn more than $100,000 per year.

…

For much of the last century, the liberal position on race in America was that we should eliminate discrimination and prejudice, treat everyone as an individual, and award opportunities on the basis of merit. Some groups, like Jews, Asian Americans, and other minority immigrant groups have flourished under this system, but black Americans continue to be represented in fractions of their societal proportions in many elite settings. In response, the progressive view has evolved. Today it holds that treating everyone the same without regard to race is actually racist because it fails to consider the impact of historic and systemic discrimination. In this way, systemic racism is preserved by judging members of historically marginalized groups as less worthy according to ostensibly race-neutral criteria (for instance, test scores).

The writing of Ibram X. Kendi—professor, Atlantic columnist, and bestselling author of How To Be An Antiracist—provides the intellectual framework for the contemporary antiracist movement. Kendi argues that:

The most threatening racist movement is not the alt-right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a “race-neutral” one… there are ideas that express hierarchy and inequality. There are policies that create equity and inequity. The other aspect of it that is troubling is that there’s no such thing as a “not racist.” There is only racist and antiracist.

…

Just as the alt-Right argues that Jewish control of media and finance is preserved through conspiracies and cabals, Kendi writes: “One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist.” If a group is less successful on average, then it is the result of victimization, and the group should be collectively promoted to rectify the inequity. If, on the other hand, a group is more successful than average, its members must be hoarding power and shaping policy to their benefit. Kendi’s proposals include amending the Constitution to ban inequity, criminalizing “racist ideas,” and creating a new police agency empowered with “disciplinary tools” of enforcement—it is hard to see these ideas as anything but extremely menacing to successful minority groups.

To Kendi’s right, intellectuals like Jordan Peterson have offered a simple explanation for the disproportionate number of Jews in the upper echelons of various fields: There are a disproportionate number of very smart Jews. However, when New York Times columnist Bret Stephens argued in 2019 that Jewish success was mostly attributable to Jewish culture, values, and norms, he was denounced as a eugenicist. Even the empirical claim that high intelligence is unusually common among Jews was blasted in American Scientist as racist pseudoscience. If it is racist pseudoscience to suggest that Jewish families and communities are unusually adept at cultivating talent, then what explanation remains for Jews’ disproportionate success?

On Twitter, Kendi has said that: “The only people who believe equality of outcome between racial GROUPS will never exist are the people who refuse to recognize that racist policy are behind the inequality of outcome between racial GROUPS.” In other words, if Jews are successful it is because they have shaped policy to benefit themselves at the expense of other groups. This is how Kendi and his antiracist disciples arrive—like the white nationalists before them—at the “JQ.” If we dismiss Jewish talent and culture as explanations for Jewish success then the only explanation left is that Jewish success is the result of Jewish mendacity.

…

If antiracist policy distributes power, wealth, and success in proportions that mirror group representation, then successful minorities must be brought into equity with everyone else. That will require purges where they are overrepresented in prestigious institutions and professions, and quotas limiting their future success are necessary to achieve the antiracist vision. In order to make space for everyone to be proportionally represented, about 80 percent of Jews have to be pushed out of the media, the professions, and elite academia. But many progressives seem to believe that white supremacy can be dismantled without examining minority success if we simply fold successful minorities into the overarching category of whiteness. You don’t have to deal with the Jewish Question if you don’t acknowledge that Jews exist. Natalie Hopkinson employed this reasoning to dismiss Weiss’s complaint about her elegy to Farrakhan in the Times; since Weiss has “become white,” she lacks the standing to complain to a black writer about oppression.

The New York Times’s “Faces of Power” package doesn’t mention Jews at all; for its ideological purposes, all the Jewish people named and pictured in its lists are merely members of the undifferentiated white collective that maintains a stranglehold on American power. Many progressives—and a lot of progressive Jews—who favor the redistribution of power, wealth, and success among groups imagine that perhaps Jews are not a group who need to be considered independently of the larger category of whiteness during the reckoning. In a 2016 Atlantic article, writer Emma Green asked: “On the extreme Right, Jews are seen as impure—a faux-white race that has tainted America. And on the extreme Left, Jews are seen as part of a white-majority establishment that seeks to dominate people of color. Taken together, these attacks raise an interesting question: Are Jews white?”

This question has been asked repeatedly in major media outlets since. When Donald Trump signed an executive order extending Title VI protections against discrimination on the basis of national origin to Jews, Boston Globe columnist Rachelle Cohen argued that the notion of Jewish nationhood had justified anti-Semitism and even genocide in the past and invoked the trope of dual loyalty. To Cohen, Jews are just white people who happen to follow a particular religious tradition. Those who think like her may consider the Jewishness of so many of the people pictured in the Times package to be incidental to their whiteness. In which case, since they rose to their positions of power aided by systemic forces that favor whites, they can be culled in the name of diversity without the fact that they are Jews ever needing to be remarked upon. According to this logic, there is no Jewish genius—despite what Bret Stephens thinks—and there is no Jewish power or success, because the Jews are simply not a people. If Jewishness is just a social construct that can be dismantled and dissolved into whiteness, and if everyone in the way of progress can be redefined as white, then the antiracist project can achieve its goal of displacing the hegemonic oppressor without persecuting any minorities!

The only problem with this reasoning is that it is obviously wrong. I can look at the “Faces of Power” and pick out the Jews—so can you and so can the neo-Nazis at Stormfront. Natalie Hopkinson may declare Jews to be white so she can dismiss our experience of oppression, but we remain non-white to the perpetrators of the massacres at the Tree of Life synagogue, in Jersey City, and in Monsey, or to the perpetrators of the thousands of anti-Jewish hate crimes that occur each year and that have been increasing in frequency.

If I send my DNA to 23andMe, they can identify me as a Jew by my Jewish saliva and my Jewish blood. University of Chicago law professor Daniel Hemel noted in a Times op-ed that Jews cannot escape anti-Semitism by not practicing the Jewish religion, and ought to be protected from discrimination regardless of how they may self-identify. Some Jews may consider themselves to be white people with white privilege who benefit from white supremacy, but that is unlikely to impress those on the radical Left and radical Right who dislike Jews for ideological reasons of their own. Progressives may try to define whiteness in a way that elides the existence of Jews, but theoretical jargon cannot alter reality. Jews still exist, and bigots still want to disappear us, and some of those bigots are pursuing their agendas under the guise of virtuous antiracism.

…

The unintended similarities between the memes produced by the alt-Right and the graphics produced by the New York Times expose the unexplored similarities between the ideologies and political missions of these two ostensibly opposed movements. Both ends of the political horseshoe are suspicious of Jews, along with Asian Americans and other successful minority groups. Antiracism went off the rails when its intellectual leaders decided they could use racial discrimination for positive purposes. That has evolved into the view, articulated by Kendi, that opposing discrimination is actually the real racist position. To enforce equity across the land, Ibram Kendi and his enforcers at his Department of Antiracism must dismantle not just white supremacy, but also Jewish, East Asian, South Asian, Catholic, Mormon, African, and Caribbean success, cutting down any group that outperforms any other group until all outcomes are equal. These groups must be purged from power and influence, stripped of their wealth, and gated from obtaining too much power or success again. This will be achieved with the application of racial quotas and by prohibiting any performance metrics that might indicate that some people are more qualified or talented than others.

Equality under the law, and equal treatment of individuals without regard for identity are core values of a free society. Equal outcomes among groups cannot be enforced without dismantling freedom and shredding individual rights. The idea that success, wealth, and opportunities should be seized and redistributed to create “equity” is totalitarian and all totalitarian movements, whether they’re found on the Left or the Right, whether they’re antiracist or white-nationalist are, in the end, alike. That’s why their propaganda looks the same.

#daniel friedman #quillette #new york times #faces of power #antisemitism

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Quillette

Published: Aug 14, 2022

Thirty-three years ago, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a religious decree suborning the murder of author Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, a work of magical realism partly inspired by the life of the Prophet Muhammad. A multi-million dollar bounty was offered by the 15 Khordad Foundation, a revolutionary organization supervised by the Supreme Leader, to whoever carried out the sentence of death.

When attempts to appease the regime with an apology were spurned, Rushdie retreated into hiding and was forced to spend the second half of his adult life under threat of assassination. As part of an attempt to restore diplomatic relations with Britain in 1998, the Iranian government of Mohammad Khatami indicated that it would no longer support Rushdie’s murder. Three years later, Khatami declared the matter “closed.”

Iran’s religious leaders, however, are a good deal less interested in the requirements of international diplomacy, and have been remarkably forthright in saying so to anyone who cared to listen. Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has repeatedly stated that the fatwa will not—indeed, cannot—be lifted, even if Rushdie “repents and becomes the most pious Muslim on Earth.” Just three years ago, the Supreme Leader’s Twitter account was briefly locked after it posted the following tweet:

Although important details are yet to emerge, pronouncements of this type almost certainly help explain why a 24-year-old man named Hadi Matar attacked Rushdie at a literary festival in Chautauqua, NY, on Friday, August 12th. Matar rushed the stage upon which Rushdie was seated, and stabbed the writer repeatedly in the neck and abdomen until the attacker was physically restrained by attendees. A grim irony: Rushdie was reportedly waiting to deliver a lecture in which he would describe the United States as a safe haven for exiled writers and artists.

Rushdie’s attacker has been taken into custody and charged with attempted murder, but his victim sustained serious injuries during the frenzied assault. Later that same evening, Rushdie’s agent, Andrew Wylie, delivered the distressing news that “Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged.”

The Satanic Verses was published in 1988. The following year, it was banned in India, and copies were burned during street protests in Bradford, UK. An American Cultural Centre in Islamabad was attacked after the book’s publication in the United States. Khomeini’s fatwa was broadcast on Iranian radio on February 14th, 1989:

We are from Allah and to Allah we shall return. I am informing all brave Muslims of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses, a text written, edited, and published against Islam, the Prophet of Islam, and the Qur'an, along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents, are condemned to death. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. And whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr, Allah willing. Meanwhile, if someone has access to the author of the book but is incapable of carrying out the execution, he should inform the people so that [Rushdie] is punished for his actions.

A wave of bloodshed ensued. Rushdie’s Japanese translator was murdered, his Italian translator was stabbed, and 37 people perished in a fire targeting the book’s Turkish translator. While the violence and threat level appeared to abate with the passage of time, allowing Rushdie to emerge from hiding and re-engage with public life, his growing sense of security proved to be illusory. Indeed, the intervening years taught the most alarming lesson of all—that no-one marked for death can ever afford to lower their guard or return to what Rushdie called “a normal life.”

Rushdie is not the only person Iran has sought to terrorize. And the murderous fanaticism of its leaders remains in evidence, even as it seeks to renegotiate an agreement with the West regarding its nuclear program. American law enforcement officials have recently uncovered assassination plots by operatives associated with the Iranian regime against Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, dissident Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad, and Iranian-American poet (and Quillette contributor) Roya Hakakian. Writing in The New York Review of Books a year ago, Hakakian relayed the story of her 13-year-old child opening the door to FBI agents, who then informed Hakakian that Iranian operatives were concocting a plan to kill her.

In a timely essay for Quillette, published in May, Paul Berman observed:

Roya Hakakian and Masih Alinejad happen to be friends, as Hakakian noted in the New York Review, and the combined threats against them suggest a broader policy of violence and intimidation on the part of the Islamic Republic and its operatives in the United States. This is a policy aimed not just at a couple of inconveniently articulate emigrés, but at the larger circles of the Iranian emigration in America and everywhere else, whose members are bound to pause an additional thoughtful moment before piping up in public about life and oppression back home in far-away Iran. The policy is a display of power. It terrorizes. It succeeds at doing this even if any given plot is foiled, or is suspended, or is merely intimated.

We do not yet know the nature of the relationship—if any—between the Iranian government and Rushdie’s attacker. Early news reports indicate that, “Matar has made social-media posts in support of Iran and its Revolutionary Guard, and in support of Shi’a [Islamist] extremism more broadly,” which could point to Iranian inspiration rather than direction. Either way, the attempt on Rushdie’s life and the sheer ferocity of the attack illustrate the dedication with which fanatics pursue the objects of their hatred, even those who produce works of fiction.

Rushdie understands as well as anyone that this threat is by no means unique to the Islamic Republic of Iran. It issues from adherents of all kinds of radical Islamic movements. In 2005, during the controversy that followed the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten’s publication of 12 editorial cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, Rushdie was one of 12 signatories to a defiant manifesto titled “Together Against a New Totalitarianism,” the full text of which appears below:

Having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism. We writers, journalists, and intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity, and secular values for all. Recent events, prompted by the publication of drawings of Muhammad in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological arena. It is not a clash of civilizations or an antagonism between West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle between democrats and theocrats. Like all totalitarian ideologies, Islamism is nurtured by fear and frustration. Preachers of hatred play on these feelings to build the forces with which they can impose a world where liberty is crushed and inequality reigns. But we say this, loud and clear: nothing, not even despair, justifies choosing obscurantism, totalitarianism, and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology that kills equality, freedom, and secularism wherever it is present. Its victory can only lead to a world of injustice and domination: men over women, fundamentalists over others. To counter this, we must ensure access to universal rights for the oppressed or those discriminated against. We reject the “cultural relativism” which implies an acceptance that men and women of Muslim culture are deprived of the right to equality, freedom, and secularism in the name of respect for certain cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia,” a wretched concept that confuses criticism of Islam as a religion and stigmatization of those who believe in it. We defend the universality of freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit can be exercised in every continent, with regard to each and every abuse and dogma. We appeal to democrats and independent spirits in every country that our century may be one of enlightenment and not obscurantism. Signed by: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Chahla Chafiq, Caroline Fourest, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Irshad Manji, Mehdi Mozaffari, Maryam Namazie, Taslima Nasreen, Salman Rushdie, Antoine Sfeir, Philippe Val, Ibn Warraq.

Salman Rushdie has risked everything for his art. Like Jyllands-Posten editor Flemming Rose, the slain cartoonists and satirists at Charlie Hebdo, and numerous other courageous writers, thinkers, artists, and intellectuals hunted across the globe for violating ancient taboos against blasphemy, he has stood up for free thought and expression, even as others have disgraced themselves by offering excuses on behalf of those who perpetrate lethal violence in the name of religion.

Rushdie’s steady courage and reliable willingness to defend individual liberty have ensured his status as one of the great moral heroes of our time. “A poet’s work,” remarks one of his characters in The Satanic Verses, “is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.” Rushdie has done all those things. And it is a tragedy that his dedication to these noble pursuits has cost him so much.

==

#Quillette #Salman Rushdie #The Satanic Verses #islam #islamic violence #fatwa #blasphemy #islamic fanatics #religion of violence #religion #religion is a mental illness

[masterofd1saster]

Israel war stories

is a good article about support in the U.S. for terror and anti-semitism.

Facing the United Nations plaza with police helicopters whirring above, 23-year-old Jordan native Youssef Almasri stood with a group of friends and declared, “Glory to the revolution.” He told The Free Press what decolonization means to him. “It means: Land. Fucking. Back. We’re taking the land that they took from us, we’re taking it back. We’re putting our refugees home,” said Almasri, who added that he is a student based in New York. As for the Israelis, he said, they should “go back to where they came from.” 

Al Masri is interesting. In Arabic, his name is slang for Egyptian. He's from Jordan. He's not from Palestine.

Where did the Israelis come from? Abraham was from Israel. So was Isaac. Jacob was from Israel - indeed God changed his name to Israel.

When Cyrus the Great released the Jews from captivity in 538BC, he didn't send them to New York or New Jersey. They went back to Israel.

So if you want Jews to go back where they came from, you want them to go to Israel.

+++

makes some good points

*** when people say something, they often mean it, and we should believe them, or at least take them seriously. Fancy-sounding academic jargon is not a curious intellectual exercise. Words make worlds.  Here is how Quillette editor Claire Lehmann put it on X, formerly Twitter: “For the past decade I’ve been told that jokes, words & scholarly debates need to be suppressed because they may cause ‘harm’ to vulnerable minorities. Yet when a global minority is butchered, tortured & maimed, those who suppress words shrug as if war crimes are no big deal.” Real decolonization is a physical process. It is about removing bodies from a place.  The meaning of Sharif’s post—a very tidy, very millennial encapsulation of the old Bolshevik spirit—is: the ends shall justify the means, and if that bothers you, well, you’ve probably been infected by some bourgeois, liberal fungus. *** The New York Times decided this was the right moment to run a story headlined “Gaza Has Suffered Under 16-Year Blockade.” The Times was good enough to note that the blockade was made possible not only by Israel but by Egypt, but it failed to mention Israeli forces withdrew from Gaza in 2005; that Palestinians elected Hamas to rule them; that Israelis routinely give Gazans notice before attacking to minimize loss of civilian life; and that one reason (maybe the reason) so many Palestinian children have died during Israeli air strikes is Hamas uses them as human shields—the better to generate sympathetic news coverage. Then, of course, there were the moral relativists, those who provide a patina of legitimacy to the alleged freedom fighters. Amnesty International’s Agnes Callamard called on “all parties to the conflict to abide by international law and make every effort to avoid further civilian bloodshed.” Representative Ilhan Omar reminded everyone, “Gaza doesn’t have shelters or an iron dome” (one wonders if she mentioned this to the Hamas leadership in Doha or its patrons in Tehran before the violence commenced). Or Jeremy Corbyn, Britain’s national embarrassment, declaring, “we need a route out of this tragic cycle of violence.” Meanwhile, the ersatz activists of Hollywood and Silicon Valley are eerily quiet. The people who turned the Ukrainian flag into their avatars, those who worry about misgendering and triggering and safe spaces, those who insist words are violence (those for whom violence is apparently not violence)—they’re busy ignoring all this. ***

+++

On a lighter note, Babylon Bee puts a point on the issue

and

#Pray for Israel

[leah-clearvvater]

Are you even indigenous? White ppl shouldn't be obsessed w native ppl

.. no I'm not indigenous also not white.. the pack aren't real people and I try my best to be respectful to the quillette tribe