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11pt”>It cannot become our standard that where analysis and discussion of matters of public concern may cause offense, the social and institutional consequences of engagement are so costly that few will be willing to do the work. It cannot become our standard that the mere allegation of harm caused by some writing or speech, in the absence of any specific evidence to that effect, is sufficient to trigger such consequences. And it cannot become our standard that the mere fact that someone who causes harm agrees with something said or written by an academic is sufficient to saddle that academic with responsibility for that harm.

The Open Letter Concerning Transphobia in Philosophy is the latest depressing example of an increasing inclination in the Academy to adopt precisely these kinds of standards. The effect can only be to discourage those whom we employ to research, think, write, and speak about these issues from doing so and to deprive students of a diverse and intellectually rigorous education. This will neither benefit our laws, regulations, and public policies nor improve the education that students receive.

At last the adults enter the room. 

men and women whose brains had been thoroughly washed – robots stripped of humanity, zealously enforcing orders, petty bureaucrats working under a system in which those who do not denounce others are themselves denounced, and those who do not punish others are themselves punished. Persuaded that we were enemies to be beaten down – traitors and terrorists – they took away our freedom. They locked us up like animals somewhere away from the rest of the world, out of time: in camps.

In the “transformation-through-education” camps, life and death do not mean the same thing as they do elsewhere. A hundred times over I thought, when the footfalls of guards woke us in the night, that our time had come to be executed. When a hand viciously pushed clippers across my skull, and other hands snatched away the tufts of hair that fell on my shoulders, I shut my eyes, blurred with tears, thinking my end was near, that I was being readied for the scaffold, the electric chair, drowning. Death lurked in every corner. When the nurses grabbed my arm to “vaccinate” me, I thought they were poisoning me. In reality, they were sterilising us. That was when I understood the method of the camps, the strategy being implemented: not to kill us in cold blood, but to make us slowly disappear. So slowly that no one would notice.

We were ordered to deny who we were. To spit on our own traditions, our beliefs. To criticise our language. To insult our own people. Women like me, who emerged from the camps, are no longer who we once were. We are shadows; our souls are dead. I was made to believe that my loved ones, my husband and my daughter, were terrorists. I was so far away, so alone, so exhausted and alienated, that I almost ended up believing it. My husband, Kerim, my daughters Gulhumar and Gulnigar – I denounced your “crimes”. I begged forgiveness from the Communist party for atrocities that neither you nor I committed. I regret everything I said that dishonoured you. Today I am alive, and I want to proclaim the truth. I don’t know if you will accept me, I don’t know if you’ll forgive me.

How can I begin to tell you what happened here?

It's a long piece, but worth reading in full to get a clearer picture of the monstrous persecution the Chinese are inflicting on the Uighurs in Xinjiang, all in the name of "re-education".

00d83451ebab69e20263e987d9db200b img-responsive” src=”http://mickhartley.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/mt_imported_image_1758337407.jpg” style=”width: 550px” title=”Istanbul-ara-guler-17″ />

[Photos © Ara Güler | Magnum Photos]

athletes-have-advantages-over-women/”>Women Are Human. Not hot news – here's a Guardian report from a month ago – but I don't remember seeing this at the time.]

The abstract of an article in Sports Medicine on Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage:

Males enjoy physical performance advantages over females within competitive sport. The sex-based segregation into male and female sporting categories does not account for transgender persons who experience incongruence between their biological sex and their experienced gender identity. Accordingly, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) determined criteria by which a transgender woman may be eligible to compete in the female category, requiring total serum testosterone levels to be suppressed below 10 nmol/L for at least 12 months prior to and during competition. Whether this regulation removes the male performance advantage has not been scrutinized. Here, we review how differences in biological characteristics between biological males and females affect sporting performance and assess whether evidence exists to support the assumption that testosterone suppression in transgender women removes the male performance advantage and thus delivers fair and safe competition. We report that the performance gap between males and females becomes significant at puberty and often amounts to 10–50% depending on sport. The performance gap is more pronounced in sporting activities relying on muscle mass and explosive strength, particularly in the upper body. Longitudinal studies examining the effects of testosterone suppression on muscle mass and strength in transgender women consistently show very modest changes, where the loss of lean body mass, muscle area and strength typically amounts to approximately 5% after 12 months of treatment. Thus, the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed. Sports organizations should consider this evidence when reassessing current policies regarding participation of transgender women in the female category of sport.

Also this, from the British Journal of Sports Medicine – Effect of gender affirming hormones on athletic performance in transwomen and transmen: implications for sporting organisations and legislators. Though the phrase "gender affirming hormones" strikes me as being unfortunate.

Summary The 15–31% athletic advantage that transwomen displayed over their female counterparts prior to starting gender affirming hormones declined with feminising therapy. However, transwomen still had a 9% faster mean run speed after the 1 year period of testosterone suppression that is recommended by World Athletics for inclusion in women’s events.

A 9% faster mean run speed in top-level athletics – well, in sport in general – is huge.

rmal structures of the body caused by congenital defects.”

You read that right: The “congenital defect” is a young woman’s healthy breasts, provided that young woman subjectively identifies as “nonbinary” or anything other than “woman.”

It matters what we call things in the public space: Just ask the ­female prisoners now housed with violent biological men in California if our lawmakers’ words matter. This lie — that a girl’s breasts constitute “developmental abnormalities” depending on her subjective state of mind — carries the result that female patients of all ages would suddenly become eligible for insurance coverage for double mastectomies. A small change in language grants doctors the green light to remove the normal, developing breasts of an 11-year old girl. Still just words?

By all means, call people what they prefer. But language in the law, by definition, ushers words into action. Words grant rights or take them away. Words can enhance or diminish status, placing people and concepts beyond the bounds of legal protection.

No one knows this better than Democrats. By pressing for these changes across the country, they have allowed biological boys into sports competition with biological girls, peeling back Title IX protections for women’s sports. If “mother” is now a useless concept under House rules, why shouldn’t it pose an equally offensive presence in federal law?

That’s where we’re headed, isn’t it? Erasing “mothers,” and “women,” because the concepts are insufficiently inclusive to gender ideologues. The rights women struggled to win become undone, paradoxically, in the name of ­inclusion.

sing the North and shook hands with Kim atop Mt. Baekdu, which is sacred to North Koreans. Moon also played on U.S. President Donald Trump's vanity and persuaded him to sit face to face with the North Korean leader three times. But each time, Kim was only intent on gaining concessions in return for his lies.

Even as the farce was still playing out, Kim unveiled a massive intercontinental ballistic missile and a submarine-launched nuclear missile is getting ready for deployment. Now he is developing nuclear-powered submarines and hypersonic missiles that could render South Korea's defenses useless. At the congress, Kim boasted that he "steadfastly led the struggle to advance nuclear weapons and was able to secure a great new victory."

Kim will not and cannot scrap his nuclear weapons. Surely Moon knows that. So is the president deliberately deceiving South Koreans with this nonsense? His eagerness to cover up for Kim persisted even as the North blew up the inter-Korean liaison office and shot and incinerated a South Korean fisheries official. Prompted by nothing in particular, Moon then bent over backwards and banned the dispatch of propaganda leaflets to North Korea that could provide vital information for the oppressed people there, in the process risking condemnation from the international community for his fat friend up North. His reward is an arsenal of North Korean weapons aimed straight at his head.

Seems about right.

ft: 40px”>Speeches were made by Ko In Ho, Choe Sang Gon, Pak Hun, Kang Hyong Bong, Ri Song Hak, Ri Kyong Il, Jong Chang Ik, So Chong Hak, Kim Kwang Nam, Yang Yong Gil, Kim Son Yong and Jang Hyok.

They all expressed full support to the report on the work of the Party Central Committee which indicated the direction of advance and fighting goals for our revolution, admitting that it is the great practical programme surely guaranteeing a fresh leap forward and victory of the socialist construction in the present stage.

Lauding the extraordinary and wise leadership of the Supreme Leader who has glorified the past five years with enormous change and miracles to be etched in history with noble sense of duty and responsibility for the Party, revolution, country and people, the speakers expressed their great pride and self-confidence over making revolution under the leadership of the prominent leader.

They stressed that the meaningful successes achieved in developing the socialist construction despite unprecedented manifold trials and difficulties are entirely a precious fruition of the wise leadership of the Party Central Committee.

The speakers recalled the brisk campaign for scientific farming and high yield which had swept the country and a series of precious progress made in science, education, public health and other fields and units in the struggle for implementing the Party policies during the period under review.

They also analyzed seriously the mistakes they manifested by obstructing the economic development of the country and inconveniencing the people, which are ascribed to their failure in study of their fields and units and lack of the spirit of unconditionally implementing the Party policies and devotedly serving the people.

Criticizing themselves for the deviations in afforestation and water-conservancy, land management, public security and others, the speakers repented of their mistakes before the Party Congress and vowed to work harder with fresh readiness and fighting spirit.

Listening carefully to the speakers, the participants seriously accepted the criticized faults as their own mistakes and the lessons of their units and keenly realized once again that the success in implementing the decisions of the Party hinges on their responsibility and role.

All the participants hardened their resolve to thoroughly implement the new five-year plan with the experience and lessons from the work in the period under review as valuable foundation and reliable stepping stone for future advance and development.

Well fancy that: the reason that they'd been making all those errors was because of their failure to implement party policies. 

Onto the sixth day, then. Maybe on the seventh day the Supreme Leader will rest.

d over 6000 new cases a day.

Iranians are trapped. They die when they’re in lockdown, and they die when they are allowed out. Late 2019 saw mass riots against a hike in the price of petrol, the last straw in a succession of economic blows for the people. The regime killed at least 180 people — and possibly hundreds more. It was the worst violence since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The Mullahs were scared; and they were right to be.

Coronavirus saved them from more mass protests and the increased killing that they would have required. But in truth they’ve merely been storing their problems up. One day the Iranian people will be let out: and they’ll be poorer and sicker and angrier than before. If you want to successfully cow a people, you must make them fear you; and you do this by threatening what they have and care about most. If you put them in a position that they no longer have anything to lose, eventually you will lose.

Logic then would dictate that Khamenei must grab onto any lifeline had can. But dictatorships don’t work on logic, or rather their logic is of the perverted sort. Considered this way: his decision makes perfect sense. The 'thin end of the wedge' is a cliché and therefore linguistically tired, but as a cliché it retains aphoristic value. Khamenei knows that the Islamic Republic can’t countenance any sort of détente with the West, when one of its key ideological justifications is resistance to the Great Satan and the 'pernicious influence' of Western culture. This means no western TV or fashion or sport, and definitely no western vaccine to solve a problem that your own negligence has made worse.

With Biden taking office shortly, Khamenei knows that the renewal of JCPOA, cancelled by Trump, is very much on the cards. So best to show your anti-western purity now, before any negotiations take place that might require some give and take. Abandoning the Iranian people to more Covid misery isn't a problem compared to the prospect of negotiating a deal that might ease sanctions and help the regime survive.

More 1950s billboard advertising from Shorpy.

Los Angeles ca. 1955. "New Chiffon — bathroom tissue that is facial tissue."

[Photo: Shorpy/Pacific Outdoor Advertising]

Not a well-thought-out campaign. Which comes first: face or bottom?

trary to trans persons’ hopes that medicine and society can fulfil their aspiration to become a complete man or woman, this is not biologically attainable … It is a rare gender-dysphoric young person who has no associated psychiatric diagnosis or symptoms suggesting one,” he said.

Levine also told the court that because trans activists attacked critics as transphobic, few dared speak out. He said: “Critical and cautious voices are shouted down as transphobic, hateful and engaging in conversion therapy. Such a climate has created an intimidating and hostile environment where silence and acquiescence are the inevitable consequence. It is left to those of us at the end of our careers, who have nothing to lose, to voice our concerns.”

John Whitehall, professor of paediatrics at Western Sydney University in Australia, another expert witness, said that information given to families attending the Tavistock clinic “does not appear to share with confused children and their parents and carers the statistical assurance that almost all confused children will revert to an identity congruent with chromosomes through puberty, that ‘puberty blockers’ and cross-sex hormones have structural effects on the brain, and the warning that the rate of suicide in adults is significantly higher after transgendering.”

The evidence couldn't be clearer: the whole Tavistock GIDS [Gender Identity Development Service] needs to be rethought, and preferably closed down altogether.