Wednesday, May 08, 2024

Links - 8th May 2024 (2 - General Wokeness)

The Misguided Moral Panic About Racism in British Universities - "According to one of the most extensive surveys ever conducted by the European Union, the U.K. is one of the least racist societies in the world, and what racism that remains is diminishing... in October 2019 the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) released a series of reports that purported to show that racism is widespread in Britain’s higher education sector, to an extent that is “seriously damaging to individuals and our society.” The reports argued that the problem was so large it could only be properly addressed by new laws and regulations. The reports triggered a moral panic, both among those who’d compiled them and among the sector’s leaders... In any basic social scientific Inquiry, it is incumbent upon the researcher to analyze a range of variables that may help explain observed outcomes. For example, a majority of black students come from state schools and state school students overall, black and white, tend to do less well at university than their private school counterparts. This suggests that it’s socio-economic status, not race, that accounts for the attainment gap. Indeed, the demographic least likely to participate in higher education in the U.K. is poor white British boys, while Indians and East Asians tend to have the highest incomes and educational outcomes of any racial group, including whites... the Vice Chancellor of Sheffield University Koen Lamberts is currently paying 20 of his students £9.34 an hour to monitor and report other staff and students for racist microaggressions to help “change the way people think about racism.” If an alleged perpetrator suggests that the accuser is “searching for things to be offended about” this is considered further evidence of racism and itself recorded as a microaggression... As the U.K. leaves the European Union, and as global competition increases with East Asia, U.K. universities will enter an increasingly competitive global higher education market, with students ever more aware of their post-degree careers and the signal their university degrees send to prospective employers. Similarly, parents will ask what kind of institutions their sons and daughters are attending, if, in the context of very high fees, their children are subjected to inquisitorial ideological policing and political dogma instead of learning how to think and study. Could this be why undergraduate admissions at SOAS fell by 37 percent between 2016 and 2018? It would be a fundamental mistake for U.K. universities to go further down the “decolonizing” road. Those universities that wish to thrive in what we predict will become an increasingly competitive market should distinguish themselves through a commitment to open intellectual inquiry, equality of opportunity, viewpoint diversity and academic freedom. These are the qualities that have long made U.K. universities among the best in the world. We should not sacrifice their reputation on the altar of ‘social justice.’"

Meme - "rural american states are the worst
This is why I hate cars
This is just my personal take but I hate the rural states in america with a burning passion they think they are so special and "free" when they live in car dependent shitholes in the middle of nowhere It's their fault we had trump as president meanwhile farming is one of the biggest causes of greenhouse gasses these people need to be forced and given cash incentives to be relocated to a dense city with public transport where they will not need pickup trucks that kill."
Clearly the people who think 15 minute cities are a way to control them are totally deluded

Meme - *US flag* "It's mam!"
*Palestinian flag* "Sir is fine."

Anti-racist Arguments Are Tearing People Apart - The Atlantic - "“It hurts people,” she said, “when they see a white man bouncing a brown baby on their lap and they don’t know the context!”... if this particular incident is exceedingly strange––almost a caricature of how conservatives think identitarian leftists behave––it also illuminates how the fight over anti-racism could roil many other institutions all across the country... If a member of a civic body expressed frustration that a colleague refused to read the Bible, the Quran, The Wealth of Nations, The Communist Manifesto, Atlas Shrugged, or Dianetics, and couldn’t understand an accusation until they did, most observers would see the problem. Drawing on outside concepts is fine. But if you can’t explain your position unless everyone reads your source material, then the fault lies with you. No one in a public meeting should have to read the books you consider important, much less accept that the ideas in those books are sacrosanct."

'My Little Pony' Fans Confront Their Nazi Problem - The Atlantic

The World Is Trapped in America's Culture War - The Atlantic - "multiple stories focused on a photograph of the British singer-songwriter Adele with her hair in Bantu knots. She was “accused of cultural appropriation,” the U.S. entertainment magazine Variety reported. According to the television channel ABC, the star was facing a “backlash” and was “caught in the crossfire.” Fox News had her “slammed” and “taking heat” for the hairstyle. The gossip site PageSix claimed that “a new photo of Adele has sent the internet into a tizzy.” Sensing the high level of interest in the story, British media websites covered it in similar terms... But prominent Black Britons, including the model Naomi Campbell and the talent-show winner Alexandra Burke, defended the singer. The politician David Lammy, a member of Parliament for the Labour Party, pointed out that Adele was celebrating the annual Notting Hill Carnival, which has a long tradition of masquerade and “dress up.” Most coverage was framed as a debate, but even the few pieces that offered straightforward criticism tended to be mild. One writer acknowledged the “differing responses to the star’s misstep,” while another argued that she could understand that Adele was “trying to be respectful at an event celebrating black culture with her Bantu knots,” before concluding that the look nevertheless “left a bad taste in my mouth.” Sunder Katwala, the chair of the identity-focused think tank British Future, told me it was notable that when the British talk-radio station LBC discussed the controversy, it had to bring on the American writer Ernest Owens to make the case against the singer... Somehow, a man from Philadelphia had become the designated arbiter of whether it was appropriate for a British woman to wear a Jamaican-flag bikini and a hairstyle named for people in southern Africa. (American readers: If you think being stuck in a culture war is bad, imagine being stuck in someone else’s.)... But what happens when another country’s conversation about race takes place in an “American accent”? In his article for Persuasion, Owolade argued that this risked cloaking “the reality of Black British lives behind an abstraction that flattens our humanity.” He noted that while many Black Americans are descendants of enslaved people, the majority of Black Britons are immigrants, or the children of immigrants—which should influence our discussions of diversity initiatives here in Britain. While Black Britons are underrepresented in publishing and the arts, the same is not true in the kinds of professions toward which middle-class immigrants push their children. “In a country in which black people make up only 3 percent of the population, for example, 6 percent of junior doctors are black,” Owolade wrote. Katwala also stressed that British-born people from a Black Caribbean background are four times as likely as Black Americans to have a white partner, and those from a Black African background are twice as likely. The majority of mixed-race Britons are themselves in mixed-race relationships. As a result, he added, the “segregationist strand of Black American race thinking” is not really present in Britain. As for cultural appropriation: “I’ve got an Indian name. I grew up Irish Catholic and did Irish dancing. Where are the boundaries?” This undisputed rule over the English-language internet is not just a problem for smaller countries such as Britain—it isn’t good for the United States either. Being part of the dominant group always leads to shortsightedness: an assumption that your laws, culture, and taboos are universal, the default state of humanity."
I like how the woke getting offended because they have imported American venom is the fault of the right

Thread by @L0m3z on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - " Woke isn't dying. Woke isn't going anywhere.  Friend told me his small red town in a red state 500 miles from the nearest international airport just announced it's having it's first ever Pride parade, including a drag show for kids sponsored by the town council. This also came with a "Proclamation" issued by the city declaring the town a safe space and condemning bigotry blah blah blah, suggesting that any objections, let alone active resistance to a city-sponsored Pride week and kid's drag show is somehow verboten... receipts, for the skeptical:  This raises complex strategic/tactical questions. Despite outnumbering the hicklibs, ordinary people who don't want their cities hosting kids drag shows are not organized, don't know how to organize, and wouldn't know what effective resistance would look like if they were What you're most likely to see is a disorganized counter-protest, some Facebook mom's group going off half-cocked, mixed in with a few feds, which will only strengthen the resolve of the Pride advocates, give fodder to local media, and look foolish to outside observers"
Thread by @JesseKellyDC on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Wanna know why “red” towns across America have child drag shows and muddy buddy parades?  Walk with me and I’ll tell you why. And how to stop it: First, you need to set aside Nursery Rhyme Conservative notions like “majority”. The Right loves cope like that.  “We’re the silent majority!”  Yeah, dork. Thinking like that is why you lose. The communist understands “power” and “majority” are very different things. His is a demonic religion of destruction so he knows he’ll never be popular. And he doesn’t have to be.  He just has to take the choke points of power in a society. Which brings us to your town. You know that library you drive by on the way to work every day? Do you even look at it?  No. You don’t.  Guess who does. The communist does. You see a library. He sees a choke point. The communist understands power in a way the American Right never has. You put on a MAGA hat and post on Facebook and think you’re “political”. The communist gets himself on your city’s parks department. Why? Cause he knows what politics really is about. So yes, there are only 10 commies in your “red” town. But they’re all on your school board. THEY have the power. Your “majority” means nothing. Nothing. If you want to save the parts of your country that can be saved, it involves much more than voting for Trump once every 4 years and avoiding Bud Light. You must become involved. LOCALLY. Run for school board. When there’s a meeting or a committee in your town (communists love committees), go get on them. When the communist pushes the next tranny parade, make noise. Organize. Last time they tried that in my “red” town, I had so many people calling that they stopped answering the phones in city hall. And in the end, I won. Legal and local is our path to victory. Your red area is vulnerable cause you’re watching the game while the communists are planning and organizing.  Plan. Organize. Fight. Win. That’s all."
Left wingers take over organisations because they have the Will to Power

Meme - s p o o k y @_s_m_n_: "Let's play a game. The rules are simple; in a google search type in Reply with your best."
"is smiling racist
The Weird Connection Between Smiling and Racism - Science of Us - The Cut"

Meme - "is air racist
This Is How Racist Your Air Is - Mother Jones
Study Finds Significant Racial Disparities In Vehicular Air Pollution  - WBUR
How environmental racism is fuelling the coronavirus pandemic - Nature"

Meme - "Is gardening racist
Is gardening racist? Tommy Richardson. - The Ames Tribune
jun Weeding out horticulture's race problem I Gardening advice - The Guardian
Gardening and the roots of racism - Community Reporter"

Meme - "is running racist
Running while Black: A distinctive safety concern and barrier to exercise in White... by LM Hornbuckle
Running while Black - Wikipedia
Opinion I Anmaud Arbery's Killing Shows Running Has Long Excluded Black People - New York Times"

Meme - "Is gravity racist
"Isaac Newton was likely racist, that doesn't mean gravity...
Why We Are Addressing Anti-Black Racism - Strong Propserous and Resilient Communities Challenge (SPARCC)
Gravity is racist? Sheffield Uni. wants disclaimers on Isaac Newton's theories, says he benefited from 'colonial activity' - RT
Cornell 'Black Hole' Class Racializes Astronomy - City Journal"

Meme - "is farting racist
Using the Phenomenology of Farts to Teach My Son About Racism - McSweeney's Internet Tendency
Ep. 5: Farts and Racism (The Rant is Due) by Lewis Black - Audible
The Silent but Deadly Fart of Racism - CALL YOUR GIRLFRIEND"

Meme - NPC: "Jesus was a leftist."
Normal person: "So follow His teachings."
NPC: *upset*

Go to a state school - "If I were advising a friend’s son or daughter facing Decision Day, I’d tell them to pass on the Ivy League and go to a high-quality state school instead under some conditions. Let me articulate some exceptions... go with the elite private college if (i) they had a high degree of confidence in what they wanted to do with their degree and (ii) it was in a field like law that regards the credential as particularly valuable.  And I’d tell them to strongly consider going if they came from an economically disadvantaged background and had been offered a golden ticket to join the elite. I’m not super familiar with the literature on the selective college wage premium, but it’s among this group of disadvantaged students where the benefits seem to be concentrated.  But if this student was just going to school to “find herself” — and she or her parents were footing most of the bill? Yeah, probably go with the top-flight state school — especially if she’s in a state with a very good in-state public school where the cost savings are much greater. Better that than to emerge with a mountain of debt and a degree from an institution that is likely to be viewed as highly polarizing. Public perceptions of higher education have declined rapidly, and I expect the problems to get worse... Chicago has always been an outlier. In my era, at least, it tended to attract its share of weird nerds who were turned on precisely by the school’s reputation for weird nerdiness. Chicago has also always been a politically pluralistic school, with strong institutional commitments to free speech, an emphasis on the core curriculum, less grade inflation than comparable schools, and less of a boost for legacy admits. I’m undoubtedly biased, but I think that if other schools had been run like Chicago, elite higher ed would have fewer problems than it has today. Even if I had gone to Harvard though — applied, didn’t get in, by the way — I don’t think that would make me a hypocrite because my argument is that this change has been relatively recent and that many of the downstream effects are still to come. Even in a period when nearly all American institutions are losing public trust, the decline in confidence for higher education stands out... I expect the decline in perceptions of elite private colleges to extend to people tasked with making hiring decisions... Once perceptions of an institution become politically polarized, it is very hard to undo that. But I expect elite higher ed to have an especially big problem.  That’s because academia is a slow-moving institution. Academic faculty — especially if they receive tenure — often serve out their entire careers at one or two institutions. Investments in new buildings or programs are expected to pay out over decades. There is an enormous amount of bureaucracy. Even a student, between the time they first apply to a college and when they graduate, is making nearly a five-year commitment, and that’s if they finish on time, which many students don’t. So although there are some signs that schools recognize the scale of their problems —notably, in restoring standardized testing requirements — I think elite private colleges’ problems are likely to worsen in the medium term. Younger faculty, some of whom were hired under regimes that required diversity statements that are thinly-veiled political litmus tests, are much more more into wokeness (or what I call Social Justice Leftism) than older faculty — and less supportive of traditional liberal values like free speech. And these problems are likely to be self-reinforcing. If conservative students — or apolitical students who just want to take their classes and goof off with their friends — are increasingly turned off by the political environment at elite private colleges, they won’t attend, and that will in turn make these colleges even more of a bubble with fewer relatively well-adjusted normies."

A Cult-Based Framework for Understanding Social-Justice Dogma - "When presented with cult-speak, imagine the task of translating it into another language, or simply into plain English.  By way of illustration, consider this recent blog entry on the website of the American Mathematical Society, entitled Can Mathematics Be Antiracist? Here is a representative passage, which I challenge readers to translate comprehensibly:     'Attempts to shoehorn social justice into mathematics curricula perhaps say more about the political leanings of the teacher than anything else. At the same time, we must be wary of diversity initiatives in mathematics which simply reproduce a different class of scientists that perpetuate structures of domination and oppression, in place of work to dismantle the whiteness which mathematics operates as, and to truly equip students for a world of growing inequality.'  What are “structures of domination and oppression”? They’re structures controlled by whiteness. What is “whiteness”? It’s the creed of institutionalized racial inequality. How do we define inequality? It’s something that perpetuates structures of domination and oppression.  Of course, it is technically possible to translate isolated phrases such as “structures of domination and oppression” into other languages, or into a form of English that is nominally accessible to ordinary people. But to do so in any meaningful way requires an investigation into the text as a whole, whose only real purpose is to signify the author’s allegiance to a certain system of thought. (In true cultish fashion, the author added a postscript to the original article, confessing to a minor source-attribution mistake that apparently furthered “the erasure and antiblack racism perpetuated consciously and unconsciously by nonblack people such as myself, including in science and math, profiting off the work and labour of black people.”) Ultimately, this is a patchwork of propaganda jargon—what Orwell once described as “prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set.” Franklin Jones was disgraced in the mid-1980s, after numerous former followers revealed details of his sexual abuse and brainwashing. Indeed, cults generally went into decline during this period. In part, this was because society began to take the issue of sexual and child abuse more seriously, and so the most notorious communes were raided (including, disastrously, the Waco Siege of 1993). Moreover, the emergence of the world wide web in the 1990s meant that many of the same people who were otherwise vulnerable to cult indoctrination could find communities, and get their marching orders from would-be prophets, without leaving their homes or selling off their possessions.  One result is that cultism now has increasingly blurred into mainstream web-mediated subcultures, including politics and academia. Another is that cultish ideas can spread more quickly. The above-quoted tract about racism and mathematics, written by a visiting professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, may appeal to only a small portion of the American population. But because the author channels a jargon that’s been adopted by at least some academics and activists in every English-speaking country, the potential audience is substantial. Thanks to the Internet, all cultish movements can spread their ideas (and punish heretics) on a global scale, subject only to the boundaries imposed by language. Cults can never be organized in any kind of democratic way because there is always some anointed class (often consisting of just one person) that monopolizes access to a critical body of revealed truths. And in this aspect, intersectionality is well-suited to a cult paradigm because its adherents presume that the “lived experience” that typifies every sub-group is fundamentally unknowable except to members of that sub-group. The conceit of secret knowledge confers an aura of mysticism on followers, especially in regard to the issue of gender identity, which is cast as an internally experienced secular rapture.  On one hand, this means that discussions within social-justice circles tend to be tortured and unproductive, as no one is allowed to presume a truth-telling power that extends beyond the narrow confines of one’s own intersectional constituency. On the other hand, this system of balkanized information monopolies helps protect intersectional dogmas from outside criticism, as no argument may contradict the internally experienced pain, trauma or perception of bigotry expressed by an acolyte who identifies as a member of an oppressed group. In this regard, social-justice cults diverge significantly from the interwar ideological cults that formed around various interpretations of Marxism (with which social-justice cultism is sometimes compared), as these older movements tended toward universalism in their underlying epistemological approach. My own country, Canada, provides an interesting case study in the propagation of social-justice cultism, as it has two official languages—English and French. And while English-speaking colleges and universities have largely fallen into line with the “structures of domination and oppression” narrative, the situation in French-speaking Quebec is still in flux. One reason for this, I believe, is that social-justice dogmas still strike many Francophones as a translated Anglo import whose mantras don’t quite ring true in the local tongue. Moreover, the racial and gender-based hierarchy presented by intersectionality runs at odds with Quebecers’ own historical conception of themselves as a culturally isolated and vulnerable people within English-speaking North America... when it comes to “l’intersectionnalité,” these student signatories are largely correct to cast these translated cultish creeds as part of a hégémonique Anglo academic movement that now is imposing itself on others in an ironic reprise of old colonial patterns"

The Outing of 'Lady G': Humiliating a Closeted Gay Republican in the Name of LGBT Rights - "In Washington, D.C., rumors have long swirled around a certain long-time Republican senator, a perennial bachelor, being not-so-secretly gay. But the long-simmering issue came to a boiling point recently when a concerted effort to “out” the senator, dubbed “Lady G,” went viral. The result was widespread derision and mockery of the senator. And a cadre of left-wing LGBT activists suddenly found themselves doing a complete reversal, arguing that it’s now actually okay to involuntarily “out” someone—expose a closeted person’s sexuality—if one finds their viewpoints to be disagreeable... many LGBT activists cheered on the mob—despite outing being a practice that normally is considered immoral and cruel by most gay people. Some explicitly stated that they were perfectly happy to violate their own principles if that’s what it took to ensure the Republican senator loses reelection. “Outing is a brutal tactic that should be reserved for brutes,” wrote LGBT activist Dan Savage. “Lady G more than qualifies.”... Is the senator in question really a vicious “anti-LGBTQ” bigot who deserves to be taken down by any means necessary? Well, sure, “Lady G” has opposed gay marriage. And he voted against gay integration in the military during his many years in the Senate. But so did the current Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden—you know, the same guy most of these hashtaggers now openly endorse... Barack Obama opposed gay marriage as recently as 2011. Was he, too, the devil incarnate?  And here’s a larger question: Who gets to decide which politicians are “anti-LGBT” and which aren’t?... More and more, you can always tell who the most puritanical social-justice advocates are. Gay or straight, they’re the ones doing logical backflips to justify viciousness and cruelty in the name of diversity and tolerance"
If nothing else, this is very unprofessional behavior by the sex workers

Meme - "When you realize they took a real black woman off of a syrup bottle and put a fake white woman on beer cans."
On Aunt Jemima and Dylan Mulvaney

Assumption University President Apologizes for Campus Ministry's LGBTQ-Negative Content
You're not allowed to be Christian

Meme *Soyjak*
"Tell me without telling me"
"must be gay"
"nEvEr mAdEa WoMaN cUm"
"mY gUy
"Die mad"
"If you don't like women just say that"
"Yikes"
"Check your privilege, sweetie"
"yas kween!"
"small penis"
"Imagine telling on yourself like this"
"Y'all aren't ready for that conversation"
"Incel"
"LOUDER"
"Read that again"
"Sis I- "
"touch grass"
"Wrong but go off"
"Who hurt you?"
"Chile"
"just say that"
"No <3"
"This is not the diss you think it is"
"Of course you call us females"

Meme - Micah Erfan @micah_erfan: "Y'all remember when Republicans were normal??? *Mitt Romney and Wife*"
Stephen L. Miller @redsteeze: "The current president said the guy on the left would put black people "back in chains" and the national media blamed the woman on the right for the confederate flag and Charleston church shooting.  Kindly go fuck yourself."
Every Republican Presidential Candidate Is Hitler

Meme - "Woke Western video game companies be like:
The face model *Ellen Page* / The in game model *Elliot Page*"

Ridiculous Zuccs: Daniel Dennett

Not exactly a zucc, but a near-zucc. An article on Daniel Dennett's death seems to go against Community Standards for Violent and Graphic Content:


"We moved one of your posts lower in Feed.

Daniel Dennett, fiery atheist philosopher who saw human brains as 'programmes' - obituary

What happened
Our technology showed that this post looks like others that go against our Community Standards for Violent and Graphic Content.

. We don't allow people on Facebook to share things that show graphic violence."

Links - 8th May 2024 (1 - Housing in Canada)

Why doesn't the original canadahousing subreddit allow any discussion on immigration? : CanadaHousing2 - "Someone posted a stats canada graph showing the all time historic highs for immigration and the mod banned the user and locked the post with "canada has all time low immigration". Mods from that sub cannot even use 0.01% of their critical thinking. Even coming face to face with facts they hold this grand fairytale belief in their minds and they cannot be wrong...  Someone posted the IG of one of the mods and she literally looks like she reaks of cat piss. Shes one of those types of people. A literall troll.  Oh also thank you to the other user who pointed it out since I missed it, this mod in question does not even live in Canada. She resides in Utah or Ohio or something and shes modding a canada housing sub reddit and pushing an agenda..."
Foreign influence is only bad when it hurts the left wing agenda

In Victoria, former Airbnbs are flooding the market — but no one is buying - "the B.C. government announced a ban on short-term rentals that are not in the owner’s principal residence. These units are the most troublesome, because they take housing off the market for long-term residents.  The ban includes units like this one in downtown Victoria — condos that were previously grandfathered-in despite a ban introduced by the city in 2018. That “legal non-conforming” designation kept thousands of homes off the rental and condo market in Victoria alone, and by some estimates boosted their value by as much as $50,000 to 100,000 because of their substantial revenue-generating potential. Before the new legislation, that premium could be made back in a year or two — but now the clock is ticking down to May, when these condos’ ability to earn money as short-term rentals will evaporate. That’s leading to a rush of units hitting the market as owners try to get out of pricey investments that seem destined to plummet in value.  So far, listing prices haven’t reflected this new reality"
Weird. I thought AirBNB was the reason housing was pricey

Bank of Canada: Interest rates not to blame for housing crisis - "Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem says the central bank can't solve the housing crisis with interest rates because the root cause is a supply shortage... he noted that shelter price inflation has remained high during times of both low and high interest rates... Macklem said government should be focused on increasing housing supply to improve affordability, and warns policies that increase demand will worsen it."
Japan, which has had negative interest rates for a long time, does not have a housing crisis because the Japanese are not "greedy". Supply and demand are racist and xenophobic

Canadians want denser housing, but not next door: Poll - "About 60 per cent of Canadians say they support increasing density in cities across the country, according to polling data published today by Pollara Strategic Insights, a market research group. However, when asked how they would feel if a single-family home on their block was converted into a triplex, only about 20 per cent said it would be a “good thing.”... About 43 per cent of Canadians said they would view a triplex replacing a single-family home on their block as a “bad thing.”"
Damn greedy landlords and developers keeping housing expensive!

'Lackluster': 6 garden suites built in Toronto since approval to address 'missing middle' housing - "Only six garden suites have been built in Toronto since the city began to search for new ways to bolster the housing supply and address the “missing middle,” stats that industry experts are calling lacklustre...   That need for this kind of “gentle density” can be helped by laneway housing as well which was approved by the city in 2018. More and more laneway homes can be found through the back alleys where garages normally stand, but there are still less than 200 in Toronto."
East Toronto garden suite dispute puts focus on city’s notification rules - "The reality of garden suites and the impact they will have is sinking in for residents of an Upper Beach neighbourhood.  A garden suite under construction at a house on Eastwood Road between Woodbine and Coxwell avenues has raised a range of emotions for both those who initiated the process and those who found themselves affected by the structure.  For the neighbours surrounding the property, they said news that a garden suite was being built in the backyard of one of the houses on the street came as a shock and they are not happy about it at all.  On the other hand, the property owners feel they are being unfairly treated by some of the other residents in the neighbourhood because of their decision to build the garden suite. In this story, Beach Metro Community News has decided to put the focus on the rules surrounding garden suites, and the rights of the property owner and their neighbours when one gets built. As for the relationship between the neighbours, it is accurate to say it has “soured” because of the garden suite... The neighbours directly to the west of the Eastwood project have a sign on their front lawn objecting to the “monstrosity” of a garden suite being built beside their backyard...   “It’s a warning to all, that inappropriate, ill-considered, and ill-approved garden suites will have negative impacts on you and your neighbourhood,” said those neighbours in a statement to Beach Metro Community News. “And if they come to your neighbourhood, know that city planning people and your city government are not on your side. Expect to be dismissed and ignored.”... “The members of the community know that they can’t stop the building of this ‘garden suite’. However, they want to change the bylaw to ensure that future ‘garden suites’ can’t be built without community consultation and an environmental assessment,” said a news release from a number of residents in the area"

Libertas Fund’s Returns Hurt by Bad Bet Against Canadian Housing Market - Bloomberg - "Last year marked the fifth time the fund posted a double-digit annual loss, and overall it’s down about 80% since its inception. Canada’s housing prices have ballooned in the past two decades, spurring speculation of an implosion that would cause a recession"

What keeps a financial planner up at night? ‘People withdrawing all of their savings to meet their new mortgage needs’ - The Globe and Mail

Pierre Poilievre on X - "Former Immigration Minister Fraser admits he knew his policies would impact the housing market but he proceeded with them anyway. Now Trudeau has made him the Housing Minister. Good luck finding a home under this guy."

The Impact of Greenbelts on Housing Markets: Evidence from Toronto - "Greenbelts are a widespread policy tool used to protect natural spaces from urban sprawl. With rising housing costs in many metropolitan areas, numerous questions have been raised about the impact of greenbelts on housing markets. Yet despite the intense policy debate, there is little empirical evidence to assess how greenbelts affect housing supply and prices across a metropolitan region. In this paper, I set out a new approach to estimate the impact of greenbelt policies on housing market outcomes and use it to evaluate the introduction of the world’s largest contiguous greenbelt, which formed a protected zone around Toronto in the early 2000s. Using rich project-level data on housing developments, I first show that the Ontario Greenbelt affected housing development patterns, where restricted, developable census tracts saw less housing built relative to unrestricted tracts. Next, to quantify the effects across the metropolitan area, I build and estimate a model of housing supply and demand with heterogeneous supply elasticities at the census tract level. Using the model, I simulate the scenario in which no Greenbelt was implemented, finding that the Greenbelt led to a reduction in aggregate housing supply of almost 10,000 units and price increases of 4.1% for houses and 6.1% for condominiums; this corresponds to an increase in condo rent of $675 a year. Finally, I show that had the Greenbelt been paired with a small relaxation of zoning regulations within cities, these negative consequences from the Greenbelt would disappear, suggesting a viable alternative to developing greenbelts in the face of rising housing prices."
Damn greedy developers and investors!

Why Olivia Chow is spending millions on Toronto renters - "Chow’s proposed changes include $41 million more for the multi-unit residential acquisition program that helps non-profit organizations buy rental buildings, both to keep units affordable and to make sure no one comes along with a wrecking ball to make way for luxury condos.  There’s also more than $2 million extra for programs that prevent evictions and $865,000 for more inspectors to work on the municipal RentSafeTO program designed to crack down on bad landlords, funded by a hike to the fee large landlords pay to register their units with the city."
When you prevent urban renewal and the creation of new housing, and impose costs on landlords that invariably will be passed on to tenants. Of course, greedy landlords and developers are why housing is so expensive. And of course, the writer repeats the complaint about overly-low property taxes, when left wingers repeatedly promote density because it's supposedly more efficient. Maybe the reality is that the left wing agenda is expensive, and there're alternative models to what left wingers claim is the only possible one

UBC student flies in from Calgary to save money - "Chen is originally from Calgary. He had previously been living in Vancouver while studying at UBC, but gave up his rental unit while he went on vacation during the fall.  When he returned, he was met with sticker shock.  "When I checked the house price I thought, oh shoot, there was a big increase!" he said. “I need to pay like $2,500 for the rent, so I don't feel like it's viable."  He began looking at the price of flights from Calgary to Vancouver and realized they were about $150 round trip.  He takes two classes per week at the university.  In total he’ll pay about $1,200 for the flights per month while he lives at home with his parents in Calgary. Ultimately, it's much cheaper than the average price of a one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver, which sits at about $2,100."

Forget downsizing: Canadian seniors staying in large houses well into their 80s, due in part to lack of options - The Globe and Mail - " “better health and better wealth” is part of what is keeping people at home longer, but so is a lack of options. Those who would be willing to downsize, he said, are often stymied by a lack of housing variety in their communities, so they stay in their homes to remain close to their friends.  “Solutions aimed at increasing supply from existing units (by creating secondary suites or laneway homes, for example) could be increasingly considered.” the report said. Mr. Cortellino said that in many of Canada’s large cities, seniors living alone or couples over age 75 are more likely than young families to live in single-family homes with three or more bedrooms... He said he’s found anecdotally that many people are instead “downsizing from the inside” – only using a small part of their house, often the ground floor, and often closing off or limiting heating in the rest.  Several other reports confirm parts of his findings. Real estate and mortgage company Redfin published a report in January that found that in the United States, “empty-nest baby boomers own 28 per cent of the nation’s large homes [with three or more bedrooms], while millennials with kids own just 14 per cent.” A September paper by University of Waterloo and McMaster University researchers states seniors are most likely to leave their homes for a retirement home only when access to home care and other services become a challenge. And a Deloitte report from 2022 found “91 per cent of Ontario seniors hope to stay in their own home for as long as possible.”... there’s also a cultural element: Canadians are very driven by home ownership... The cost of moving – especially for someone living in a home that is paid off – is also a barrier to many seniors who would otherwise consider downsizing"... “Moving costs will be higher than most people expect,” Ms. Chung said. Among her clients who are staying in their homes instead of downsizing, “either they find that they would not have the net financial gain from downsizing that they’d expected, or they even might find that it costs more for this smaller home because of the location, amenities, age, and of course, the market that wants the same thing.”"

Bank of Canada says government efforts to curb housing crisis will help 'gradually' - "The Bank of Canada says record levels of immigration are driving up the cost of housing and recent government efforts to cut the number of non-permanent residents and encourage home building will help lower housing costs, but "only gradually."   "In the short term any increase in population, particularly in an environment of constrained supply, is going to put upward pressure on prices," said Carolyn Rogers, senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada."
Damn racist xenophobes!

Ontario family could lose its farm due to Ford government's Highway 413 : ontario - "Except according to our housing task force that isn’t going to solve anything:  “Too much land inside cities is tied up by outdated rules. For example, it's estimated that 70% of land zoned for housing in Toronto is restricted to single-detached or semi-detached homes.' This type of zoning prevents homeowners from adding additional suites to create housing for Ontarians and income for themselves.  …it's estimated that about half of all residential land in Ottawa is zoned for single-detached housing, meaning nothing else may be built on a lot without public consultation and an amendment to the zoning by-law.  Most of the solution must come from densification. Greenbelts and other environmentally sensitive areas must be protected, and farms provide food and food security.”... Environmentalists agree too.  You know who doesn’t agree? The developers and builders."
"While we wait for those municipalities to figure its shit out (which could take a decade).  We just need to build, build up, build out, build as much as we can.."
What sort of voodoo logic is this? Zoning prevents land from being used for dense housing, therefore the solution can only be densification, and we must prevent housing from being built where and when it's easily built, and developers are evil

Calgary sprawls into open fields around it, while existing areas are closed off to change - "This is the reason why a rundown old bungalow in places like Rundle or Southwood will languish for years, because a teardown can't be turned into a duplex or side-by-side like it can in other areas. It's also the reason why almost all the infill redevelopment is happening in neighbourhoods like Killarney, North Glenmore Park or Tuxedo Park — it's because those areas have RC-2 or R-2 zoning, and you can't legally replace one wide-lot house with two anywhere else in the city. Well, you can get it done. But on any of those lots in those orange zones, property owners must apply to the city for rezoning, a costly process that includes having to get your individual proposal accepted at a city council meeting.  Remember that longstanding absurd spectacle of homeowners' one-at-a-time pleadings to councillors to allow them to add in legal basement suites, before council finally relented and eased those stubborn limits on suites? Most Calgary homeowners need that same special permission to develop semi-detached homes... there can even be pushback getting neighbourhoods used to duplexes to stomach more than two houses where a single house once stood.  At a council hearing into Pabla's four-unit proposal on a 20th Street S.W. corner lot in Altadore, several residents spoke out.  "Please consider the traffic and safety of our community," said one neighbour, who also fretted that potentially losing the lot's trees made it bad for the climate. (Council approved the rezoning, 9-5.)  Duplexes face similar resistance in R-1 zones, with many community association leaders explicitly defending the preservation of "R-1 neighbourhoods."  Kourtney Penner is councillor for Ward 11 in Calgary's suburban southwest, and lives with her children in a skinny infill.  "You hear the comments: it's gonna bring increased parking, or increased cross traffic, or it's going to lower my house prices," she says. "And those are all urban myths."...  the city has let the lion's share of housing growth happen at the edges where, interestingly, R-1 zones don't exist. In developing neighbourhoods like Keystone Hills in the far north and Belmont in the southwest, they've instead zoned everything as R-G, which allows duplexes without special permission.  In those new subdivisions, there are no established community groups or residents to push back against potential change.  Elsewhere, change to find the missing middle won't come easily."
Damn greedy developers keeping housing expensive!

Public spat erupts on social media over city council housing decision - "“The Trudeau government wants us to allow 4-plexes to be developed in ANY residential neighborhood and on ANY residential street ANYWHERE in Forest Glade, Riverside, East Riverside, Walkerville, Ford City and South Windsor;” Dilkens said. “This intensity will have big implications on the underground (sewer) and parking infrastructure throughout the city….for which we will ALL pay!” Dilkens went further in his comments, saying, “The majority of residents in our city don’t want these types of developments next door or across the street. City Council respects our residents and their opinion. “We have offered a fair, reasonable and sensible solution to allow more housing to be built but we won’t be bullied into a solution that alters the quality of life of residents who have worked hard to buy a home in a great neighbourhood,” he wrote... One Dilkens supporter wrote, “Thank you for exercising some common sense and standing up for Windsor!”"
Clearly the way to make housing cheaper is to outlaw renting

Ontario pushes false narrative we don't have enough land - "Premier Doug Ford claims his new so-called “Get it Done Act” will make it easier to build houses in Ontario, but in reality it’s a disingenuous piece of work that quietly slips in changes that will make Ontario’s housing crisis worse.  Hidden in the middle of this messy omnibus bill is language that will require many Ontario municipalities to allow new development on previously protected farmland, forests, river valleys and wetlands... if the bill is passed we’ll see builders encouraged to put up more large, expensive houses that are unaffordable to average Ontario families"
I'm sure liberals blocking housing construction will make housing cheaper, since according to them, increasing the supply of housing will make the housing crisis worse. Because of course, they don't understand supply and demand and how new high end housing leads to a ripple effect, lowering the price of lower end housing

Chrystia Freeland touts 'affordable' 330-square-foot units for $1,600 - "Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland toured a new building on Monday offering micro-apartments starting at $1,600 per month that she said was illustrative of the homes that her government is getting built for “low and middle income Canadians.”... What the deputy prime minister did not mention is that Hudson House will be renting its 227 units at rates considered high even by the wildly inflated standards of Coastal B.C.  Two-bedroom units at Hudson House start at about $3,300 per month. The lowest priced one-bedroom unit is advertised at $2,410 per month.  The absolute lowest priced Hudson House unit being advertised is their A2 Studio Apartment, a micro-unit of just 330 square feet — about the size of two parking spots. The A2 starts at $1,680 per month. Even with Victoria at the sharp end of some of the most inflated rents in Canadian history, units at Hudson House have asking rents that are higher than average. According to the most recent report by Rentals.ca, the average asking rent for a Victoria two-bedroom is $2,743, with one-bedrooms averaging $2,116.  And all of these figures are well beyond the rents paid by the average Victorian. Since most Victoria renters are locked in at lower rates, according to CMHC the average rent paid in the city is $1,516 per month...  like all Trudeau government housing announcements these days, Hudson House represents an infinitesimal contribution to a housing shortage that is being utterly swamped by record-high immigration. In just a three-month period last year, Canada added 430,635 new people — easily placing Canada among the top five fastest-growing countries on Earth. That’s an average of 5,000 newcomers per day.  This means that even if every single Hudson House unit ends up housing a family of five, it will account for just five hours’ worth of new immigration. Freeland’s visit to Hudson House also included an aside in which she seemed to hint at B.C. being superior to her home region of the Prairies. “How lucky you are to live in this amazing city — wow,” Freeland told the assembled Victoria press corps, before referring to a line from the Margaret Laurence novel The Diviners that “for Prairie people the real-life version of dying and going to heaven is to move to B.C.”"

Petition For Non-Payment of Rent Gaining Momentum : TorontoRealEstate - "There are no statistics that support the assertion that there's a huge 'increase in landlording' - that's simply not true in the city of Toronto. The city actually saw a slight rise in home ownership during the 90s, which has now gone back to previously stable levels of about 50% owner vs. 50% renter (which has been the aprox split for about 40 decades which you can see in the city of Toronto's public data).  The Ombudsman did a very lengthly investigation into the state of the LTB which doesn't align with anything you've said - so if you actually want a source of truth on the matter here you go: "
Ombudsman calls for legislative change, overhaul of “moribund” Landlord and Tenant Board - Ontario Ombudsman - "The investigation, conducted by the Special Ombudsman Response Team, reviewed the Board’s existing systemic problems, as well as its struggles with COVID-related challenges, including a shift to online hearings and a glitchy application portal. Throughout, Ombudsman staff helped numerous tenants and landlords resolve their individual cases. Among the “host of inefficiencies” the investigation identified were:
A shortage of qualified adjudicators (members), compounded by a lengthy, cumbersome appointment and training process
A complex application process that sometimes forces applicants to start over for errors
Antiquated systems that are not equipped to triage or expedite urgent cases, track orders and member caseloads, or identify members near the end of their terms
   A lack of available bilingual adjudicators, and issues with application forms that only identify if applicants require services in French, not respondents"
This doesn't stop the left wingers and their conspiracy theories about how Doug Ford is trying to destroy the LTB

Some Ontario landlords are calling for 'automatic' evictions for tenants who don't pay rent - "In B.C., if a tenant has not paid their rent, a landlord can serve them with a 10 day notice to end the tenancy. The tenant then has five days to either pay the rent or apply to the province's Residential Tenancy Branch to dispute the notice.   If the tenant does neither of those things, the landlord can then apply for an order of possession without a hearing.   Lawyer and tenant advocate Robert Patterson, with the Tenant Resource & Advisory Centre, says the system may lead to speedy evictions, but it can also be taken advantage of by "bad actors." He encourages other provinces not to look to B.C. as a model for handling evictions... When it comes to landlords facing debt due to months of unpaid rent, Dent argues that's simply part of the risk of business.   "I have no sympathy for landlords right now in this rental market. I have no sympathy for investors that have to learn about investment risk. But I have a lot of sympathy for tenants," Dent said... Seepe says the level of support and interest from landlords has surprised even him, which he says is a clear indicator that there's a growing number of landlords who are fed up.   He argues that if landlords didn't need to worry about lengthy processes, it could improve the rental market for everyone. "I wouldn't even worry about bank statements or pay stubs or identification and so on," Seepe said. "If I knew that the tenant could be gone in 30 to 60 days because of non payment of rent, I believe that the great majority of housing providers would open up their doors."   Mahmood, in Oshawa, says that after his ordeal he will think "100 times" about ever renting out a property again. Right now his plan is to save money in order to fix up the property so he can sell it and recoup some of his losses."
In left wing land, tenants are too stupid/incompetent/lazy to dispute falsified claims of non-payment of rent. But then they also think landlords don't price in risk and just mock them for not being wise investors, while excoriating them for being greedy and unreasonable

Brampton home renting out multiple rooms, people living in car - "“A house in Brampton has multiple rooms being rented and people living in a car on the driveway,” according to an Instagram post shared by NMG Brampton. “They’ve also been seen urinating on the side of the house.”... “The Walmart parking lots in Brampton have cars with entire families sleeping in them every night,” they continued. “It’s just insane how two people that work full time can no longer provide basic housing for their children. What have we done?”"
Clearly, more regulation making housing even scarcer is the answer!

Business leaders say housing biggest risk to economy: KPMG survey - “Housing issues are forcing businesses to boost pay to better attract talent and budget for higher labour costs, agreed 87 per cent of respondents… The need to pay more not only directly affects business finances, but is also making it harder to tamp down the inflation that is keeping interest rates high, said Charest… Higher housing costs are themselves a big contributor to inflation, also making it harder to get the measure down to allow for lower rates ahead, she said”

Tuesday, May 07, 2024

Links - 7th May 2024 (2 - History Extra Quoting)

Surviving Hitler and Stalin | HistoryExtra - "‘The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact divides Poland in two. The Germans come from one end when the Russians invade from the other end. The first reaction of some Poles was they'd come to save us from the Nazis, in fact they were in alliance with the Nazis and they had come to take their part of the deal, their end of the deal and they then set about trying to destroy the elite of Poland and when I say Elite, what the the Nazis meant by Elite, uh everybody who was Jewish, some of whom happened to be shopkeepers, and the Soviets meant by that people who happened to be shopkeepers, some of whom happened to be Jews. And they mean by Elite everybody who was a teacher. Everybody who'd been in the Army. Anybody who had religious practice. Anybody who was in touch with a philatelist or or spoke spoke Esperanto. Anyone with any international connection at all. And all of those people they regarded as an elite and they began to arrest them... No one ever asked my father to tell his story. I'm sure he'd have happily done so. But no one was interested in knowing about Stalin's crimes and the Katyn  massacres and um the deportation he faced, so he never was asked um to do any of these things… because the Soviets were on the winning side and nobody was interested in what they'd done… had it not been for the fact that the association of Jewish refugees has a project of taking the testimony of refugees, it might have been much more difficult for me to turn that childhood knowledge into a book’"

Secrets of ancient Chinese tombs | HistoryExtra - "‘Horses can't be easily bred in China, they have to be brought in from the far north, towards Mongolia where the conditions are better for breeding horses. China's really too hot, too humid and lacks certain nutrition in the soil’...
‘Some tombs are deliberately looted, and some are looted in ancient times. So the royal tombs of the Shang Kings buried before 1000 BC, those have all been looted, and they were probably looted immediately by their successors who are called the Zhou, because we can see that there are enormous pits dug down, straight down in the middle of the tombs. They must have been easily located, they perhaps had small buildings on top of them, and it's very important for the succeeding Dynasty to do away with the power of the ancestors of the preceding Dynasty. So, it's a confirmation to us,  telling us that the Zhou leaders feared the ancestors of the Shang Kings… quite a lot of trouble is taken to hide Royal tombs and in some areas they were successful probably, because we've never found them. What later happens is they put great mounds on them. That makes it harder to dig in’"

How did empire shape modern Britain? | HistoryExtra - "‘During the 1950s British people are kind of going to these places to make new lives but white British people, Australia in particular has a very kind of string migration policy called the white Australia policy which means it's white British people are particularly welcome to go to Australia. White British people seem to talk about immigration during the 1950s without ever really acknowledging that they are also a nation of migrants. There's this huge outflow as well as a huge inflow that that never really comes up right when people talk about Imperial immigration...People who migrated to Britain across the 20th century, did these people view themselves in general as as Imperial subjects? Did they view themselves as British citizens? How did they conceptualize the idea of Britishness and the idea of Empire and how did those kind of things intertwine?’  ‘You often when you read, reading the accounts of people who are coming to Britain, you often see this huge moment of disillusionment, because they had been you know put through school systems, in the colonies where they had been told, you know, you're part of the British Empire, they learned about, you know, what they often refer to as the mother country. They often talk about England as the mother country or Britain, you know you see lots of accounts of people saying, oh you know, I could name all of the lakes in the Lake District. In my Village School in Kenya I could, I could tell you the name of every river in England. You know this is what, but that their kind of education was totally framed about learning around England and Britain but actually predominantly England, and they had this real sense of you know, you're part of kind of particularly into the sort of mid 20th century, you're part of this Imperial Community, and then they come to Britain and they find themselves unwelcome and they find themselves a target of of real explicit racism, and so for a lot of people there's this real moment of kind of psychic crisis I think. The writer Donald Hines who wrote a memoir about his migration called Journey to an Illusion which which is a title which gives you a kind of sense of his feelings about this. He's part loosely, kind of part of the Windrush generation, and he interviewed lots of his friends about migration and one of the accounts in the book is about coming to Britain and seeing white British street sweepers. It's like white men cleaning the streets in London. And and the narrative is like you know this person's heart just sinks because he says if this is the kind of jobs that white people are doing in the UK what, you know what jobs are there? They're not going to give us jobs, right. They're not going to be happy with us being their bosses and if if these jobs are being done by white people, we're not going to be included in this, we're going to be completely excluded... This country that's like poor, it's it's gray. You know there's no food in the shops. There's, you know, what this like this is what we were being told was this wonderful beacon of civilization'"
I like how she admits that she says that she refuses to change her mind to consider that Empire might have been a good thing

Did our ancestors really think the world was flat? | HistoryExtra - "‘When Aristotle first suggested it this was a really radical idea, and some of his contemporaries must have thought it was completely bonkers. And some really quite big name Greek philosophers like Epicurus didn't believe it. The Roman epicurian Lucius for instance who is often held up as almost being a kind of protoo scientist, but he was convinced that the Earth was flat and and in his book On the Nature of Things he mocks people who think it might be a sphere saying well obviously anything on the other side of the world would indeed just fall off. It spread relatively slowly over the next few centuries but I think in the Roman world it was really helped because of the cachet of Greek thought. And if you were an up and coming Roman you sent your children off to Athens to be educated and you wanted to show that you were you know totally on top of all the trendy thinking coming out of ancient Greece. And one of those things was that the Earth was spherical. So in a way you could feel smugly superior to ordinary people because you were aware of this and you knew your Greek philosophy but gradually it became better known in the Roman world. For example Roman emperors started putting globes onto their coins as sort of to represent their power over the world’...
‘After around about 700, 750 AD, we don't find any sign of anybody who was vaguely literate believing that the Earth was anything other than a sphere, it becomes very much a commonplace. And it's also a common place in medieval art and even medieval poetry for instance. The troubadors of France, they seem to be aware that the Earth was a sphere. So probably common people may well have known it, as well. In one poem, Alexander the Great is presented with an apple, and he takes this as as a symbol of the world that he's about to conquer. So obviously he was aware that the Earth was round. And of course kings and queens, they were presented with an orb when they were crowned, there there's a picture of it happening in the Bayeux Tapestry, and that orb represents the Earth, it represents the secular power of the king under God, because it has a cross on top of it. And presumably if  people in the Middle Ages had believed that the Earth was flat they would have presented their king with a dinner plate rather than with an orb... I think it's very clear that the people who wrote the Bible or the Vedas or, or the Quran, they assumed that the Earth resembled traditional cosmology, they assumed it was flat...
I went into [writing the book] very much of the view that the globe is counter intuitive and if I had been born in China 500 years ago I would have been a convinced flat earther because that's what I would have learned at school and I therefore was quite surprised at how defensive a lot of people are about the idea that people in the past in one culture or another believed in traditional cosmologies. Of course they did but I've read entire books on Chinese science which don't mention the Chinese picture of the Earth at all. Or try to gloss over it or try to suggest that actually it wasn't what they really thought, or it didn't matter, or something along those lines. And similarly in the Roman world there just seem to be an assumption that as soon as one person was able to articulate Aristotle's theory, everyone would immediately accept it. But that's not how things work out at all’"

Tokyo’s devastating 1923 earthquake | HistoryExtra - "'People in Tokyo, A, they have grown up being taught that people in Korea, people in China are backward in terms of, relative level of civilization Japan sees itself as being the great modernizer, and modernized nation in Asia. Also there's a a heavy racial tinge to that. These people are lesser in all sorts of ways, and the expectation is that Koreans who live in Japan will feel not terribly good about their colonization and might take the opportunity of chaos like an earthquake and a fire to resist, to rise up against the authorities. And so a rumor starts to go around that Koreans in Tokyo are setting fires of their own, so they're making these fires much much worse, that they are maybe even plotting bombs, that they're doing all sorts of things to try and, at last, get some kind of payback for what the Japanese authorities have been doing on the Korean Peninsula. And it's really difficult now to know how exactly this happened, people think that it was some combination of thugs and opportunists. People who were seeking to raid Koreans’ homes and get something. Others who were, yeah, simply awful people looking for a fight. The result we think was about, and it's an incredible number, about 6,000 Korean people were killed, over the course of these few days after the earthquake. And they were killed you know in the most brut, brutal of ways. Thrown down wells, they were sort of chopped up with whatever blades people had in their houses, they were physically beaten up. And one extra element which seems to made it worse is that parts of the Japanese Armed Forces who were sent in quite quickly under martial law after the earthquake and parts of the Tokyo Police Force, some of the men who serve in those two institutions have not long come back from service on the Korean Peninsula. And to put it mildly they don't feel particularly warmly about Koreans. So far from trying to quell this violence, which is hard anyway, you know in a period of such chaos, they seem actually to be getting involved. Egging people on, helping them out and making it possible for this you know extraordinary slaughter to go ahead...
In 1945 it was roughly a quarter of the city destroyed. So not quite as devastating as 1923, but that's a a weird thing to say when you got 100,000 people losing their lives. And interestingly I think it was in the early 1960s or so the Japanese emperor emperor Hirohito made this comment… had they rebuilt Tokyo properly, done the more expensive job in 1923, those fires that killed so many tens of thousands of people in 1945 just wouldn't have been possible'"

Big questions of the Crimean War: the build up | HistoryExtra - "The crisis begins not in the Crimea or indeed in Turkey. It begins in the holy places in Palestine with a dispute between Roman Catholic and Orthodox Greek monks about who should place their emblems in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. There is then a serious riot on the streets of Bethlehem and men of faith are killed by other men of faith using religious instruments as their weapons. The Turks think this is absurd but the Russians then demand a protectorate, the French demand a protectorate over these places, and so the Protectors of Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity are on the verge of war over who should bully the Turks most, about something the Turks care very little about. The British are involved not because of the religious issue but because if this issue of the future of Turkey is opened it will have implications for the British. The British want this to go away, they want the Russians and the French to stop bullying the Ottoman Empire and they want to negotiate a settlement. This doesn't happen, the Russians refuse to back down. They seize Ottoman territory essentially what is now modern day Romania and they demand that the Turks make major concessions which would have undermined the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. Eventually the Ottomans get bored waiting for something to happen so they start the war. In October 1853 they crossed the Danube and attack the Russians"

Big questions of the Crimean War: into the Valley of Death | HistoryExtra - "Britain is the dominant Marine engineering and shipbuilding power. So the British have the latest weapons, the latest engines and the most number of powerful warships. They have the largest navy by manpower as well. But what happens at a cusp in technology? So while, if you look at the pictures it looks remarkably like the Battle of Waterloo. They're all dressed up in very colorful uniforms, marching in very tight formations. Most of the British and French troops are armed with rifles, not with muskets. Musket is accurate to about 50 Paces. A rifle is accurate to about 300. And this is a transformational moment on the battlefield. The Russians don't have rifles. Or very very few of them. So in any kind of infantry firefight the Russians are going to lose. And they're going to lose a lot of men in the process. And that happens in all of the Infantry fighting in the Crimea. It's why the Russians fight behind walls. It's the only way they can avoid getting slaughtered in the open field by superior technology. The Allies are even using rifled canon in the siege of Sebastopol as well, although not very many. Russia doesn't have access to high technology. It can't manufacture rifles. It can't import them because of the British blockade. And so it's condemned to fight this war with the weapons of Borodino, whereas the British and French are using the latest high technology rifles. That is a major transformation. Even more significant, everybody will be familiar with the famous Charge of the Light Brigade. And the most scientific thing the British took to the Crimea was horsepower. The British breeding program had produced some amazing horses. Big powerful fast horses that could cover long distances with fully equipped troopers on board. They absolutely transformed the nature of the cavalry charge from a short dash to a very long sustained gallop. It meant that when the British collided with the Russians on horseback the Russians were simply knocked out of the way by these much bigger stronger faster horses. And after the Charge of the Light Brigade the Russians never again came out on horseback to engage with the British...  but even things like mass-produced rations, the British are using machine made products where the Russians are using things that are handmade. And the supply lines are different. British logistics into the Crimea are better than Russian ,logistics because the British have 3,000 miles to cover with a steamship. The Russians are having to drag their stores over the steppe in winter and they're losing a lot of men and draft animals and a lot of supplies. So the Russians are actually out supplied in their own country... Napoleon always said this. He would rather fight two brilliant generals on the other side than one ordinary one, because the two brilliant men would disagree and nothing much would happen. Whereas one ordinary general could at least make a decision'...
‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’...
‘Lord Tennyson's great poem, the problem of of which is it's wholly inaccurate. He wrote it having read an initial report of the battle which suggested that the Light Brigade had been pretty much wiped out. He'd finished it when he found out that that wasn't the case but it was so good he published it anyway. So it's a piece of fiction... The first thing that turns up is the Times report from William Howard Russell who's on the spot. And he generates this idea that these men were massacred in almost entirely due to the incompetence of their aristocratic officers, so there's a class war element in the initial report. These posh guys have led these working-class fellows to their deaths and isn't that terrible? And Russell got it wrong, he had the numbers of men who mustered at the end of the charge. That's only the men who were able to ride back up the valley on unwounded and horses that were still fit enough to ride. Rost of the horses were either blown or wounded and were not able to get back to the muster line in time to be mustered. So, the real figures is 120 who didn't come back rather than 120 was all that came back. He later corrected himself, but by that time Tennyson had written the poem and expressed the sentiments which are in the poem. The battle becomes such a cause celebre that there's a court of inquiry held on the conduct of Lord Lucan who ordered the charge and Lord Cardigan who presided over it... Neither Lucan nor Cardigan are particularly admirable human beings so it's very easy to throw a lot of blame on them. Then Lord Raglan's life is written up in a grand style to exculpate him from being, from responsibility. So it's, it's serving a lot of agendas. A lot of people have a stake in this battle being something other than what it really was’"

Big questions of the Crimean War: aftermath and legacy | HistoryExtra - "Florence Nightingale is is a very interesting phenomenon. The one thing that the press wants in this war is a middle-class hero. And of course British wars are fought by aristocratic officers and working-class soldiers. The middle classes stay at home, make money and read the newspapers. So the nearest thing they find to a middle class hero is a heroine, using the old vernacular, who’s only just middle class. Florence is very posh, you know. She's not called Florence for fun, she was born in Florence. Her sister is called Parthenope, she was born in Naples. You know there, and she knows most of the Cabinet quite well, some of them very well. So she's very posh, very well connected and her job is not the nursing thing, it's the management. She's the hospital manager who turns a ramshackle effort to support the wounded into something that actually delivers. So she's taking control of organizations that are trying to help but don't really know how. She has the experience both of practical and a managerial level to create an organization that can deliver more effect.  It's not entirely clear that what she did in the war saved that many lives. Some of the statistics which she collected suggested that her hospital at scutari wasn't particularly successful in in saving men's lives. But it was successful in improving the conditions in which they were operating, so in that sense it may have worked. The Russians have ladies doing the same job in Sevastopol, so it's it's a kind of universal thing. The French already did. The French army always had taken um women with them who worked in essentially doing, delivering that effect. The British army had not. And so for the British army it was a bit of a shock. But the latest research makes it quite clear the the medical problems in the Crimea were solved by the Army's own doctors in the Crimea, not by Florence Nightingale down on the, near Istanbul. She was dealing with evacuated casualties, but the Crimean disease problems were solved in the Crimea by pretty straightforward contemporary medical knowledge... Florence nightingale's obsession wasn't with nursing as with sanitation. She was obsessed with, with cleanliness… that's her main contribution. The clean thing is is is where she's coming from. Hospitals were filthy and she understood that filth and disease went together... the heart of the war is a struggle for global strategic and economic dominance between Britain and Russia, and the British don't lose this war. The grand old late Victorian version of the war leaves you with the impression that somehow the British didn't really win. They did. Um, Russia was shattered as a pre-industrial state. It was forced to rebuild itself to, with revolutionary  consequences. This war opened up the Russian population's access to great cities and great cities are where great revolutions come from. Without this war you don't get a Russian Revolution, you don't get transformational change in Russia. It makes France briefly once again the dominant military power in Western Europe, but that's only briefly. As then knocked over by by revived Germany in 1871. So for 1871 onwards Britain is actually in a very strong position because the Germans are not a threat to British interests, the French are now worried about the Germans, and the Russians are not in a position to operate either. The last 30 years of the 19th century are a great period for Britain because it doesn't face a major strategic threat. So this war has finished the Russians, the Franco-Prussian wars finished the French, and the new German Empire until 1900 isn't looking at being a challenge to Britain’...
‘Putin does idolize Tsar Nicholas the First. The state portrait of Tsar Nicholas hangs in his, the anteroom of his office, I'm informed. And when the guardsman opens the door to let Putin through for his audience, that's a Romanov Double Eagle on the door and the guardsman is wearing the uniform of a mid-19th century Russian guards regiment. Putin is a Russian imperial revivalist. He's not post-Soviet, he's not a Communist, he's a Russian imperialist. And we have to understand that what we're dealing with in 2023 is a Russian Empire that wants to extend its control over territories that in the 1850s were part of Russia. So if you read the book that, that Putin reads, it's perfectly natural the Crimea should be part of Russia’
 ‘So this modern war has very much its roots firmly back in the 19th century and before, before then’
 ‘Really the thing everybody forgets is that Russia is different to most of the rest of Europe because it was occupied for 200 years by the Mongols. The Mongols created modern Russia. It's an administrative element of the Golden Horde’s Empire. And they created a regime in which nobody had any personal rights or any property rights, that political power was unaccountable and everything within the Empire belonged to the autocrat. Nothing has changed. So we're looking at a massive cultural division between Western Europe and the Russian lands. Everywhere where the Mongols operated is a different part of the world to the Western Europeans who avoided that'"

Tom Holland on Rome’s golden age | HistoryExtra - "‘The emperor Trajan and he presides over the Roman Empire at its height. Do you think there's a case to be made that he was Rome's greatest Emperor?’
 ‘Well he was called by the Romans the Optimus Princeps, so the best of Emperors and and that is how he is commemorated. Not just by the Romans but intriguingly right the way into the Christian period, so Christians when they look back at Trajan couldn't bear the thought that this great emperor um because he hadn't been converted to Christianity might have ended up in hell. And so they um they they came up with all kinds of um stories to uh suggest that perhaps he'd got a pass uniquely and had made it into heaven. My personal take is actually that Trajan is vastly overrated. He wins this great victory in in Dacia but he is essentially encouraged by that to aim at um conquests that over stretch Roman resources. Um and he does what has been disastrous to so many subsequent Western leaders - he invades Iraq. So the only real rival, geopolitical rival that the Romans take seriously on their own borders is the Parthian Empire... He sees a ship sailing away and he asks where is that ship sailing and he's told oh it's off to India and he kind of um he expresses an Alexander the Great type lament that he you know that he he can't follow in Alexander's footsteps and conquer Indiahimself but the truth is that  even conquering Mesopotamia has overstretched his resources and he essentially dies amid the implosion of those conquests.  Um and it's left to Hadrian his successor basically to clear up the mess. There's a point when Trajan is dying. Not only are his recent conquests in Mesopotamia are imploding but there's a massive uh Judean revolt that is kind of general across much of the Mediterranean. There seems to have been massive turbulence in Britain, in Mauritania, across the Empire and um I think when Trajan dies there's a very real chance that the whole fabric of the Empire is on the point of implosion. I think an emperor has to be judged by his legacy and I think actually Trajan's legacy is not nearly what it seems to be. The reason that a veil is cast over that by subsequent historians is that Hadrian does his job very well. Hadrian very very discreetly clears up the mess and because Hadrian is Trajan's heir, Hadrian has no, no stake in blaming Trajan'...
‘The year of the four Emperors was something of an aberration’
‘It's expressive I think of something that is a problem for Roman statecraft right the way up to the very end of the Empire. Which is that although the Roman Empire has become a monarchy, it hasn't become a kingship. Rome was originally ruled by Kings and the Kings got thrown out Rome, became a Republic. And the memory of that doesn't never entirely goes. The word King remains a dirty one for the Romans. And so therefore the question of how an emperor is to be succeeded is always a live one...
He comes to be seen as a very kind of brutal tyrant by the senatorial elites, but Domitian abs-, of course doesn't see himself as a tyrant. He sees himself as instituting policies that are designed to appease the gods. To restore the Roman world to the equilibrium that it previously enjoyed. And in the long run I mean who's to say that he, he wasn't right? Because it's under Domitian essentially that the Roman Empire does get put back on an even keel’"

Ancient Egyptian religion: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'The King… the only Egyptian technically who can communicate between the gods and the people and he worships them. If you might have noticed, if you look at pictures of Egyptian temples, that the pictures on the walls all show the King making the offerings because technically that's what happened. Actually in in real life of course the King couldn't make every offering in in every temple in Egypt because there were way too many of them and some of these Gods needed offerings every hour. So he had priests who helped him'...
‘How many gods and goddesses were there, and who are some of the more significant ones?’
‘I would say well over a thousand, but it is difficult. Because sometimes a God can have several names. And sometimes Gods come together to form a sort of compound God. And sometimes very odd things like inanimate objects can be treated as a God so for example a birthing brick. Birthing bricks are what women squatted on when they're in labor. But there is a deity that actually looks like a birthing brick. So it seems that almost anything in ancient Egypt could be worshipped...  Although the these are Gods who are parents to other gods, they don't look like each other. So Osiris looks like a mummy. Isis looks like a woman. But Horus is a hawk... I don't imagine that the Egyptians themselves imagined the gods looking like a man with a crocodile head or looking in the case of Hathor like a woman with a cow head. I think this is how the artist depicted the gods. That they wanted to show the nature of the Gods. So they would show a human body which was capable of sitting on a throne or holding offerings or presenting things. And then they would put an animal head on which would show the nature of the person...  Classical people back home tended to see Egyptian religion as being very basic. Basically they worshiped animals and actually it's far more subtle and complex than that. They're not just worshiping animals, they're worshiping maybe a co-like essence in the form of a woman. It's far more complicated. It's very difficult for us to understand it because we don't have it explained to us. We, we're picking it up from archaeology and um from writings and and it's difficult for us. But I think we have consistently underestimated how complex this, this situation is'"

New Zealand: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘The Scots were very important for New Zealand, they're actually, New Zealand's one of the most Scottish places on Earth outside Scotland. Um Nova Scotia and Ontario and Canada may be competitors. But especially southern New Zealand was largely settled by Presbyterian Scots. Not just in the 1840s when the foundational, 1848 I think, was the foundational settlement. But that Scots attracted Scots and they became an important part of the population, I think about 24% of the population, so they played the role in New Zealand of Catholic Irish in Australia, they're about the same proportion. So New Zealand was less Catholic Irish, although they were also quite significant and important. And more Scottish than Australia. And this had all sorts of effects on Pākehā culture which is more Scottish than Australian culture, arguably to this day...
This is one of the things that bewilders the history of the uh the historians of the, all the British dominions. You know you cannot put your finger on when Canada, Australia or New Zealand became independent. There are various dates for New Zealand. One is 1856 when a colonial government was set up with its own Premier. The central government on top of that of the provinces. And you could say that was a date for Independence. There were, there was de-, when New Zealand became a Dominion in, um was it 1908. And then uh when New Zealand um sort of belatedly adopted the notion of independent but associated nations that was the kind of formula for the British dominions which was, I think 1949. And then you could argue that it was as late as uh 1973 when uh Britain ran off with the Frenchmen and joined the European Economic Community. Or, or alternatively joined the Franco German commune, as New Zealanders used to say at the time. Because even at that late date New Zealand did a, did a lot of its trade with Britain. In fact 1966 was I think…  the last date in which more than half of New Zealand's exports went to Britain, 12,000 miles away. So there was an intimate economic and cultural relationship between Britain and New Zealand, such that New Zealanders actually saw themselves as Britons, but not in a colonially cringy way. They thought themselves as better Britons, you know as demonstrated on the battlefield, on the rugby field and in the climbing of mountains. And to a surprising extent they're accepted not as better Britons but as kind of near enough to British. You know they might be the odd sneer, but no more than towards a Scott or a Yorkshireman...
 New Zealand was one of the big three of the Tasman world, and its interaction with Australia was, was pretty strong. Uh then when the Depression hit in 1890, if the Australians had federated then, New Zealand probably would have joined. But the nature of these federations, in Canada, in Australasia, in Southern Africa, was essentially that they were attempts to restore credit when the colonizing crusade had stalled. You know, there was a bust and no one would lend to these, um, these bankrupt colonial governments anymore, or near bankrupt. And so they federated to sort of renew the brand and uh that's what happened in Canada in 1867, or whatever it was. That's what happened in uh in Australia around about 1900 where the bust lasted longer than in New Zealand uh and because of that, New Zealand didn't join. But the notion of it being entirely separate from Australia in the 19th century is a bit of a myth, because at the time the Tasman Sea was more of a bridge than a barrier.'"

I May Have Gender Dysphoria. But I Still Prefer to Base My Life on Biology, Not Fantasy

I May Have Gender Dysphoria. But I Still Prefer to Base My Life on Biology, Not Fantasy

"Feelings and opinions have displaced facts and evidence in many areas of the liberal arts. This is nothing new. A more recent phenomenon, however, is the extension of this trend into the realm of biology, which has fallen victim to the idea that men can become women—and vice versa—merely by reciting a statement of belief. It is an insidious movement that combines the postmodern contempt for objective truth with pre-modern religious superstitions regarding the nature of the human soul.

The subordination of science to myth was exemplified in the recent British case of Maya Forstater, who’d lost her job after pointing out the plain truth that transgender people like me cannot change our biological sex by proclamation. “I conclude from…the totality of the evidence, that [Forstater] is absolutist in her view of sex and it is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate,” concluded Judge James Tayler at her employment tribunal. “The approach is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

I’m not sure where that leaves me, a British transgender person who agrees with Forstater. As I know better than most, sex is immutable... As a scientist, I know this to be a fact. It’s Judge Tayler who’s the absolutist here: Under the guise of tolerance, he’s put the force of law behind a cultish movement that treats biological reality in much the same way that the Catholic Church once treated Galileo and his heliocentric ideas. Just like its medieval forbears, this neo-religious crusade demands that adherents chant an absurdist liturgy—in this case, “Transwomen are women. Transmen are men.”...

I made up a t-shirt with my own slogan: “Transwomen are men. Get over it.” It caused considerable outrage. But my question was sincere: Why can’t we, as trans people, just get over it? It’s merely another political slogan. What does it matter if we are men or women in some technical sense, so long as we can live our lives in peace, free from abuse, harassment and discrimination?

In recent months, I have been accused of hate speech and reported to my professional colleagues, while newspaper reports suggest that I am at risk of being banned from an LGBT committee connected to my trade union...

The most obvious problem with gender ideology is that it is entirely circular. It’s like defining an airline pilot as someone who just has that indescribable “feeling” of being an airline pilot. When Massachusetts legislators tried to nail down the idea of gender identity in legislation, for instance, the best they could come up with was “a person’s gender-related identity, appearance or behavior, whether or not that gender-related identity, appearance or behavior is different from that traditionally associated with the person’s physiology or assigned sex at birth.”

Moreover, when people begin trying to get around this circularity by actually detailing what it means to “feel like” a woman, they typically just catalogue a bunch of sexist stereotypes about how they always liked the idea of wearing dresses and maybe played with dolls as a child.

Yes, gender dysphoria is a real condition. I know, because I have it: the feeling that my male biology is at odds with my desire to have a female body. But I don’t have to invent some mystical spiritual force called gender identity to explain it.

Just as there is no single cause of chest pain or headaches, there doesn’t need to be a single cause of gender dysphoria. But there is a well-observed typology. In the 1980s, American-Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard proposed that transsexualism (as it was then commonly called) in males generally manifested as either (1) effeminate gay men seeking to further accentuate their appeal to other men (homosexual transsexualism, or HSTS); or (2) heterosexual autogynephiles—self-attracted men who prefer to conceive of themselves as women—who typically come out as trans women later in life (and often to the great surprise of family and friends). The most vocal and aggressive proponents of trans rights—biological males who often will express themselves aggressively to women who bring up the issue of biology—appear to be drawn disproportionately from this second, autogynephilic category.

Transsexualism in females appears to be substantially different, and more rooted in socially propagated factors, as suggested by the recent vast increase in the number of teenage girls being referred to gender-identity clinics (sometimes originating in self-reinforcing clusters of friends or classmates). As former Tavistock governor Marcus Evans recently wrote in Quillette, this is the first time in recorded clinical practice that females outnumbered males in this treatment area. Moreover, the girls who present as transgender are now disproportionately autistic, and affected with other developmental and mental-health conditions—which is consistent with the observation that many adolescent trans children aren’t driven by some mysterious gendered force field.

And yet, reporting on these facts in the scientific literature remains difficult. Lisa Littman of Brown University—who first published on the phenomenon now known as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (or ROGD)—has been denounced as a transphobe, and concerted attempts were made to smear her research. Scientists in the field note that it is relatively easy to get a study published if it supports the idea of “affirming” a child’s self-conception, but difficult to impossible if the data leads to another conclusion.

As noted above, my own experience leads me to believe that efforts to protect gender ideology from critique are most vigorously led by a specific and identifiable sub-section within the trans community. Autogynephilic males who abruptly declare themselves to be trans often experience a sense of insecurity and even shame, especially since the transitioning process can have a traumatic effect on their wives and children. Demanding that the world recognize them as actual women is a strategy for absolving them of responsibility. If gender is an innate quality, like height or sexual orientation, how can they be morally responsible? Gender ideology is the tool they use to legitimize that emotional reflex. Their sudden rejection of their old life is reimagined as a mystical journey into their own gendered soul.

Of course, adults are free to act in this way—and to explain themselves to their friends and loved ones in whatever fashion they please. Unfortunately, this gender mysticism is romanticized in a way that makes the idea of transformation seem attractive to children, especially children struggling with identity and relationships.

Indeed, there is an especially ghoulish militant fringe within the autogynephilic subcategory that explicitly seeks to break family bonds in order to groom children for transition. This apparently includes notorious transgender cyclist Rachel McKinnon (rebranded recently as “Veronica Ivy”), who has appealed to children to “dump moms on Mother’s Day and join the ‘glitter-queer’ family of adult trans activists.”

I speak from experience when I say that it’s difficult for autogynephiles to admit the simple truth that they are simply heterosexual males who use the conceit of female self-identification as a means to rationalize their sexual attraction to a female version of themselves. As any sex therapist can attest, people often feel ashamed about unusual sexual proclivities. Shame is a powerful emotion, and a person who suffers from it often will be driven to control their narrative in a way that protects their sense of self-worth...

Rather than protect the emotional fragility of people who don’t want to investigate the nature of their autogynephilia, a better strategy would be to simply demystify and destigmatize autogynephilia itself (much as we have demystified and destigmatized any number of victimless paraphilias), while also ensuring that therapies are available for trans adults who understand the attendant medical ramifications. We should not need to pretend that we are women (to ourselves or anyone else) in order to find relief from gender dysphoria.

Cross-dressing—or transvestism as it once was called—is more common than some imagine: A 2005 study in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy found that almost three percent of Swedish men reported at least one episode of transvestic fetishism. Of course, this is not the same as being transgender. But since autogynephilia is associated with both the need to dress in women’s clothes and feminize one’s body, we can never fully demarcate the two. (Thus, an old joke in the community about transitioners who start out as occasional cross-dressers: “What’s the difference between a transvestite and a transsexual? About five years.”)

Unfortunately, many trans advocates would prefer to shoot the messenger, and a whole sub-industry of censorship and ostracism has been created to deal with anyone who casts doubt on the gender-identity framework. As many readers will know, Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy was thrown off Twitter, and is subject to constant harassment in regard to her live speaking events, because she spoke the plain truth of biology to a vexatious Vancouver-area individual who goes by the name Jessica Yaniv. Here in the UK, Katie Alcock and Helen Watts were both removed from leadership positions and expelled from Girlguiding UK for objecting to the inclusion of boys who identified as female in their single-sex organisation.

My transgender identity has not protected me from this censorship regime, and I have been excluded and shamed for my political statements (as I regard them). Both my employer and my professional associations have been contacted by activists who claim that my political views should disqualify me from being able to work with children (I’m a teacher), or represent my colleagues...

Not so long ago, we truly did live in a transphobic society, where people like me were subject to public abuse (or worse). And there are still scattered reports of actual transphobia. In extreme cases, trans people have been physically attacked, or even killed, because of who they are.

But on an everyday basis, many trans people are now more afraid, for their reputations and livelihoods, of the opposite threat: They are afraid of saying the wrong thing—which is to say, something based in truth and actual science—about who we are. For their own emotional purposes, members of a militant and vociferous group within our own ranks have found a way to embed a lie at the very heart of our public discussion about gender.

For the rest of society to acquiesce to this lie is not only a betrayal of science, but of democracy. And we must work to restore an attitude of honesty before more harm is done to women, children and trans people ourselves. When society realises that there is no rational basis for gender ideology, the backlash may be very severe indeed."