Links - 20th January 2024 (2 - Diversity)

Harvard Medical School ashamed of white male department heads - "The Harvard University Medical School has removed portraits of former department chairs from a lecture hall because the individuals pictured are not sufficiently diverse... Dr. Betsy Nabel, the hospital’s president, told The Boston Globe last week that the portraits do not reflect the diversity of students at the medical school, and suggested that so many portraits of white males may make medical students uncomfortable."
Diversity means rewriting history
Good luck to white males who feel uncomfortable seeing different demographics

Tasha Kheiriddin: Canada, the land of imported ethnic conflicts - "Fifty-six per cent of Canadians believe that while some elements of diversity can provide strength, some elements of diversity can cause problems and conflict. In addition, 21 per cent say diversity is definitely causing problems and conflict. And lest you think that this is just the view of old white men with a high school education in rural Canada, the research found that an equal number of white (55 per cent) and BIPOC (56 per cent) respondents believe diversity is both a strength and a problem. An equal number of Quebecers (55 per cent) and people in the “rest of Canada” (56 per cent) share that view.  More women (60 per cent) than men (51 per cent), and more university graduates (61 per cent) than high school or college-educated Canadians (52 per cent) also agree. This shouldn’t be surprising. A multitude of communities have been directly impacted by the importation of internecine conflicts from abroad. The Khalistan separatist movement pits Sikhs against Hindus and has left thousands in Canada feeling unsafe . Jewish students have been targeted with swastikas in school bathrooms in Toronto and   ”I (Heart) Hamas” stickers at the University of British of Columbia.   Sudanese students at the University of Toronto complained the school’s limited response to the current genocide in Sudan was inadequate and anti-Black.  In other words, when the world’s problems come to Canada’s doorstep, we fail to respond in a coherent, consistent way. And the way we manage diversity directly impacts this. Instead of grounding our actions in a common set of values and principles, such as freedom of speech, respect for democracy, and the equality of gender, race, and religion, we fall into racism, tribalism, and intolerance. This is exacerbated by the twin scourges of identity politics, which deems personal characteristics more important than universal concepts, and decades of state-funded multiculturalism, which have encouraged newcomers to retain their cultural identity, to the profit of vote-seeking politicians."

Britain’s immigration is out of control, and could spell the end of the Tories - "Amidst the wall-to-wall coverage of Eurovision, one fact was curiously overlooked in all the reviews. To borrow Bridgerton star Adjoa Andoh’s infamous comment about the British Royal family on the Palace balcony, Eurovision was “terribly white”.  Of the 26 acts on Saturday night, only a handful featured a black person at all. Ukraine’s lead singer was originally from Nigeria, and Belgium’s entry – the oldest man ever to think it was a good idea to wear pink culottes – had three black female backing singers, as did the Lithuania song. The eventual winner, Sweden’s Loreen, has Moroccan parents. Apart from a few dancers, though, that was it for ethnic minority representation in the whole of Europe.   I must have missed the uproar. Where was the Channel 4 News item bemoaning Eurovision’s appalling lack of diversity? Remember former anchor Jon Snow gazing with north-London horror at a pro-Brexit march and complaining, “I’ve never seen so many white people in one place.”  Did The Guardian splash on “institutional whiteness” in Europe?  Not a peep. When it came to the overwhelmingly pale stage at Liverpool, there were no cries of “racism” from Labour MPs, no allegations of “white privilege” from the identity politics agitators. Why the silence?   I think we know. To criticise the overwhelmingly homogenous contestants from Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Finland, Lithuania, Poland, France, Austria, Czechia (six porcelain-skinned damsels) et al would be to acknowledge that, by comparison, the UK is really not the ghastly racist country the left wants and needs to claim we are.  On the contrary, according to the recent World Values Survey, Britain is one of the least racist nations in the world. Meanwhile, the supposedly enlightened, brotherhood-of-man, caring-sharing EU, worshipped by the Remainer elites, is riddled with the kind of bigotry and discrimination that has long been on the decline here... Don’t get me wrong. It’s refreshing that other European countries have not yet been guilted into featuring non-white people in every band, advert and drama, in wholly disproportionate numbers to their presence in the population. The non-Anglophone world has largely been spared the toxic import of identity politics from the US that views everything through the poisoned prism of race. Lucky them.  Unlike us, they are still allowed to be unashamedly proud of their heritage and culture... Suella Braverman made a barnstorming speech about immigration, which struck a chord on a related theme. “It’s not xenophobic to say that mass and rapid migration is unsustainable in terms of housing supply, public services and community relations,” insisted the Home Secretary. The “unexamined drive towards multiculturalism as an end in itself, combined with identity politics, is a recipe for communal disaster”. In addition, she told the National Conservatism Conference in London: “White people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt. Nobody should be blamed for things that happened before they were born.”  That this should even need saying by a British government minister is grim proof of how successfully leftists have assumed ownership of immigration, shutting down debate by saying anyone who frets about the likely effect on our national quality of life is “racist” while turning “white” into a dirty word. So, all credit to Braverman for marching into the treacherous ground where timorous Tories fear to tread... The pressure of numbers on housing and the health service, unmatched by enhanced infrastructure, will soon turn us into the kind of failed state asylum seekers come here to escape.     This is not what the millions who voted for Brexit had in mind... Instead of governing with the people’s interests and values in mind, the Conservatives have sold out to hyper-liberal globalists who owe their loyalty to no place and no one. The rootless elite are at odds with the deep rootedness of a good society."
No wonder Braverman got fired

Nihal Arthanayake says working at the overwhelmingly white BBC is bad for his mental health - "BBC Radio 5 Live presenter Nihal Arthanayake has said an 'overwhelmingly white' working environment is affecting his mental health.  The presenter told a journalism diversity conference on Wednesday: 'It's really affecting me that I walk in and all I see is white people.'  His colleagues' response when he told them this was to reply defensively that they were not being racist, he claimed as he said that was missing the point. Speaking at the Journalism Diversity Fund (JDF) conference at BBC Media City in Salford, he said: 'I've seen a lot of people leave this building because they couldn't deal with the culture.'...  'The hardest thing is to walk into a room, look around and nobody looks like you.'"
WATCH: Nihal Arthanayake's BBC diversity comments are 'driving a wedge between communities' says Shaun Bailey - "Conservative Peer Shaun Bailey commented on Arthanayake’s comment, saying: “He said that going to work with white people gave him mental health problems and and I go back to my point, most people in this country are white. So he's either campaigning for unemployment or campaigning for apartheid.“He needs to make his mind up. But the most important thing is a divisive statement is driving a wedge between communities. People of colour have faced racism in this country and we've fought it for years. But there's a point if you keep accusing white people of being racist for absolutely no reason, then they'll just be racist.”Amy Nickell-Turner replied: “We don't want to discourage these type of discussions because surely discussions about diversity and inclusion and how it's making you feel really important to progress.”Shaun disagreed: “But we really want to discourage this kind of provocative, useless statement because it's just driving people into opposing corners. There's nothing in this that will help us work something out. It'll just cause a fight.”"
The UK is over 80% white, so it looks like segregation is the way to go, to "protect" minorities
These are the same people who go on about "white fragility"

Meme - "PRINCESA DE ESPANA EN LA VIDA REAL
PRINCESA DE ESPANA SEGÚN DISNEY"

Doctor Who fans defend Wild Blue Yonder's casting of Nathaniel Curtis as Isaac Newton - "the casting of Curtis received some backlash from a vocal minority, who criticised a British-Indian actor portraying the scientist when the real man was white, a factor that has also been defended by viewers who remarked on how the show has always broken boundaries. Commenting on the BBC show's long history putting famous figures in unexpected situations, one viewer wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter: "Isaac Newton wasn't Asian, you're right. But Charles Dickens didn't blow up ghosts. Agatha Christie didn't fight off a Giant Wasp. Mary Seacole didn't treat Sontarans. Van Gogh didn't stab an invisible chicken.  "It's #DoctorWho. Get a grip. And they say *we're* the snowflakes...""
I love the hypocrisy. Recently, the cope has been that it's okay if fictional figures are race-swapped, since they're not historical figures (even though in the past the left kept bitching about "white washing" even with fictional figures, and there's been lots of race swapping going on with historical figures like Anne Boleyn). Of course, the real reason is that white people are evil

Netflix Accused Of “Race Swapping” After Replacing Investigators Who Took Down Purdue Pharma During Opioid Crisis With A Fictional Black Woman - "Netflix is under fire once again for “race swapping” following the release of their new series Painkilller, a dramatized retelling of massive lawsuit filed against Purdue Pharma over opioid manufacturing. In the series, the investigators who took down the company are erased and instead depicted by a fictional Black woman...   “Saw a preview for the [Netflix] show Painkiller about Purdue Pharma and noticed the story’s intrepid, wily hero Edie Flowers is a black girlboss Fed prosecutor who single-handedly takes down the Sackler family, and thought it was weird that I’d never heard of this person and that she’s not a more prominent public figure since she perfectly ticks every lib fantasy box–strutting, cunning, courageous, sassy, and who outsmarts her evil Big Pharma antagonists–but of course, when I looked up, it turns out Edie Flowers isn’t real. They just made her up.” Another user writes, “It’s contrived, predictable and boring at this stage. Almost every new American TV series or movie with a character that is a judge, mayor, chief of police, head of the FBI will have a black women in that role. It’s doesn’t reflect the diversity of real life in any way.” Others describe Edie Flowers’ character as, “The most unlikable character that I’ve seen on a TV show in a while. She’s unpleasant to every person she interacts with.”...   Audiences have become increasingly frustrated with entertainment companies and outlets that continue to race-swap and gender-swap characters, with many lamenting these characters are empty, vapid, and lack proper character development making them completely unrelatable.  In 2022, the streaming service lost almost one million subscribers, the largest decline since 2011. They’ve since gained back subscribers following a crackdown on password sharing, but they reported an $18 billion loss in value last July."

Standing on the Shoulders of Diversocrats - "Why not appreciate seeing the best-trained scholar in front of your classroom?  Any female who thinks that she needs a female in front of her in order to learn as much as she can, or to envision a career in a particular field, has declared herself a follower rather than a pioneer—and a follower based on a characteristic irrelevant to intellectual achievement. If it were really the case that a role model of the same gender is important to moving ahead, it would be impossible to alter the gender balance of a field, assuming such a mission to be worthwhile, which—absent a finding of actual discrimination—it is not. Marie Curie did not need female role models to investigate radioactivity; she was motivated by a passion to understand the world. That should be reason enough to plunge headlong into the search for knowledge. The Columbia University Medical Center has just pledged $50 million to diversify its faculty and student body, reports the Wall Street Journal, part of a new $100 million diversity drive across the entire university. Never mind that Columbia University has already fruitlessly spent $85 million since 2005 toward the same end. Never mind that there is a huge gap between the MCAT scores of blacks and whites, which will affect the quality of subsequent hiring pools. Columbia’s vice provost for faculty diversity and inclusion regurgitates another classic of diversity boilerplate to justify this enormous waste of funds. “The reality is that you can’t really achieve excellence without diversity. It requires diverse thought to solve complex problems,” says vice provost Dennis Mitchell.   Mitchell’s statement is ludicrous on multiple fronts. Aside from the fact that the one thing never sought in the academic diversity hustle is “diverse thought,” do Mitchell and his compatriots in the diversity industry believe that females and underrepresented minorities solve analytical problems differently from males, whites, and Asians? A core plank of left-wing academic thought is that gender and race are “socially constructed.” Why then would females and underrepresented minorities think differently if their alleged differences are simply a result of oppressive social categories?   Columbia’s science departments do not have 50/50 parity between males and females, which, according to Mitchell, keeps them from achieving “excellence.” Since 1903, Columbia faculty members have won 78 Nobel Prizes in the sciences and economics. The recipients were overwhelmingly male (and white and Asian); somehow, they managed to do groundbreaking work in science despite the relatively non-diverse composition of their departments.   The only thing that the academic diversity racket achieves is to bid up the salaries of plausibly qualified candidates, and redistribute those candidates to universities that can muster the most resources for diversity poaching...  If the goal (a dubious one) is to increase the number of female engineers overall, then it doesn’t matter where they graduate from. But every college wants its own set of “diverse” students and faculty, though one institution’s gain is another’s presumed loss... Reaves will engage the company’s “leaders” in “candid conversations about the role of gender and diversity in the workplace,” said Dell chief customer officer Karen Quintos in a press statement. “Candid” means:  you are free to confess your white cis-male privilege. “Candid” does not mean questioning Dell’s diversity assumptions, as this summer’s firing of computer engineer James Damore from Google made terrifyingly clear to any other potential heretics... Official scientific organizations have all turned obsessively to the diversity agenda. Any academic scientist who wants to move up in administration—or apply for grants, leave, or access to the conference circuit—must be on a crusade against his fellow scientists’ microaggressions and implicit bias. This is good news for the diversity industry, but bad news for America’s scientific competitiveness."
From 2017

Former Facebook diversity leader pleads guilty to fraud - "Barbara Furlow-Smiles, who led various Facebook Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs from 2017 through mid-2021, stole the money “through an elaborate scheme,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Atlanta said."
Damn racism!
Diversity hurts in more ways than one

Meme - The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHoles4: "DEl is is a way for people to obsess over demographics while pretending they are fighting discrimination.
"Amanda Blanc, the chief executive of Aviva, has said all senior white male recruits must get final sign-off from her as part of a diversity drive to stamp out sexism..."
'Non-diverse' candidates are not hired without my sign off, says Aviva boss Amanda Blanc
Diversity efforts aim to stamp out sexism in financial services industry"
Weird. We are told that diversity just means correcting discrimination to give everyone an equal chance. Of course there're liberals who will still bite the bullet and claim that, even though white men are discriminated against in so many ways (while pretending that wokeness is about "empathy")

‘Diversity’ just means discrimination - "both racism and sexism are actually encouraged by the DEI agenda. After all, it effectively legitimises discrimination on the basis of sex and skin colour.   Furthermore, because the imperatives of DEI encourage recruitment on the basis of racial or sex categories rather than individual merit, this can lead public, civic and private organisations to undermine their core purpose. Aviva’s aim is – ostensibly – to provide insurance services to the public. Its recruitment policies should be informed by the need to perform that function well. Yet, on Blanc’s watch, Aviva’s recruitment seems to be informed by identity politics instead.  Of course, those defending the DEI agenda will claim that it helps people from minority backgrounds. But more often than not, it actually undermines ethnic-minority recruits. Those recruited on the basis of their ethnicity or sex, rather than on merit, will likely struggle to work alongside those who have been selected on merit alone. This leads to a divided and resentful workplace."

Wanting to hire ‘fewer white men’ for a job is not discrimination - "Wanting to hire “fewer white men” for a job is not discrimination, a tribunal has ruled.  Chris Palmer was turned down from an £80,000 post at a financial services company, who instead opted to hire a woman, after he was told at his job interview the company wanted to hire fewer white men."
Some animals are more equal than others

Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "After I tweeted a picture of Princeton's DEI website, university officials deleted the page and mobilized psychological support resources "to protect DEI practitioners." They're scared of their own reflection—and want to impose their dismal ideology on everyone else."
Colin Wright on X - "It's a shockingly common occurrence that simply posting screenshots of official websites that woke ideologues made public about their views results in those websites being taken down and swept under the rug.   This happens frequently when people post screenshots of websites from children's hospitals and gender clinics outlining their "life-saving" "gender-affirming" surgeries for minors. If these procedures were truly evidence-based and life-saving, why take down the website? If people started posting screenshots of children's cancer center websites complaining that they were treating some kids with radiation, the cancer centers would simply explain the evidence supporting radiation therapy for treating some forms of cancer. They wouldn't try to cover anything up, because there's nothing to cover up.   Posting screenshots of DEI websites is now eliciting this same response. But if DEI is truly good and moral, what's to hide?   It's clear that woke ideologues know, at some level, that their ideas do not hold up under scrutiny and that they shouldn't be doing what they're doing. That's why their immediate response to their actual ideas getting exposed and criticized is to conceal them and demonize their critics.   We have the better ideas. In a free Marketplace of Ideas, woke ideology loses badly. That's why they are so focused on censoring their ideological opponents rather than engaging with them. We must keep exposing them."
Clearly, they need to be protected from scrutiny

James Lindsay, America's top op on X - "In light of revelations by @JamesOKeefeIII about IBM and Sanofi and their DEI-baaed illegal quotas in hiring, here's a throwback. There's a reason this is happening."
James Lindsay, America's top op on X - "Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, tells The Economist diversity quotas for identity-based equity are necessary, and "the more forceful, the better," regarding the strength of policy behind them."

Meme - AltAzn @ALt_Azn: "Two Japanese guys get a billion dollars
CNN:
Major League Baseball has a diversity problem, experts say. This year's World Series is proof"
i/o on X - "The most population-representative major sport in America has a "diversity problem." Sports lacking a diversity problem: NFL and NBA."
Craig Murphy on X - "This report awards the NFL an A+ for "diversity" among players. The grade should be an F. But apparently "diversity" in practice doesn't mean what they say it means in theory."
Diversity means no white people, so

American-owned US bar gets flak for using 'Barkada' in their name - "Filipinos all over the world are seemingly divided over a recent cultural appropriation issue on social media. In Washington DC, USA four Americans named their newly opened bar as Barkada Wine Bar, in reference to the Tagalog term for a group of friends.  A Filipina based in Washington DC recently posted on Facebook a photo of the bar owners and had this to say: “This is problematic on so many levels. Completely ignorant and of course, a PRIVILEGED thought-process. What makes you think it’s okay to take a word from another culture when you pay no respect or homage to the culture itself? No Filipino items on your menu, no Filipino flavors incorporated, no Filipino winemakers included, not even in your decor? No support going towards a non-profit benefiting Filipino Americans or back in Philippines?”...   “Is it cultural appropriation that we as Filipinos have taken Chinese food (lumpia and pancit canton), Lechon, and even “American” food like burgers, fried chicken, and fries and created Jollibee?  “I don’t see them disrespecting our culture in anyway. If anything, they think the word is so cool that they are willing to adopt it and share it with their clientele. This means more Americans will know what the word Barkada means. It may very well be the only time they get to hear such a word.  “To be clear, I have no interest in visiting this place (I don’t like bars of any kind) but there seems to be more cultural appreciation here as opposed to appropriation. If we want our culture to spread we cannot be so sensitive and easily offended by something as simple as a word being embraced by non-Filipinos,” says one person in the comments."
Original Post
Never use words from non-white cultures, because grievance mongers will get upset. Of course, if you don't use words from non-white cultures, they will get upset too (because they are always upset) but at least you'll save yourself a bit of trouble

Thomas Sowell - "The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department."

NHS chiefs told to cut woke roles as diversity tsars still cost £13m a year - "The Health Secretary has told NHS chiefs to stop “promoting woke ideology” as £13 million is still being spent on diversity tsars despite his clamp down on such jobs.  Steve Barclay’s team has condemned new revelations that equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) roles at trusts across the country are still costing the taxpayer vast sums.  He wrote to the chairmen of England’s integrated care boards in October demanding that they stop “actively recruiting” into EDI roles and “move resources from the back office to the front line”, the latest in a series of warnings to health bosses.  But The Telegraph can reveal that at least £13,586,636 is being spent on 336 diversity roles at 111 trusts, raising questions about how the burden on taxpayers can be further reduced without mass redundancies or job moves."
This is just the roles. The true cost is going to be much more

Thomas Price on X - ""White men never have to worry about people thinking they're a diversity hire" because white men have zero chance of BEING a diversity hire. If you don't want to be thought a diversity hire, preach against the practice rather than against the awareness."

If Black People Don't Speak Out Against Blackwashing, It's Going To Have Dire Consequence On Their Mind, Image & Legacy! - "What is actually the end goal here? What do we take from this method of inclusion? We’ve even begun to Blackwash historical figures, I mean where do we draw the line? Do they not have historical figures of their own? Worthy of having their stories told? What kind of a message are we sending here? Look, I know their end goal is to just pretend that by Blackwashing characters long enough, those who’ll come after us long into the future won’t even realize that they were once white characters, heck it happened to me! Characters that I thought were original and unique turned out to be Blackwashed versions of White characters. Once I learned that truth, I couldn’t see the characters as the original anymore. He/she felt like a fraud, an alternate version of the original character!n It made me become more aware of the deceit. When I tried to point this out, I was called all sorts of names, hurtful ones. I didn’t get it, and it angered me even more! It goes beyond being accurate to the source material, it felt like they’re being hypocrites to the very method they once scorned and condemned. I mean, just try and whitewash a Black character in a fanart and see the hell you’ll unleash. There’s a psychological effect at play here. There’s also integrity and pride at stake. Black people who want to be respected by everyone, are doing things that will ultimately be used to make fun of them. Have you ever wondered why Black people are more active and adamant to see characters Blackwashed, instead of being more vocal to support new stories that involve new characters? How vocal they are to be included in fiction that honestly never planned on having a Black character in it? How they celebrate a Blackwashed character in a way to gloat and mock others? Heck, even fanart has this trend where they do it to be “seen”. Yet, they never felt like by advocating for original characters, that they’d be seen. I’ve noticed it and it’s quite unhealthy in my own opinion. And to add fuel to the fire, when said Blackwashed character has actually been accepted by the majority gets criticized as many other fictional characters has before, they turn incredibly defensive and assume the criticism stems from their race. I mean look no further than Amber from Invincible! I actually don’t even believe Black people are ready to be seen if this is how they react! I’ve heard every argument for Blackwashing, and not a single one has made any logical sense to me. Every argument, all of them, revolve around an emotional plea, devoid of all reasons! It’s very clear that Blackwashing in Hollywood is a ploy to pander to an emotionally unstable community while waving the “virtue savior” flag! A ploy to strengthen their hold and cement this idea that everything on “that side” is what you want to be."

When Trans Activism Becomes Government Policy

When Trans Activism Becomes Government Policy

"Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper published a story about one Nathaniel Le May, a 41-year-old civil servant seeking government funding for “gender-affirming” surgery.

Le May, who identifies as “transmasculine non-binary,” is seeking a phalloplasty (an artificial penis) but not a vaginectomy (vagina removal). In other words, Le May is a biological woman who wants to have both a vagina and a penis, at taxpayer expense.

This being Canada, Le May’s provincial health insurer—the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP)—was more than happy to bankroll the pseudo-penis. But phalloplasties typically aren’t performed on women unless their female reproductive organs are removed, so as to avoid hormonal complications that can elevate the risk of cervical cancer.

Le May, however, wanted both sets of parts, cancer risks notwithstanding, and so took the case to a medical appeals board. The Globe story announced the happy resolution: Government officials caved in, even before the appeal was heard.

Indeed, they capitulated so quickly that Le May seems upset to have been denied a bigger legal stage; and so is now (retroactively) pursuing a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Frank Nasca, Le May’s legal assistant, complains that the insurer failed to issue a suitably dramatic public statement indicating a “commitment to systemic change for the trans community.” (“Mx. Nasca,” the Globe informs us, is also trans.)

The Canadian media has been full of this kind of story for years now—fawning profiles of students, government workers, artists, and activists with exotic gender descriptors and tales of transphobic woe. As in this case, these dispatches tend to be peppered with jargon that, just a few years ago, would have been confined to niche internet subcultures. What does it even mean to be “transmasculine non-binary”? The reporter doesn’t tell us, and probably doesn’t know. We’re all just supposed to pretend that it’s a real thing. 

All radicalized social movements attract a backlash. And genderwang has proven no exception—as evidenced by the brutal reaction to CNN’s recently published Guide to Neopronouns, from ae to ze... Just a few years ago, this kind of article would have been politely ignored by mainstream readers, who were willing to dismiss this mangling of the English language as a mere campus fad. But things changed in 2022, when a biological man named Lia Thomas made a mockery of the NCAA women’s swimming championships. For the first time, it dawned on the average citizen that, yes, there are ideologues out there who actually believe (or, at least, pretend to believe) that saying “I’m a woman” acts as a sort of magic spell upon the male body.

Since then, a growing list of international sports organizations have been setting down rules to ban trans-identified biological men from competing in protected female categories. (Even chess is following suit.) And in the UK, a major victory for common sense was scored last month when the country’s Labour Party finally acknowledged the fairly obvious (but formerly unutterable) truths that (1) self-declared “gender identity” differs from actual biological sex; (2) trans rights must be balanced against the need for girls and women to maintain protected sex-based spaces; and (3) public policies based on unfettered self-identification are untenable.

It was a watershed event—marking the first time, since the mainstreaming of gender ideology among progressives in the late 2010s, that any major left-wing political party in the English-speaking world had uttered such (again, perfectly obvious) truths explicitly.

In Canada, on the other hand, this pendulum swing back toward gender sanity still seems like it’s a long way off. Our Liberal Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, has gone in hard for transgender boosterism—so hard that he seems to have left himself with no politically attractive way of backtracking now that the movement is losing popularity.

Gender-bending spectacles and hashtags have become a big part of the Liberal effort to siphon young progressives from Canada’s (even more left-of-centre) New Democratic Party. And so one regularly hears Trudeau’s cabinet ministers babbling about “heteronormative and cis-normative” boogeymen, much in the style of academics at a gender symposium or bouncy-headed progressive tiktokkers. This past June, some of these ministers even hosted an all-ages drag-queen show on Parliament Hill to showcase their rainbow allyship.  

In 2022, Trudeau’s government announced something called a “federal 2SLGBTQI+ action plan,” which was described as “a whole-of-government approach to achieve a future where everyone in Canada is truly free to be who they are and love who they love.” This would be unobjectionable—admirable, in fact—if it weren’t obvious that such rhetoric now embeds a coded demand that men should be allowed free access to women’s locker rooms, sports leagues, rape-crisis shelters, and prison cells. Trudeau, who has traditionally marketed himself as a feminist, seems fine with men invading all of these spaces. 

One outspoken activist whose operation is funded by the federal government is Fae Johnstone, a trans-identified biological man who demanded, in 2022, “a political environment in which [women who insist upon the reality of biological sex] are so vilified [that] they don’t dare speak their views publicly.” Less than a year after this misogynistic outburst, Johnstone was honoured as Grand Marshall of Ottawa’s pride parade...

Trudeau’s 2022 “action plan” instructed Canadians to adopt the term “2SLGBTQI+” in place of “LGBT”—on the basis that fronting “2S” (signifying Indigenous “Two-Spirit” individuals) “places the experiences of Indigenous 2SLGBTQI+ communities at the foreground as the first 2SLGBTQI+ peoples in North America.”  

In fact, “Two-Spirit” is a faddish neologism that was invented in the late twentieth century. And even Canadians who champion the term’s usage have admitted that they can’t really explain what it means. Nevertheless, it gives the gloss of ancient Indigenous gender wisdom to what’s actually an upper-class white Western academic movement. Thus do Canadian activists now delight in advancing the (completely false) claim that the country’s original Indigenous societies were chock full of multi-spirited proto-trans and non-binary people who’d never even heard of the male-female “gender binary” until racist colonialists forced it upon them at gunpoint. 

Many Canadian school administrators now openly instruct teachers to conspire with students to keep gender transitions secret from parents. Ontario’s Halton District School Board became particularly infamous this year when its trustees dithered for weeks over whether it might be considered transphobic to discipline a male teacher who taught shop class while wearing gigantic strap-on boobs inspired by Japanese fetish porn. At the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, a “trans and gender diverse student support coordinator” named Sara Savoia told the world that Jesus was a drag queen. (At her former job, she’d publicly boasted of giving tampons to grade-five students for use in their art projects.) 

Nor have Canadian medical authorities—whom one might suppose were capable of distinguishing men from women—provided Canadians with a voice of reason. Academics at the University of British Columbia’s medical school now claim that “sex and gender binaries” are a “colonial imposition” “entangled with white, Western and Christian worldviews.” And a nurse in the province, Amy Eileen Hamm, is enduring a lengthy investigation by her professional regulator on the basis of her declared belief in the reality of biological sex..

The number of Canadian teen girls and young women lining up to get their breasts cut off—on the basis that they were “born in the wrong body”—has been exploding in recent years.

For many therapists, this movement has clearly become a means to explain away a child’s depression, loneliness, or trauma in a way that offers families the tantalizing possibility of a decisive fix. This tendency is reinforced by school curricula, public-service announcements, and media reports, in which transition is presented as a wondrous “gender journey” into a magical land of self-fulfillment. Well-meaning parents, having been told that a failure to instantly “affirm” their child’s claimed trans identity might prompt self-harm, or even suicide, naturally fall into line.

Needless to say, Canadian authorities also have supported the ongoing farce by which trans women—i.e., biological men—chalk up victories in female sports categories. Just this month, Anne Andres, a male powerlifter who identifies as a woman, demolished the female competition at a Canadian Powerlifting Union (CPU) event. “Andres’ total powerlifting score was over 200 kg more than the top-performing female in the same class—597.5 kg versus SuJan Gil’s 387.5 kg total,” reported Reduxx. “Andres’ total would have placed him amongst the top-performing male powerlifters in the entire championship had he participated in the men’s category.”...

In Canada, the propaganda flows in only one direction, as even the country’s (nominally) Conservative politicians have stayed out of the fray for fear of being labelled as bigots by our clubby, government-subsidized media.

There are many things to dislike about America’s deadlocked culture war...

But at least America’s combative political culture ensures that neither side can pursue radicalized policies that go unchecked on a national level. Canada’s wholesale acceptance of trans-activist demands offers a case study of what happens when one side is permitted to completely capture the commanding heights of social policy without any real political opposition.

In many cases, Canadian gender propaganda has taken on the tone of spiritual literature, assuring troubled youth that a promised land is around the corner once they embrace the revealed truth that their gendered soul is trapped in the wrong flesh vessel. (As part of this mash-up of progressive gender dogma and old-time religion, the Anglican Church of Canada has even produced something called a “Pastoral Liturgy for Journeys of Gender Affirmation & Transition.”)

The province-wide Rainbow Health Ontario service, for instance, instructs gender-dysphoric youth that by “suppressing puberty” (with drugs, of course), they can “improve mental well-being, reduce depression and anxiety, lessen self-harming thoughts and behaviours, [and] improve social interactions with peers.” In B.C., a provincial outfit called Trans Care BC gives tips to trans-identified youth on how to deepen their faith in their newly discovered gender identity—such as “read or listen to books by trans authors,” “make art about your gender: collage, movies, cartoons, music, etc.,” and, more bluntly, “go to drag shows.” Does this sound like neutral therapeutic advice—or a form of recruitment into a cultish social movement?

This being Canada, however, the cutting-edge trend of renouncing one’s biological mugglehood in favour of transgender (or non-binary) gender wizardry has run headlong into an old problem that’s been around since the dawn of socialized medicine: long waiting lists. Despite the heavy demand for trans scalpel work, surgical capacity in Canada’s public system is limited by underfunding. And only two facilities, B.C.’s Vancouver General Hospital and Ontario’s Women’s College Hospital, are known to offer genital surgeries.

But Canadian health care law requires that any services deemed medically “necessary” must be provided one way or another. And so some of the overflow patients are being sent (at taxpayer expense, of course) to facilities such as Centre Métropolitain De Chirurgie, a busy private clinic in Montreal that apparently performs hundreds of trans surgeries per year (some on international patients).

The increasing flow of top-surgery referrals, meanwhile, has been directed in part to the private McLean Clinic in Mississauga, Ontario, which boasts of being “just 10 minutes from Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, and “conveniently located next to the beautiful Novotel Hotel and directly across the bustling Square One Shopping Centre.” Thus has Canadian progressives’ longstanding aversion to private medicine gone by the wayside when it comes to the apparently urgent task of lopping off pronoun-incongruent body parts...

The macabre premise here is that every chopped-off body part represents a data point on the march of human progress...

If finding a free gender clinic is a hassle, private businesses are now springing up to offer a quick virtual assessment and a reference letter for a mere $199. “We are anti-oppression and understand the negative clinical experiences our patients may have had in the past,” promises Ontario’s Foria Clinic. “We prioritize your physical and mental well-being in all interactions.” The tone here leads one to suspect that few letter-seeking applicants come away disappointed.

Indeed, Canada’s provincial health authorities have turned themselves into veritable plastic-surgery emporia for those sailing forth on their “gender journeys”—offering not only government-paid breast amputation and construction, phalloplasties, vaginoplasties, castrations, testicular implants, urethral extensions, clitoral elongations, but also add-ons, such as laser hair removal so that your scrotal public hair doesn’t get caught inside your neovagina. The remote northern territory of Yukon even offers paid-for facial-feminization surgery (very pricey), “body contouring,” vocal surgery, and follow-on voice therapy.

In the UK, the backlash against this ghoulish industry began in earnest with the scandalous collapse of the Tavistock youth gender clinic, which was then the world’s largest facility of its type—amid reports that Tavistock clinicians were rushing confused teenagers through irreversible surgeries following hasty pro forma procedures (the case of Keira Bell having become particularly infamous). While Canada’s gender profiteers haven’t yet faced this type of (inevitable) legal reckoning, some practitioners are starting to speak out.

This includes Aaron Kimberly, a registered nurse with a specialty in mental health who has counselled hundreds of young people at a B.C. gender clinic. “We’re praising people who use the medical system to manufacture imaginary personas of all kinds,” Kimberly wrote recently. “We’re institutionalizing the recruitment of children into this movement, many of whom will alter their healthy bodies needlessly.”

Kimberly is a self-identified transsexual man, now in his 40s. A one-time butch lesbian, he transitioned at age 30, and feels more comfortable as a result. But he emphasizes that transition is no cure-all for psychological distress, and warns that several of his trans friends regret their decision to transition.

“I don’t want to frame this as ‘gender dysphoria isn’t real,’” he told the media. “It is. But there are a lot of different drivers for why people want to medicalize their bodies and transition. Some of these youth [cases] are very complex. They have autism diagnoses, PTSD, a background of trauma.”

Some have no gender dysphoria at all, but just want people to see them as trans. “It doesn’t seem right to just rubber stamp them and move them along.”

Consistent with the evolving consensus in the UK and Scandinavia, Kimberly believes in going slow. He also believes that trans-presenting youth need to know if their transition hopes might be unrealistic. In most cases, no amount of drugs and surgeries, or facial feminization will transform them into people who convincingly pass as the other sex.

While Kimberly felt fulfilled by his work as a gender clinician, he says he was effectively forced out by activists, some in the employ of the government, who insisted that teenagers should have a largely unfettered right to alter their bodies according to their gender beliefs. Since then, Kimberly, who’s found new employment unconnected with gender therapy, has helped create a group called Gender Dysphoria Alliance. One of its goals is to inform the public conversation about gender dysphoria through the voices of those who have detransitioned. Like Kimberly, some of the group’s other members use the older term “transsexual” as a form of self-identification, instead of “transgender,” to signal their adherence to a more realistic understanding of the limits of transition.

Kimberly’s critiques highlight the fairly obvious contradictions embedded in trans-activist demands. On the one hand, they typically insist that gender dysphoria shouldn’t be seen as an affliction, but rather as a natural (perhaps even welcome) outgrowth of the soul-like gender spirit that supposedly infuses all of us. On the other hand, we are simultaneously warned that many trans people will experience crippling psychic pain if they do not receive immediate access to surgeries and a lifelong program of cross-sex hormones. That sounds a lot like a serious medical condition rather than some kind of cosmic gender journey, no?

In every normal medical context, Canadian doctors require a formal diagnosis before offering patients risky treatment programs. Only when it comes to those who claim to channel an opposite-sex gender spirit is it proposed that such safeguards be dispensed with—even, as Nathaniel Le May’s case shows, when the risk of a deadly side effect hovers in the background.

There’s also a genuinely unsettling gulf between the upbeat public messaging around trans therapy—which tends to involve anthropomorphic gingerbread men and winking unicorns who inhabit a land of endless rainbows—and the grim reality of post-op life. (Of particular note is “Gegi,” a creepy mascot created by an in-house activist at a publicly funded Ontario university, who tells gender-distressed kids, “I can’t wait to meet you.”) 

Consider the medical reality faced by women who seek to be masculinized with something called a metiodioplasty, whereby a micro-penis is created by cutting into the tissue around the clitoris in order to make it longer, with the labia being fashioned into a faux-scrotum. The fake scrotum can then be filled with implants that resemble testicles. It will surprise no one to learn that the complication rate is high, and that additional medical procedures are often required. Penetrative sexual intercourse isn’t possible. These are realities that “Gegi” doesn’t like to talk about. 

An even more radical option for women who wish to transform themselves into something resembling men is phalloplasty, which involves creating a larger artificial penis, typically with a wide flap of tissue harvested from the forearm. (Patients can pick their preferred size.) The patient’s urethra is extended through the artificial penis so that she is able, hopefully, to pee standing up. (This is apparently one of the main clinical measures of success for such procedures.) The ersatz penis requires further artificial assistance, in the form of pumps or inserts, to become erect, and sexual sensation is not guaranteed. Incontinence is a common complication, and sometimes the thing acts like a faulty shower head.

Vaginoplasty, the construction of an artificial vaginal canal, generally involves inverting the penis and using the tissue to form the walls of a neovagina. It, too, comes with myriad complications, including fistulas (abnormal connections between body parts) and infections (caused by pubic hair inside the vagina). Post-operative sexual pleasure is not guaranteed. And patients must dilate their new opening as long as they live in order to keep it from closing up, since one’s body treats the cavity as a wound.

The science of genital surgery is still a work in progress, to put it mildly. And data on long-term outcomes are sketchy, in part because those who have the best access to such numbers often have a financial incentive to keep media focused on hand-picked success stories involving telegenic patients. Private clinics, where many surgeries are performed, typically do not perform systematic patient follow-ups or publicize complication rates.

A rare cautionary note was struck in a recently published Journal of Sexual Medicine paper co-authored by Dr. Yonah Krakowsky, the Medical Lead at the Transition Related Surgery Program run out of the University of Toronto’s Urology department. In a study of medical complications related to metoidioplasty in 74 patients, researchers found urethral complications in 57% of patients; as well as fistulas, permanent fistulas, and urethral strictures in, respectively, 46%, 36%, and 19% of patients. Common patient-reported symptoms included pain (54%), vaginal bleeding (42%), and poor sexual function (34%).

Some women who’ve gone through this kind of medical ordeal are suing their former therapists and doctors—such as Ontario’s Michelle Zacchinga, 34, who started transition in 2010, after her therapist called her an “ideal candidate” for hormone therapy. Later, she had her breasts amputated and her uterus removed. Today, she says her real problems were depression, ADHD, and other undiagnosed mental conditions that can’t be solved with a surgeon’s knife. Her statement of claim alleges that the defendants “permitted Michelle to self-diagnose as transgender and prescribe her own treatment without providing a differential diagnosis or proposing alternative treatments.”

“I will live the rest of my life without breasts, with a deepened voice and male-pattern balding, and without the ability to get pregnant,” she says. “Removing my completely healthy uterus is my greatest regret.”

Lois Cardinal is another alleged victim. In this case, doctors tried to turn an Indigenous man into a woman. Cardinal lives on the Saddle Lake Cree reserve in northern Alberta, where she (Cardinal prefers female pronouns) had grown up as an effeminate boy. She says she had no concept of the term “gay,” but was an outsider who was attracted to boys and badly bullied. At 18, addicted and depressed, she wound up as a psychiatric patient in Edmonton, where a doctor put her on estrogen and allegedly told her she should have sex-change surgery. “He wanted to turn me into a straight woman,” she recalls.

Cardinal trusted the system. At 21, she found herself at the aforementioned Centre Métropolitain De Chirurgie in Montreal, only dimly aware of the lifetime impacts of her decision. The aftermath has not gone well. Her depression did not lift. And her neovagina gives her constant trouble: “I have to keep dilating for the rest of my life, or else it will collapse and create an infection that could kill me.”

At 35, she is well aware that instead of being a straight Indigenous woman, she is actually a gay Indigenous man who has been castrated with the encouragement of the (largely white) public-health establishment—a tragically ironic result given the current Canadian focus on making amends for the genocidal policies inflicted on Indigenous peoples, which included the forcible sterilization of women.

Cardinal also says that she can’t get adequate local medical support. A female doctor, she claims, actually brushed her off by telling her that “vaginal atrophy is very common in older women like us.”

The worst torture of all for Cardinal is her unshakable feeling of regret. “What’s done is done,” she says bitterly. “People like me can never [truly] detransition. How do you unsterilize the Indian?”

When Canadians transition, they can become media rock stars, lovingly fawned over by the CBC, and praised by reporters for embracing their “authentic” identities (even once they keep transitioning to new “authentic” identities, as with serial gender-change addict Amanda Jetté Knox). But when trans-identified Canadians express pain or regret about a transition, those same reporters stare at their shoes.

Reversing the effects of this propaganda will require more than just a change of government in Ottawa and the provincial capitals, since the mission to proselytize youth “gender journeys” has begun to seep into the administrative marrow of public service. In B.C., for instance, the province’s Representative for Children and Youth just published a propaganda document entitled The Right to Thrive: An Urgent Call to Recognize, Respect and Nurture Two Spirit, Trans, Non-Binary and other Gender Diverse Children and Youth, with chapter titles such as “Trans and Non-binary Gender Identities are Sources of Joy and Liberation,” and “Embracing Two Spirit Identity as a Source of Freedom.” (It also provides readers with yet another unpronounceable acronym for all of us to learn: 2STNBGD, for “Two Spirit, transgender, non-binary and other gender diverse people.”) 

The jargon-riddled manifestos, the utopian promises of a better life, the vicious attacks on dissenters, the belief in self-mutilation as a path to fulfillment—these are the characteristics of a proselytizing cult, not a normal anti-discrimination campaign. Restoring sanity to Canada’s public conversation about gender dysphoria will take years. And it’s a disgrace to the nation’s leadership in all spheres that, even following the parade of tragicomic scandals described above, this process of reform hasn’t even truly begun."

Links - 20th January 2024 (1 - Left Wing Economics)

The Romantic Idea of a Plentiful Past Is Pure Fantasy - "Jason Hickel from the University of London rejected the generally-accepted estimate of reduction in absolute poverty “from 94 percent in 1820 to only 10 percent today.” In “Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong,” Hickel critiqued academics, like Max Roser from Oxford University and Steven Pinker from Harvard University, journalists, like Nick Kristof from The New York Times and philanthropists, like Bill Gates, for suggesting that “global extension of free-market capitalism has been great for everyone.”...   Hickel’s critique of the claim that absolute poverty in the world has drastically declined over the last 200 years rests on his belief that monetary income overestimates poverty in the past, when people enjoyed a lot of non-monetary benefits “from abundant commons” (more on that below) and underestimates poverty today. Incremental growth of income at the bottom of the global income ladder (the absolute poverty level is set at $1.90 per person per day), Hickel contends, falls far short of what’s needed for human flourishing. As such, he prefers poverty measure of at least $7.40 per person per day... I wish to focus on Hickel’s assertion that people in the past didn’t need money “in order to live well.” In fact, lives of ordinary Western Europeans prior to the Industrial Revolution were dismal and fully in accord with Roser’s definition of “absolute poverty.” Put differently, poverty was widespread and it was precisely the onset of industrialization and global trade that Hickel bemoans, which led to poverty alleviation first in the West and then in the Rest... Up to the 19th century, poor people wore woolen clothes and underclothes that itched and did not wash easily. That practice or, to be more precise, necessity, exacerbated the across-the-board problem of poor hygiene. Lest we forget, most people lived, and slept with, their domestic animals, including chickens, cows and pigs (to guard the livestock from thieves and predators). Eggs, milk and occasional meat enriched the usually bland diet of bread, and animal waste was needed to fertilize crops. The dangers inherent in using waste as fertilizer were compounded by the fact that people seldom washed their hands and clothes. That led to epidemics, and contributed to sky-high mortality rates among our ancestors.  As late as the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, during which 55,000 men were either killed or wounded, the dead soldiers were stripped before burial. Why would anyone bother stripping the dead, when every hour increased the danger of putrefaction and spread of disease? The most likely reason for the practice was that clothing was still very expensive and the uniforms were washed, patched up and reused. Jules Michelet, a 19th century French historian, who was a ferocious critic of capitalism, was honest enough to recognize the material benefits of the Industrial Revolution... Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were no less fawning with regard to the material improvements taking place all around them"

Richard Hanania on X - "Unions don't like Elon Musk, so the Swedish post office won't deliver Tesla license plates, and the port workers won't unload the car you paid for. We all know that Europeans are poorer than Americans. But it must be demoralizing to have your life controlled by these thugs."

Meme - Matt Huang @matthuang: "Stocks are worth $100. Print a lot of money, stocks are now worth $200. Tax the unrealized gain of $100. Rinse, repeat"
Sparky Wilson @SparkyWilson3: "Your house is worth $200,000. Print a lot of money, your house is now worth $400,000. Tax the unrealized gain of $200,000. You don't have that kind of cash. Blackrock buys your house at auction."
Of course, the left wing solution is to exempt owner-occupied property from taxes on unrealised gains, then to complain about loopholes (e.g. family members owning property)

Opinion: It’s no coincidence we have shortages in the most regulated sectors of our economy - "housing, health care, and childcare all rank near the top of the public policy agenda... they’re all cases of a persistent supply-demand gap that’s leading to shortages and in turn driving up prices or producing long wait lists... Take childcare. The economist Pierre Fortin, for instance, has described how after the introduction of $10 per day daycare in Quebec, spaces in non-subsidized care (which, together with non-centre based care, still make up the majority of spaces in the province) “understandably crumbled” as a result of the province’s intervention... policy interventions such as stringent land-use restrictions, strict licensing requirements for childcare, and prohibitions on the use of private clinics have both muted the signaling device and blocked those who can still faintly hear it from responding by building more homes or creating more childcare spaces or carrying out more surgeries...   In order to make these decisions in an evidence-based and rigorous manner, however, policymakers must understand the inherent trade-offs and how the public thinks about them. Yet so much of the campaign debates about housing, health care, and childcare seems to neglect these trade-offs.  This matters because many of those who argued for existing interventions now want another round of policy interventions to account for the costs imposed by the previous ones. The layering of interventions on top of interventions fails to grapple with the root causes of the problem. It reflects a weird myopia where people can’t seem to see the full consequences of their policy preferences."
Of course, the left wing solution is more regulation

Billions at stake as Doug Ford government prepares to change booze retailing in Ontario : toronto
The Ford government is about to change booze retailing in Ontario. Billions of dollars are at stake | CBC News : ontario
The comments are interesting. So many left wingers hate competition and choice and love monopolies. Though I'm sure part of this has to do with their hatred for Doug Ford

A new study by Minneapolis staff says what we have been saying all along about rent control - "When both Minneapolis and St. Paul proposed rent control on their ballots in 2021, American Experiment recommended voting against those proposals, citing the harmful consequences of rent control. Specifically, our report concluded that in the places where it has been enacted, second-generation rent control — also commonly known as rent stabilization — has only managed to
    Reduce the quantity and quality of housing supply
    Almost exclusively subsidize housing for middle- and high-income renters (who do not need assistance), since it is not targeted toward low-income renters
    Reduce the mobility of renters
    Lead to housing misallocation
    Reduce property values and erode the property tax base
A new report commissioned by the Minneapolis city council is, more or less, echoing these findings... in economics, there is a wide consensus that rent control has a negative impact on the housing supply. Results in the Minneapolis study are merely a reflection of the existing body of research on rent control.  Studies that support rent control often point to the fact rent control reduces or prevents the displacement of renters. But rent control is not the only mechanism for preventing displacement. Increasing the housing supply through the market, for example, would make housing more affordable, which would reduce displacement. Unlike rent control, however, the market would achieve the same goal much more efficiently.   Artificially reducing the mobility of renters through rent control comes with other costs. For one, the housing market benefits from the constant churn of tenants. When people don’t move because of rent control, future renters — some of whom might even have lower incomes than current renters — have fewer housing options, which translates to high prices. Additionally, some renters may be reluctant to move to a place with better economic opportunities because they do not want to lose the savings that come with rent control, which leads to economic stagnation."
Some left winger dismissed this as being from a right wing think tank. Weird how left wing think tanks must be believed unconditionally. And of course he blamed rent control not being adequately enforced, ignoring all the other problems

In first months since passage of St. Paul’s rent-control ordinance, housing construction is way down - "When St. Paul’s rent control ballot measure passed in November, it contained a unique provision for national rent control policies: there was no exception for new housing construction. Typically, in order to make sure that new homes still get financed and built, rent control policies only apply to older apartments, either exempting buildings for a certain period of time or only including buildings built before a certain date. The policy laid out in the St. Paul referendum had no such exception.  With the passage of the rent control ordinance, there’s now a useful real-world experiment taking place... in Minneapolis overall construction is up as the economy has rebounded... Overall in the U.S., 2022 is looking to be the largest year for apartment construction in almost a half-century...   “Every single city that we can find with a rent stabilization policy in place provides an exemption to incentivize construction of new housing units, and so should St. Paul,” Mayor Carter said. “Simply put, we are in a housing crisis because we have more people than homes at every income level. And our population is growing fast. Anything we do to slow the production of new units will only make this problem worse.”"
Of course, the left wing "solution" is for the government to build housing

Aaron D. on X - "It's 80,000 BC. You are immortal. The world is still frozen in an ice age. You decide to save $10,000 EVERY DAY, never spending a cent. 82,021 years later, it's 2021. You still don't have as much money as Elon Musk. TAX. THE. FUCKING. BILLIONAIRES."
Left-wingers don't understand compound interest, or the difference between cash and net worth (which is why they keep going on about wealth taxes)
Billionaires are already taxed, so what they mean is to tax them into penury, because they hate the rich

Existential Comics (find me on bluesky) on X - "What's funny about rich people complaining that poor people don't work and are a drain on society is that every rich person does negative work. That is, it takes far more work to accommodate their life than their labor could possibly produce. They are the real drain on society."
Left wingers just hate the rich on principle

Meme - Jesus: "HELP YOUR NEIGHBOR AND TAKE CARE OF THE POOR AND HELPLESS"
Crowd member: "BUT JESUS CAN'T WE JUST GIVE OUR MONEY TO THE ROMANS AND LET THEM DO IT FOR US?"
Jesus: "... OKAY I'M GOING TO START OVER FROM THE BEGINNING. LET ME KNOW WHERE I LOST YOU"
Weird. Liberals keep claiming Christians advocating for laws they agree with (even if done in a non-religious way) is a violation of Church and State, but they keep imagining that Christians are hypocrites if they don't support taxation being used for social welfare because Jesus supposedly said to do that

Grocery prices fact check: Viral TikTok about price of carrots misses a major detail - "A TikTok video that's gone viral for the apparent shocking discrepancy in carrot prices in the U.S. and Canada actually has a very simple explanation: The bags compared are completely different sizes.  The video by @missjanet shows her munching on an Ontario carrot that came in a bag she says she bought in Mississippi for 98 cents.  “I’m in Mississippi right now and these are from Brandford, Ontario,” she says.  She crunches on the carrot some more as she continues to wonder aloud.  "How does it make any sense at all that these were grown in Canada in Ontario, and put on a truck, and I bought the whole bag for [98 cents]," she says. "Who's making any money? Probably nobody."  Well, it turns out, it doesn't really make sense.  While many commenters were understandably irate at what looked like a massive price difference, the TikToker's bag contained only one pound of carrots for under a dollar. When you compare it to the three-pound bag sold at Loblaws for $3.99, the difference is negligible. In fact, when factoring in the exchange rate, we're likely getting a better deal here (2.96 USD = 4.01 CAD). Steven Kamenar is the general manager of Hillside Gardens, the Bradford, Ont.-based company behind the bag of carrots featured in the video.  He says while they don’t sell directly to retailers, he confirmed they do sell products to exporters and adds “it’s a pretty open market” when it comes to pricing.  But Kamenar was unsettled by the reaction to the video. He says too many angry people are ignoring the fact that the TikToker's bag is just one pound, which is a size generally not available in Ontario... Additionally, American Thanksgiving just passed and many retailers discount certain products that they may have a surplus on.  “It was pretty likely it was part of a Thanksgiving promotion,” he says. “Especially around Thanksgiving, we do export a lot more products.”"
A lot of left wingers kept raging about this. Too bad they fell prey to misinformation, as usual

Saving Rates and Poverty: The Role of Conspicuous Consumption and Human Capital - "Poor families around the world spend a large fraction of their income consuming goods that do not appear to alleviate poverty, while saving at low rates. We suggest that individuals care about economic status and interpret this behaviour as conspicuous consumption intended to provide a signal about unobserved income. We show that if human capital is observable and correlated with income, then a signalling equilibrium in which poor individuals tend to spend a large fraction of their income on conspicuous consumption can emerge. This equilibrium gives rise to an increasing marginal propensity to save that might generate a poverty trap."
Left wingers get very upset when you point out that many poor people are poor because they have poor spending habits. Of course one cope is that poor people deserve to enjoy things too, or that their lives are very sad so they need to enjoy themselves

20% of Americans would go into debt to buy a new iPhone reveals interesting survey - "more than 1 in 5 Americans believe it is worth going into debt to purchase one of the new iPhone 15 series handsets. That is half of the 2 in 5 who do plan on buying one of the new 2023 iPhone models...  Phone shaming is a thing. If you don't believe us, watch the reactions of an iMessage chat group made up of teens when an Android user joins the discussion. Text bubbles turn green from blue and features like end-to-end encryption, read receipts, typing indicators, and high-quality images all go away. The Android user gets to hear insults like, "What's the matter, your pops can't afford to buy you an iPhone?" Of course, what these iPhone-totin' teens don't care to understand is that if they were to join a chat between two Android users using RCS (found in the Messages by Google app and others), text bubbles turn green from blue, and features like end-to-end encryption, read receipts, typing indicators and high-quality images all go away. The only difference is that Android users are less likely to mouth off with insults."
Clearly the system is broken and capitalism has failed

Meme - James Lindsay, manspreading into feminist angst @ConceptualJames: "Dismantle private property, they say. Probably need to start taking them seriously and saying no. They won't go easily, but it's the better option than continuing to try to appease them. Where's your Woke breaking point? Finding it is important."
Teen Vogue Retweeted: Kandist @kandistmallett: "While we're working to abolish the police, we must also work to dismantle what the police were put here to protect: property. What is more evident of the legacy of settler colonialism and its violence than the idea of the ownership of land?"
"Abolish Landlords: Housing Is a Human Right"
Weird. We're told no one wanted to abolish the police

Meme - "SO YOU WERE SAYING YOU WANNA OWN THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION..."
"WELL, YES"
"BUT YOU DONT WANT TO INVEST, TO START A BUSINESS, OR TO WORK..."
"WELL, NO"

Housing Should Be Free for Everyone - YouTube
A lot of people claimed no one is asking for free housing

Meme - Culture Critic @Culture_Crit: "Reminder that Argentina was once one of the richest nations on Earth and a rival of the U.S. - hence the well-known phrase, "as rich as an Argentine'.
Incredible facts about the Argentinian economy in the early 20th century:
As rich as the U.S. per capita at the turn of the century
GDP grew 6% annually during the 43 years to 1914 (fastest in the world)
Top 10 wealthiest nations globally per capita by 1914
Argentinian exports peaked at ~4% of world trade during the 1920s
Argentina was still as rich as much of Europe as late as 1950"
Jannik (Kilmawandel Connaisseur) @kineyDE: "It all came to an end with socialism and peronism...
Posicion de Argentina en el Ranking Mundial de PBI per capita
Constitucion liberal de Juan Bautista Alberdi
Reforma Constitucional de 1949 Abandono definitivo del Modelo Liberal
Modelos economicos populistas, proteccionistas y desarrollistas"

A New Study Suggests Private Companies Outperform Public Utilities When It Comes to Meeting Regulations - Bloomberg - "When it comes to complying with important health regulations, private companies far outperform the public sector."
The left are going to be very upset

The National Study of Millionaires - "The top five careers for millionaires include engineer, accountant, teacher, management and attorney.
79% of millionaires did not receive any inheritance at all from their parents or other family members...
Most of them did it through consistent investing, avoiding debt like the plague, and smart spending. No lottery tickets. No inheritances. No six-figure incomes. Really... 8 out of 10 millionaires invested in their company’s 401(k) plan, and that simple step was a key to their financial success. Not only that, but 3 out of 4 of those surveyed also invested outside of company plans. But they didn’t risk their money on single-stock investments or “an opportunity they couldn’t pass up.” In fact, no millionaire in the study said single-stock investing was a big factor in their financial success. Single stocks didn’t even make the top three list of factors for reaching their net worth.  Three out of four millionaires (75%) said that regular, consistent investing over a long period of time is the reason for their success. So, the story about the young computer genius who developed an app that earned millions overnight is the exception, not the rule. Even when millionaires don’t have to worry about money anymore, they’re still careful about their spending. Ninety-four percent of the people studied said they live on less than they make, and nearly three-quarters of the millionaires have never carried a credit card balance in their lives!  These millionaires also said they spend $200 or less each month at restaurants. And 93% of millionaires use coupons all or some of the time when shopping. By staying out of debt and watching expenses, they’re able to build their bank accounts instead of trying to get out of a financial hole every month... only 3% received an inheritance of $1 million or more. In fact, the majority of millionaires didn’t even grow up around a lot of money. According to the survey, 8 out of 10 millionaires come from families at or below middle-income level. Only 2% of millionaires surveyed said they came from an upper-income family... only 15% of millionaires were in senior leadership roles, such as vice president or C-suite roles (CEO, CFO, COO, etc.). Ninety-three percent of millionaires said they got their wealth because they worked hard, not because they had big salaries. Only 31% averaged $100,000 a year over the course of their career, and one-third never made six figures in any single working year of their career."
Joel Landoe - "There's a bunch of backlash to Dave Ramsey's recent tweet about top five millionaire careers. Almost nobody thinks a "teacher" is on that list.  This all makes perfect sense though once you realize the teachers are just marrying the engineers. 🚀🤣"
Liberals are going to be very upset

Majority of Torontonians concerned in wake of rideshare freeze: Poll | Toronto Sun - "A new survey by Pluriel Research on behalf of Uber Canada found 64% of Torontonians are concerned about increased wait times and 72% about higher prices in the wake of city council’s freeze on rideshare driver’s licences. The poll also found that 58% of Toronto residents think the freeze will “only make life more difficult and more expensive,” while 59% think it will “impact working people and lower income people especially hard.”... of all the 11 issues tested, regulating rideshare companies came in last in terms of priority with only 3% putting the issue in their top three concerns, and 77% preferring council’s focus on other, more important issues.  The top three issues were housing affordability, homelessness and economic issues."
The liberals were very upset (replies), because they hate market competition

Spike Cohen on X - "Imagine finding out on the news, or on social media, that your 3 year old with special needs was abused in school. And no one told you prior to that.   Say hi to Michelle Carpenter.   She was a special needs preschool teacher who is now facing 20 counts of neglecting and abusing her students.   All of her superiors covered up her alleged abuses for years, and they've been given immunity for it. Some of them have even received awards.   And they kept the parents of her child victims in the dark for months, and even years for some. In fact, a few the parents first heard that their children were abused after it was reported on the news.   Carpenter is accused of dragging 3 year olds with special needs around by their wrists, grabbing their faces, calling them names, and other acts of physical abuse and neglect, for years.   And for years, @kcs__district  administrators and superintendents received allegations of her multiple abuses, from multiple eyewitnesses.   And for years, even after being ordered to pass along the information they had to investigators and get out of the way, they continued to stonewall.   And why did they do cover for Carpenter?   Because she was tenured.   Even after they suspended Carpenter in 2022, 3 years after allegations began, they refused to tell parents, or investigators, why she was suspended.   In order to get the school administrators to cooperate, they were all granted criminal immunity from prosecutions for their attempted coverup.   A grand jury had now indicted Carpenter on 20 counts of felony child abuse and neglect.   But not only are the people who covered up her crimes not going to be punished, some of them have even been given awards, and the school itself was named a "Reward School" by the TN Department of Education.    Imagine finding out that 3 year olds with special needs are being physically and verbally abused, covering it up for years, receiving no punishment for it, keeping your job, and getting an award.   Only in government schools can children and parents be so profoundly harmed and disrespected, with no accountability.   Here are the names of the people who received immunity.
Jeff Moorehouse - District Superintendent
Stacy Edwards - Principal; Awarded "Principal of the Year"
Jennifer Guthrie - Head of HR "
Time to bash the Catholic Church and police unions

Durham Region paid $5M more for a homeless shelter site than a developer did. Residents have questions - "A decision by Durham Region to convert an empty long-term care home into an emergency homeless shelter is prompting criticism after the municipality paid a developer millions more for the property than he paid for it months earlier.   A group of residents and a regional councillor say they're concerned about the use of taxpayer dollars after the region acquired the former Sunnycrest Nursing Home this past August at a price tag of $13.7 million from a company that paid just $8 million for it. The region is defending the move, saying it will rapidly address a recent rise in homelessness and will save money over the long term... They also say the region didn't adequately consult the public on the plan to locate the shelter in a residential area and worry it could disrupt the safety of the community, particularly given that the facility will operate as a "low-barrier" shelter.  According to the region, low-barrier shelters aim to remove systemic barriers —which can include having to produce identification, for example — to be more accessible to people with disabilities, seniors, those with pets, people from the 2SLGBTQI+ community, and those experiencing mental health and addiction challenges.  "With a low barrier shelter, there are no caps on the kind of people who would be let into the shelter," Sagar said.   "I'm deeply concerned about the safety and the security of our children."... Members of Durham's regional council voted behind closed doors at a meeting on June 14 to authorize the purchase of the Sunnycrest building to address that need.  The decision to purchase the property came after the region was unable to successfully negotiate a lease with the property owner"
The left hate private companies and love government, so presumably they see no problem with this

Meme - "American leftists trying to explain how them not getting a job and being able to afford a house after doing a useless liberal arts degree and burrying oneself in student debt is capitalism's fault"

Meme - "1920s Soviet Poster: "He who does not work, neither shall he eat!"
Authoritarian Left: SOUNDS REASONABLE
Authoritarian Right: SOUNDS REASONABLE
Libertarian Left: Nooooooo that's literal slavery, you cant force people to work autom*something* luxury sociali*something* fuck capitalism. The *something* in the face *something* Trotsky *white *something* inbred rednecks fuck landlords this is ridiciulous...
Libertarian Right: SOUNDS REASONABLE"

Meme - just maureen @ASewcialist: "I don't even want them to pay their fair share anymore. I want them stripped of everything they own."
The left just hate the rich and want them to be poor, like them. Left wing ideology is basically the seven deadly sins

Meme - "PLEASE DON'T FEED THE BEARS, IT CREATES A DEPENDENT POPULATION UNABLE TO TAKE CARE OF THEMSELVES"
"...YOU MEAN LIKE WELFARE PROGRAMS?"

Meme - "Whenever they come at you with "okay boomer" just retaliate with "okay renter". It usually either shut them up or sets them off. It's a real soft spot for millennials knowing they will never own their own home."

Meme - NPC: "Big real estate companies intentionally keep apartments vacant because it's more profitable than renting them out"
Normal person: "Really? How does that work?"
NPC: *upset*

Links - 19th January 2024 (2 - Feminism)

Anti-Suffrage: Why Were Some Women Opposed To Gaining The Vote? - "women had neither the inclination nor ability to handle the responsibility of voting. Too sensitive and impulsive, they would form an ill-equipped electorate, which, as one anti-suffrage pamphlet put it, would “lower the quality of our legislation” and increase “capricious, emotional, meddlesome laws”. Concerns for society ran so deep that anti-suffragists were able to propagate other fears, including the threat posed to family life. Extending suffrage would inevitably lead to husbands and wives quarrelling over political allegiance and, if women became less focused on the health and happiness of their homes, it would be detrimental to their children... Many anti-suffragists – or simply, ‘antis’ – vociferously believed that women’s place in society should change. Upper or middle class and educated, they had been part of debates in the Victorian era about changing notions of citizenship and gender expectations, and concluded that women had essential roles in social reform and community-orientated projects, which did not need the vote. “We believe that men and women are different, not similar, beings with talents that are complementary, not identical,” said Violet Markham, a campaigner to alleviate poverty and unemployment for women, and an anti. The ‘Forward Policy’ promoted a woman’s place in the ‘domestic sphere’, where they could best utilise their natural qualities of caregiving and nurturing, and not in politics. That said, local government should be open to women so as to improve their work in the localities. While they were to be key players in the running of the country, parliamentary elections did not play to feminine strengths and, if anything, would be a distraction. As early as 1889, the antis asserted that, “Women will be more valuable citizens, will contribute more precious elements to the national life without the vote than with it.” Besides, a silent majority of British women were “notoriously indifferent” to having the vote anyway. This more positive approach had good intentions – although it is hard to see it as anything but misguided by today's standards – and drew public support or at least private agreement from several high-profile women. Among them was Gertrude Bell and Elizabeth Wandsworth, founding principal of Lady Margaret Hall, the first women's college at Oxford University... Suffrage was, as Ward declared, “now in a process of defeat and extinction – and that not at the hands of men, but at the hands of women themselves”. There may have been justification for her optimistic outlook, as the League picked up members quickly among women disgusted at the direct action of the suffragettes. Ward saw them as no better than terrorists, and the antis printed a selection of postcards attacking them."
Women only have agency when they are feminists, of course

Female Danish Athletes Diminish Their Own Championship Victory By Taking Nude Photos - "A female sports team has celebrated winning the Women’s European Handball Federation Cup by posing naked with their trophy. In a photograph that shows both the attention-seeking narcissism and self-objectification rampant amongst Western women today, members of the winning Danish squad, Tvis Holstebro, use different angles, their teammates’ bodies, their hands or even the trophy itself to conceal their breasts and genitals.  Once more, the self-objectification of female athletes raises important questions about the relative value of women’s sports. Men are routinely denigrated, attacked and witch-hunted for judging female athletes on their bodies, yet those in female sports, provided they have semi-decent figures (or even only scary ones), seem to take every opportunity to try to exploit and then commercialize their sexuality.  People like British “psychologist” Priscilla Choi have in the past complained that female athletes are evaluated more on their looks than their athletic ability. There are nonetheless at least two glaring holes in this kind of argument: 1) women are generally and markedly inferior to men in sports and 2) female athletes themselves directly participate and even want objectification if it is profitable for them... Tvis Holstebro’s European finals victory occurred in the early part of May against a Russian side. Provided the women in the photograph are from Tvis Holstebro, it appears likely that they were jealous of the greater attention men’s handball or men’s sports in general get in Denmark. Surprisingly to those not familiar with the differences between the Nordic countries, Denmark has a reputation for being the most conservative of the five culturally Scandinavian societies. It may not be saying much to describe Denmark in this way, but it is the least socially insane of the group"

One in Four? Rape myths do injustice, too. - "The one-in-four statistic, she found, was derived from a survey of 3,000 college women in 1982. Researchers used three questions to determine if respondents had been raped: Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs? Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man threatened or used some degree of physical force… to make you? And, have you had sexual acts…when you didn’t want to because a man threatened to use some degree of physical force… to make you?  Based on women’s responses, researchers concluded that 15 percent of women surveyed had been raped and 12 percent had experienced an attempted rape. Therefore, 27 percent of women– more than one in four– were either the victims of rape or attempted rape. This is the origin of the one-in-four statistic.  Yet other data from that same survey undercut its conclusion. While alcohol surely plays a part in many rape cases, the survey’s wording invites the label of rape victim to be applied to anyone who has ever drank too much, had a sexual encounter, and then regretted it later. In addition, only 25 percent of the women whom researchers counted as being raped described the incident as rape themselves. The survey found that four in ten of the survey’s rape victims, and one in three victims of attempted rape, chose to have intercourse with their so-called attacker again. The survey researchers scratched their heads as to why these women would return to their attackers, but Sommers asks the obvious question: “Since most women the survey counted as victims didn’t think they had been raped, and since so many went back to their partners, isn’t it reasonable to conclude that many had not been raped to begin with?”  Correcting for the biases in the original survey yields a radically different picture of the prevalence of rape in America. Subtract the women identified by the alcohol and drug question and those who didn’t think they had been raped, and total victims fall to between 3 and 5 percent of the women surveyed."

“To our horror”: Widely reported study suggesting divorce is more likely when wives fall ill gets axed - "A widely reported finding that the risk of divorce increases when wives fall ill — but not when men do — is invalid, thanks to a short string of mistaken coding that negates the original conclusions, published in the March issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.  The paper, “In Sickness and in Health? Physical Illness as a Risk Factor for Marital Dissolution in Later Life,” garnered coverage in many news outlets, including The Washington Post, New York magazine’s The Science of Us blog, The Huffington Post, and the UK’s Daily Mail .   But an error in a single line of the coding that analyzed the data means the conclusions in the paper — and all the news stories about those conclusions — are “more nuanced,” according to first author Amelia Karraker... Using the corrected code, Karraker and her co-author did the analysis again, and found the results stand only when wives develop heart problems, not other illnesses"
From 2015. Yet, even many years later, I still saw feminists citing this study as evidence of misogyny. The fact that it only shows up for heart problems suggests the effect isn't real

Meme - "The left: conservatives have an oppression complex
Also the left: *dressed as Handmaids (ketchup bottles)*

Meme - "still waiting for the "misandry affects men irl" mfs to show proof of something as gruesome as this incident happening"
"I was beaten and raped by one of my ex girlfriends, I was groomed by 20 year old women when I was 12, I was silent about it because people like you think men can't be beaten, abused, and raped"
"note: they didn't do that to you because you're man, so it's not misandry"

Meme - Ricky Martinez: "Wait a minute. The end of the movie. All of the "Barbies" team up and subvert all of the "Kens" by pretending to be normal, then twisting and turning all of the "Kens" against one another, causing them to fight amongst themselves while all the "Barbies" seize control of the world. This movie is a subtext masterpiece."

Wilfred Reilly on X - "At root, perhaps the core liberal/leftist idea is that the naturally occurring patterns which arise in the universe are "unjust" and must be fixed by humans. Human nature and ill-luck are not simply "what they are," but immoral.  For example, female executives do make quite a bit less than male executives. The main reason for this turns out not to be "sexism," but the fact that only women can have babies and most women want them - and pregnancy requires months off work every three years or so for birth and childcare.   The conservative solution to this 'problem' is basically to support traditional families: Mom can girl-boss hard, but there will be times when it makes more sense for Dad to work while she raises kids. The primary liberal solution seems to be to "fix nature (E. Warren, 2020):" setting up some kind of vast national child-care bureaucracy, or at very least paying women as much as men for different amounts of work.  You can support and vote for either, but which of two very different visions of the world you hold likely determines the path you prefer."
Jennifer Leigh on X - "The “gender wars” so to speak would be a lot less toxic if the story we told about women’s rights and history was along the lines of “only women can have babies, that takes a lot of time and energy” as opposed to “no one let women do anything but be moms” or “men did everything because women suck”.   Obviously the truth is more complex but it seems one side leans heavily on the oppression narrative and the other leans heavily on the incompetence narrative. In reality the majority of it is explained by “only women can have babies”"
Psikey on X - "At bottom, the leftist project is eliminating difference. But differences define reality. In the limit, this necessarily results in death worship. And what do we see? Degrowth. Antinatalism. Deceleration of technology. Death worship."

Meme - "Feminists when a man makes a slighty offensive joke about woman *crying*
Femisists when a woman says she wants men to go extinct *laughing*"

Meme - *Megan Rapinoe and other women's football players kneel as they let in a goal*
*Swedish women's football players cheer*
Megan Rapinoe: "I deserve more money."

Megan Rapinoe says playing for USWNT is 'worst job in the world' as she takes aim at critics
The woke destroy what they're involved with - because they really hate it

Young Men Embrace Gender Equality, but They Still Don’t Vacuum - The New York Times - "Norms about what men are supposed to do also have an effect, researchers say — starting in childhood, when boys do fewer chores than girls do. Masculinity is strongly tied to earning an income and avoiding things that are considered feminine. Studies have shown that men can feel threatened if their wives earn more than them, and that to compensate, men who feel this way might do even less housework... The Gallup survey did not ask how people wanted to divide chores — perhaps they were content with the arrangement. It’s not realistic or efficient to equally divide all tasks. And it’s not always based on gender: Research on same-sex couples has shown that one person tends to do more at home and less at work once they have children."
Clearly, men need to be forced to do more housework to satisfy female neuroses, women cannot want to do more housework, and women cannot think men are emasculated if they do more housework than them because women have no agency

Crying woman wants kids at 38 and feels 'betrayed by feminism' - "A 38-year-old woman has been left in tears after realising that she wants to have kids, despite previously swearing off all the ‘trappings’ of a traditional life.  Melissa Persling never thought she’d want to get married again after going through a divorce at 30, and she certainly didn’t want to start a family.   Instead, she planned to ‘chart [her] own course’, dating without any expectations for the future and focusing on her career.   However, as she approaches 40, Melissa, a writer from Idaho, says she has come to realise how ‘wrong’ she was and has changed her mind about it all... she continued to claim she’d spent her entire life being ‘fed’ the idea that women can do anything and they don’t need men and she has since come to believe this isn’t the case."

Naked feminists stage screaming protest for violence against women - "More than 100 women stripped naked and performed a screaming protest about violence against women in Argentina.  They gathered outside the president’s palace, Casa Rosada, in Buenos Aires. The women performing the Femicide is Genocide protest stood in a group and undressed in front of onlookers before screaming en masse.  They were members of the Artistic Force of Communicative Shock (FACC) performing a dramatisation as a prelude to the next march of the feminist collective NiUnaMenos (Not One Fewer) to be held on Saturday, 3rd June in Argentina. In all, 120 women undressed completely in the Plaza de Mayo and in front of the Palace of Courts."
Clown World ™ 🤡 on X - "BRING BACK INSANE ASYLUMS"

Girl Scouts spark backlash from left after congratulating Justice Amy Coney Barrett - "The Girl Scouts deleted a tweet late Wednesday congratulating Justice Amy Coney Barrett for being the fifth woman named to the Supreme Court after social media backlash primarily from the left, with the decision to delete the post also sparking outrage... “We are neither red nor blue, but Girl Scout GREEN. We are here to lift up girls and women,” it continued. “If you would like to debate partisan politics—keep scrolling.”  Backlash from progressives, including from Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), quickly ensued, prompting the deletion"
So much for feminism being about supporting and promoting women

Does divorce risk depend on spouses´ relative income? A register-based study of first marriages in Sweden in 1981–1998 - "The relationship between increasing women’s earnings and rising divorce rates frequently has been explained by the so-called independence effect: If a wife enjoys a higher earning than her husband does, she gains less from marriage. It has also been argued that in a society with egalitarian gender attitudes this effect is less important. In this paper, we test if the independence effect applies to Sweden, a country in which egalitarian gender views dominate and female labor-force participation and divorce rates are high. Our analysis is based on a large register data set and intensity regression models. We found support for the ‘independence effect’: The linear relationship between the share of a wife’s income and the divorce risk is positive. We also found that the higher the total income of the couple, the lower their divorce risk, but this relationship appears to be less strong."
Clearly, since in the most feminist country in the world, the more a woman earns relative to a man, the more likely they are to get divorced, the solution is even more feminism

Fortunate Families? The Effects of Wealth on Marriage and Fertility - "We estimate the effects of large, positive wealth shocks on marriage and fertility in a sample of Swedish lottery players. For male winners, wealth increases marriage formation and reduces divorce risk, suggesting wealth increases men’s attractiveness as prospective and current partners. Wealth also increases male fertility. The only discernible effect on female winners is that wealth increases their short-run (but not long-run) divorce risk. Our results for divorce are consistent with a model where the wealthier spouse retains most of his/her wealth in divorce. In support of this assumption, we show divorce settlements in Sweden often favor the richer spouse"

Gender Asymmetry in Educational and Income Assortative Marriage - "The reversal of the gender gap in education has reshaped the U.S. marriage market. Drawing on data from the 1980 U.S. Census and the 2008–2012 American Community Surveys, the author used log-linear models to examine gender asymmetry in educational and income assortative mating among newlyweds. Between 1980 and 2008–2012, educational assortative mating reversed from a tendency for women to marry up to a tendency for women to marry down in education, whereas the tendency for women to marry men with higher incomes than themselves persisted. Moreover, in both time periods, the tendency for women to marry up in income was generally greater among couples in which the wife's education level equaled or surpassed that of the husband than among couples in which the wife was less educated than the husband. The author discusses the implications of the rising female advantage in education for gender change in heterosexual marriages."
Even educated women want richer men. The implications of young, single women earning more than similar men are interesting

Money, Work, and Marital Stability: Assessing Change in the Gendered Determinants of Divorce - "Despite a large literature investigating how spouses’ earnings and division of labor relate to their risk of divorce, findings remain mixed and conclusions elusive. Core unresolved questions are (1) whether marital stability is primarily associated with the economic gains to marriage or with the gendered lens through which spouses’ earnings and employment are interpreted and (2) whether the determinants of marital stability have changed over time. Using data from the 1968 to 2013 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I consider how spouses’ division of labor, their overall financial resources, and a wife’s ability to support herself in the event of divorce are associated with the risk of divorce, and how these associations have changed between couples married before and after 1975. Financial considerations—wives’ economic independence and total household income—are not predictive of divorce in either cohort. Time use, however, is associated with divorce risk in both cohorts. For marriages formed after 1975, husbands’ lack of full-time employment is associated with higher risk of divorce, but neither wives’ full-time employment nor wives’ share of household labor is associated with divorce risk. Expectations of wives’ homemaking may have eroded, but the husband breadwinner norm persists."
This suggests that the narrative of women divorcing lazy men who refuse to do housework is false

David Fox on X - "Name a TV show in the past 15 years that shows:
• Married Couple (With/without kids)
• The man is painted as the provider, leader, and well respected by the family and peers.
• The man is intelligent, has his house in order and cares about his health.
I’ll wait."

Attractive Women Were More Likely To Be "Right-Wing" While "Left-Wing" Women Showed More Contempt, According To Study - "They found that masculinity and attractiveness weren't linked to ideology in men, but happy faces (both men and women) were likely to be representatives of right-wing parties. Meanwhile, politicians who had a neutral expression or showed contempt were more likely to represent left-wing ideologies. How interesting, but we're not surprised.  Three years ago, we reported on a study that revealed over half of white, liberal women under 30 have a mental health disorder. These findings were backed by more recent data that showed that liberal women are statistically the unhappiest and most mentally ill demographic in America. As we all know, most U.S. media leans to the left. So could the harmful narratives and advice be the reason for liberal women's unhappiness? Believe it or not, this is not the first study to come out on attractiveness and political beliefs. In 2018, a study published in the Journal of Public Economics echoed these findings by stating that attractive people were likelier to be right-wing. Authors Rolfe Dause Pterson and Carl Palmer wrote, “Controlling for socioeconomic status, we found that more attractive individuals are more likely to report higher levels of political efficacy, identify as conservative and identify as Republican.”"
More evidence that feminists are angry and ugly, and that the left is angry

Girl math vs. Boy math: an insight into the internet's tit-for-tat battle of the sexes - "The fun in the memes was snatched like a rug from right under women's feet. As one would expect, something silly, light and for women to bond over on the internet has been converted into a larger insight into the internet's battle of the sexes and a peek into how easy it is to wield misogyny against women on the internet. The internet is no stranger to being a breeding ground for this kind of perpetuation of violent rhetoric against women."
Feminism is about double standards, after all

Quebec party loses longtime member after deciding men can't run in byelections - "Self-described feminist Olivier Bolduc has stood three times for election with leftist Québec solidaire, but now that the party has banned men from running in byelections, he gave up his membership in protest. At its weekend convention, Quebec's second-largest opposition party adopted a resolution to accept only women and non-binary people as candidates if any byelections are triggered over the next year."
Of course, we will still be told that feminism benefits men too. But if you don't support marginalising men, you are not a real feminist, because power relations means never having to say you're sorry

Meme - "Nov 19. INTERNATIONAL MEN'S DAY
BECAUSE MEN:
CONSTITUTE 76% OF SUICIDES
CONSTITUTE 85% OF HOMELESS PEOPLE
ARE THE VICTIMS OF 70% OF HOMICIDES
ARE VICTIMS OF 40% OF DOMESTIC ABUSE
ARE VICTIMS OF MOST VIOLENT CRIME
SERVE 64% LONGER PRISON SENTENCES
ARE 92% OF DEATHS ON THE WORKPLACE
ARE 3,4 TIMES MORE LIKELY THAN A WOMAN TO BE IMPRISONED FOR THE SAME CRIME"

Half of misogynistic tweets sent by women, study finds - "Half the aggressive tweets using the words slut and whore analysed by social thinktank Demos came from women and girls, research indicates... “The algorithm suggested 50% were women, and a cursory look at who they were following – Beyoncé, One Direction and Justin Bieber – indicated they were ordinary women and girls, not a cabal of angry white men following rightwing activists... Britain’s biggest teaching union the NASUWT, in its latest study of teachers’ experience of abuse online, has found anecdotal evidence that girls are involved in abuse towards teachers and other pupils often using misogynistic language.  Their research found cases in which girls of 15 were calling each other “skinny slut” and “fat slag” and engaging in body shaming.  Dr Fiona Vera-Gray, from the centre for gender equality in the media at Durham University, said it was not surprising that young girls were using misogynistic language that had become normalised in society.  “There is very little space where these representations of women are being challenged,” she said. “We know that young girls are being exposed to more and more pornography where these descriptions are used, and it makes sense to me that they are starting to believe that what it means to be a girl or woman is to be judged in this kind of way.”"
Given that almost two thirds of Twitter users are men, this means women send more "misogynistic tweets" than men so the "safety gap" is the fault of women. Of course, they'll just blame "internalised misogyny" and "patriarchy", because feminists always beg the question

Nobel economics prize awarded to Claudia Goldin for work on women's pay - "Prof Goldin's research uncovered key drivers behind the gender pay gap, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.  She is only the third woman to receive the prize, and the first to not share the award with male colleagues... Her research found that married women started to work less after the arrival of industrialisation in the 1800s, but their employment picked up again in the 1900s as the service economy grew.  Higher educational levels for women and the contraceptive pill accelerated change, but the gender pay gap remained.  While historically that earnings difference between men and women could be blamed on educational choices made at a young age and career choices, Prof Goldin found that the current earnings gap was now largely due to the impact of having children."
I still see feminists go on about the gender wage gap and discrimination, and how the researchers who have found that it's a myth are men so their findings can't be trusted

I'm a Non-White White Feminist - "I’m not white. Applied to me, non-white is a meaningless descriptor, but it’s also a very obvious one. My complexion makes it difficult for this fact to go unnoticed, especially in my home country of Sweden, where I stand out quite a bit. So, I was a bit shocked when I was called a white feminist—by a white feminist.   The term white feminism is used to describe feminism that focuses on the struggles of white women and ignores other forms of oppression faced by non-white women. It is the opposite of intersectional feminism, which, at its best, is an acknowledgment that different women have different struggles, and, at its worst, a form of victim Olympics. But, since I was the only non-white person in the room, the irony of calling me a white feminist soon dawned on my accuser and she tried to explain: you know, you’re a liberal feminist.   I sport the term liberal feminist with pride and, for me, it has nothing to do with white feminism. My liberal perspective on gender equality is intersectional: i.e. I acknowledge that women in different cultures face different challenges in the struggle for female liberation. My work against honour culture, religious oppression and patriarchal rhetoric is the opposite of white feminism. The exchange with my accuser reveals how badly many western university students understand both international women’s struggles and the western world’s role in them.  Feminism is important to me because I grew up in a patriarchal Arab environment...  I live in one of the most egalitarian countries on Earth. I can therefore see how much better the situation of western women is than that of eastern woman—thanks to liberalism... To me, arranged marriages are wrong, no matter what culture they are part of. Female genital mutilation is wrong, no matter where it occurs. Strict gender roles are wrong, no matter what culture they are part of. But, to many, this mind-set makes me a white feminist. My strict interpretation of equality strikes many as Eurocentric. They forget that women from many different places and many ethnic groups are fighting for their freedoms... I, as a non-white woman, am still much more privileged than many white women in the same continent as me. The pejorative term white feminist destroys any real conversation about diversity in feminism.   My issue is not that a white woman said this to me. Anyone of any skin colour who lives in the west—including me—has access to a degree of equality of which many other women cannot even dream. The issue is that the term implies that feminism is about race and that liberalism is a western invention that shouldn’t be adopted by other cultures.  Those who use the term white feminist demonstrate that they are not intersectional, since the differences in women’s experiences are due not to race, but to their economic and social situations"
They just hate white people