Links - 25th April 2024 (1 - Palestine/Middle East Peace)

Meme - "Muslim women in hijabs: cheering with rifles before the attack and crying after it"

Martyrs source of pride for Palestinian families - "Dying as a Martyr for Allah - becoming a Shahid - continues to be presented as a positive achievement in Palestinian society. As documented by Palestinian Media Watch, for years the Palestinian Authority has promoted Martyrdom as an ultimate value and goal both to adults and children. Still today, aspiring to become a "Martyr" is considered an honor and praised by society. Often the death and funeral of a "Martyr" is referred to as a wedding and he himself is considered a "groom" who marries the virgins of Paradise."
Why would the Zionists kill them? Monsters!

Abe Greenwald on X - "Gaza is precisely what the Western left says it hates: a racist, sexist, homophobic, militaristic, anti-Democratic, kleptocratic, dogmatically religious police state of science fictional inequity and oppression. And they love it more than anything in the world."

Meme - "The Temple Mount. How Islamic history was built on top of Jewish and Christian history. A HISTORY LESSON FOR THE UN
957BC JEWS BUILD THE FIRST TEMPLE
352BC JEWS BUILD THE SECOND TEMPLE
561AD Christians build Church OF ST MARY OF JUSTINIAN
691AD MUSLIMS BUILD DOME OF THE ROCK ON TOP OF SECOND TeMPLE
705AD MUSLIMS BUILD AL-AQSA MOSQUE ON TOP OF SECOND TEMPLE AND BYZANTINE CHURCH
WESTERN WALL. REMAINS OF SECOND TEMPLE"

Ryan Saavedra on X - "Bill Clinton in 2016: “I killed myself to give the Palestinians a state. I had a deal they turned down that would have given them all of Gaza... between 96%-97% of the West Bank, compensating land in Israel, you name it."  “Hamas is really smart. When they decide to rocket Israel, they insinuate themselves in the hospitals, in the schools, in the highly populous areas, and they are smart. They said they try to put the Israelis in a position of either not defending themselves or killing innocents. They’re good at it. They’re smart. They’ve been doing this a long time.”"
Edward Northman on X - "I don’t like Clinton but that’s the truth.  Read the biography of Prince Bandar Bin Sultan. The former Saudi ambassador in DC and the father of the current one.   He single handedly solved Palestine 3 times and every time it was rejected by Palestinians   Read it. Please."
Austin Dunn on X - "And '08 was far better. They objected to not getting East Jerusalem, so in '08 Israel included it, and then Abbas just walked away, and wouldn't even negotiate."
Cranky Cold War Vet on X - "I saw it, the Palestinians have turned down every peace offer. Clinton and Barak got them the best deal ever at Camp David but Arafat turned it down cold and then started the Second Intifada. There will only be peace when the Palestinians want it on their knees"
John Hawkins on X - "If the Palestinians wanted to have their own state and live in peace with the Israelis, they'd have had it a long time ago. What they want is an Israeli genocide and all of the land. They're just too dumb and incompetent to pull it off."

Yael on X - "The war in Gaza is really not as big as other wars going on in other places, like Sudan. But it’s really easy to stop it. Just let Israel win, really win"

Meme - Amnesty International @amnesty: "The death in custody of Walid Daqqa, a 62-year-old Palestinian writer who was the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner in Israeli jails after 38 years of imprisonment, is a cruel reminder of Israel's disregard for Palestinians' right to life"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "Daqqa was imprisoned for the abduction, gruesome torture, and eventual murder of an Israeli citizen. He was not in jail for his writing - he only became a writer after his criminal conviction. Criminals die in jail all over the world - it is no reflection on Israeli attitudes."
Sneakily, Amnesty International did a fake edit of the tweet (not changing any text) to get rid of the community note

AG on X - "Just incredible. Daqqa was convicted for kidnapping, torturing (including castrating), and murdering 19 year-old Moshe Tamam. Look at how Amnesty International describes him below. It’s a sickness. It’s actually astonishing just how little these international groups even pretend to value Jewish life. They consistently portray clear murderers as victims.   Anyways, this was Moshe Tamam. The only real victim in this story. May his memory continue to be a blessing."

Adam Albilya - אדם אלביליה on X - "Do you mean Walid Daqqa? One of the most sadistic terrorists the Palestinian Nazi indoctrination system has created?  Kind Reminder: Walid is responsible for kidnapping 19 year old Moshe Tamam. First, they gouged out Moshe’s eyes, and then they mutilated him by cutting off parts of his body, starting with his sexual organs.  Finally, they shot him in the chest and dumped his body in an olive grove near Jenin.  May Tamam’s memory forever live while Walid Daqqa simply rots."

leekern on X - "I’m going to be quite honest: Muslim antisemites are the most disgusting antisemites I’ve ever encountered  Hard left antisemites are scum  Neo-Nazi antisemites are filth  But Muslim antisemites supersede them in every respect in their hateful cruelty and zeal - fuelled in no small part by a primitive, sectarian religiosity that gives them supernatural “justification” and motivation for hurting Jews  The hard left and neo-nazis do not have that impetus  For jihadists and muslim extremists, hurting and killing Jews is pleasing to their imagined deity Allah and a way for them to get into their imagined heaven  The hard left and neo-Nazis do not have that crack cocaine coursing through their antisemitism  And that makes Muslim antisemites the most disgusting of all antisemites in their attitude, tone and behaviour"

Rachel Riley MBE 💙 on X - "Dear @Apple  @AppleSupport  @tim_cook    I’ve just upgraded my software to version iOS 17.4.1, and now, when I type the capital of Israel 🇮🇱, Jerusalem, I’m offered the Palestinian flag emoji. 🇵🇸 This didn’t occur on my phone immediately before this update.  Below is a (non-exhaustive) list of capital cities that do not offer their nation’s flags, let alone the wrong one.  Showing double standards with respect to Israel is a form of antisemitism, which is itself a form of racism against Jewish people.  Please explain whether this is an intentional act by your company, or whether you have no control over rogue programmers.  Sincerely, a Jewish woman concerned about the global rise in antisemitism.
London Washington DC Canberra Dublin Paris Berlin Madrid Brussels Lisbon Vienna Buenos Aires Beijing Zagreb Prague Sarajevo Moscow Sofia Quito Kyiv Accra Cairo New Delhi Nairobi Kabul Tirana Algiers Andorra La Vella Luanda Saint John’s Bangkok Abu Dhabi Hanoi Tashkent Montevideo Ankara Lome Damascus Khartoum Seoul Victoria Belgrade Dakar Riyadh Ljubljana Bratislava Freetown Cape Town Kingstown Doha Manila Lima Windhoek Chisinău Nouakchott Rome Athens Baghdad Libreville Banjul Conkary Jakarta Reykjavik Port au Prince Tehran Tokyo"
Aurora D Flynn on X - "I just went through the keyboard on the iPhone and I figured out the Palestinian flag comes up for the word “Jerusalem” if you select English UK, English Singapore and English South Africa. English US, English India, English New Zealand, English Canada, English Japan don’t."

Richard Hanania on X - "Israel says it wants to push humanity along the technological frontier. When you listen to Palestinians, it’s “my grandpa owned an olive tree and donkey.” The Palestinian cause is extremely ambitious when it comes to committing genocide but small and petty in every other way."

US-based Gazan peace activist calls on Palestinians to abandon armed resistance narrative - "When it comes to lashing out
When one side does not want peace, nothing the other side does can ever lead to it, short of wiping the terrorists out

Why Palestine Can't Deliver Peace - "My staunchly pro-Israel views are based on a general pessimism about the possibility of the Palestinians being able to make peace... most Palestinians have very extreme views. When the majority of the people of Gaza reject Israel’s right to exist, how can there ever be peace?... Say I point to a poll showing that Palestinians love Islamic Jihad. That makes it sound like if one eventually gets to a point where 55% of Palestinians say they want a two-state solution and accept Israel’s right to exist, the conflict would be over. Yet this ignores how political processes actually play out in the real world. In the free speech debate, there’s something called the “heckler’s veto,” or the “assassin’s veto.”... The only way two sides can have peace is if there is no major faction within a society willing to disrupt the process, or, if one does exist, their neighbors and co-nationals will work to crush them. When the broader population cannot do that, we can say that extremists hold a “spoiler’s veto” over the process.  Let’s say... The people of the West Bank and Gaza have an election, and the Reasonable Arab (RA) Party wins 60% of the vote, compared to 40% for the Islamist Lunatics (IL). What happens at that point?  If the members of the losing party were the types to accept the will of the majority of voters, then they wouldn’t be called Islamist Lunatics. Upon losing, there’s a good chance they start launching missiles and planning attacks against Israel, if they haven’t been doing so previously. Perhaps they start assassinating Reasonable Arab leaders. Israel has to respond to new provocations, and so all the good will that the Jews created that allowed the RAs to win elections in the first place evaporates. All of this ignores regional actors like Hezbollah and Iran who might also oppose peace. Its strategy could backfire if IL causes outrage and disgust among fellow Palestinians, which makes them an even smaller minority. But remember, the reason why this is such an intractable conflict in the first place is because Arabs care about the crimes of Jews a lot more than they care about what Arabs do to one another. If history is any guide, an attack by Palestinians that draws an Israeli response will only increase hostility towards Israel... Every step in the process of finding a permanent solution to the conflict creates new opportunities for IL to either assassinate moderate Palestinian leaders or strike out against Israel and play the role of spoilers. And once a Palestinian state is formed, the problem doesn’t go away. What guarantees does Israel have that the Palestinian state won’t fall apart as soon as it has formed, given the almost unblemished record of Arabs being unable to build stable and functioning societies in the aftermath of attempts to create a new political order?  One might ask, if achieving peace is so hard, then, and small groups of fanatics may be able to throw things off course at any time, how does any conflict ever end? What’s required is a societal consensus against extremists, or at least the institutional capacity to restrict the ability of minorities to play the role of spoiler. Americans are nationalistic, but if a group of our fellow citizens were lobbing missiles at Mexico, maybe 5% of the population would support them for getting revenge for the border crisis or something, but almost the entirety of the rest of society, including most importantly, functional law enforcement agencies, would be sure to come down hard on them and put an end to the organization. If 25% of Americans wanted war with Mexico, and that section of the population provided passive or active support to a few thousand men willing to die to make it happen, maintaining peace between the two countries would be extremely difficult. One could argue that Israel also has a spoiler’s veto problem. In 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated over his support for the Oslo Accords. The settler movement can also be considered as spoilers, often provoking the Palestinians. That said, Israel has shown some capacity to enforce collective decisions arrived at through the political process, as when Ariel Sharon uprooted Jewish settlers from Gaza in 2005. It’s just much harder to imagine Palestinian leaders being able to functionally commit Arab-on-Arab violence for the sake of giving land to Jews. Part of this is because Palestinian opinion is so extreme, but it’s also because Palestinian society doesn’t have institutions strong enough to make difficult decisions and then carry them out. People talk about the Palestinian Authority ruling Gaza after the war is over, but it doesn’t even really control the West Bank, having to rely on Israel for basic functions like security and collecting taxes... The need to build institutions does not refer to a trivial undertaking. In fact, the question of how to do so in developing countries is one of the most fundamental questions in political science. Much of the world has never gotten there, and across Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, there are countless examples where the central state fails in its most basic task of achieving a monopoly on the use of force. Wikipedia currently lists over 20 countries experiencing civil war right now, with some of them involving governments fighting on multiple fronts... since most conflicts don’t make headlines, people underestimate how dysfunctional much of the developing world is and therefore the challenges involved in giving Palestinians a stable society. If any people doesn’t have the historic and cultural preconditions for statehood, it is this one. Palestinian society is rife with extremism, dependent on outside aid, has no history of functioning institutions, and practically defines itself in terms of a struggle against a much more powerful enemy. Bukele’s successes are so shocking because the norm is that third world states that have been torn apart by violence for a long time tend to stay that way. This is one lesson that American leaders either never knew or forgot when they went around undertaking regime change wars throughout the Middle East in the decade and a half after 9/11 and just assuming something better would pop up and replace previous governments... I say we pick the culture and civilization that we think has more value and cheer for it to win, and to me that’s not a difficult decision... the only path forward for Israel is continuing to kill Hamas leadership, and seeking the strategy of depopulating Gaza by trying to get someone else in the world to take the people of the enclave as refugees... If even a significant minority of Gazans goes elsewhere, it will make life much more difficult for Hamas and the Palestinian problem a lot more manageable, as part of a longer process of the Arabs losing hope of ever destroying Israel.  This path has many costs and dangers, but it strikes me as imminently more sensible than believing that Palestinian society could both change its attitude towards Jews and do so at the same time that it builds functioning institutions, accomplishing something that tends to be difficult for poor societies even under the most favorable conditions"

Thread by @Monika_is_His on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "🔶 10 questions for which I seek answers:
1- If Israel wanted to commit genocide, why does it send in soldiers on foot and risk their lives instead of just flattening Gaza from the air?
2- If Israel is an apartheid state, how are there anti Zionist Muslims in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament?
3- If Israel is ethnically cleansing the Palestinians for 75 years, how has the Palestinian population grown by millions since 1948?
4- If Israel occupied an Arab Palestinian state, when was this state established and what was its language and currency?
5- If Israel made up October 7th, who took the GoPro footage of the murders and rapes and why are Hamas boasting about it if it never happened?
6- If Israel is occupying Gaza; what was the Disengagement in 2005?
7- If what we are seeing today around the world is anti Zionism and not antisemitism, why are Jewish content creators online who have never stepped foot in Israel being harassed and verbally abused? .... Why are synagogues being attacked?
8- If Israel’s occupation is what caused Palestinian terror, why were Arabs massacring Jews before there was any occupation or even any state of Israel? See Hebron 1929.
9- If the Palestinians want a two state solution, why can’t you find a single leader of theirs who will say that Israel has a right to exist?
10- If Israel killed 30,000 innocent people in Gaza, if you believe those numbers, then how many terrorists has Israel killed?
Asking for a friend ..
(Hillel Fuld on X)"
This is adapted from this thread which also looks at Koranic verses and the claim that Israelis are white
Someone claimed that no one was accusing Israel of genocide before October 7th, so you can't point to the exploding Palestinian population to refute the absurd claims of genocide. Then I dug up 3 examples from September to October 6th alone

Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 on X - “We ran out of Palestinian flags so we start selling Jordanian flags and white people don’t know the difference.”

Tucker Carlson on X - "Ep. 91 How does the government of Israel treat Christians? In the West, Christian leaders don’t seem interested in knowing the answer. They should be. Here’s the view of a pastor from Bethlehem."
David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense on X - "Bethlehem is NOT controlled by Israel; it’s under the control of the Palestinian Authority. These churches and priests are threatened with their lives unless they toe the line—same as in Egypt or Syria, or everywhere there is a religious minority in an Islamic territory.   Had Tucker been interested in getting the answer to the question of how Israel treats its Christians, he’d have spoken to Christians IN ISRAEL. But he isn’t, so he didn’t."

Meme - Marina Medvin @MarinaMedvin: "I'm just going to leave this here and you tell me.
CHRISTIANS IN BETHLEHEM OVER THE YEARS
85% 1948 Jordan Control
40% 1967 JORDAN CONTROL TO ISRAEL CONTROL
65% 1993 ISRAEL CONTROL
12% 2024 PA CONTROL"
"The visual aid above is explaining that when Jordan took over control of Bethlehem (from the British), the Christian population was 85%. At the end of their rule, the Christian population was a minority, 40%. Israel then took control in 1967 and the Christian population rose back up to a majority, 65%. The Palestinians then took control of Bethlehem in 1993 and the Christian population plummeted to minority status, lower than at any point in the last century. Today it stands at 12%."

AG on X - "Christians are currently being actively killed and persecuted in Lebanon, Nigeria, Sudan etc.   Tucker doesn’t have a word to say about that.   He didn’t bother to ask the 200K Israeli Christian citizens how Israel treats them. It’s the only actively growing Christian community in the ME.  He didn’t bother to ask why 2/3rds of the Christians in Gaza fled after Hamas took over.   No, instead he took an anti-Israel nationalist from The West Bank and tried to frame his takes as evidence of mistreatment of Christians.   Which btw is Tucker’s whole shtick. He presents a question then suggests an implied answer using dishonest or partial facts, then insists he’s selling his audience a truth instead of feeding them obvious BS. Also, why is he talking about this when allegedly discussing Israel instead of the border is evidence you don’t care about America? At least when it comes to anyone whose views he doesn’t like."

Thread by @EBluemountain1 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "*Hadriani Relandi: Palaestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata*
The book is written in Latin. In 1695. Rilandy was describing what was then called Palestine. The author Adriani Rilandi is a geographer, cartographer, traveler, philologist, he knew several European languages, Arabic, ancient Greek, Hebrew.  He visited almost 2,500 settlements mentioned in the Bible. The research was conducted as follows:
*He first created the map of Palestine. He then designated every settlement mentioned in the Bible or the Talmud with its original name.
* If the original was Jewish, it meant "pasuk" (a suggestion in the Holy Scriptures that mentioned the name. )
* If the original was Roman or Greek, the connection was in Latin or Greek.
In the end, he made a population census by settlements. Here are the main conclusions and some facts:
* The country is mainly empty, abandoned, sparsely populated, the main population is Jerusalem, Akko, Tsfat, Jaffa, Tveria & Gaza.
* Most of the population is Jews, almost everyone else is Christians, very few Muslims, mostly Bedouins
* The only exception is Nablus (now Shchem), where approximately 120 people from the Muslim family Natsha and approximately 70 "shomronims" (Samaritans).
* In Nazareth, the capital of Galilee, lived approximately 700 people - all Christians.
* In Jerusalem there are about 5,000 people, almost all Jews and a few Christians.
* In 1695, everyone knew that the origin of the country was Jewish.
* There is not a single settlement in Palestine that has Arabic roots in its name.
* Most settlements have Jewish originals, and in some cases Greek or Roman Latin.
* Apart from the city of Ramla, there is no Arab settlement that has an original Arabic name. Jewish, Greek or Latin names that have been changed to Arabic that don't make any sense in Arabic. In Arabic, there is no meaning in names like: Akko, Haifa, Jaffa, Nablus, Gaza or Jenin, and names like Ramallah, al-Khalil (Hebron), al-Quds (Jerusalem) - they do not have philological or historical Arabic roots. So, for example, in 1696, Ramallah was called Bethel (Beit El, the House of God), Hebron was called Hebron and the Cave of Mahpel was called El-Khalil (the nickname of Abraham) by the Arabs.
* Relandi mentions Muslims only as nomadic Bedouins who came to the cities as seasonal workers in agriculture or construction.
* About 550 people lived in Gaza, half of them Jews and half Christians. Jews were successful in agriculture, especially in vineyards, olives and wheat, Christians were engaged in trade and transportation.
* Jews lived in Tveria and Tsfat, but their occupation is not mentioned, except for the traditional fishing in Kineret.
* In the village of Um El Fahm, for example, lived 10 families, all Christians (about 50 people). There stood a small Maronite church.
The book completely refutes theories about "Palestinian traditions", "Palestinian people" and leaves almost no link between the land and the Arabs who even stole the land's Latin name (Palestine) and took it for themselves.
Book by Adrian Reland (1676-1718) about Palestine, published in Utrecht in 1714."

Richard Hanania on X -  "Here's the situation in Arab countries on the eve of the Six-Day War, which they provoked in 1967.  Egypt was 45% illiterate, with a GDP per capita of $140, and relied on the US for 60% of its bread. Meanwhile, Nasser accuses the US of starving the country!   Syria had a series of coups, with elites regularly executing each other. The government had tensions with its own population over religious sectarianism, and merchants whose businesses it seized. The major issue a month before the war was some guy had written an article denying the existence of God, so 20,000 took to the streets and he was sentenced to death.  Under those circumstances, these governments decided that what their malnourished, stunted, primitive people needed was to kill some Jews.  The Palestinians today continue that legacy.  With the exception of the Gulf monarchies, Arab societies have simply failed modernity."

Han Shawnity 🇺🇸 on X - "There are 9 countries that spend more than Israel on lobbying in the US. Qatar alone (one of the biggest state sponsors of terrorism) spends 35% more on lobbying than Israel."
Damn Israel lobby controlling the US and preventing peace in the Middle East!

Meme - NMH 🇮🇱 @NMHbackup 🇮🇱: "Israel & the “occupied territories” myth, & it’s ONLY about destroying the Jewish State & more importantly terrorizing Jews.   A lot of people in the western world don’t realize that Arabs in Gaza & West Bank (or the world) don’t view any differently Ramallah or Tel Aviv, to them it’s ALL “occupied Palestinian land” So while the west is busy going on & on with a “2 state solution”, guess what? The “Palestinians” don’t want that.  BTW the original mandate for the Jews included “Transjordan”, instead Jordan went to the Shariff of Mecca’s son (other son got Iraq), so THERE is your “Arab state”  The next is from @l_ysr66365  who says it better than I could have.  The western distinguish between 1948 and 1967 is a FAKE one!   Claiming delusionary that this is the "internatonal  low"😅.
1. Nobody in the left or the Muslim word cares about that when chanting "from the river to the sea" and "we don't want 48, we want all of it".
2. To claim that Haifa is Jewish but Jerusalem or Hebron is not, is ridiculous! No Palestinian recognize such difference anyway, and Israel can't sign an agreement with itself.
IT IS MORE WISHFUL THINKING Than a FACT!"

Meme - "Great Britain's Division of the Mandated Area 1921-1923
British Mandate
Palestine
Area Remaining for Jewish National Home
Transjordan
Area Separated and Closed to Jewish Settlement, 1921"
"The Palestinian Answer To Peace with Israel:
1947 UN Partition: NO
1967 Khartoum Resolution: NO
2000 Camp David: NO
2001 Taba: NO
2008 Olmert Offer: NO
2009 Bar-Ilan Initiative: NO
2016 John Kerry Plan: NO
2020 US Peace Plan: "We say 1,000 times: NO, NO, and NO" Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas"

Abbas on US plan: 'We say 1,000 times: No, no and no to the deal of the century' - "Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas firmly rejected the Trump administration’s plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Tuesday, calling it the “the slap of the century.”...   “We say a thousand times: No, no and no to the ‘deal of the century,'” Abbas said, adding that the US plan “will not come to pass” and that “our people will send it to the dustbins of history.”
From 2020
Why don't the Zionists want peace?!

LInks - 24th April 2024 (3 - Trans Mania: Judith Butler)

The Phantasmagoric World of Judith Butler - "One chapter of Judith Butler’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, is called “TERFs and British matters of sex.” (“TERF” is an acronym for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist.) The book has not landed well on TERF Island. “Butler flatters herself if she thinks there’s anything to be afraid of in her work,” writes Sarah Ditum in the Times. Jane O’Grady’s review in the Telegraph is titled “Is this the most incoherent book about gender yet?” (One star out of five.) Kathleen Stock (who is mentioned in the book) is also underwhelmed: “The chapter on British so-called TERFs is a compendium of smears culled from online teenagers about their gender-critical mums.”  On the other side of the Atlantic, the reception has been somewhat warmer... you might suspect that Butler, who became legally non-binary a few years ago, is “she” to her detractors and “they” to her supporters. Although a “they/them” review of her book might be positive or negative, a “she/her” review is an infallible sign of thumbs down. Of course, I have now given the game away.   In short: Who’s Afraid of Gender? is not just poorly argued. Butler also persistently misdescribes the people and views she attempts to criticize, and her carelessness with citations would be unacceptable in an undergraduate essay. And, as if this mess wasn’t bad enough, it comes with a dollop of plagiarism on top.   “Why would anyone be afraid of gender?” is the opening of the book’s lengthy introduction. Afraid of what, though? The expectation that Butler will explain what “gender” means is briefly raised only to be dashed at the end of the first paragraph... She is certainly right that “gender” is used in a bewildering variety of ways, but some of her examples in the first paragraph are baffling. Allegedly, some “presume that the word is synonymous with ‘women.’” Others take “gender” to be a “covert way of referring to ‘homosexuality.’” Who are these lunatics? Butler gives no citations.  On one use of “gender” in the book, gender is everything anti-progressives, reactionaries, and fascists are afraid of...  This assortment has no internal coherence, as Butler admits...   However, the incoherence is an artifact of Butler’s own making. As she recognizes, her targets—for instance Pope Francis and the UK organization Sex Matters—have very different concerns. Francis pronounces on the family, the blessing of same-sex couples, and the role of women in the Church, not to mention climate change and the war in Ukraine. Sex Matters is a single-issue organization, campaigning for clarity about sex in law and policy. It is extremely misleading to bundle the anxieties of the Pope and Sex Matters together, and say they are both afraid of gender. Fortunately, for the most part Butler uses “gender” more conventionally throughout the book, as when she tells us in the introduction that “gender has been part of feminism for many decades” (17). Unfortunately, as in a lot of the gender studies literature, she uses the word inconsistently and with maddening imprecision. From Butler’s perspective, this is a good thing: “Gender has to remain relatively wild in relation to all those who claim to possess its correct definition” (243). On the other hand, this makes no sense whatsoever of her expressed hope to “demonstrate the value of gender as a category” (24)... Maybe Butler finally skewers Rufo when she says that he “refuses to read or study the academic field against which he has waged a culture war” (22)? No. Rufo’s 2023 book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, has chapters on Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell. Because Butler’s disinformation is so easy to expose, it simply provides Rufo with free ammunition. If he had paid Butler to run PSYOPs for right-wing culture warriors, she could hardly have done a better job... Despite urging the virtues of careful textual analysis, Butler is not very good at it... Butler’s understanding of the medical literature is as tenuous as her grasp of Catholic theology... She’s fairly clear that there are sexes beyond male and female—the alleged “fact that there are two sexes” (213) has been “effectively contested” (212). She’s even clearer that people can literally change their sex. Trans women are not only women, they are also female: “when one is called male when one is a woman… the calling is an effacement of what one is” (184)...   Butler thinks science is on her side, particularly that done by “feminist scholars” (176). Some scientists, she reports, have argued that sex is “a spectrum or a mosaic” (190), citing a book by the neuroscientist Daphna Joel, Gender Mosaic: Beyond the Myth of the Male and Female Brain (co-authored with a science journalist, Luba Vikhanski). Since that book argues nothing of the sort, presumably Butler never bothered to open it. Joel, incidentally, recently co-authored a paper with the psychologist Cordelia Fine in which they say that “sex categories” (male, female) are “binary.”...   Plagiarism has been in the news recently, and it’s ironic to find Butler joining in, since her idiosyncratic prose style should make that impossible. I should emphasize that Butler’s plagiarism was obviously inadvertent. But it does indicate the level of quality to be found in Who’s Afraid of Gender?... She reminds us that “the killing of women and trans, queer, bisexual and intersex people is an actual form of destruction taking place in the world,” strangely forgetting to mention the demographic most likely by far to die from homicide...   In Butler’s phantasmagoric world, the oceans are boiling, bisexuals lie dying in the streets, and the empty shelves of school libraries gather dust. On a hillside, J. K. Rowling stands between Vladimir Putin and the Pope, the papal cassock flapping in the breeze. The trio gaze with grim satisfaction at the devastation below, under a glowering sky.  Plagiarism aside, there are many reasons to be irritated with Who’s Afraid of Gender?. One is Butler’s delusional insinuation that gender-critical feminists have engaged in “bullying” and “censorship campaigns” (135), when they and their sympathizers have so plainly been on the receiving end. (Butler signed the censorious 2017 open letter denouncing the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia for publishing Rebecca Tuvel’s paper on transracialism.)  Another is Butler’s claim that her opponents “refuse to read the material under dispute” (18). In serving up this dog’s breakfast of a book, Butler shows that she is the one who has not done the reading."

Judith Butler, the intellectual behind the trans movement, bites her feminist critics - "The last time I had to read Judith Butler it was as an undergraduate, and the experience affected me so profoundly that I left my university (Manchester) and moved to a new one (Sheffield) in the hope of never doing it again. A pointless gesture, because 20-odd years on, while Butler remains a professor at Berkeley, her theories have thoroughly escaped it. Who’s Afraid of Gender? is an elaboration on her big idea, as laid out in the 1990 book Gender Trouble, that gender is “performative”... This is the intellectual ballast in the now-common claim that “trans women are women, trans men are men”. (Butler identifies as nonbinary, but generously tolerates being called “she”.) The insight that men and women’s behaviour is at least partly socially constructed wasn’t new, but Butler pushed it further. Not only gendered behaviour but sex itself was socially constructed. Female, she wrote in Gender Trouble, “no longer appears to be a stable notion”. The proper job of feminism, therefore, was to ask “what political possibilities are the consequence of a radical critique of the categories of identity”. You might complain that Butler reduced sexual politics to wordplay: not long after I first read her I got pregnant, which is the female body equivalent of Samuel Johnson kicking the stone (his way of refuting the claim that matter did not exist). But her airy abstraction is her appeal. Most humanities academics deal principally in language, and the more power language is supposed to have, the more powerful they get to feel... She does not differentiate between the authoritarian bigotry of a Viktor Orban and the rights-balancing concerns of a left-wing feminist. All critics of gender ideology, according to Butler, desire “the restoration of a patriarchal dream-order where a father is a father; a sexed identity never changes; women, conceived as ‘born female at birth’, resume their natural and ‘moral’ positions within the household; and white people hold uncontested racial supremacy”. That is a very windy way of saying that if you disagree with Butler you must be racist. Butler might be all about troubling the gender binary, but morally hers is a simple world of goodies and baddies. There is no effort to persuade the sceptical reader, because Butler’s presumption is that her opponents don’t read. “It is nearly impossible to bridge this epistemic divide with good arguments, because of the fear that reading will introduce confusion into the reader’s mind or bring her into direct contact with the devil.” Actually, I’m not sure even Butler’s own editors have read this text with much care. She repeats herself, and when she occasionally lowers herself to deal in vulgar material fact there are worrying errors. For example, she claims the Gender Recognition Act applies only to individuals “covered by the National Health Service”, but there is no mention of the NHS in the act. In any case she’s true to her word about not bothering to make good arguments. Instead, Butler is out to pathologise those who disagree with her. Either they’re under the influence of a vaguely sketched conspiracy beginning with the Catholic Church (we are treated to two chapters establishing that the Pope is a touch on the socially conservative side) or in the case of feminists who perversely “insist on the biological differences between two sexes”, they are gulled by their own trauma. In all the verbosity you could almost miss how insulting Butler is to female victims of male violence. But it’s there. After a section on JK Rowling, Butler writes: “Living in the repetitive temporality of trauma does not always give us an adequate account of social reality.” In other words, women who have been abused (which includes Rowling) cannot be trusted. No wonder Butler doesn’t want to identify as a woman: she doesn’t seem to like them very much... It is not damning of feminists that they are on the same page as Vladimir Putin about there being two sexes. That is just how many sexes there are. Butler condemns feminists for being fellow travellers with the politically unspeakable, but never questions who she might be aligned with. In her world there are no homophobic parents turning their effeminate sons into acceptable little girls; there are no men declaring themselves women simply to commit violence. (Or if there are, Butler will only concede to a “few instances”, and what’s a rape or two?) It is insulting to have to treat a book like this seriously, when it treats its own subject as a game. Butler flatters herself if she thinks there’s anything to be afraid of in her work. The only terror is that anyone would find it impressive."
Hitler was anti-smoking. Therefore we should all smoke, or we are supporting fascism

How the Irish saved womanhood - "In early March, Ireland held a referendum to amend two provisions of its constitution. The first was to change the definition of the traditional family and instead replace it to recognize “durable relationships.” The second would remove references to “women” and “mothers” and broaden the definition of care in the welfare of a family. Both amendments lost by a wide margin, which dealt the progressives and major political parties supporting the amendments a shocking blow, thwarting their attempts to bring the language of gender into the 21st century while giving victory to those concerned about encroachments on the traditional language.   The Irish aren’t immune to reform. In 1995, they approved gay marriage and later allowed for divorce. In 2018, they approved legalized abortions. Ireland is only one of four nations that approve of medical sex-change operations based on self-determination. But the question of eliminating the ancient idea of family and especially the concept of motherhood in a once deeply Catholic country where the cult of the Virgin Mary still lingers was asking too much. This despite the insistence of Ireland’s elite, including the National Women’s Council of Ireland, who fought hard for the changes, even placing the referendum on March 8, International Women’s Day.  In the same month, Judith Butler, the American philosopher and arguably the most acclaimed gender studies teacher worldwide, was promoting her new book Who’s Afraid of Gender? The Irish elite who pushed to reform Ireland’s constitution was no doubt influenced by Butler’s work on queer and gender theory. Butler wants to eliminate the very idea of motherhood and women, arguing instead that biological sex, like gender, is nothing but a social deception. Butler, who uses the pronouns they and them, goes further and claims that the body’s genitalia is itself socially constructed. Sex isn’t an obvious fact simply “based on observation.” We are born as a blank slate without the influence of biological connection. That’s why gender studies advocates refer to assigned sexes at birth, meaning that we are not rooted to them in our behaviour if we so choose.    What we believe about the differences between men and women isn’t based on any eternal concept of nature but on social power dynamics and customs, is the claim. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum reminds us this is nothing new. John Stuart Mill said the same thing in his The Subjection of Women: “What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing.” Where Mill understood that women were kept in subjugation by hierarchies of power, Butler teaches that “nature is not the ground upon which construction of gender happens.” This is an extraordinary admission even though our species, as writer and podcaster Andrew Sullivan says, existed “before we even achieved the intelligence to call it a sex binary.”    Butler demands that only an understanding of culture, history, languages, and anthropology can answer the question of what a woman is. We must see the changing nature of women and their roles through time. In other words, the privilege of knowing what a woman is belongs to a select few gender studies scholars. The idea of gender is a continuum with countless definitions of gender behaviour, ever-expanding preferences akin to identifying new chemical elements on a Periodic Table. And the only reason we define women as we do today is through the social demands of the patriarchy, heterosexuality, and, finally, white supremacy.  In Who’s Afraid of Gender? Butler continues the assault on our misguided perception of gender by widening the door that defines what a woman is to the point that any man can claim membership. Transwomen are now allowed membership and the special honour of accessing women’s spaces. Suppose a man wishes to exhibit their preferences to take on feminine attributes. But why can’t the definition of manhood expand rather than intrude on the definition of women and their spaces?  Butler’s book wasn’t written to answer questions but to attack critics of the very notion of gender and transwomen... They are accused of “fascism”—a word Butler uses liberally—to attack Evangelicals, Christian Orthodox, Catholics, or any organization in favour of traditional families. The author even accuses defenders of families of using “junk science” to defend their case—a curious claim given that gender studies is hardly a field based on established science. Butler lives in a Manichean world of good and evil where enemies must be destroyed. But who are these enemies when a growing number of liberals and leftists are resisting the move to diminish the rights of girls and young women?    Butler claims that attacks on gender are a “phantasm” or an illusion invented by the enemies of gender to hide behind the world’s real problems of capitalism, neoliberalism, destruction of the environment, attacks on immigrants, poverty, Indigenous Peoples, and the oppression of Black and brown people. And any resistance to Butler’s idea of gender is seen as an attack on liberal democracy.   The Irish referendum wasn’t only about rights, tolerance, or one’s right to choose a preferred gender identity but about the nature of language"

Our present dark age - "Butler’s followers and critics tend to gravitate more towards what they think Butler says, rather than her real meaning. The reason for this is that all of Butler’s ideas, however trivial or obvious, are expressed in a comically verbose and obscure manner. She will never use one word if ten will suffice, and she has a penchant for Graeco-Latin abstract nouns. “Facticity,” “liberalization,” “hegemony,” “multiplicitous,” and “heteronormativity”—Butler’s writing is a compost heap of such jargon, and the sentences are often far too long...  though her writing is generally bad, it is not always unintelligible. Amidst all the pompous obscurity, acolytes and critics will either thank or blame Butler for the mysterious transmutation of sex into gender...   Simone de Beauvoir had a dim view of “femaleness,” but she took seriously the idea that biology circumscribed and determined womanhood. In contrast, Butler does not. Her main goal is to dismantle the idea that mankind is by nature divided into only two sexes, and therefore that male and female sexual relations are normal. As contemporary jargon has it, Butler wants to undermine “heteronormativity.” This is the force of Butler’s 2004 book Undoing Gender. Butler followed Michel Foucault into the labyrinth of postmodernism, and discovered at its centre that “power dissimulates as ontology.” In other words, our perception of male and female only seems real because of the power of the authorities who impose them upon us. Accordingly, all norms of gender and sex must be dismantled—even, as it seems, the prohibition against incest, to which Butler devotes an entire chapter of Undoing Gender. She even raises the prospect of removing reproduction from heterosexual relationships by means of technology and warns feminists against resisting it. To do so, she says, would be to “risk naturalizing heterosexual reproduction.” “The doctrine of sexual difference in this case.” she continues, “comes to be in tension with antihomophobic struggles as well as with the intersex movement and the transgender movement’s interest in securing rights to technologies that facilitate sex reassignment.”   I for one do not know how we could tell if anything Butler says is right. If the “truth-as-power” doctrine is, er, true, then I cannot think of a good reason to take Butler at her word. This, however, is not the main problem with Butler’s work. The problem is that the near irrelevance of biological sex and the theory of performative gender as either male or female militate against the main assumption of transgenderism. If, as it is said, you can have a “gender identity” that does not accord with your bodily sexual characteristics, then Butler’s most important ideas cannot be true. And if you must change your sexual characteristics to align with those correlated with the other gender, then you are dangerously close to affirming, rather than dismantling, “heteronormativity.” Accordingly, Butler admits that her former work is now “questionable in several ways, especially in light of trans and materialist criticisms.” This is undoubtedly why Butler has once again revisited the topic of gender in her new book Who’s Afraid of Gender, wherein she tries to assimilate her older ideas to present orthodoxy. The task is fundamentally hopeless. And so it is no surprise that Butler is now in grave doubt...   But what do all those malign figures have in common? Fascism, says Butler. They are all fascists who use the “phantasm” of gender to stir up fear in order to distract from real problems like “war,” “systemic racism,” and “devastations of capitalism.” The fascists wish to restore “a patriarchal dream-order where a father is a father; a sexed identity never changes; women, conceived as ‘born female at birth’ resume their natural and ‘moral’ positions within the household; and white people hold uncontested racial supremacy.”  Butler’s enemies are also racists, apparently, and so she also provides a bizarre digression into what she believes to be a misguided opposition to Critical Race Theory... Consider the reaction to British feminist Kathleen Stock whom Butler hates perhaps even more than the Papacy. Stock is wrong—not because of any errors of reasoning, but because “she does not seem to understand the toxicity or cruelty that she herself brings to the table” when insisting that “the designation of ‘woman’ should be tied to the determination of biological femaleness.”... Butler seems to imply that nothing could be worse than failing to affirm a person’s identity or his or her claim of belonging to a particular group. If this is indeed what Butler means, it can only signify his or her disconnection from actual pain and suffering...   But that phrase “your own definition of who you are” is almost equally troubling. It places Butler in the same category as the Jesuits of Paraguay and the Pilgrim Fathers imagining a fresh start in a new world of personal and social perfection. Butler is also the almost bankrupt heir to the Marquis de Condorcet for whom “the perfectibility of man is absolutely infinite.” And in the world of anthropology, she is the Trofim Lysenko: the Soviet agronomist who believed that one species of plant could be transformed into another under the right conditions.   Such utopian visions may be attractive to some people, but they always lead to disappointment, disaster, and cruelty. The future of gender theory does not appear to be bright, not because it is widely feared, as the title of Butler’s book implies, but because its precepts are false and many of its effects are harmful. In many parts of the West, it seems to be in retreat now, as puberty blockers and surgeries are increasingly restricted. A Pew Research poll from 2022 showed that the number of people who affirm two and only two human sexes and only two genders has been growing since 2017. Perhaps the tide is turning."

Judith Butler: Enough Already! - "We have legislated gender in which her main claim in Gender Trouble that sex is “socially constructed” is the heart of the legislation. Not only have we legislated it, but the cultural institutions of this country have adopted it as the new normative order and used their institutional power to enforce it. From the legacy media, to social media, to tech companies, to educational institutions from schools to universities are all now repeating in unison: “sex is socially constructed.” Butler speaks as if what she says is not already endorsed by the state. Perhaps it is terrifying for the subversive professor of the ‘90s to realize she is now in power? She would have to confront the rebellion from the margins, a place that Butler has endowed with virtue and has positioned herself in. If power was everywhere, as Butler, per Foucault, had theorized, and Butler was now in power, then surely rebellion against it is not just what the theory foretold, but the same virtue would have to be attached to it... it is now right-wing populism, the religious Right, and radical feminists (TERFS) who are standing in the way of her subversive claims. This is all nonsense, of course. None of these forces holds power over cultural institutions, especially the elite ones and those which indoctrinate youth to her theories of gender. Perhaps recognizing that her theories are in power will force Butler to look at their impact in the world. Butler, like many celebrity academics of her generation, was an academic of “theory” with no interest in “sociology.” Theory is elite, it is what smart professors do. They deconstruct the reigning order through their theories. Whether ordinary people are interested in deconstructing the gender order or what the impact of enforcing these theories on them via powerful cultural institutions is of no interest. It is demeaning for the theory professor to look at the social lives of others. Considering the plight of lesbian teenagers who went further than “enjoying the world of they”—as Butler refers to herself in the Guardian interview—by moving from taking hormones to undergoing a double mastectomy within a year, is just too messy. To know that these girls lived to regret it and wondered where all the adults were is even messier. To wonder as to the impact of the disappearance of the “dyke” in the lesbian community many of whom have decided they are now transmen, erasing the erotic place of the “dyke” in the lesbian community, is too “sociological.” Goodness: What is the fancy theory for that?... Butler asserts that “queer for me was never an identity, but a way of affiliating with the fight against homophobia.” If this were a critique of the identity-obsessed trans movement, it was so subtle I doubt that her object of critique even noticed it. The trans movement has indeed taken “identity” from its usual liberal legalist articulation and inflated it beyond recognition, and Butler is right to notice that and to distance herself from it. It is identity on steroids in which one's identity changes by the day if not by the hour. A buffet of identities that one serves oneself with daily and screams for the world to recognize it on TikTok. From group identity as liberal entitlement to individualist identity as neoliberal consumerism.  But, then again, perhaps daily or hourly identity is the only possible cultural embodiment of academic “anti-identity!” Not only was her critique of the trans movement barely noticeable, indeed, a paragraph later, she withdrew it and endowed the trans movement with the best of intentions, “The right is seeking desperately to reclaim forms of identity that have been rightly challenged. At the same time, they tend to reduce movements for racial justice as identity politics, or to caricature movements for sexual freedom as concerned only with ‘identity.’ In fact, these movements are primarily concerned with redefining what justice, equality and freedom can and should be.” A hint of critique that is immediately withdrawn through the usual trick of re-centering the evil Right as the problem. This allows Butler to do two things: on the one hand, deny the state power her ideas have acquired (the new hegemon), a power that has produced horrible distributive consequences across the board: revival of heterosexual norms (dykes becoming trans men who sleep with women); medicalization of children’s bodies; the slippery slope of endowing children with capacity to consent to “gender identity"; thought and language control that attacks the very common sense of people; and the list goes on. On the other hand, it allows Butler to imagine that ‘90s politics go on; a discursive trope familiar among the militant progressives who have become mainstreamed by the post-Trump Democratic Party.  Maybe Butler is an anti-identitarian when it comes to gender, but she sure defends her political identity most rigidly, indeed, in an obscurantist way... Far from being apostles of revolution, those academics provide the most articulate apologetics for the contemporary war of the elites on the working class."

Mahler on Schoenberg

"The early works of Schoenberg always come as a pleasant shock to listeners expecting a grueling atonal exercise. The music exudes a heady, luxurious tone, redolent of Klimt’s gilt portraits and other Jugendstil artifacts. Brash Straussian gestures mix with diaphanous textures that bear a possibly not coincidental resemblance to Debussy. There are spells of suspended animation, when the music becomes fixated on a single chord. The chamber tone poem Transfigured Night, written in 1899, ends with twelve bars of glistening D major, the fundamental note never budging in the bass. Gurre-Lieder, a huge Wagnerian cantata for vocal soloists, multiple choruses, and supersized orchestra, begins with a great steam bath of E-flat major, probably in imitation of the opening to Wagner’s Ring. Yet all is not well in Romantic paradise. Unexplained dissonances rise to the surface; chromatic lines intersect in a contrapuntal tangle; chords of longing fail to resolve...

Mahler found Schoenberg’s music mesmerizing and maddening in equal measure. “Why am I still writing symphonies,” he once exclaimed, “if that is supposed to be the music of the future!” After a rehearsal of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony, Mahler asked the musicians to play a C-major triad. “Thank you,” he said, and walked out. Yet he made a show of applauding Schoenberg’s most controversial works, knowing how destructive the critics and claques of Vienna could be."

--- THE REST IS NOISE: LISTENING TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY / ALEX ROSS

Links - 24th April 2024 (2)

Alabama IVF ruling: What does it mean for fertility patients? - "A ruling from the Alabama Supreme Court that frozen embryos are considered children, and that a person could be held liable for accidentally destroying them, has opened up a new front in the US battle over reproductive medicine.  The decision has thrown the future of IVF treatments in the state into doubt, with a host of healthcare providers in the state suspending the service."

'Such a good heart': Dessert stall in Bukit Merah gives out free food for Muslims to break fast, earning praise - "TikTok user Shallummaswandi, who goes by Shallum, shared a clip of him visiting Jin Jin Dessert stall at ABC Brickworks Market & Food Centre and having a chat with a staff member there.  In an unplanned interview with one of the dessert stall's bosses, Shallum learned that Jin Jin Dessert has been actively giving out free food to the Muslim community during the month of Ramadan.  And apparently, it's a tradition that has been going on for a few years. Jin Jin Dessert's boss, who wasn't named in the clip, shared that the stall has been providing free desserts to mosques around the area "for the past five to six years".  During Ramadan, 100 packets of desserts will be prepared every Friday for Muslims to break their fast.  On Saturdays, at about 5pm, Jin Jin Dessert will set aside desserts by the side of the stall for Muslim patrons to pick up at no charge.  "For any Muslims, feel free to take," he added."
What would happen if someone gave free fish to Christians on Fridays, or during Lent?

Thousands of older drivers opt for restrictions on how far they can drive rather than do on-road driving test - "Thousands of elderly people in NSW are dodging on-road driving tests by opting for a modified licence that restricts the distances they can drive.   In NSW, drivers must undergo annual medical tests once they turn 75 to maintain their licence.  Once they turn 85, they must also complete a practical driving test every two years.  But older drivers can skip the on-road assessment if they volunteer for a conditional licence, which limits how far they can drive and may stop them driving at night. Judy Kelly, 87, took up this option, labelling the requirement for an on-road assessment "ageist"."

Meme - "Sunday supermarket shopping in Europe
Green: Open
Red: Closed  Norway, Germany, Poland, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, most of Spain, Greece, Slovenia, Montenegro*
Blue: Open 6 hours *France, England, Northern Ireland*

Meme - Frodo Baggins: "Bilbos' gone? this is the worst day of my life"
Gandalf: "the worst day of your life so far. Pick up that ring."

Everyday Aggression Takes Many Forms - "Aggression can take a variety of forms; people hurt one another in a variety of ways. This article summarizes a research program that has examined several questions regarding how people harm one another in their day-to-day lives. The evidence shows that (a) the people that we interact with most frequently (e.g., family members, friends, romantic partners) are the most likely to make us angry; (b) we can hurt people by direct (e.g., physical or verbal attack) or nondirect action (e.g., spreading rumors, giving someone the silent treatment); and (c) the way we hurt people depends on our relationship with them. Whether the harm takes the form of words or blows, aggression is harmful to individuals and to relationships."

Puberty makes teenagers’ armpits smell of cheese, goat and urine, say scientists - "Puberty makes teenagers’ armpits smell of cheese, goat and even urine, scientists in Germany have discovered.  The particular chemical compounds that make up pubescent body odour have been singled out, should anyone want to bottle “eau du teenager”.  More usefully, the discovery could help the creation of deodorants that mask those particular smells. It has also explained why babies smell better. The study compared infants under three years old with 14- to 18-year-olds and found teenagers had two particular chemical compounds that smell of sweat, urine, musk and sandalwood, which were not present in babies. Infants, on the other hand, had higher levels of a ketone that smells flowery and soapy... The pads from the teenagers’ armpits had two steroids present – 5alphaandrost-16-en-3-one and 5alphaandrost-16-en-3alpha-ol – which smell of sweat, urine, musk and sandalwood. They also had higher levels of six carboxylic acids, which give off unattractive smells including cheese, goat and wax.  Babies’ samples showed higher levels of the ketone alpha-isomethyl ionone, which smells of flowers and soap, with a hint of violet... Researchers at Erlangen-Nürnberg’s Aroma and Smell Research Facility said changing body odour in development was known to affect the interaction between parents and children. “Body odours of infants are pleasant and rewarding to mothers and, as such, probably facilitate parental affection,” they wrote.  “In contrast, body odours of pubertal children are rated as less pleasant and parents are unable to identify their own child during this developmental stage.”"

Quiet quitting is just Gen Z's new name for an old work concept | Fortune - "Quiet quitting is just a new term for an old concept that every generation discovers anew: doing the bare minimum at work. The caption to @thelizjane’s video says it all: “Quiet quitting isn’t just a Gen Z thing or a new phenomenon—people have worked like this for years.” (Or not worked like this for years, critics would say.)...   You might know quiet quitting by another term: disengagement, Stephan Meier, professor of business at Columbia Business School and Chair of Management Division, tells Fortune.   He points to the statistics: More than 67% of U.S. employees and more than 86% of employees worldwide report not being engaged in their jobs over the past 15 years. “It’s possible that this has increased somewhat after the pandemic, but it is not a new phenomenon,” he says."

Meme - Dasha & Varg Do America: "I have a soft spot for the last logos movie studios used before they all converted to CGl. *Universal. WB. Paramount. 20th Century Fox*"

How Can I Dress to Not Look Like a Tourist in France? - The New York Times - "Once upon a time it was easy to spot Americans abroad (or so the cliché went, anyway): They were the loud ones in jeans and T-shirts with fanny packs and baseball caps.  Now, of course, everything once out is in again, and, as is its wont, fashion has embraced all of the above. The erstwhile gauche is now global and can even be chic, depending on your appetite for irony. That does not mean, however, that there aren’t certain … national stereotypes that still apply.  Since I have spent the last week at the couture shows in Paris, I took the liberty of asking some locals what pieces scream “American” to them. The answer, almost always: leggings. Or, for that matter, other sorts of workout wear worn as daywear: sports bras, bike shorts and the like. There is no word for “athleisure” in French. Honestly, that term shouldn’t even exist in English. It is the new fanny pack.  Also, on the other extreme, anything too “Emily in Paris.” (French people have a lot of feelings about “Emily in Paris.”)  Translation: anything that is too colorful (it’s the clothing equivalent of loud), complicated and appears to be trying too hard. Including hairdos that are overly blow-dried, obvious makeup and stilettos. Instead, think neutrals: black, white, beige, navy, olive green. Which, in any case, can be mixed and matched at will and are thus good for packing. Think understatement; think the marketing executive played by Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu in “Emily” rather than Emily herself. Think sneakers, but in classic white, not in wildly clashing neon. Denim, as long as it is worn almost as if it has been tailored. Also a trench coat, a shirtdress, a white shirt, a black blazer. And think the single strategically chosen accessory: a scarf, a wide belt, some big earrings, though worn one at a time. Ditto logos. They are OK, but not in multiples.  As Inès de la Fressange, a woman who is so quintessentially French that she became the model for Marianne, the face of the nation, once said: “In France, women put on less things. If they have a necklace, they don’t put on earrings. If they have nail polish, they don’t put on all their rings and all their bracelets.” (As it happens, she has a line with Uniqlo, so if you want to see what she means, you can find it for yourself.) The point is: There’s nothing basic about basics when you’re traveling; they are now universal. It’s the basics you choose that give away your point of origin."

Marcus du Sautoy: Escape by numbers - "Several of the Lebanese hostages incarcerated for years in the 1980s described how exploring numbers in their heads helped relieve days of isolation. Prison wardens can deprive inmates of hard-earned TVs and games consoles if prison rules are breached. But even the harshest regimes can't strip you of the tools necessary for digging a tunnel out to the mathematical world... Mathematical history is peppered with examples of stunning breakthroughs (rather than breakouts) made by prisoners. In 1831, Evariste Galois, a 19-year-old French revolutionary, was imprisoned for wearing a banned military uniform and threatening the life of the king, Louis-Philippe. Although his actions failed to incite political turmoil, his scientific achievements inside the notorious Sainte-Pelagie prison eventually caused a mathematical revolution. The memoir he wrote in prison is the foundation stone for the modern mathematical theory of symmetry.  In 1940, the pacifist and mathematician André Weil, brother of the famous philosopher Simone Weil, found himself in prison awaiting trial for desertion. An Indian friend of Weil's had once joked that "if I could spend six months or a year in prison, I would most certainly be able to prove the Riemann hypothesis" - the greatest unsolved problem of mathematics. Now Weil had the chance to put the theory to the test. During those months in Rouen prison, Weil made a breakthrough on a problem closely linked to Riemann's conjecture. He wrote to his wife: "My mathematics work is proceeding beyond my wildest hopes, and I am even a bit worried - if it is only in prison that I work so well, will I have to arrange to spend two or three months locked up every year?" On hearing of his breakthrough, fellow mathematician Henri Cartan wrote back to Weil: "We're not all lucky enough to sit and work undisturbed like you..."... There are also stories of those condemned by terminal illness who have sought solace in mathematics as a way of surviving beyond their deaths. Julia Robinson was given only years to live after contracting rheumatic fever as a child in the 30s. She dedicated her life to solving one of the 20th century's major unsolved problems: Hilbert's 10th problem about solving equations... Mathematics has also been a sanctuary for those social misfits unable to cope in the turbulent emotional world around them. While fellow humans can react in an unpredictable and contradictory manner, the world of mathematics offers a safe haven where certainty reigns and results don't collapse. Euclid's 2,000-year-old proof that there are infinitely many primes is as valid today as it was in ancient Greece.  Maybe this security is what makes mathematics so appealing to those who suffer from Asperger's syndrome, such as Mark Haddon's character Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Simon Baron-Cohen's book The Essential Difference documents several leading mathematicians with autistic leanings. Mathematics is responsible for creating and explaining much of the physical world we live in, but it can also offer an alternative world in which to escape the pressures of reality."

Where Did the Prohibition on Combining Seafood and Cheese Come From? - "“It definitely originated in Italy, there’s no doubt about that,” says Julia della Croce, a cookbook author, teacher, writer, and one of America’s foremost experts on Italian cuisine. “Italians are very religious about mixing cheese and fish or seafood, it just isn’t done.” I spoke with several food historians and nobody seems to disagree on this point: The prohibition, and its aggressiveness, come from Italy... A common explanation is that seafood is very delicate and cheese very strong, and that cheese can overpower the flavor of seafood. This is, of course, ridiculous: plenty of seafood items, like clams, mackerel, oysters, and sardines, are very strong in flavor, and plenty of cheeses, like ricotta, mozzarella, queso fresco, and paneer, are very mild. Della Croce says that the Italian objection to seafood and cheese is more based on preference. “The reason it isn’t done is, as the Italians will say if you ask them, they’ll just tell you that it really muddles the flavor of seafood,” she says. “Seafood is just not meant to be served with cheese, the flavors just don’t work together.”... To declare something “traditional” suggests that it is static and unchanging, when of course it must have changed many times before becoming what it is.  In order to create something that can be referred to as “traditional,” a large group of people must decide all at once to dig in their heels and defend against any changes. It naturally follows that there must be some kind of large event to trigger this; otherwise why would everyone simultaneously decide that the way their grandmother made polpetti is the only way?...  “Italy changed enormously after World War II, so people became very protective of their local traditions, because they were eroding away,” she says. “The war ruined Italy. Everything became modernized and Americanized.”... Food is Italy’s greatest cultural export. Easily. Everyone freakin’ loves Italian food. But with increased globalization comes a struggle. Italian food, like widely dispersed cuisines from China and Mexico, would be changed upon landing on other shores. And change, at that time, was something that scared the hell out of Italy, because it seemed inevitable and oppressive and overwhelming. So—and this is obviously a generalization, but one that the data backs up—Italians locked in on what they grew up with. The way their grandmothers did it, that was the only way to do it. Any other way was wrong, and to do it wrong was potentially disastrous... The food thought of as “traditional” Italian food is often, though of course not entirely, from the late 19th century. Pizza margherita, bolognese, risotto, osso buco (in its current form), and many more, can be dated to that era, and no earlier. These were the dishes of the grandmothers of those who survived World War II. They became tradition, even though they are not, objectively speaking, all that old; there are many cookbooks and written descriptions of Italian food from the 18th century and earlier, and they do not mention these dishes. Instead they were the green bean casserole of their time, albeit much tastier. Another element: Italy has always had fierce regional pride. The country itself has only been unified since 1861, and had prior to that been an area of competitive and sometimes hostile individual nations and city-states... It’s worth mentioning here that pretty much everyone can get touchy about the right way to prepare and eat their food. But usually the things people get touchy about are specific dishes, not basic rules like the combination of two widely eaten categories (at least in the West)...   Ken Albala, a food historian and professor at the University of the Pacific, suggested something else: This was originally a medical prohibition. From the time of Hippocrates, in the fourth and third centuries B.C., humorism was the dominant medical theory throughout what is now Italy. The theory relies on balancing of the four humors (humors in this case meaning bodily fluids): black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. Good health was considered to be a result of proper balancing of the humors. One thing that could throw the humors out of whack, or be used to re-balance them, was food, and types of food were considered to have different effects on the humors."

Meme - lin @_nkemtwin: "Celebrities With Loyal Partners Since Childhood
9. Kobe Bryant and Vanessa Bryant
8. Will Smith and Jada Smith
2. Jay-Z and Beyonce"

Author Richard Brittain attacked reviewer with bottle - "An author tracked down a teenager in Fife and hit her over the head with a bottle after she gave his book a bad review, a court has heard.  Richard Brittain, a former champion on the TV programme Countdown, travelled from England and used Facebook to find Paige Rolland, 18, at her work.  He admitted assaulting Miss Rolland with a bottle to her severe injury on 3 October 2014 at Asda, Glenrothes... Glasgow Sheriff Court heard Brittain uploaded part of a published book of his called The World Rose onto a website called Wattpad, where people can read and critique literature written by others.  Miss Rolland read the excerpt of Brittain's book and left comments about it... a month before the attack on Miss Roland, Brittain stalked a university classmate, Ella Durant, 23, who moved from London to Glasgow.  He used her Twitter and Instagram accounts to find where she worked and turned up on two occasions to speak to her.  Brittain, whose address was given as Palgrave, Bedford, pled guilty to engaging in a course of conduct which caused Miss Durant fear or alarm by repeatedly pursuing her, approaching her, following her and publishing a story about stalking her in September 2014."

Social Experiment Or Attempted Murder? The Morality Of 'The Push' - “The Push sees UK mentalist and magician Derren Brown conduct an elaborate, choreographed, highly manipulative experiment: can he get an entrepreneur who believes he’s attending a legitimate charity fundraiser to push a man off a roof? While Kingston chooses not to push the man to his supposed death, Brown eventually reveals that he has conducted the experiment three more times. And, each time, the participant went through with ‘the push’.

A man who 'hopes he runs out of money' before he dies explains why you may not need as much cash to retire as you think - “"Retirees who had $500,000 or more right before retirement had spent down a median of only 11.5% of that money 20 years later or by the time they died," he writes. And, this pattern held true even for those with smaller savings. "Retirees with less than $200,000 saved up for retirement ... had spent down only one quarter of their assets 18 years after retirement."”

I quit sugar for 6 months and this is what it did to my face and body - ““That said, the daily recommended added sugar is less than 50 grams (about 12 teaspoons), so having some sugar won’t cause inflammation. These studies look at people who eat more than the recommended amount. Generally, skin inflammation presents as pimples or acne, but it may also cause eczema flares, which is linked to dry skin,” she adds. She also says that artificial sweeteners, like aspartame, have been shown to have the opposite effect on skin. “That said, the studies with aspartame use really high doses and are usually performed on animals, so they aren’t the most conclusive.”… “Eating more than the recommended amount of sugar on a daily basis may cause weight gain, which may present as bloating or puffiness. The inflammation that the excessive sugar causes may also cause some slight bloating,” Rizzo says. But the transformation didn’t stop there. Oh no, my energy levels experienced a renaissance of their own. No longer was I subject to the erratic highs and crashing lows that had plagued me for so long. Instead, I found myself sustained by a steady, reliable source of energy that carried me through the day with ease.”

8 surprising (and bizarre) federal tax deductions you can actually claim on your return - “Crutches... Without any certification or prescription. So, technically, even if you bought the crutches to pull a prank on someone or as a prop for the student film you were making, you can claim them as a medical expense…  
Living with your parents... Kind of. The Multigenerational Home Renovation Tax Credit is a new refundable tax credit that applies if you do renovations to create a secondary unit in your home where a senior or disabled adult, such as an elderly parent, would live. You have to make sure both you and the person living with you are considered "qualifying individuals" with a "qualifying" relationship, but if all that checks out, you can claim up to $7,500.  
Food... But only if you're a bike and/or foot courier and you might have to go to court over it. Basically, in 1998, the Federal Court of Appeal ruled that a man named Alan Wayne Scott could write off extra food he required due to physical exertion from his job as a bike and foot courier. His argument was that he considered it fuel — much in the same way you can write off fuel for a vehicle if you use it to earn business income. If you want to try your luck, this precedence exists, but it might not be worth ruffling the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA)'s feathers over.  
Firefighting and search-and-rescuing... But only if you're a volunteer. You can claim up to $3,000 for the volunteer firefighters' amount or search and rescue volunteers' amount but not both. Also, you must have completed 200 hours of eligible volunteering at either service.”

Scientists have discovered the maximum age a human can live to - “Research conducted in The Netherlands has found that the maximum ceiling life span for a female is 115.7 years. For men, it is slightly lower at 114.1 years but even so, that's a long time. This conclusion was come to by statisticians at Tilburg and Rotterdam's Erasmus University who studied data from 75,000 people who have died in the Netherlands in the last 30 years… These findings correlate with a study carried out in America, where a similar lifespan bracket was discovered by researchers. They determined that a person's maximum lifespan plateaus in their nineties and was unlikely to ever increase beyond 115.”

Kim Jong Un bans dogs and certain haircuts in North Korea - “the national broadcaster had censored a pair of jeans worn by British TV gardener Alan Titchmarsh after a repeat of a BBC show was aired. The offending item of blue denim jeans are viewed as a sign of US imperialism and have been banned in the country since the early 90s… North Korea’s Rejection of Reactionary Thought and Culture Act had an addition made. Officials declared that any woman who wears clothing that does not sit below the knee line defies the principles of “socialist etiquette”. According to an anonymous North Korean resident, the crackdown on women wearing shorts or anything above the knee came amid 30 degree Celsius temperatures… “A few years ago, they were cracking down on wide-legged skirt pants, saying they were Japanese fashion. “Many women are complaining, asking why men can wear shorts and women can't. They are saying that the authorities are discriminating against us.”… Keeping dogs as pets is also banned because it “is incompatible with the socialist lifestyle”. According to a source who spoke to Daily NK, the new rule was told to the Socialist Women Union of Korea… Authorities labelled the practice of keeping dogs as pets as having “the stench of the bourgeoisie”. They claimed: “Dogs are basically meat that’s raised outside in accordance with their nature and then eaten when they die. Therefore, such behaviour is totally unsocialist and must be strictly eliminated.””

Charlie Munger lived in the same home for 70 years: Rich people who build 'really fancy houses' become 'less happy' - “"[Buffett and I] are both smart enough to have watched our friends who got rich build these really fancy houses," Munger said. "And I would say in practically every case, they make the person less happy, not happier." A "basic house" has utility, said Munger, noting that a larger home could help you entertain more people — but that's about it. "It's a very expensive thing to do, and it doesn't do you that much good."

Meme - Enfant: "Maieuh... j'veux pas me laver !"
Femme: "Allons...tu n'es plus un bébé !"
Enfant: "Si je me lave je deviendrais un grand garçon ?"
Femme: "Oui ! Et tu me rendras très heureuse !"
Enfant: "Alors d'accord !"
*L'enfant entre la chambre à gaz d'un camp d'extermination et la femme souriante est est une aufseherin*

Jail for Taylor Swift concert cheat who claimed he was a fan but did not know any of her songs - "A man who was arrested after he was involved in a Taylor Swift concert scam claimed he was a fan of the American pop star during investigations.  But Yang Chenguang was unable to sing any of her songs and could not provide a good reason for why he could not do so.  On March 28, the 29-year-old Chinese national was sentenced to three months’ jail after he pleaded guilty to one charge of criminal trespass and another of cheating.  Swift’s Eras Tour concert at the National Stadium was held over six nights from March 2 to 9 and attracted more than 368,000 concertgoers. It has also been linked to at least 960 victims of ticket scams... In mitigation, Yang, who did not have a lawyer, said this was the first time he had left China and that he was remorseful.  He added that his wife had died two years ago and that he wished to return to China as soon as possible to be with his two children. He promised to teach them not to commit any offences."
"This makes it sound as though it's criminal to claim to be a Taytay fan but not be able to sing her songs."

Coconut Shell Bearing Rescue Message – All Artifacts – The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum - "On the night of August 1, 1943, the PT boat commanded by Lieutenant John F. Kennedy was sunk after being hit by a Japanese destroyer in Blackett Strait, south of Kolombangara in the Solomon Islands. Four days after they had been given up as lost, Kennedy and his surviving crew were discovered by Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, two indigenous Solomon Islands scouts working for the Allies. Kennedy carved the message into this coconut husk that 11 crew members were still alive and passed it along to two Gasa and Kumana, who carried the message to a nearby Australian coast watcher. The chance encounter with the islanders resulted in the rescue of PT-109's crew.  Joseph P. Kennedy had the inscribed coconut shell fragment encased in plastic and mounted to a wood base for his son. The object became a treasured memento, one that served as a reminder of a turning point in young Kennedy's life that would shape him as a man and a president. He kept it prominently displayed on the desks he used throughout his political career. The coconut husk was on the President's desk in the Oval Office on the day he died."

Meme - "When she doesnt look like her pic, but you just drove 8 hours *man having sex with alien*"

Meme - Chaya Raichik: "It's so cringey to see middle-aged men wearing Nirvana brand t-shirts like they're trying to fit in with young people. Like shouldn't you have your own style from your own era?"

Meme - "Top 7 Italian Restaurants in N.J.
Olive Garden Italian Restaurant
Olive Garden Italian Restaurant
Olive Garden Italian Restaurant
Olive Garden Italian Restaurant
Olive Garden Italian Restaurant
Olive Garden Italian Restaurant
Olive Garden Italian Restaurant"

What evil prank have you pulled off? : AskReddit - "Two of my friends have never met eachother. Before they spoke I told both of them that the other is a bit deaf. They shouted at eachother for a few minutes before they realized that I'm an asshole."

The Louder the Monkey, the Smaller Its Balls, Study Finds - "Howler monkeys are the loudest land animals on Earth, capable of bellowing at volumes of 140 decibels, which is on the level of gunshots or firecrackers. Not surprisingly, male howlers frequently use this power to advertise their sexual fitness, catcalling females with their ear-splitting roars... a louder, small-balled monkey is more likely to develop a harem of females with whom he has exclusive breeding access. The quieter, well-endowed monkeys, on the other hand, tend to end up in larger groups containing many males and females that copulate freely with each other. In this non-exclusive group, males compete for paternity quite literally with their balls. The bigger a male's sperm count, the more he is to edge out all the other males that are mating with the same females. In this way, howler monkeys have evolved two sexual strategies—calls versus balls—to the exclusion of each other... Naturally, Knapp warns against anthropomorphizing these findings, and she is completely right"

Opinion: School boards should focus on academics and order - "After months of meetings, the Waterloo Region District School Board in Ontario finally released its new strategic plan. Its key feature? An upside-down organizational chart that puts students at the top and the director of education at the bottom. Of course, the chart is nonsense. The district has not given students the power to hire and fire staff, nor can students tell the director of education which programs to cut or even what time they want school to begin in the morning. Anyone who wants to know the actual chain of authority in the district won’t get much help from this chart. The rest of the strategic plan isn’t much better. It’s filled with lofty promises about “preparing students for the future” and catchphrases such as “celebrating the gifts of each and every student.” The plan also focuses on preparing students for the 22nd century — when most current students will be retired or dead. What we don’t see in this strategic plan are concrete measures to improve academic achievement. Sadly, Waterloo is far from the only school board to focus on everything except academics. The Toronto District School Board recently dropped its skills-based entrance requirements for specialized schools and the Vancouver School Board has eliminated its honours programs, mediocritizing schools in the name of “equity.”... the Ontario Human Rights Commission released a damning report (Right to Read) about Ontario’s approach to literacy in public schools. According to the report, students need much more phonics instruction than many of them are currently getting in school... School boards also need to ensure that students can learn in safe and orderly classrooms. Prioritizing student safety means giving teachers the power to maintain order and discipline in their classrooms. Violence in school should never be tolerated. This might seem obvious but it’s a serious issue in some schools. For example, there have been numerous media reports about serious violent incidents in Saunders Secondary School, which is part of the Thames Valley School District based in London, Ontario. A recent CBC story quoted an anonymous teacher who described Saunders as a “tinderbox of violence” where students regularly challenge teachers to fistfights. Incredibly, instead of addressing the problem, school board officials argued that the violence at Saunders was no worse than at other schools. The district’s director of education also wants to reduce the number of student suspensions, which might make sense if suspensions were unwarranted but is absurd when dealing with real incidents of violence. It would also help if school boards hired fewer consultants and put those resources into classrooms instead. In far too many cases, consultants feel the need to justify their own positions by recommending the creation of additional programs. The end result is that teachers spend less time with their students because they’re required to attend professional development sessions staged by these consultants.  Finally, school boards, particularly in large urban centres, need to empower families by encouraging more choice within the system. Instead of making all schools follow the same cookie-cutter model, schools should be able to specialize and families choose the school they want. The Edmonton Public School Board has successfully used this model for decades. More school boards should follow the Edmonton model."
From 2022

Meme - "Workout ball
$15
Sold
Seller: Jeff
Description: Used only once, cleaned with vinegar. Still in great condition. *purple ball with 2 handles and dildo sticking out*"

Michael Shermer on X - "Question:  Is the "sharp rise in adolescent depression" (and anxiety disorders, eating disorders, suicidal ideation, ADHD, etc.) due to exogenous causes like social media/smart phones, parental coddling, life history theory, etc?   What if the cause is endogenous—an artifact of the pathologizing of things teens used to normally get upset about (and recover from quickly), and instead are now being labeled with diagnoses like depression, ADHD, autism, anxiety disorders, etc., and then a feedback loop is created in which the kids are instructed to ruminate, cogitate, and wallow in their negative emotions, which only fuels the problem, and THAT is what has caused this spike?  I don't know the answer but am curious what readers here think."

Meme - Glinda: "We've had to adapt, Dorothy. Nobody uses imperial weights these days."
"The Wizard of 28g"

Ultimately, there are 10 Basic X-Men Plots : i will not apologize for art - "1. Aliens ruin Scott Summers’ day
2. The teenage female audience surrogate (Kitty, Jubilee, Armor, etc.) does something cool
3. Bigots ruin Scott Summers’ day
4. Storm wrestles with her leadership position
5. Time travelers ruin Scott Summers’ day
6. Everything connects back to Wolverine
7. Literal demons rise up from Hell to ruin Scott Summers’ day
8. Professor Xavier turns out to have done a Bad Thing
9. The other X-Men ruin Scott Summers’ day
10. The Phoenix shows up (most likely to ruin Scott Summers’ day)"

Race and False Hate Crime Narratives

From 2021:

Race and False Hate Crime Narratives

"The reaction to the mass shootings in Boulder, Colorado, and Atlanta, Georgia, over the last week has revealed how invested the Democratic establishment is in one all-powerful narrative. Both shootings produced an immediate response from the media, Democratic politicians, and activists—that the slaughters were the result of white supremacy and that white Americans are the biggest threat facing the US. That interpretation was reached, in the case of the Boulder shooting, on the slimmest of evidence, and in the case of the Atlanta shooting, in the face of contradictory facts.

After the Boulder supermarket attacks, social media lit up with gloating pronouncements that the shooter was a violent white male and part of what Vice President Kamala Harris’s niece declared (in a since-deleted tweet) to be the “greatest terrorist threat to our country.” (Video of the handcuffed shooter being led away by the police appeared to show a white male.) Now that the shooter’s identity has been revealed as Syrian-American and his tirades against the “Islamophobia industry” unearthed, that line of thought has been quietly retired and replaced with the stand-by Democratic response to mass shootings—demands for gun control.

But the false narrative about the Atlanta spa shootings still has legs. It represents a double lie—first, that the massacre was the product of Trump-inspired xenophobic hatred, and second, that whites are the biggest perpetrators of violence against Asians. The most striking aspect of these untruths is the fact that they were fabricated in plain sight and in open defiance of reality...

 [Robert Aaron] Long told the police that he had targeted the three Atlanta spas to purge himself of his lust and his addiction to pornography. This explanation is wholly credible. All three establishments have been investigated for prostitution, and Long had frequented at least two of them. Customer reviews of the massage parlors attest to their provision of sexual services. Long has said nothing about Asian responsibility for the coronavirus. Indeed, if he were upset by a supposed connection between Asians and the pandemic, one would expect him to have avoided close contact with Asians. By all accounts, Long was tormented by an inability to control his sexual thoughts and behavior, which he believed to be a violation of his Christian faith. He also said nothing about hatred of Asians... Long intended to target a business in Florida next that made pornography, he told police. The employees there were unlikely to be Asian.

The uncontradicted evidence for Long’s motivation and the absence of evidence for a white supremacist impulse were no impediment to the narrative. Anyone who doubted that narrative was complicit in white supremacy. Reuters was reprimanded on social media for the headline: “Sex addiction, not racial hatred, may have driven suspect in Georgia spa shootings.” The news organization’s revised attempt—“Motive in Georgia spa shootings uncertain, but Asian-Americans fearful”—earned it no absolution. “We don’t let mass casualty shooters diagnose themselves,” sniffed a terrorism expert at Georgia State University. Needless to say, had Long told the police that he was seeking revenge on Asians for COVID, his self-diagnosis would have been taken as definitive proof.

Both Harris and Biden obliquely referred to the question of motive while dismissing its relevance... 

If the fact that 75 percent of Long’s victims were Asian turns the shootings into an anti-Asian hate crime, then the fact that 100 percent of Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa’s victims in Boulder were white should turn that shooting into an anti-white hate crime...

Nowhere was the compulsion to buttress the meme about white supremacist violence clearer than in the treatment of the actual street violence that Asians have long suffered...

In March 2020, four teenage girls assaulted a 51-year-old woman on a bus in the Bronx, hitting her with an umbrella and accusing her of spreading the coronavirus. Here was a more promising story of Trump-inspired COVID xenophobia, if only the girls had been a different race.

In fact, the suspects in all of these cases were black; the news reports rarely mentioned that detail. Had the suspects been white, their race would have led each news report, as it did for Robert Aaron Long. A former member of the Oakland police department’s robbery undercover suppression team tells me that this racial pattern of attack and its lack of coverage is longstanding. No one cares about Asian robbery victims, he says, “We used to follow around elderly Asians, waiting for the bad guys to start circling. This has been one of my long-term frustrations. They are pretending to care now but ironically blaming it on white supremacy”—even though the suspects in Asian robbery attacks are almost exclusively, in this cop’s experience, black.

The New York Police Department compiles the most extensive data on hate crimes in the country. These data confirm the Oakland officer’s observation. A black New Yorker is over six times as likely to commit a hate crime against an Asian as a white New Yorker...

Inner-city animus against Asian small business owners is also longstanding, as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the 1990 Big Apple grocery boycott in New York City recall. The predominantly black character of the attacks on elderly Asians may be euphemistically acknowledged in only one context: disparate impact. Racial justice advocates oppose a law enforcement response to those attacks because, the New York Times explained, going to the police would have a disparate impact on “Black and Latino communities.” Actors Daniel Kim and Daniel Wu had offered a $25,000 reward to anyone who helped find the assailant in the January 31st assault on the 91-year-old man and two other Asians in Oakland. Teen Vogue contributor Kim Tran criticized them both for failing to understand “why it’s problematic to offer 25k for information about a Black man in Oakland.” In response to a polite objection, she added: “this looks a lot like a bounty on a Black person funded by Asian American celebrities.” According to Time magazine, the reward underscored the problem of how to “tackle anti-Asian violence without relying on law enforcement institutions that have historically targeted Black and brown communities.” Neither Time nor Kim Tran explicitly said that anti-Asian violence is predominantly black—we are left to infer that for ourselves.

In disparate impact analysis, it is the government response to antisocial behavior that is the problem, not the behavior itself. A supervising attorney with the Racial Justice Unit at Legal Aid in New York City told the New York Times: “I’ve rarely seen people who are more socially privileged be the ones accused of hate crimes. Often what you end up seeing is people of color being accused of hate crimes.” Maybe that is because those are the people disproportionately committing hate crimes. But that possibility must not be granted. Biden chastised the country for its silence about anti-Asian violence. The reason for that silence, however, is that blacks are the primary drivers of this violence. Acknowledging these assaults only became acceptable when there was a white perpetrator, even if his motive did not fit the story being told.

Two other strategies have emerged for ducking the reality of anti-Asian violence. The first of these is a retreat into denial. Claire Jean Kim, a professor of political science and Asian American studies at the University of California, Irvine, told Slate that she was asked by Asian reporters if black people are going after Asians. Those reporters had apparently seen the videos. Kim pushed back against what is patently obvious. “I kept asking them, What’s the evidence? Are there other videos? There was a rush to judgment about these cases all being about Black people going after Asians, and when you think about the tendency in American society to criminalize Black people, it’s a problem to reach for that frame and apply it before the evidence warrants it.” [emphasis in original] A COVID-xenophobic frame was applied to Long before the evidence warranted it, but never mind.

The second strategy is simply to change the subject. In a Los Angeles Times column, Erika D. Smith notes that activists are “blaming white supremacy, systemic racism and the societal constructs that support them” for “racially motivated crimes,” rather than “focusing on individual perpetrators and demanding more policing.” In her Slate interview, Claire Jean Kim complained that focusing on the “Asian-Black thing” takes “attention away from the larger structures of power in which they’re embedded.” A racial justice educator, Bianca Mabute-Louie, warned about focusing on interracial (i.e., black-Asian) conflict, since doing so would deflect from recognizing that “racism is a result of white supremacy,” as Time put it. It turns out that white supremacy has been bashing frail Asians over the head, not individual criminals.

White supremacy is also apparently getting whites beaten up. Blacks commit 88 percent of all interracial violence between whites and blacks, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Yet on March 22nd, 2021, CNN ran a special entitled “Afraid: Fear in America’s Communities of Color,” as if whites were putting US minorities at risk. The move to blame white supremacy for black-perpetrated attacks on Asians results in a strange linguistic divide. Press reports refer to activists condemning “anti-Asian racism” and fighting anti-Asian “hate.” The intended referent in such observations is whites. But the actual referent is blacks.

The lie about white supremacist violence is not innocuous. It forms the basis of the Biden administration’s policy in national security and in a host of domestic welfare programs. It is the pretext for Big Tech and Big Media’s silencing of speech. And the shamelessness with which that lie is constructed grows more brazen by the day. It must be fought with facts before it irrevocably alters our culture."