"Take the Win"

Now that it might have discovered that its one-word deterrence has yet again failed, the Biden foreign policy team has lit on a new slogan, this time three words-- “Take the win.” At least they are sticking with monosyllabic words. 

You have to wonder how it could happen that these seasoned foreign policy hands to confuse infantile inanities with policy.

The Biden team was addressing itself to the Israeli war cabinet, working now on how best to respond to the Iranian drone and missile attack of last weekend. It was telling them to do nothing in response to the Iranian attack. It was counseling restraint. 

In reality, Israel had succeeded in shooting down the incoming missiles, with some help from its friends, but that does not constitute a victory. 

“Take the win” reminds one of the Vietnam War, when some anti-warriors recommended that we declare victory and go home. Strangely, they seemed incapable of differentiating between saying you win and actually winning.

For Israel, and perhaps even for us, the question is deterrence. To deter an adversary, you have to make them pay a price for their first attack and you have to show them that the price is very high indeed.

Surely, you do not want to assert that your defenses will always succeed.

Consider this. The Iranians attacked Israel in order to save face. They had seen their Syrian consulate incinerated and had lost some of their most important commanding officers. 

They ignored the simple fact that the Israeli attack on Syria officers was retaliation for October 7. Unfortunately, it was not sufficiently costly for Iran. They were undeterred.

Iran financed and approved of the October 7 attack on Israel. And yet, when Israel attacked Gaza, Iran could do nothing to defend its proxy forces. Iran had not counted on an Israeli counterattack that would cripple Hamas and turn Gaza into rubble.

Perhaps that will be sufficient deterrence. If not, the solution, as the Israelis have suggested, lies in destroying Hamas-- which is beyond deterrence.

Last Saturday Iranian subjects were cheering the attack on Israel, for a simple reason. For once their country seemed to be asserting itself. It was saving face, so to speak.

And yet, even if the attack had succeeded, it would have provided a false sense of price. You do not gain pride from destroying what others have built. You only gain pride from building something yourself.

That is the overarching lesson from the experience of Israel. That is the point that sticks in the terrorist craw.

As you know, Iran has hegemonic ambitions. It supports proxy forces throughout the region and seeks to damage its opponents, first Israel, second America, third certain Arab states. 

While the Trump administration, with the Abraham Accords, began establishing a counterforce to Iran, the feckless Biden administration decided that it wanted to return to the Iranian nuclear deal. It took the proxy Houthis off the terrorist list and chose to absorb countless attacks by other pixies on American outposts in the region. 

Over a hundred unanswered attacks on Americans in the region sends a message-- and that message is not: take the win.

And yet, if Israel fails to react to the Iranian aggression, why would Iran not consider that a sign of its own victory? It would have shown Israel to be a paper tiger. The Jewish nation needs now to make Iran pay a price for its bluster and its flagrant attack. It needs to expose Iran as a weak regional bully.

Walter Russell Mead explains this aspect:

What the president appears not yet to understand is that Iran has become so powerful, and America’s reputation as a source of sound policy and reliable support so weak, that only resolute American backing of our allies can turn the tide.

In many ways the worst impression Israel could give would be to appear to be tools of the feckless Biden foreign policy team. If it did so, it would lose face.

Israel needs also to show itself to be a stalwart ally of the Arab nations with whom it signed the Abraham Accords. 

From an Arab point of view, there are two things that make Israel valuable at a time of diminished confidence in the U.S. First, Israel sees the common fight against Iran as part of its own fight for survival. It will be a reliable ally because it has no choice. Second, Israel offers the mix of strength and relentlessness without which Iran cannot be stopped. At a time when liberal opinion in the U.S. was elegantly wringing its hands about Israeli ruthlessness in Gaza destroying any possibility of Arab-Israeli cooperation, Jordan and Saudi Arabia leapt to Israel’s defense against the Iranian attacks. The fastest way for Israel to lose friends in the Middle East would be to start thinking like American liberal foreign-policy hands.

To be more precise, the fastest way for Israel to lose friends in the Middle East would be to appear to be taking orders from the Biden administration. Thus, it is honor bound to reject the counsel of restraint and to make Iran pay a severe price for attacking it.

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Wednesday Potpourri

First, while our intelligentsia is agonizing over misinformation it has largely failed to see that the Biden administration has mismanaged foreign policy, especially in the Middle East.

It takes a special level of stupidity to think that the word “Don’t” constitutes a policy or especially a deterrent.

And yet, Biden keeps mouthing this word, while seeing that no one, from Vladimir Putin to the ayatollahs in Iran, takes him seriously.

In Martin Gurri’s words:

So we said "Don't" to the Iranians and they did. So we said we stand with Israel but we also said we condemn Israel. So we called the ruling prince in Saudi Arabia a "pariah" the we begged him for more oil production. Is there a plan anywhere in here?

On the Powerline blog, Scott Johnson had this to say:

Biden and his team have forfeited every element of deterrence against the Iranians. Rather, they have showered the mullahs with money and love while they have financed and accommodated the regime’s activities. They have communicated nothing but fear of the regime. The Biden administration seems not to understand that the regime cannot be appeased.

Now Biden seeks to hedge the Israelis in from responding to the massive Iranian attack. The attack, by the way, targeted Jerusalem among other areas throughout Israel. The Dome of the Rock escaped unscathed thanks to air defenses, but destroying an Islamic holy site and killing Muslims are A-Okay in pursuit of the genocide of the Jewish people. They have their priorities in order.

Second, while the Biden administration helped the Israeli military defend against the Iranian attacks, the truth is, the administration policy, consisting in constantly carping about Israeli military tactics, encouraged said attacks.

And, constantly criticizing Israel while forgetting about the atrocities committed by Hamas, must have given the Iranians the wrong ideas.

Third, after sending its military to help the Israelis, the Biden administration, notably speaking out of both sides of its mouth, immediately told Israel that it would not support a counterattack.

By now, however, the Israelis no longer take the Biden administration’s word very seriously.

It is worth noting a point that everyone else has been noting, namely, that Israel is the only country that is constantly being told to restrain itself, and to accept being attacked violently.

Fourth, one cannot fail to remark that the governments of Jordan and Saudi Arabia contributed to the Israeli effort. One understands that they both have publicly supported the Palestinian people, but, as I have had occasion to remark, the Saudis in particular have no affection for Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Fifth, meanwhile in Bidenland, Morgan Ortagus reminds us that Biden had been doing his best to revive the Iran nuclear deal, through a policy of appeasement. In her words:

Reminder: Biden allowed the UN sanctions on Iran's drones and ballistic missiles to expire less than six months ago. The very same drones and missiles en route to Israel right now.

Sixth, Richard Grenell reminds the world of what it all looked like before Biden took office.

In his words:

Donald Trump had Iran broke. Joe Biden gave the Iran Regime hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief, credit and cash. Iran is now attacking Israel with Joe Biden’s money.

Seventh, Victor Davis Hanson has also taken the measure of Biden’s foreign policy mismanagement. Here are some of the points he sees as contributing to the mess in the Middle East:

On the eve of the October 7 massacres, National Security Advisor bragged in an essay that his Mideast portfolio was “quieter than it has been for decades”.  Now we are on the verge of a multifront Middle East war. How did Joe Biden inherit a decades-long regional calm and turn it into a precursor to a gargantuan war?

1. Talk loudly and carry a twig. Issue hollow Obama-like “redlines” or serial Biden threats to aggressive enemies like the vapid “Don’t!” Witness a U.S. President who works a 3-day week, struggles to read a teleprompter, and shouts more at conservative Americans than at America’s enemies.

2. Destroy hard-won deterrence. Abruptly pull out of Afghanistan. Abandon $50 billion in weapons to terrorists. Abandon a new $1 billion embassy. Abandon a $300 refitted air base. Abandon thousands of NATO allies, thousands of U.S. contractors, and thousands of Afghan allies. Lose 13 Marines in a horrific scramble to get out, while killing collateral Afghan civilians in a supposedly “righteous strike”. Call the entire American humiliation an impressive withdrawal.

5. Coddle terrorist Iran. Seem eager to resume the Iran Deal. Lift sanctions. Allow $100 billion in oil profits to flow into Iranian coffers. Restore aid to the terrorist Palestinian authority and Hamas. Ignore Hezbollah’s terrorism. Remove the terrorist designation of the Houthis. Mostly ignore over 120 Iranian attacks on American installations. Transfer suspended funds to Iran at the rate of $1.2 billion for each American hostage it took.

6. Pressure Israel not to destroy Hamas—and not to reply to missile and drone attacks on the Israeli homeland. Threaten to cut off military aid to the only democratic government and longest U.S. ally in the Middle East should it finish off Hamas. Signal the Middle East that there is growing distance between

Israel and America. Try to subvert if not overthrow the elected government of Israel. Transfer U.S. weapons stocks from Israel to Ukraine. Ignore thousands of missiles launched by Hamas and Hezbollah, and 100,000 Israelis internally displaced from their homes.

7. Run up the U.S deficit by $1 trillion every 100 days through reckless spending for entitlements, massive green subsidies, and DEI initiatives—while neglecting American shortages of munition stocks, arms, ships, and planes.

8. Recalibrate the U.S. military by substituting DEI criteria for past meritocracy. Accuse white males of being suspect white supremacists, then investigate them, then find no such evidence—and then suffer a shortage of a record 41,000 recruits. 

Lose the confidence of the American people in the military, so that less than half the population polls high confidence in the armed forces. Render the Uniform Code of Military Justice a mere construct.

Eighth, the Jerusalem Post reports that Iran had informed Turkey of the pending attack on Israel and that Turkey informed the United States. 

Iran informed Turkey in advance of its planned operation against Israel, a Turkish diplomatic source told Reuters on Sunday, adding that the US conveyed to Iran via Ankara that its operation must be "within certain limits."

Obviously, this has been strenuously denied. I report; you decide.

Ninth, your tax dollars at work, supporting National Public Radio. As you know, one Uri Berliner, a longtime editor at NPR has denounced the station for having become a left wing propaganda machine.

To which NPR President Katherine Maher took serious exception. It turns out that Maher is a pathetic flake herself. Being white and blond she has still bought into all the anti-white supremacy noise:

I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive. But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.

Evidently, NPR must be defunded. It has every right to hire a certifiable imbecile as President, but there is no reason for the taxpayers to foot the bill. 

Late news has it that Uri Berliner has been suspended from the network without pay for a few days. If he does not toe the line, he risks being fired.

Tenth, remember the good old days when armies of overpaid consultants declared that remote work was the future.

I have to give myself some credit for having pointed out that this  fairy tale was destined to fail. Now, the New York Post reports on the most recent study, from the University of California, at Berkeley. It tells us that working remotely is career suicide:

A new study co-authored by Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, highlights its repercussions on fleeing professionals. Moretti’s research reveals that leaving major cities can cripple career prospects….

Moretti’s findings challenge the notion that remote work heralded an era of geographic flexibility in living and working, stressing the enduring importance of urban hubs in career advancement.

“The big takeaway is that market size matters,” Moretti told Insider. “It’s clear that larger markets improve the quality of the match.”

The pandemic-induced migration might have lured many with promises of lower costs and spacious homes, but it came at a cost. Living in industry hubs fosters professional networks and serendipitous knowledge exchanges, fueling innovation and productivity.

Eleventh, as the DEI mania recedes another university-- this time Harvard-- is returning to merit, that is, to standardized tests:

Harvard University announced last Thursday that it would be reversing its “standardized testing-optional” policy for applicants to the Class of 2029. This change in course — Harvard dropped the SAT/ACT requirement for applicants four years ago — comes on the heels of announcements by fellow Ivy League schools Dartmouth and Yale in February that they would be doing the same.

  

… it represents a setback for the continuing effort by left-wing academics to redirect higher education away from the pursuit of excellence and toward the pursuit of an ideological agenda.

Twelfth, a word from New York City politician, Maud Maron, regarding the way illegal migrants are displacing American citizens.

It is not very large, as these matters go, but it is certainly relevant:

Yesterday my eldest son’s soccer team could not play one of their scheduled games because migrants refused to leave the field the league had permits for, even after the cops came and told them they needed to leave. Finally the ref said it was too late to start the game and left. Two teams of high school boys, in uniform, with their coaches present. and a valid permit, could not play a soccer match in NYC because our city has become lawless. Not the biggest issue or problem, but so ugly and so diminishing to the quality of life.

I am happy to inform you that I now have some free consulting hours in my coaching practice. If you are interested, contact me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.

Getting Along

As you may recall, I have been writing a book called Can’t We All Just Get Along. The phrase dates to the 1992 Los Angeles race riots. It was pronounced by one Rodney King. It was brilliant then. It is still brilliant.

Just don’t tell the grandees of the publishing world, many of whom seem to consider it a trivial matter. That means, my manuscript is still looking for a publisher.

Publishers seem to believe that the concept is old school. And besides, it is not sufficiently psychodramatic for their unsophisticated tastes. Of course, that is the point, alas.

So, now Linda Greenhouse is making the case for my book. I am very grateful even if I am confident that she does not know that the manuscript exists. Greenhouse promotes my thesis in a backhanded way, by writing an essay for the New York Times wherein she expresses her jejune view that Supreme Court justices do not need to get along. 

I am hardly qualified to comment on the Greenhouse view of the court system, but her efforts to disparage getting along expose her as a borderline fanatic, someone who eschews adult behavior and insists on getting her way. If she does not get her way, she will trash you in the pages of the New York Times.

When people do not get along their lives are filled with permanent psychodrama, they take everything personally and hold grudges and resentments. It makes for a miserable life and it also makes for a barely functioning court system. 

Fair enough, Greenhouse obviously does not understand this, but, if that is the case she should not be pontificating in the pages of the New York Times.

In short, Rodney King was trying to help us not to end up as tired old scolds, like Linda Greenhouse. If that doesn’t motivate you, nothing will.

To give her her due, Greenhouse reports on what the justices themselves have been saying. You might imagine that the justices are onto something when they tell us that they all get along, but Greenhouse does not get it:

“When we disagree, our pens are sharp, but on a personal level, we never translate that into our relationship with one another,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor told an audience at the National Governors Association conference in February. “We don’t raise our voices, no matter how hot-button the case is,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett said at the civics forum at George Washington University in March.

The retired justice Stephen Breyer, on the talk circuit for his new book on constitutional interpretation, has been making the same point. In a guest essay in The Times this month, he observed that “justices who do not always agree on legal results nonetheless agree to go to hockey games or play golf together.” He added: “The members of the court can and do get along well personally. That matters.”

So, justices from the left and the right agree on the importance of getting along. Apparently, Greenhouse finds it all rather offensive, because she thinks-- or at least pretends to think-- that getting along would compromise the court’s work. It is a bizarre and mindless notion, but what were you expecting?

It may be a bit of each of these or none of them, but the inventory itself suggests that what matters is what the court does or doesn’t do: that the legacy of the Roberts court will reside in the pages of United States Reports, the official compilation of Supreme Court decisions, and not in the justices’ datebooks. What counts is not how the justices treat one another but how they treat the claims of those who come before them.

So, as we watch Linda Greenhouse descend into incoherence, it seems not to have crossed her mini-mind that the one does not preclude the other. Getting along, not turning legal matters into psychodrama, not turning philosophical differences into personal animus, is the necessary precondition for objective jurisprudence.

In truth, the justices are trying to set an example of good behavior, of congeniality and cordiality in a country that seems wedded to constant psychodrama and fanatical gestures. 

As though she is not sufficiently confused and confusing, Greenhouse declares that collegiality is not the same as getting along. And yet, it certainly is is. 

“Collegial” in that usage is a term of art. It doesn’t mean that the judges necessarily get along. It means that these multimember courts act as collectives, when a majority coalesces. In a forthcoming memoir, “Vision,” Judge David Tatel, who recently retired from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, offers as good a definition of judicial collegiality as I have seen. “Judicial collegiality,” he writes, “has nothing to do with singing holiday songs, having lunch or attending basketball games together. It has everything to do with respecting each other, listening to each other and sometimes even changing our minds.”

Evidently, Judge Tatel does not understand the issue any better than Greenhouse does. Misery loves company, but so does ignorance.

Respecting each other, listening to each other and changing minds involves getting along. The precondition for such adult civil conversation is uniform manners. Because that is one thing that it means to get along.

It’s about group cohesion and social harmony. If you sit down to dinner and everyone is practicing different table manners, group cohesion does not exist. Then it becomes more important for people to cohere by indulging in groupthink, by thinking the same thoughts and believing the same beliefs.

If a group of people speak the same language and practice the same table manners, they can more easily disagree, without their disagreements threatening group cohesion. 

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Escape from Therapy

In her new book on Bad Therapy Abigail Shrier rips back the curtain on therapy practice. I would be remiss if I did not remark that I have been doing the same thing on my blog, Had Enough Therapy? for around sixteen years. I have also been fighting the good fight on my Substack.

Now, Shrier had a conversation with Nick Gillespie on the Reason site. In it she makes a number of salient and compelling points. They are worth your attention.

The first point is intended as a counterpoint to the current belief, presented by Jonathan Haidt,  that the problem with young people today is social media. To which Shrier remarks that young children, children under eight, have serious mental health issues, but do not have access to social media or smartphones. 

So in 2016, one in six kids between the ages of 2 and 8, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), already had a mental health or behavioral diagnosis. Those kids weren't on social media. They didn't have smartphones, certainly not in 2016. They don't have them today. So we know that this diagnosis has been exploding. And also mental health treatment has gone in one direction. So, nearly 40 percent of the rising generation has been to see a therapist already. And I'm not the only one to have noticed this—a team of researchers did a year ago and called this the treatment prevalence paradox. 

Shrier points out that, contrary to what happens with medical treatment, where treatment causes a reduction in illness, the prevalence of mental health treatment seems to correlate with an increase in mental illness. Is therapy the solution or the problem?

What they were noticing is that with treatment of illness, the more treatment there is, the more the point prevalence rate of a disorder should go down. We saw this with breast cancer treatment and other things. The incidence of death from breast cancer went down with more pervasive treatment. Here, there's been vast expansion of treatment and the rates of depression and anxiety have only gone up.

We have made the vagaries and emotional vicissitudes of life into mental illness. The point is well taken. Shrier might also have remarked that we have been in the business of producing armies of therapists, and as with other academic manias, the more therapists we produce the more we feel compelled to keep them working.

We're taking healthy kids who are a little bummed out, a little anxious, and we're loading them with intervention, as you say, much of it through school, through social-emotional learning and all the therapeutic techniques now going on in school. And so all these kids face is risk. 

If you thought that DEI was bad, take a look at the prevalence of counseling in today’s school systems.

And what I want people to know is that when a school counseling staff expands in your high school, it operates a lot like the [diversity, equity, and inclusion] staff of a university. It starts to take over everything. All of a sudden, the mental health staff is overseeing the entire curriculum. And that's what we're seeing.

The problem is, what's going on today in schools is effectively group therapy—they don't call it that—social-emotional learning where the kids sit around sharing their pain and sharing their trauma. You're very likely in that process to introduce incorrect memories or exaggerate kids' memories of a past pain.

What have we done? We have turned children into self-absorbed hypochondriacs.

We've created a generation of emotional hypochondriacs who are so focused on their emotional pain, so convinced of their trauma that it's debilitating them. And that's not to say that their pain isn't real. But as I learned when I talk to experts in hypochondriasis, the hyper-focus on real pain magnifies it. And I think that's what they're doing.

We have manipulated minds to turn everyone into trauma victims.

 Meaning, if an adult thought that what happened to him as a kid constituted trauma, he was more likely to suffer as an adult than a child who actually had suffered but didn't think of it as trauma. And here's the thing: Many of the adults who believed they had been traumatized as kids and so were suffering as adults, when they went back and looked, there was no record of actual trauma.

It turns out, if we come to believe we were traumatized as children and that the body keeps the score—that somehow, mysteriously, we have these memories stored outside our central nervous system, which has been disproven—we're a lot more likely to manifest symptoms than if we just think, "Yeah, I went through a hard time," and are able to surround ourselves with family, with friends, if we exercise, if we are active in the world, if we contribute to others. We tend to do really well in life with those things. In fact, the story of humanity is one of profound resilience in the face of what we think of as trauma.

I will mention, as I have done previously, that the notion of trauma being remembered, not in the mind, but in the body, dates to the Victorian era where it was called conversion hysteria.

Apparently, one cause of the problem was the wave of divorce and the number of children brought up in broken homes. Rather than stay married, we prefer to divorce and send the children off into therapy.

We had the high watermark of divorce in America when I was young, and people were put in therapy, or they felt like they needed therapy, because they went through something hard, like their parents splitting up. And as they entered adulthood, they entered therapy. They went into therapy and they thought it was beneficial. And they thought, my parents weren't there for me in various ways. I remember the pain I went through and also my therapist really encouraged me to see my parents' failings. 

Now Shrier tries to bring back the notion of parental authority. You know that the word authority has become a bad word, especially when it is associated with authoritarian government. And yet, what happens when parents concede authority over their children to an army of therapists.

One needs also to emphasize the role of Yale Law Professor, one Amy Chua, aka the Tiger Mother, who had no problem exercising authority over her daughters and who was wildly excoriated as a bad mother for doing so.

Right now, all disciplinary problems are treated as a mental health problem. And the kids get talk therapy and no discipline. That makes us put kids who are good kids really in danger of violence from other kids who really should be expelled. And we're seeing that. We're seeing kids brutalized in school. Since [former President Barack] Obama issued his "Dear Colleague" letter, they're not allowed to expel a disproportionate number of minority students. So instead of doing that, they do these therapeutic interventions. They don't work. We're seeing chaos in schools. We need to bring back order and shrink the mental health staff so that they can only treat the kids who actually need it, not everyone.

You may believe-- I dare you to try not to believe-- that liberal democracy is the greatest way to construct a government. But, do you believe that childrearing should be more democratic and less authoritarian. 

In many ways, that is what we have been doing. Funnily enough, this is what happened in China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. They empowered children and the children ran wild. Are you surprised that China, when it came time to choose between authoritarian capitalism and liberal democracy, opted for the former.

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Julie Burchill on Transmania

Nothing quite like a little Julie Burchill with your morning coffee. As you might know Burchill is a famous British writer, someone who has given special meaning to being slightly off kilter. She has shown that if you need to be somewhat strange to write somewhat strange.

An interesting thought, but for another day.

Whatever the reason, Burchill is an excellent writer. Reading good writing contributes to your brain health. If you don’t believe me, try it.

Anyway, Burchill writes mostly about specifically British topics, so she is not very well known here. Yet, she is always fun to read and always writes very, very well. So, consider it a public service to bring her latest to your attention. 

The topic is transmania. In particular, she addresses the fallout from a new report, noted in these pages, about transgenderism, authored by one Dr. Hilary Cass. For the record, Cass is the head of the Royal College of Pediatric Medicine. She spent four years working on her report.

Thanks to the Cass Report, failing to follow sexist stereotypes (which decree that girls play with dolls and boys play with themselves) will no longer get you marched off to the sex-correction clinic. You’ll no longer be stuffed like a five-bird roast with the best that Big Pharma can tout and later shuttled off to the abattoir to have your perfectly healthy sexual organs hacked off. For the Great Trans Con has been bust as wide open as the space between India Willoughby’s ears.

Burchill continues to take the measure of the trans liberation movement. Her clear analysis suggests that more than a few of the people who embraced this madness were not doing much thinking, assuming that they knew how to think.

Was ever a ‘liberation’ movement ever so risible from the start? Did any other allegedly oppressed group’s bid for equality include seeking to rob another oppressed group of their rights? Did any other oppressed group claim their freedom by dressing up as another oppressed group? And, crucially, did any allegedly oppressed group ever carry out such a comprehensive and conclusive capture of the most conservative and capitalist corporations and institutions? No, they didn’t – because previously, oppressed groups weren’t mostly composed of white middle-class men, as the trans-lobby are.

As you know, trans activists seem especially prone to commit violent acts against those who refuse to accept their delusional beliefs as real:

The threats of violence, rape and death while calling women who sought to preserve women’s spaces the hateful ones. The snitching to the police – such rebels! – who reacted true to form by siding with the blokes and arresting women for being impolite to men, joined by the judges who made raped women call their attackers ‘she’ out of ‘respect’. They stand revealed as a bunch of liars, fantasists and bullies, the whole rotten lot of them.

The activists should now apologize for their own behavior, for fostering child mutilation and for persecuting those adults who refused to sign on to their delusions.

For weary, dreary years they’ve stamped their huge feet and demanded that we apologise for hurting their feelings; now we want them to apologise primarily for cheerleading the mutilation of children and secondarily for damaging the lives of the adults who sought to stand in their way.

The next point is so obvious that even I have noticed it. Many of those who are being induced into thinking they are transgendered are really homosexuals.

The Cass Report marks a milestone for many, most of all for the children of the future who will now grow up into happy homosexuals with un-mutilated bodies. 

Of course, the victor in this debate has been J. K. Rowling, chastised and vilified for refusing to accede to what became the conventional wisdom, now shown by the Cass Report, to have been right all along:

But for JKR-watchers, there’s a minor milestone here too. I don’t generally believe in ‘journeys’, unless you actually book a ticket at some point, but Rowling’s certainly been on one. Starting off as a prissy modern lefty – complete with pro-Labour and anti-Brexit knee-jerks – she has become a practitioner of real, old-fashioned communitarianism, driven by generosity and compassion. Hence her suggestion that the apologies be distributed elsewhere. It’s the difference between real progressive politics – people coming together to work for the common good – and the politics of envy and identity, with every interest group screaming ‘ME, ME, ME!’ 

Burchill may or may not have been thinking of Dylan Mulvaney, who distinguished himself for nearly destroying the most popular beer in America, but her remark rings true.

Many talentless trans people have benefited during the past decade of lunacy, picking up everything from book deals to modelling contracts to sporting trophies as rewards from the male establishment for giving uppity women a drubbing. That’s going to finish now, too. Now they’ll be the ‘dinosaurs’ – as David Lammy so despicably dismissed feminists who cared about children being butchered.

Transmania has not merely been homophobia, it has also been institutionalized misogyny:

Whatever the reason, the hellish 1984-like dystopia we’ve been living through – where we’ve been required to lie that a penis metaphorically held up in court is female – is rapidly crumbling. You might want to slap on the extra-waterproof mascara, all you woman-facers and female-appropriators – because your days as lady-cocks of the walk are numbered.

Amen.

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Saturday Miscellany

 First, Tucker Carlson had a bad day. He chose to wade into the propaganda war between Israel and Hamas, on the side of Palestinian terrorists. He chose to denounce Israel for the way it was treating its Christian citizens.

In his words:

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.

To that Dumisani Washington and Karys Rhea responded on Tablet:

For one, this Lutheran pastor doesn’t even live in Israel. That’s right. Instead of speaking to one of the 180,000 Christian Israelis, Tucker chose to interview someone who lives under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority in Area A of the West Bank, a place where priests live in fear and toe the party line about Israel’s “occupation” in order to protect their churches. By way of example, in 2002, Palestinian militants holed up in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and forced civilians and clergymen to remain in the church with them at gunpoint, setting off a 39-day siege of the church that featured firefights with the IDF. Greek Orthodox priests later relayed how the terrorists seized church stockpiles of food and “ate like greedy monsters” until the food ran out while the civilians survived on a meager diet. Catholic priests meanwhile said that the Palestinian gunmen tore up Bibles for toilet paper and stole valuable sacramental objects. Civilians were threatened that they would be “dealt with later” if they attempted to leave.

Pastor Munther Isaac is a fan of these bestial thugs, and not some good faith interlocutor interested in raising awareness about the plight of Christians. He is a malicious agitator who publicly lauded the Oct. 7 massacre one day after it occurred, waxing poetic about “the strength of the Palestinian man who challenged his besiegement.” He is also a critic of Western democracies that don’t place social justice and racially centered values as their most cherished articles of faith, and a supporter of the politicized theology of the Kairos Palestine document, which asserts that occupation is a “sin against God” and that true lovers of Christ would stand in solidarity with Palestinians. 

With Tucker’s disdain of the pastor’s fellow travelers on the woke American-left, Pastor Isaac seems a strange bedfellow to represent the views of Christians in Israel. Is this unrepresentative choice a personal reflection of Tucker’s affinities? Is he expressing his own antisemitic sympathies by taking cover beneath the morally depraved views of the pastor?

The real story to be told here is the demographics. Christians in Bethlehem, the town where Jesus was born, represented more than 80% of the population when the territory was controlled by Israel. Since the Palestine Liberation Organization took over in late 1995, it is now over 80% Muslim. The Christian population of the West Bank and Gaza has plummeted to roughly 1%. This is in keeping with the larger trend in the region, where Christian communities have largely been driven out and disappeared after two millennia of faithful presence.

I cannot imagine what Tucker Carlson was thinking. I like to think that he was duped or was simply ignorant, but seriously….

Second, on the same topic a Christian named Shadi Kahlloul living in Israel wrote this:

I am Native Christian living in Israel who speaks the language of Jesus Christ. Most of us 180k Christian Israelis prefer to live under Israel freely rather than under a Palestinian Islamic Authority regime controlling Bethlehem. Israel gives us freedom while living under Arabs has been genocidal for Christians all across the Middle East. Tucker, I invite you to visit our Aramaic Christian Galilee center. Don't be deceived by collaborators of the Satan.

Third, in the meantime, on the Gaza front, the Biden administration is obsessed with feeding the people of Gaza. If said people are starving perhaps some of the blame lies with their Hamas overlords.

Consider this, from Miha Schwartzenberg:

The world is sending food to Gaza,as in hundreds of trucks daily.Hamas takes over everything and sells it at extreme prices-did I mention the International Aid is for free ? Wait, there is more -Hamas is throwing away food,instead of giving it to people.Because they have enough for themselves,but they need the story to impress the fools about the drama of the population…

Tell me you find this surprising.

Fourth, yesterday British Dr. Hillary Cass released a report about transmania, that is, gender denying care.

Among her observations:

There are few other areas of healthcare where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behavior.

This must stop.

Fifth, from the Twitter account of Libs of TikTok, some news that has been scrupulously ignored by the media:

Did you even know that there was a bombing at the Republican Attorney General’s Office in Alabama? They arrested and charged an unhinged trans nonbinary leftist antifa activist for it. This was politically motivated terrorism. This should be the biggest news story right now.

Sixth, the silence was deafening. Michigan Governer Gretchen Whitmer, the Queen of Botox, was faced with a challenge. She failed it.

Robert Spencer reports:

If a group of people in America get together and scream “Death to America,” officials ought to be lining up to condemn them, and there should be investigations and, if non-citizens are involved, deportations. We live, however, in Old Joe Biden’s America, in which the America-hating left is the dominant cultural force, and so some high-profile politicians have been notably wary about condemning calls for the destruction of the nation they have vowed to protect and defend.

In Dearborn, however, as a pro-Hamas activist named Tarek Bazzi denounced the United States as “one of the rottenest countries that has ever existed on this earth,” some of the people in the crowd screamed “al-mawt li Amrika,” that is, “Death to America.” As they did so, Bazzi stood with head bowed, waiting for them to go silent so that he could resume speaking. He gave no hint of disapproval of the chants.

Aside from Gretchen Whitmer, other Michigan politicians, when asked for comment about the anti-Americanism, refused to respond:

Reps. Debbie Dingell, Haley Stevens, Debbie Stabenow, Gary Peters and (what did you expect?) Rashida Tlaib “refused to share their stance on the matter.” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer likewise “did not respond to a request for comment.”

Seventh, now that women are no longer tools of the patriarchy and that feminism has liberated female sexuality, the latest trend among young people is-- sexual strangulation. Or choking during sex-- and do not confuse this with deep throat.

Say what? 

Peggy Orenstein has written a long, detailed study for the New York Times. Not a minute too soon. She connects the trend toward sexual strangulation with women’s liberation.

… at a time when women’s social, economic, educational and political power are in ascent (even if some of those rights may be in jeopardy), when #MeToo has made progress against harassment and assault, there has been the popularization of a sex act that can damage our brains, impair intellectual functioning, undermine mental health, even kill us.

I will not speculate on the relationship between these two, but shouldn’t young women find a different way to express their feminine sexuality. And would it not be better if they were not wedded to the psycho notion that if they want to do it they should do it. The alternative is-- whether they should do it.

How prevalent is this sexual strangulation?

For the past four years, Dr. Herbenick has been tracking the rapid rise of “rough sex” among college students, particularly sexual strangulation, or what is colloquially referred to as “choking.” Nearly two-thirds of women in her most recent campus-representative survey of 5,000 students at an anonymized “major Midwestern university” said a partner had choked them during sex (one-third in their most recent encounter). The rate of those women who said they were between the ages 12 and 17 the first time that happened had shot up to 40 percent from one in four.

This apparently is not an incidental occurrence. It almost always seems to be on the menu. 

And it is dangerous, no matter how practiced you are:

There is no safe way to strangle someone.

According to the American Academy of Neurology, restricting blood flow to the brain, even briefly, can cause permanent injury, including stroke and cognitive impairment.

And then there is the mental health aspect. I have occasionally opined that young women’s declining mental health might have something to do with the fact that they are engaging in sexual behaviors that they ought not to be engaging in.

Orenstein makes the connection:

Women who had experienced more than five instances of choking were two and a half times more likely than those who had never been choked to say they had been so depressed within the previous 30 days they couldn’t function. Whether girls and women with mental health challenges are more likely to seek out (or be subjected to) choking, choking causes mood disorders, or some combination of the two is still unclear, but hypoxia — judging by what research has shown about other types of traumatic brain injury — could be a contributing factor. Given the soaring rates of depression and anxiety among young women, that warrants concern.

In some cases men, having learned sex education by watching porn, wanted to try it out. Yet, sexual strangulation is designed to enhance female sexual pleasure. 

Among girls and women I’ve spoken with, many did not want or like to be sexually strangled, though in an otherwise desired encounter they didn’t name it as assault. Still, a sizable number were enthusiastic; they requested it. It is exciting to feel so vulnerable, a college junior explained. The power dynamic turns her on; oxygen deprivation to the brain can trigger euphoria.

Should there not be other ways for young women to recover their lost feminine mystique?

Eighth, as though to show that we are following an important social trend-- the dying out of feminism-- Monica Hesse has written an extended complaint about some of the other ways that young women are trying to recover their feminine mystique, without choking on it.

These often involve a new set of roles-- the tradwife, the stay-at-home-girlfriend, the woman who wants to marry someone who is older and more established and who will not oblige her to have a career. It amounts to feminine leisure. 

Now, Hesse presents the reasoning behind the search for feminine leisure.

 That women raised on the virtues of female independence have been sold a bill of goods. Yes, we are allowed to have successful careers. But nobody had decreased the amount of laundry or errands that still needed to be run. Nobody had added any more hours onto the clock.

Naturally, she and other feminists look upon tradwives and SAHG with boundless contempt. One understands that this is a phase of the culture war. One understands that Hesse and the editors at the New Yorker cheer when a tradwife goes out and gets a job. 

But, has said tradwife discovered the truth about feminism and patriarchy or has she been browbeaten by her friends and neighbors into becoming a good little feminist.

So much for free to choose.

Ninth, on the migrant crime front. Some people have trotted out statistics showing that illegal migrants do not commit any more crimes than anyone else. About which Bill Maher commented:

"Sweden opened it's borders to 1.5 million immigrants since 2010. Now 20% of their citizens are foreign born, and their education system is tanking. And it has Europe's highest rate of gang-land killings. To which liberals say: Blaming immigrants for the rising crime rate is racist. Yeah, but is it true? Of course it's true."

On that note, I hope you have enjoyed reading this miscellany. If so, please subscribe to my Substack.