Saturday Miscellany

First, never say that propaganda does not work. What with Tommy Friedman constantly trashing the Israeli prime minister in the New York Times and one Masha Gessen arguing in The New Yorker that the Israelis are really Nazis in disguise, and what with the Biden administration declaring Israel to be guilty of war crimes, which Kamala herself called a humanitarian disaster, the latest polling suggested the a mere 41% of Americans would be willing to send American troops to defend Israel.

This tells us that Israel is doing poorly in the propaganda war. 

Among those who have been beating the Israelis-as-Nazis drum is one Masha Gessen, in The New Yorker. As it happens Gessen is a woman who believes she is a man or who believes she is both. A transman, if you will. 

Back in the day, before psychiatry became infested with ideology, psychiatrists understood transmania to be a delusional belief. Those who hold delusional beliefs imagine that what they believe is incontestably true, even if reality says otherwise. 

In its current iteration, transmania also insists that transmen and transwomen be acknowledged to be what they believe they are, lest one be considered to be committing crimes against who they really, really are.

So, whether it is a mere accident, a brain spasm gone wrong, the delusional Gessen has been arguing at length that Israelis are Nazis. What happened to the New Yorker?

David Mikics recounts the story in detail in Tablet:

Over the past decade, however, Gessen has become a purveyor of unhinged conspiracy theories about everything from Butlerian understandings of gender as a vast, malign cultural conspiracy to the malign influence and actions of the State of Israel—which as the ur-conspiracy theory of Western civilization, is inevitably where both Gessen and The New Yorker have wound up.

Unsurprisingly, the chief argument that Gessen wishes to prosecute is that Netanyahu’s Israel is now fully equivalent to Hitler’s Germany.

As for the notion that Israel is like the Nazis for producing so many civilian casualties, Mikics offers some historical context:

Even if the piece were more reliable on the numbers of dead in Gaza, Gessen still neglects the moral necessity to compare this conflict with other wars of self-defense, all of which have caused the terrible death of innocents. Hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese children were burned to death by Allied bombers. Before and after D-Day alone, America and Great Britain killed an estimated 50,000 French civilians. Were those Allied actions the equivalent of Nazism? One could argue—idiotically, but according to some internally consistent logic—that they were. But Gessen doesn’t bother to do so. Apparently, only Israeli actions can be equivalent to Nazism. Why is that?

I will spare you the details. Needless to say, for those of us who do not make a habit of reading The New Yorker or Masha Gessen, this should suffice.

Presumably, since Gessen is Jewish she has the right to call Jews Nazis.

Pathetic.

Second, three Columbia University deans were suspended for trafficking in anti-Semitism. Now they have all resigned. We do not know whether the resignations were voluntary or involuntary.

The Wall Street Journal has the story:

Three Columbia University deans, who were placed on indefinite leave last month over insensitive text messages they sent during a panel about Jewish life on campus, are resigning, a university spokeswoman said Thursday.

The university said last month that the administrators from Columbia College, the undergraduate liberal-arts college, sent troubling text messages in May during a reunion weekend event forum called “Jewish Life on Campus: Past, Present and Future.” 

The Columbia College administrators who are resigning are Susan Chang-Kim, the vice dean and chief administrative officer; Cristen Kromm, the dean of undergraduate student life; and Matthew Patashnick, the associate dean for student and family support. 

Third, Janan Ganesh has some guidelines for choosing which books to read over the summer. I am sure that this is what was missing in your life:

… avoid the con­tem­por­ary. If a novel has worth, it will still have it in a dec­ade or two. If not, the fil­ter­ing effect of time — which is imper­fect in its judg­ment, but still the best thing we have — will remove the book from con­sid­er­a­tion by then. (If you didn’t read Ver­non God Little in 2003, how temp­ted are you now?) In either case, there is something rash, something of the royal food taster, in going first. Let oth­ers take the hit.

I don’t think he is saying that great books, like fine wine, get better with age, but certainly he is correct to say that the latest bet seller might not stand the test of time.

Fourth, detransitioner Cristina Hineman is suing Planned Parenthood. The problem has nothing to do with abortion. It is about testosterone. It turns out that PP is the nation’s leading provider of testosterone to transitioners.

The story comes from The Free Press:

Insurance claim information provided to The Free Press by the Manhattan Institute shows that at least 40,000 patients went to Planned Parenthood for this purpose last year alone, a number that has risen tenfold since 2017. The largest proportion, about 40 percent, were 18- to 22-year-olds.

And then she changed her mind:

Just over a year into treatment, Hineman realized she had made a terrible mistake, and that gender was not the source of her problems. “I was brainwashed,” she says now. “A lot of people say that adults should be able to do whatever they want. But if you have mental illness that’s clouding your view, or you’re so misinformed about what gender dysphoria even means, then you cannot consent to such invasive treatments.”

She is also suing the therapists who encouraged her to change sex  and the plastic surgeon who removed her breasts when she was nineteen.

We wish her great success, and we recall that the edifice of transmania in Great Britain began to crumble when a detransitioner sued the clinic that was providing the service.

In the end transmania will be buried in a flurry of lawsuits. You heard it here first.

Fifth, Evolutionary biologist and emeritus Oxford professor Richard Dawkins managed to say the wrong thing on Facebook. His account was deleted.

He explains:

My entire @facebook account has been deleted, seemingly (no reason given) because I tweeted that genetically male boxers such as Imane Khalif (XY undisputed) should not fight women in Olympics. Of course my opinion is open to civilised argument. But outright censorship?

Someone ought to do something about this. A distinguished Oxford professor has no right to an opinion. But the idiot fact checkers at Facebook rule the conversation. 

Sixth, from once-Great Britain, where the crackdown against those who protest the government’s two-tiered justice system proceeds apace.

Oli London reports on Twitter:

The UK has now joined the likes of Venezuela in arresting and prosecuting people who WATCH ongoing disorder as it takes place in the street, even if they are just a “curious observer.”

So much for free and open expression. We are living in an era of mind control.

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