My truth? What about the truth? From halls of learning to an intellectual wasteland
Instead of Oxford University Press language experts choosing an annual (and often ridiculous) word of the year, they could do something that might help stem intellectual darkness. The editorial staff at OUP should draw up a shortlist each year of the worst, most distorted words and phrases that are enemies of clear thinking. The worst of the worst could be named the Brave New World Word or Phrase of the Year.
I have a list to get us started. First is “context” – a word used many times by the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology when they were asked a simple question last week during a US congressional hearing into the rise of anti-Semitism on US campuses.
Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik asked Harvard president Claudine Gay, Penn’s Liz Magill and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth whether advocating for the genocide of Jews violated their universities’ code of conduct regarding bullying and harassment.
None among the three intellectual thought leaders said yes. Instead, they waffled about it being nuanced and context-driven, as if they are stuck in an ivory tower minus the Socratic dialogue.
There is nothing nuanced about Jewish students being harassed and intimidated on campus by pro-Palestinian protesters chanting the chosen slogans of Hamas terrorists. What context makes this legitimate?
Context is an entirely sensible word when used properly to explain complex issues. During three minutes of excruciating testimony last Wednesday, since viewed by millions of people, these well-educated university leaders from some of the most esteemed universities in the US used “context” to let pro-Palestinian protesters off the hook for knowingly or unknowingly advocating on campus for the genocide of Jews.
Alas, free speech was not their north star. Instead, as The Wall Street Journal noted this week, Harvard was 248th out of 248, and Penn was 247th, in the annual college ranking by the free-speech Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
In September last year, during a mandatory online Title IX training session, Harvard students were told that not using a person’s preferred pronouns could violate the university’s sexual misconduct and harassment policies.
Racial microaggressions are policed on campus; academics are sacked for committing “progressive” speech crimes. But if you chant the genocidal slogans favoured by a terrorist group, it’s a matter of context.
It’s welcome news that Gay has walked back from her context drivel, and Magill was forced to resign. But when the first instinct of university elites is moral pusillanimity, why wouldn’t university students feel free to intimidate Jewish students?
To understand how we got into this mess, let’s move on to the next contender for worst word or phrase of 2023: “from the river to the sea”. Why on earth are university students running around campus chanting Hamas’s genocidal plan to claim the state of Israel “from the river to the sea”? Do the kids know what it means? They may not have learned about it at Harvard, Penn and MIT, but there is the internet.
The terrorists who murdered 1200 Israelis on October 7, raping and mutilating women, beheading babies, and kidnapping 240 others enshrined this genocidal slogan in their 2017 constitution: “Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.” The terrorist organisation doesn’t mention where seven million Jews and two million Arabs living between the Jordan River, bordering eastern Israel, and the Mediterranean Sea, to the west, should go.
Students are shouting this violent slogan on campus, disrupting classes and intimidating Jewish students because more than a decade ago liberal values lost out to a new political order on campus.
Liberalism is a progressive project that depends on a marketplace of ideas, on people listening, on genuine tolerance and treating people equally and civilly. Instead, we have become a marketplace of outrage where groups claiming to sit on the lower rung of the oppression ladder, along with their supporters, insist on different and higher rights to groups they imagine are higher up the oppression hierarchy.
The oppressed groups, with their special status, have succeeded in convincing university elites that words and ideas they disagree with amount to a form of violence.
The reverse is true for the so-called oppressor class: when Jewish students face real intimidation with genocidal chants, we’re told it’s just words.
Today, ideas are no longer contested. In these dark anti-intellectual times, people are.
For thousands of years, different groups have hated each other on the basis of race or religion or some other tribal identifier. We were meant to be better than our forebears, understanding that judging people according to their individual character, not by group membership, would better unify us. Yet, in 2023, group hatreds continue, though under the new name of identity politics.
As Andrew Sullivan wrote in 2018, we’re all on campus now, with this new oppression hierarchy seeping into our broader culture. Our streets are full of protesters chanting “from the river to the sea”. Hamas enjoys unwitting support from ill-informed Westerners, the latest a group of Australian artists whose collective letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza included Hamas’s genocidal jingle.
If you think it’s unkind to call them useful idiots, University of California, Berkeley political science professor Ron Hassner published the results of a small survey of students that found only 47 per cent of them could name the river and the sea. Some thought it was the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic.
More than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed the Oslo peace agreements were never signed. Less than a quarter had heard of Yasser Arafat; 10 per cent thought he was an Israeli prime minister.
“There’s no shame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions,” wrote Hassner. Importantly, the survey of 250 students from across the US found that students switched from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the motto when they learned some basic facts.
When it comes to genocide, facts should matter. Which brings me to another contender for bullshit word or phrase for 2023.
In her end of week mea culpa, the Harvard president told student newspaper The Harvard Crimson she was sorry for not conveying “my truth”.
My truth? What about the truth? Is Gay an Ivy League university president or an angsty teenage girl at a counselling session wanting to speak her truth? When a university leader describes a judgment about those who advocate genocide as her truth, she opens the door for others to claim they have a different truth. Which is exactly what is happening on university campuses right now.
Universities aren’t just coddling the minds of students. They are messing them up. When “my truth” is used to win an argument, why wouldn’t universities become breeding places for anti-Semitism?
The issue goes deeper still, instilling an aggressive form of anti-intellectualism. Students ill-equipped to distinguish between facts and feelings will rely on their subjective truth to make demands of university administrators, including protection from words and ideas that offend them. When someone speaks of their truth, they ring-fence it from debate.
Worst of all, the foundational virtues of a liberal democratic society are, more often than not, being turned on their head by people who dare to call themselves progressive.
My nomination then for the Brave New World Prize for most disfigured word or phrase for 2023 is “progressive”. Practitioners of illiberal identity politics have no claim to this word. Progress means improvement. It is one thing to critique the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza by suggesting a better way forward to stop terrorism. How many of the pro-Palestinian protesters, be they screaming students or letter-signing artists, are doing this? Most of them are taking the low road, echoing chants for the annihilation of Israel. That’s not progress.
But congrats all around to the prize-wining faux progressives.
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‘Only the Beginning’: Lawsuits From Detransitioners Are on Rise
As the number of people who have chosen to detransition out of a transgender identity continues to grow, a parallel increase in lawsuits filed by detransitioners against gender clinics and medical professionals is also occurring.
In November of last year, 18-year-old Chloe Cole became the first detransitioner to file a medical malpractice suit against Kaiser Permanente as well as the doctors who advised her to undergo gender-transition procedures and performed them over a five-year period beginning when she was 13.
The lawsuit noted that as a result of undergoing “puberty blockers, off-label cross-sex hormone treatment, and a double mastectomy,” Cole experienced “deep emotional wounds, severe regrets, and distrust for the medical system” and has “suffered physically, socially, neurologically, and psychologically.”
In June, Kaiser was sued by a second detransitioner in California. At the advice of her doctors, Kayla Lovdahl began taking puberty blockers at age 12 and underwent a double mastectomy at age 13. Lovdahl’s doctors “did not question, elicit, or attempt to understand the psychological events that led Kayla to the mistaken belief that she was transgender, nor did they evaluate, appreciate, or treat her multifaceted presentation of co-morbid symptoms,” the lawsuit stated.
It appears that Cole and Lovdahl’s cases are just the tip of the iceberg.
Earlier this year, a new law firm was launched in Dallas that specifically serves detransitioners who are seeking recompense for being victims of what they say is medical malpractice. So far, Campbell Miller Payne has filed lawsuits on behalf of four clients, and the firm says that it is currently in discussions with 40 more potential clients. According to founding partner Jordan Campbell, it is “only the beginning.”
The firm’s clients include Prisha Mosley, who began testosterone injections at age 17 and had both breasts removed just one year later. Soren Aldaco was also prescribed cross-sex hormones at 17—without her parents’ knowledge—and also underwent a double mastectomy only two years later. A third client named Isabelle Ayala was prescribed testosterone at age 14, with her doctors keeping her on the drug despite a subsequent suicide attempt.
Lawsuits against medical practitioners who carry out gender-transition procedures are likely to continue surging due to the explosive growth in demand for the procedures and in the facilities that carry them out. In 2022, the U.S. market size for gender-transition surgery was estimated to be $2.1 billion and is estimated to grow to more than $3.1 billion by 2032.
The lawsuits come as new studies reveal that gender-transition procedures do not appear to be resolving the mental health issues of those struggling with their gender identity. A Finnish study published last month found that those with gender dysphoria “present with many more common psychiatric needs” than the general population, “even when medical GR [gender reassignment] interventions are carried out.”
Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, a licensed therapist and clinical researcher who has studied the effects of trauma on children, was encouraged by the increasing number of detransitioners who are stepping forward to file lawsuits.
“This is good news,” she told The Washington Stand. “We need to fight this from every direction. This whole ideology was introduced from multiple directions, so we need to fight it multiple ways. We’re fighting it legislatively, but now we’re fighting it through these individual lawsuits, and hopefully those will just continue to grow.”
Bauwens continued:
The other great thing about this is it really opens up a discussion and the impact that these individuals have experienced as a result of this so-called gender-affirming care. When you’re giving testimony to a legislative body, you’re just given a few minutes, but through these lawsuits we’re going to hear more of what these people have gone through and the tragedy that they have faced. A lot of the transgender activists say that there are so few minors that are undergoing ‘gender-affirming care,’ yet we are seeing these lawsuits from very young women. This is not an anomaly. The fact that there have been at least 40 people that have contacted this law firm should be raising alarm bells. We know that there have to be so many more. This is not just some one-off, one person who was pushed through these types of procedures.
“I also appreciate how they are bringing out the physiological harms that have happened to them,” she added. “They’re also bringing out the fact that when they went for help to the therapeutic and medical community, instead of getting an accurate assessment, they were just onboarded to these so-called treatments. I think that’s a really important thing that we will hear more about through these lawsuits, and I hope they get a lot of money for what they went through.”
Bauwens, who serves as director of the Center for Family Studies at the Family Research Council, went on to observe that the lawsuits could serve as a caution to institutions and medical professionals that push gender ideology.
“The good thing with these lawsuits is for those activists who are motivated primarily by money, this hits them where it hurts,” she noted. “I do believe that there are some people who are so ideologically driven that they will push forward regardless of how it hits their bank account, but I think that so much of this practice is tied up to money. When hospitals and universities and the profession itself starts losing money, they’re going to back away from this faster than even any legislation that’s put forward. It’s a good attack strategy.”
Cole, the first detransitioner to file suit, has in many ways become the face of the growing movement. At an event at the University of Utah last week, Cole was labeled “transphobic” by a professor, a label that has become a consistent line of attack against detransitioners from the Left. Bauwens remained unconvinced that the strategy will be effective going forward.
“I think the more the public learns about what’s involved with ‘gender-affirming care’ and what the long-term ramifications are, I think people are beginning to move away from it,” she said. “The line of ‘transphobia’ is going to carry less weight the more that people see the faces of those who have fallen prey to the ideology.”
As to the question of how those struggling with gender identity can achieve authentic healing, Bauwens highlighted the importance of homing in on underlying causes.
“Healing is going to need to take place where the original problem started,” she underscored. “It’s too bad that they were put on this other track that veered them away from dealing with whatever the root cause was to the distress. There’s going to be a layering of issues to deal with because now, they’re going to have to face the fact that those in authority—and those who were supposed to be experts and healers—have completely led them astray and actually were (perhaps unwittingly) part of re-victimizing them, their bodies, as well as their minds. But it’s not all hopeless, by any stretch.”
Bauwens further emphasized how those who have detransitioned are in a unique position to become peerless witnesses and role models for those wrestling with gender confusion.
“When someone who has been through a situation where the authority has so clearly violated them, as they heal, they can be a tremendous voice. They can be tremendously clear about what they believe and how they view the world,” she pointed out. “The potential for raising up other Walt Heyers and people who are able to help others and be a clear voice on this issue and many others is phenomenal.”
“People like Kathy Grace Duncan and Laura Perry have developed relational depth through their experience and have a clear understanding of their authentic self. They would have done some of the identity work that maybe others haven’t been forced to do. They have the opportunity to have a richer authentic connection with themselves and with others once they’ve actually treaded that hard road of grappling with their identity.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/12/07/only-beginning-lawsuits-detransitioners-rise/
*************************************************'Diversity Hires' and Progressive Hatred Highlight Everything Wrong With Democrats
I really hate racism and reject it in all its forms. It’s a big part of why I’m not a Democrat – I judge people as individuals and am disgusted by those who don’t do the same. The Democratic Party insists people be judged and treated differently based on characteristics that have nothing to do with who they are as people. They treat people differently based on their sexuality, their income, their “gender” declaration, and most importantly, their skin color. They are the heart and soul of hatred, the personification of bigotry, and everything wrong with our culture today.
Some white liberals love to self-flagellate about their skin color and what people who look like them did centuries before they were born. They’re free to do it. It’s wildly stupid, but you can’t teach dumb people to be smart any more than you can teach a fish to appreciate the desert. They are what they are. That doesn’t mean you have to play along. If someone wants to martyr themselves on the altar of grievances of the Christmas past, let them. Do not join in.
The concept of “reverse racism” is another thing that’s always been annoying to me. It would technically mean NOT discriminating against someone based on race, but it’s been bastardized into meaning discrimination against white people. This isn’t by accident – the left needs division to ascribe victimhood to control people, and for there to be victims, there must be perpetrators, too. Every dynamic set up by the left involves a victim and an oppressor, whether they exist or not. And white people can’t be victims for this tactic to work.
For this, Democrats created the asinine idea that “minorities can’t be racist” because they lack the “power” to do anything about it. Conversely, white people always have the power, so even a white, homeless, unemployed high school dropout with a heroin problem has more “privilege” than Oprah Winfree, and Oprah can’t be racist, but that junkie definitely is, though he may not know it. It’s wildly stupid and “progressive.”
This idiotic dynamic is how you end up with someone like Claudia Gay as the President of Harvard. Her only qualifications for the job were her political beliefs and skin color. She brought fewer credentials to her current job than Hunter Biden brought to the board of Burisma. If her resume were a person, it would have starved her to death. As Bill Ackman, billionaire former Harvard donor now experiencing the effects of the “red pill,” put it, “I learned from someone with first-person knowledge of the @Harvard president search that the committee would not consider a candidate who did not meet the DEI office’s criteria.”
The idea of Harvard firing Gay for her incompetence or bigotry is less likely than Hunter leaving a whore house with cash in his pocket.
It is a little surprising how these obvious truths and the bigotry of the left are only now becoming apparent to so many of the people who’ve funded it against everyone else for decades, but better late than never.
Ackman is Jewish, and he sees now what the campuses of these schools are. They’ve been it for a long time against white people, minorities who refuse to obey the progressive agenda, straight people who aren’t interested in dating someone “trans,” and anyone who doesn’t buy the climate change hoax.
Under it was always a hatred of Jews, but it rarely bubbled to the surface. The Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7th changed that.
The immediate aftermath saw “allies” for every victim group rallying to Hamas under the guise of caring about Palestinians. That anti-Semitism broke the dam, and everyone saw it.
Normal people recoiled, leftist activists embraced it, and Democrats tried to pretend it wasn’t really happening. They can’t do that anymore. Too many Democrats in Congress spent the last two months justifying Hamas’ terror for any rejection of hatred to sound believable to anyone who hasn’t recently suffered a closed-head injury or is a loyal MSNBC conspiracy theories addict.
Racism is the oxygen of the left; bigotry is their food, and it’s always been that way. Without both, they can’t live. In both, they thrive. It’s gross, it’s disgusting, it’s harmful to the country, it’s anti-American, and it is the very essence of “progressive.”
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Australia: Townsville cops ‘helpless’, residents terrified as young crims wreak havoc
Kid-glove treatment of young black offenders is the root of the problem
Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll will fly to Townsville after three weeks of unrelenting and violent youth crime leaving cops feeling “defeated” and locals terrified. SEE
On a single day last week in the space of six hours officers were called to 120 jobs, most involving stolen cars, as cops the North Queensland town battle the worst spate of crime many had ever seen.
One Townsville station has no police vehicles left, and is being forced to borrow cars from surrounding precincts. It’s understood eight of the region’s 139-car fleet are sidelined in Townsville.
In the last week alone more than 60 cars have been stolen and 150 homes broken into, with the young criminals turning on the police targeting their cars and the officers in them across multiple nights.
Townsville mum Melissa Young-Florence broke down in tears while talking about how she was chased and rammed by youths in a stolen car on December 7. Picture: Natasha Emeck
Townsville mum Melissa Young-Florence broke down in tears while talking about how she was chased and rammed by youths in a stolen car on December 7. Picture: Natasha Emeck
The conditions have become so bad, one officer speaking anonymously to The Courier-Mail said “it’s the worst it’s ever been in respect of the level of intended harm to emergency services,” a source said.
“Officers feel helpless and fear for their safety. They will keep turning up for work to keep the community safe, but they worry what is being done to keep them safe.”
Multiple police sources told The Courier-Mail how officers are afraid to go to work as juveniles target police cars – and now ambulances – night-after-night.
Sources say they are “fighting a losing battle” and were “torn apart” after a night of carnage last week where more than 120 jobs were called in over just six hours, most of those involving stolen cars.
So out of control has the issue become, officers from the specialist Public Safety Response Team (PSRT) have been flown into the city to catch the young criminals.
A terrified Townsville mum broke down in tears as she relived the terror she felt when a group of young criminals chased and rammed her across Townsville in a stolen car while she was out buying Christmas gifts.
Melissa Young-Florence has just left a Townsville shopping centre in her Land Cruiser when she was suddenly targeted by young car thieves in Aitkenvale last Thursday.
She said masked juveniles in a stolen Ford Everest — which also rammed two police cars last week — began ramming her car around 6.30pm and followed her through the streets of Aitkenvale as she desperately tried to lose them.
When she pulled up near a school to call triple-0, the youths rammed the driver’s side of her car, and one of them got out to confront her.
“He threatened me and said: ‘Don’t f**k with our gang, you f***ing b*ch,” she said.
“They took a weapon out and started smashing the glass of the back of my LandCruiser.”
The youths continued to tail her when she returned home to Vincent, and she began to scream at the top of her lungs as they rammed her again, pushing her car onto the kerb.
“Four kids hopped out of the car. My neighbour thinks one of them had a gun, and another came to my window with a wrench to hurt me,” she said.
“One of my amazing neighbours, Damien, chased them off.
“I’ve never been so scared in my life. You don’t know what it feels like. “They were ready to kill me.”
It’s understood the young criminals are a mix of seasoned juvenile offenders, and new crooks from places like Cairns and Palm Island who police hadn’t seen before.
“It’s a generation of kids who have no respect for anything,” a police officer said. “New kids, old kids, there’s no simple fix to a festering decline of parenting.”
On Monday night, sources say one police crew had three separate stolen cars drive at them. Another police car had their tyres slashed. “We feel useless and embarrassed,” another source said. “There’s nothing we can do after our pursuit powers were taken away.
“All you can do is just turn on your bodycam and record everything.”
While no officers had been seriously injured in the rammings, sources say the mental toll was more significant. “Mentally, we are f – ked.”
The Courier-Mail understands the Townsville Watchhouse was “chockers” on Tuesday, with staff calling for back-up and a “line of police cars” waiting outside to get in.
Townsville District Officer Chief Superintendent Chris Hodgman said they charged eight offenders on 138 charges within 24 hours on Monday, bringing the total arrests for Operation Victor Romney up to 20.
One of the recent arrests was a 13-year-old Wulguru boy allegedly linked to the stolen car ram raids on a number of businesses on Saturday.
The boy has been charged with 51 offences, including 13 counts of unlawful use of a motor vehicle, 11 counts of entering the dwelling, and one count each of robbery, arson and assault. He was refused bail and is due to appear in Townsville Children’s Court at a later date.
Chief Supt Hodgman said there were still “several” outstanding targets on their list that police would continue to target this week.
He said the level of offending had increased for many of the city’s high-risk youths. “When we talk about 13 and 15-year-olds out committing life imprisonment offences at night … It is absolutely terrible for the community,” he said.
Townsville Labor MPs Les Walker and Aaron Harper said they had raised the region’s crime issues with potential premier candidates this week.
Mr Harper – who supported Deputy Premier Steven Miles as the state’s new leader – said Mr Miles “understands the situation” in regards to youth crime in Townsville. “We know it’s a serious problem and we want it fixed.”
Police Minister Mark Ryan said the Commissioner would be in Townsville on Wednesday.
Commissioner Katarina Carroll said she was closely monitoring the situation in Townsville and is being briefed multiple times each day. She intended to visit police stations and the Operations Command Centre on her visit north.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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