Linkage

A typically incandescently brilliant barnstormer from Abigail.

There is a clash going on in Britain between two fundamentally irreconcilable ideologies.

The NHS, DHSC, and many other official institutions like courts view transition as a response to a medical problem they call ‘gender dysphoria’ or ‘gender incongruence.’ From this starting point it seems appropriate that trans people have to get permission to transition: transness is a medical matter with inherent risks that ought to be controlled by “specialists.” Sometimes those specialists delay or deny permission, but that’s just part of the job. It also makes sense to ask which treatments are “most effective at treating dysphoria” and explore alternative treatments through trials, reviews, consultations, etc. I call this view ‘Pathologization.’

According to Pathologization, past treatments like electric shocks simply failed to alleviate patients’ dysphoria. These days we have more effective methods, and one day we might discover a cheap way of treating it without transition- a silver bullet conversion therapy. Doctors and managers will determine when and whether adjustments to the system are needed. Ideally they’ll engage with trans people in “stakeholder groups” but if those groups don’t get what they want that’s not a dealbreaker. Patients who suffer or die waiting are unfortunate but hey, the NHS can’t save everyone.

On the other hand, the view of an increasing number- especially young people and trans people ourselves- is that transition is a bit like pregnancy. It’s a process that may require professional assistance to bring to the happiest possible conclusion (whether completion or termination), and for this reason it is appropriate and necessary that the NHS is involved. But whether, how, and when to do it should be up to you. From this starting point there should be as few obstacles as possible: the role of doctors and managers is to facilitate and advise but never delay or deny. Prompt, reliable access to transition is a civil rights matter.

[…]

It is vital to realise that organisations can embody an ideology even if nobody working in them believes it. I think sometimes when people hear “Organisation X is institutionally discriminatory” they interpret that as “The leaders of Organisation X are bad people.” For example;

“The Metropolitan police are institutionally racist.”

“I’ve met some police officers and they’re lovely!”

This is a mistake. To say that an organisation is institutionally discriminatory makes no comment on the character of its employees, merely the pattern of its outputs. Not everyone who controls trans healthcare is a frothing bigot; again, I have no animosity towards Colonel Korn or his colleagues. My issue is with the outputs of the system they manage.

Depending on the title, public libraries may pay two or three times more for an e-book than they pay for its print edition. In some cases, the e-book may be up to six times the price, librarians told CBC.

Calls for cheaper e-books are longstanding.

In 2014, Coun. Tim Tierney led a group of municipalities asking the federal government to investigate the publishing industry for e-book pricing. At the time, OPL was spending about 11 per cent of its materials budget on electronic content.

By 2023, that share had grown to about 40 per cent.

While the library's spending on e-books is trending upward, the number of copies in its collection has declined slightly since reaching a peak in 2020.

The library is getting less for more — and readers are left waiting longer.

[…]

In addition to high prices, Chevreau said the "big five" multinational e-book publishers "throttle" access to e-books by selling them to libraries for either a limited time or a limited number of circulations — sometimes both.

Those publishers — Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster — will often license copies of e-books for just 12 or 24 months. Once that licence expires, libraries must repurchase access to the same book.

Even as many East Coast Straussians such as The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol have become vocal Never Trumpers, West Coast Straussians are obsessed with the Founding and the idea that America is good because the Framers based the country on certain natural rights and timeless laws of nature, enshrining these eternal laws and morals in the country’s founding documents. In this interpretation, progressivism is the key enemy: A relativistic project of adapting laws and morals over time, thereby alienating America from the timelessly pure essence it once embodied. This, to West Coast Straussians, puts progressivism in the same category as fascism or communism—ideologies that seek to remake humankind and the world in defiance of the natural order through totalitarian government intervention. That is what Vought invokes here: When “the left” started to “modernize” the constitutional order, they were in fact destroying all that was good and noble about America—they were deviating from the “natural order” itself.

[…]

The American right today has become dominated by forces and factions that are convinced that the answer is that our moment requires not restraint and preservation but radicalism and counter-revolutionary force. As the major institutions of American life are supposedly in the grip of anti-American, leftist, “globalist,” “woke” forces that desire to tear the moral fabric of the nation apart, as the “natural order” is supposedly under siege, those who used to call themselves “conservatives” need to do whatever is necessary to defend a particular kind of “freedom”: the freedom to live in accordance with the “natural order,” which necessitates imposing it on the whole country.

[…]

Many people get caught up in Trump’s nomination of clowns and buffoons to key positions. That’s invariably bad. But something even scarier awaits us: Trump also empowers competent radicals like Vought who pursue goals like “rehabilitating Christian nationalism” and “pursuing the largest deportation in history,” as an undercover video caught him saying. And unlike in the first go-round, there won’t be the moderating presence of “adults in the room” in Trump’s second term. That’s the whole point of Project 2025, of the Center for Renewing America, of handing Vought the policy keys from the beginning. Vought’s “radical constitutionalism” is about to be elevated to a position of immense influence and power, unbothered and undisturbed by inconvenient guardrails like moral and legal accountability, for the next four years. Somehow, he’s convinced himself that this is just what the Founders would have wanted.

This quote is just so telling:

A few miles away, another prison employee, Crystal Minton, accompanied her fiancé to a friend’s house to help clear the remnants of a metal roof mangled by the hurricane. Ms. Minton, a 38-year-old secretary, said she had obtained permission from the warden to put off her Mississippi duty until early February because she is a single mother caring for disabled parents. Her fiancé plans to take vacation days to look after Ms. Minton’s 7-year-old twins once she has to go to work.

The shutdown on top of the hurricane has caused Ms. Minton to rethink a lot of things.

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

It's pure nihilism. Nobody expects anything good. They just want to see people they don't identify with hurt more.

“We have shifted this conversation so incredibly far in the direction of restrictions on trans people’s autonomy and rights in a way that was completely unfathomable to many of us even just three or four years ago,” said Chase Strangio, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Legislation in Oklahoma and South Carolina would make it a felony to provide hormonal or surgical transition treatment to transgender people younger than 26 — an uncharted incursion into adults’ health care. Other bills in both states, and in Kansas and Mississippi, would ban such care up to age 21. And bills in more than a dozen states would ban it for minors, which Arkansas was the first to do in 2021, against the consensus of major medical organizations.

A bill in Mississippi — declaring that “separate is not inherently unequal,” an allusion to Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 ruling in which the Supreme Court upheld segregation — would define sex as immutably set at birth, denying transgender identities under state law. A measure in West Virginia would define “any transvestite and/or transgender exposure, performances or display” as obscene, potentially outlawing transgender people’s presence around children.

[…]

But the bills arriving in legislatures show a movement expanding beyond what it pitched itself as.

The 25-year-olds who would be unable to receive transition care in Oklahoma and South Carolina are not, after all, children. An Arizona bill would ban drag shows on Sunday mornings whether or not minors were around. (The lawmakers who introduced those bills did not respond to requests for comment.)

Matt Sharp, senior counsel and state government relations national director for the Alliance Defending Freedom, said his group believed “gender ideology attacks the truth that every person is either male or female.”

And Mr. Schilling, of the American Principles Project, confirmed that his organization’s long-term goal was to eliminate transition care. The initial focus on children, he said, was a matter of “going where the consensus is.”

Cathryn Oakley, the state legislative director and senior counsel at the Human Rights Campaign, said the bills disproved the notion that protecting children had ever been the motivation.

“Under His wings,” one lobbyist wrote in an email. “The Devil never sleeps,” another person sent in an email chain about the distinction between gender and sex. “I pray for the 2nd coming more and more.”

These missives are part of a trove of leaked emails between South Dakota GOP Rep. Fred Deutsch, anti-trans lobbyists, and other state lawmakers about anti-trans policies that are filled with language so deeply religious that, at times, the communications read like scripts from The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s the language, one expert told VICE News, of Christian nationalists who believe they’re engaging in a holy war.

[…]

“Know that many have prayed and are praying for you this day. Do not back down, nor should you be afraid. Know that the Lord is with you. The children of South Dakota belong to him. He is jealous over them. Let his jealousies be spoken forth in the House of Representatives of South Dakota today so that his children would be made safe. Know you are HIS representative today. Do not be afraid. Stand firm in what is right,” wrote Vernadette Broyles, a lawyer and president of the Georgia-based Children and Parental Rights Campaign, which mobilizes against “gender ideology,” in 2020.

[…]

“It is the language of Christian nationalism,” Thomas Lecaque, an associate professor of history at Grand View University focusing on apocalyptic religion and political violence. “It is the language of people who very much believe they are doing God’s will, and it is the language of people who very much believe that they are engaged in a holy war.”

[…]

“Stopping the existence of transgender people and the acceptance of trans people in the public sphere is to them some sort of religious imperative,” Lecaque told VICE News.“It’s particularly fascinating that this group that has all this money, control in state legislatures, control of the house, they had a presidency, is acting like somehow they are David in the struggle.”

None of this is particularly surprising, and none of it is new. Today’s Christian nationalists believe that America is an inherently holy, Christian land, and that it’s their duty to restore God’s kingdom in order for Jesus to return. Part of this means that they think the country’s laws, policies and cultural institutions should reflect evangelical Christian values, VICE News previously reported. As a result, contentious cultural and political issues, like drag queen story hours and “critical race theory” are perceived as Satanic. Indeed, the Devil came up in the leaked emails.

See also.

On the 14 December 2024, housing advocates and people experiencing homelessness occupied three adjoining empty properties in Brunswick, an inner-city suburb in Melbourne, Australia, which have cumulatively been empty for almost 25 years.

[…]

Government reforms since colonisation have created a landscape where housing in Australia is now treated as a commodity rather than a basic necessity for living. When the area now known as Brunswick was first colonised and the land privatised, only 1 out of the 10 allotments sold for speculation at a Sydney auction was actually lived on by the purchaser, a legacy that continues today.

In 2023, nearly 100,000 homes in metropolitan Melbourne, or 5.2% of all dwellings, were found to be either empty or underused. This number exceeds the 48,620 households currently on the Victorian social housing wait-list, suggesting vacant homes could house everyone on the list twice over.

With 540,000 rental properties in Melbourne, utilising vacant homes would increase rental stock by nearly 20%. The number of vacant homes also equals more than two and a half years’ worth of new construction, based on the annual average of 37,000 new homes built.

This action is not without historical precedent. Dr. Iain McIntyre, Historian and research fellow at The University of Melbourne has written extensively on the historical role of squatting in the housing crisis following the end of World War 2. According to Iain, squatters “had the most impact in Victoria where three days after the house in Hawthorn was squatted the Premier announced that the state government would introduce its own legislation to give councils and municipal shires the power to install tenants in disused houses, with the state government to guarantee the payment of rent”.

“For a medieval historian, they’re really obvious red flags,” she says, and all the experts interviewed expressed similar unease and anxiety. “If you told me that it was some random proud boy, I wouldn’t be surprised for a second. But given his position it is pretty shocking,” Elley says. Lodder echoes this exact feeling: “It’s both absurd and terrifying; terrifying that … someone with such prominent and worrying tattoos on their body is getting a Cabinet position in the U.S., but also absurd, because it’s all very cosplay.” 

When it comes down to it, there are some undeniable features of Hegseth’s collection of tattoos. “It’s all very specifically violent,” summarizes Jannega. “There is no way of reading this that isn’t about violence, when you have guns and swords all over you. He’s telling you this. He cannot play the misunderstood Christian — he’s violent.” What a medievalist finds particularly troubling in the real history of the Crusades is what happened before Crusaders got to the Holy Land. “One thing that happened was horrific violence here in Europe,” Janega continues. “There were so many knights so keyed up — why would they bother waiting for the Holy Land when there were non-Christians in their backyard?” Lecaque, too, is anticipating increasing oppression at home — already seen in Hegseth’s book “American Crusade,” which, in its own words, “lays out the strategy we must employ in order to defeat America’s internal enemies,” as well as more violence abroad, especially in the Middle East. 

While the editor of this hallowed section and I do not always agree, he has conceded that it’s almost Christmas – which is all the excuse I need for a quiz. So let’s play What Did Nigel Say? Read these broadsides from Westminster’s biggest names, and guess: which are from Nigel Farage?

1) Rishi Sunak was “the most liberal prime minister we’ve ever had on immigration”.

2) Mass immigration “happened by design, not accident”.

3) British government is “broken”.

4) The UK is a “one-nation experiment in open borders”.

5) The British state is wallowing in “the tepid bath of managed decline”.

[…]

Through his speeches, how he frames debates, and most of all in his shrugging acceptance of how limited and slow his political powers are, time and again the Labour leader makes Farage’s case for him.

Want an example? Go back to the five phrases at the top. A collection of nasties, I’m sure you agree. How many came from Nigel Farage?

None. Nor are they the work of Kemi Badenoch, Liz Truss or any other horror you care to think of. Each was said by Keir Starmer, most within the past few days. Britain’s progressive-in-chief claims that politicians and civil servants have deliberately allowed immigration to run rampant, and that the country has “open borders” to the rest of the world. He did this in a speech at the end of last month, which made not one positive reference to immigrants or migration. During the election campaign, he accused Britain’s first Asian prime minister of being “the most liberal” on immigration, sounding a dog whistle that could be heard by any follower of Farage. As far as I can see, hardly any commentator has picked him up for using such rhetoric – but to talk about migrants as only a burden to this country, here on a scam, is the kind of language that people like me are used to catching after last orders on streets that suddenly don’t feel so safe. To hear them from our prime minister should shame him and his party.

Even in LGBTQ-friendly states like New York, transgender Americans are what estate attorney Elizabeth Schwartz politely calls “concerned” or “alarmed,” but she knows it’s much more than that. “I don’t want to sound like I’m downplaying it or making it sound milquetoast,” Schwartz said. “My inbox has been blowing up with people who are absolutely freaked out.”

Schwartz, who is based in Miami, has been working nonstop the past two months to help clients complete name and gender-marker changes, healthcare proxies, powers of attorney, wills, trusts and confirmatory adoptions. “If you’re married and have a child and both parents are on the birth certificate, there shouldn’t be a question of who the parents are, but this is a belt-and-suspenders kind of situation,” Schwartz said, meaning you have to double up protections.