#new progressive orthodoxy

[phyrexianphamily]

Jin-Gitaxias: Elesh, if you have a complaint, I suggest you submit it through our network system. I'd be happy to refer you to our overseers.

Elesh Norn: I was told that the Praetor I'd be meeting with was very careful. A cautious one. I believe we are alike in that way. If you are who I think you are, you should give me another chance.

[Jin-Gitaxias' expression doesn't change but his voice subtly does.]

Jin-Gitaxias: I don't think we're alike at all, sister. You are not a cautious Praetor at all. Your angel was late. And she was high.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Adopting rightwing policies on issues such as immigration and the economy does not help centre-left parties win votes, according to new analysis of European electoral and polling data. Faced with a 20-year decline in their vote share, accompanied by rising support for the right, far right and sometimes the far left, social democratic parties across Europe have increasingly sought salvation by moving towards the political centre. However the analysis, published on Wednesday, shows that centre-left parties promising, for example, to be tough on immigration or unrelenting on public spending are both unlikely to attract potential voters on the right, and risk alienating existing progressive supporters.

[...]

One of the key lessons was that “trying to imitate rightwing positions is just not a successful strategy for the left”, he said. Two studies in particular, looking at so-called welfare chauvinism and fiscal policy, illustrated the point, the researchers said. Björn Bremer of the Central European University in Vienna said a survey in Spain, Italy, the UK and Germany and larger datasets from 12 EU countries showed that since the financial crisis of 2008, “fiscal orthodoxy” had been a vote loser for the centre left. “Social democratic parties that have backed austerity fail to win the support of voters worried about public debt, and lose the backing of those who oppose austerity,” Bremer said. “Centre-left parties that actually impose austerity lose votes.”

[...]

The data strongly suggests centre-left parties can build a coalition of voters who believe a strong welfare state, effective public services and real investment, for example in the green transition, are essential,” Bremer said. “But doing the opposite – offering a contradictory programme that promotes austerity but promises to protect public services and the welfare state, and hoping voters will swallow such fairytales – failed in the 2010s, and is likely to fail again.” Similarly, said Matthias Enggist of the University of Lausanne, analysis of data from eight European countries showed no evidence that welfare chauvinism – broadly, restricting immigrants’ access to welfare – was a successful strategy for the left.

[itsawritblr]

Holy shit, the New York Times is FINALLY interviewing and listening to detransistioners.

The tide is turning.

Opinion by Pamela Paul

As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do.

Feb. 2, 2024

Grace Powell was 12 or 13 when she discovered she could be a boy.

Growing up in a relatively conservative community in Grand Rapids, Mich., Powell, like many teenagers, didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin. She was unpopular and frequently bullied. Puberty made everything worse. She suffered from depression and was in and out of therapy.

“I felt so detached from my body, and the way it was developing felt hostile to me,” Powell told me. It was classic gender dysphoria, a feeling of discomfort with your sex.

Reading about transgender people online, Powell believed that the reason she didn’t feel comfortable in her body was that she was in the wrong body. Transitioning seemed like the obvious solution. The narrative she had heard and absorbed was that if you don’t transition, you’ll kill yourself.

At 17, desperate to begin hormone therapy, Powell broke the news to her parents. They sent her to a gender specialist to make sure she was serious. In the fall of her senior year of high school, she started cross-sex hormones. She had a double mastectomy the summer before college, then went off as a transgender man named Grayson to Sarah Lawrence College, where she was paired with a male roommate on a men’s floor. At 5-foot-3, she felt she came across as a very effeminate gay man.

At no point during her medical or surgical transition, Powell says, did anyone ask her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression. At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.

“I wish there had been more open conversations,” Powell, now 23 and detransitioned, told me. “But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”

Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won’t let kids be themselves.

But right-wing demagogues are not the only ones who have inflamed this debate. Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increased scrutiny in recent years. Under that model of care, clinicians are expected to affirm a young person’s assertion of gender identity and even provide medical treatment before, or even without, exploring other possible sources of distress.

Many who think there needs to be a more cautious approach — including well-meaning liberal parents, doctors and people who have undergone gender transition and subsequently regretted their procedures — have been attacked as anti-trans and intimidated into silencing their concerns.

And while Donald Trump denounces “left-wing gender insanity” and many trans activists describe any opposition as transphobic, parents in America’s vast ideological middle can find little dispassionate discussion of the genuine risks or trade-offs involved in what proponents call gender-affirming care.

Powell’s story shows how easy it is for young people to get caught up by the pull of ideology in this atmosphere.

“What should be a medical and psychological issue has been morphed into a political one,” Powell lamented during our conversation. “It’s a mess.”

A New and Growing Group of Patients

Many transgender adults are happy with their transitions and, whether they began to transition as adults or adolescents, feel it was life changing, even lifesaving. The small but rapidly growing number of children who express gender dysphoria and who transition at an early age, according to clinicians, is a recent and more controversial phenomenon.

Laura Edwards-Leeper, the founding psychologist of the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States, said that when she started her practice in 2007, most of her patients had longstanding and deep-seated gender dysphoria. Transitioning clearly made sense for almost all of them, and any mental health issues they had were generally resolved through gender transition.

“But that is just not the case anymore,” she told me recently. While she doesn’t regret transitioning the earlier cohort of patients and opposes government bans on transgender medical care, she said, “As far as I can tell, there are no professional organizations who are stepping in to regulate what’s going on.”

Most of her patients now, she said, have no history of childhood gender dysphoria. Others refer to this phenomenon, with some controversy, as rapid onset gender dysphoria, in which adolescents, particularly tween and teenage girls, express gender dysphoria despite never having done so when they were younger. Frequently, they have mental health issues unrelated to gender. While professional associations say there is a lack of quality research on rapid onset gender dysphoria, several researchers have documented the phenomenon, and many health care providers have seen evidence of it in their practices.

“The population has changed drastically,” said Edwards-Leeper, a former head of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the organization responsible for setting gender transition guidelines for medical professionals.

For these young people, she told me, “you have to take time to really assess what’s going on and hear the timeline and get the parents’ perspective in order to create an individualized treatment plan. Many providers are completely missing that step.”

Yet those health care professionals and scientists who do not think clinicians should automatically agree to a young person’s self-diagnosis are often afraid to speak out. A report commissioned by the National Health Service about Britain’s Tavistock gender clinic, which, until it was ordered to be shut down, was the country’s only health center dedicated to gender identity, noted that “primary and secondary care staff have told us that they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach and that this is at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis that they have been trained to undertake in all other clinical encounters.”

Of the dozens of students she’s trained as psychologists, Edwards-Leeper said, few still seem to be providing gender-related care. While her students have left the field for various reasons, “some have told me that they didn’t feel they could continue because of the pushback, the accusations of being transphobic, from being pro-assessment and wanting a more thorough process,” she said.

They have good reasons to be wary. Stephanie Winn, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Oregon, was trained in gender-affirming care and treated multiple transgender patients. But in 2020, after coming across detransition videos online, she began to doubt the gender-affirming model. In 2021 she spoke out in favor of approaching gender dysphoria in a more considered way, urging others in the field to pay attention to detransitioners, people who no longer consider themselves transgender after undergoing medical or surgical interventions. She has since been attacked by transgender activists. Some threatened to send complaints to her licensing board saying that she was trying to make trans kids change their minds through conversion therapy.

In April 2022, the Oregon Board of Licensed Professional Counselors and Therapists told Winn that she was under investigation. Her case was ultimately dismissed, but Winn no longer treats minors and practices only online, where many of her patients are worried parents of trans-identifying children.

“I don’t feel safe having a location where people can find me,” she said.

Detransitioners say that only conservative media outlets seem interested in telling their stories, which has left them open to attacks as hapless tools of the right, something that frustrated and dismayed every detransitioner I interviewed. These are people who were once the trans-identified kids that so many organizations say they’re trying to protect — but when they change their minds, they say, they feel abandoned.

Most parents and clinicians are simply trying to do what they think is best for the children involved. But parents with qualms about the current model of care are frustrated by what they see as a lack of options.

Parents told me it was a struggle to balance the desire to compassionately support a child with gender dysphoria while seeking the best psychological and medical care. Many believed their kids were gay or dealing with an array of complicated issues. But all said they felt compelled by gender clinicians, doctors, schools and social pressure to accede to their child’s declared gender identity even if they had serious doubts. They feared it would tear apart their family if they didn’t unquestioningly support social transition and medical treatment. All asked to speak anonymously, so desperate were they to maintain or repair any relationship with their children, some of whom were currently estranged.

Several of those who questioned their child’s self-diagnosis told me it had ruined their relationship. A few parents said simply, “I feel like I’ve lost my daughter.”

One mother described a meeting with 12 other parents in a support group for relatives of trans-identified youth where all of the participants described their children as autistic or otherwise neurodivergent. To all questions, the woman running the meeting replied, “Just let them transition.” The mother left in shock. How would hormones help a child with obsessive-compulsive disorder or depression? she wondered.

Some parents have found refuge in anonymous online support groups. There, people share tips on finding caregivers who will explore the causes of their children’s distress or tend to their overall emotional and developmental health and well-being without automatically acceding to their children’s self-diagnosis.

Many parents of kids who consider themselves trans say their children were introduced to transgender influencers on YouTube or TikTok, a phenomenon intensified for some by the isolation and online cocoon of Covid. Others say their kids learned these ideas in the classroom, as early as elementary school, often in child-friendly ways through curriculums supplied by trans rights organizations, with concepts like the gender unicorn or the Genderbread person.

‘Do You Want a Dead Son or a Live Daughter?’

After Kathleen’s 15-year-old son, whom she described as an obsessive child, abruptly told his parents he was trans, the doctor who was going to assess whether he had A.D.H.D. referred him instead to someone who specialized in both A.D.H.D. and gender. Kathleen, who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her son’s privacy, assumed that the specialist would do some kind of evaluation or assessment. That was not the case.

The meeting was brief and began on a shocking note. “In front of my son, the therapist said, ‘Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?’” Kathleen recounted.

Parents are routinely warned that to pursue any path outside of agreeing with a child’s self-declared gender identity is to put a gender dysphoric youth at risk for suicide, which feels to many people like emotional blackmail. Proponents of the gender-affirming model have cited studies showing an association between that standard of care and a lower risk of suicide. But those studies were found to have methodological flaws or have been deemed not entirely conclusive. A survey of studies on the psychological effects of cross-sex hormones, published three years ago in The Journal of the Endocrine Society, the professional organization for hormone specialists, found it “could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.” In a letter to The Wall Street Journal last year, 21 experts from nine countries said that survey was one reason they believed there was “no reliable evidence to suggest that hormonal transition is an effective suicide prevention measure.”

Moreover, the incidence of suicidal thoughts and attempts among gender dysphoric youth is complicated by the high incidence of accompanying conditions, such as autism spectrum disorder. As one systematic overview put it, “Children with gender dysphoria often experience a range of psychiatric comorbidities, with a high prevalence of mood and anxiety disorders, trauma, eating disorders and autism spectrum conditions, suicidality and self-harm.”

But rather than being treated as patients who deserve unbiased professional help, children with gender dysphoria often become political pawns.

Conservative lawmakers are working to ban access to gender care for minors and occasionally for adults as well. On the other side, however, many medical and mental health practitioners feel their hands have been tied by activist pressure and organizational capture. They say that it has become difficult to practice responsible mental health care or medicine for these young people.

Pediatricians, psychologists and other clinicians who dissent from this orthodoxy, believing that it is not based on reliable evidence, feel frustrated by their professional organizations. The American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have wholeheartedly backed the gender-affirming model.

In 2021, Aaron Kimberly, a 50-year-old trans man and registered nurse, left the clinic in British Columbia where his job focused on the intake and assessment of gender-dysphoric youth. Kimberly received a comprehensive screening when he embarked on his own successful transition at age 33, which resolved the gender dysphoria he experienced from an early age.

But when the gender-affirming model was introduced at his clinic, he was instructed to support the initiation of hormone treatment for incoming patients regardless of whether they had complex mental problems, experiences with trauma or were otherwise “severely unwell,” Kimberly said. When he referred patients for further mental health care rather than immediate hormone treatment, he said he was accused of what they called gatekeeping and had to change jobs.

“I realized something had gone totally off the rails,” Kimberly, who subsequently founded the Gender Dysphoria Alliance and the L.G.B.T. Courage Coalition to advocate better gender care, told me.

Gay men and women often told me they fear that same-sex-attracted kids, especially effeminate boys and tomboy girls who are gender nonconforming, will be transitioned during a normal phase of childhood and before sexual maturation — and that gender ideology can mask and even abet homophobia.

As one detransitioned man, now in a gay relationship, put it, “I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man. If that’s not conversion therapy, I don’t know what is.”

“I transitioned because I didn’t want to be gay,” Kasey Emerick, a 23-year-old woman and detransitioner from Pennsylvania, told me. Raised in a conservative Christian church, she said, “I believed homosexuality was a sin.”

When she was 15, Emerick confessed her homosexuality to her mother. Her mother attributed her sexual orientation to trauma — Emerick’s father was convicted of raping and assaulting her repeatedly when she was between the ages of 4 and 7 — but after catching Emerick texting with another girl at age 16, she took away her phone. When Emerick melted down, her mother admitted her to a psychiatric hospital. While there, Emerick told herself, “If I was a boy, none of this would have happened.”

In May 2017, Emerick began searching “gender” online and encountered trans advocacy websites. After realizing she could “pick the other side,” she told her mother, “I’m sick of being called a dyke and not a real girl.” If she were a man, she’d be free to pursue relationships with women.

That September, she and her mother met with a licensed professional counselor for the first of two 90-minute consultations. She told the counselor that she had wished to be a Boy Scout rather than a Girl Scout. She said she didn’t like being gay or a butch lesbian. She also told the counselor that she had suffered from anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. The clinic recommended testosterone, which was prescribed by a nearby L.G.B.T.Q. health clinic. Shortly thereafter, she was also diagnosed with A.D.H.D. She developed panic attacks. At age 17, she was cleared for a double mastectomy.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m having my breasts removed. I’m 17. I’m too young for this,’” she recalled. But she went ahead with the operation.

“Transition felt like a way to control something when I couldn’t control anything in my life,” Emerick explained. But after living as a trans man for five years, Emerick realized her mental health symptoms were only getting worse. In the fall of 2022, she came out as a detransitioner on Twitter and was immediately attacked. Transgender influencers told her she was bald and ugly. She received multiple threats.

“I thought my life was over,” she said. “I realized that I had lived a lie for over five years.”

Today Emerick’s voice, permanently altered by testosterone, is that of a man. When she tells people she’s a detransitioner, they ask when she plans to stop taking T and live as a woman. “I’ve been off it for a year,” she replies.

Once, after she recounted her story to a therapist, the therapist tried to reassure her. If it’s any consolation, the therapist remarked, “I would never have guessed that you were once a trans woman.” Emerick replied, “Wait, what sex do you think I am?”

To the trans activist dictum that children know their gender best, it is important to add something all parents know from experience: Children change their minds all the time. One mother told me that after her teenage son desisted — pulled back from a trans identity before any irreversible medical procedures — he explained, “I was just rebelling. I look at it like a subculture, like being goth.”

“The job of children and adolescents is to experiment and explore where they fit into the world, and a big part of that exploration, especially during adolescence, is around their sense of identity,” Sasha Ayad, a licensed professional counselor based in Phoenix, told me. “Children at that age often present with a great deal of certainty and urgency about who they believe they are at the time and things they would like to do in order to enact that sense of identity.”

Ayad, a co-author of “When Kids Say They’re Trans: A Guide for Thoughtful Parents,” advises parents to be wary of the gender affirmation model. “We’ve always known that adolescents are particularly malleable in relationship to their peers and their social context and that exploration is often an attempt to navigate difficulties of that stage, such as puberty, coming to terms with the responsibilities and complications of young adulthood, romance and solidifying their sexual orientation,” she told me. For providing this kind of exploratory approach in her own practice with gender dysphoric youth, Ayad has had her license challenged twice, both times by adults who were not her patients. Both times, the charges were dismissed.

Studies show that around eight in 10 cases of childhood gender dysphoria resolve themselves by puberty and 30 percent of people on hormone therapy discontinue its use within four years, though the effects, including infertility, are often irreversible.

Proponents of early social transition and medical interventions for gender dysphoric youth cite a 2022 study showing that 98 percent of children who took both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones continued treatment for short periods, and another study that tracked 317 children who socially transitioned between the ages of 3 and 12, which found that 94 percent of them still identified as transgender five years later. But such early interventions may cement children’s self-conceptions without giving them time to think or sexually mature.

‘The Process of Transition Didn’t Make Me Feel Better’

At the end of her freshman year of college, Grace Powell, horrifically depressed, began dissociating, feeling detached from her body and from reality, which had never happened to her before. Ultimately, she said, “the process of transition didn’t make me feel better. It magnified what I found was wrong with myself.”

“I expected it to change everything, but I was just me, with a slightly deeper voice,” she added. “It took me two years to start detransitioning and living as Grace again.”

She tried in vain to find a therapist who would treat her underlying issues, but they kept asking her: How do you want to be seen? Do you want to be nonbinary? Powell wanted to talk about her trauma, not her identity or her gender presentation. She ended up getting online therapy from a former employee of the Tavistock clinic in Britain. This therapist, a woman who has broken from the gender-affirming model, talked Grace through what she sees as her failure to launch and her efforts to reset. The therapist asked questions like: Who is Grace? What do you want from your life? For the first time, Powell felt someone was seeing and helping her as a person, not simply looking to slot her into an identity category.

Many detransitioners say they face ostracism and silencing because of the toxic politics around transgender issues.

“It is extraordinarily frustrating to feel that something I am is inherently political,” Powell told me. “I’ve been accused multiple times that I’m some right-winger who’s making a fake narrative to discredit transgender people, which is just crazy.”

While she believes there are people who benefit from transitioning, “I wish more people would understand that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” she said. “I wish we could have that conversation.”

In a recent study in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, about 40 young detransitioners out of 78 surveyed said they had suffered from rapid onset gender dysphoria. Trans activists have fought hard to suppress any discussion of rapid onset gender dysphoria, despite evidence that the condition is real. In its guide for journalists, the activist organization GLAAD warns the media against using the term, as it is not “a formal condition or diagnosis.” Human Rights Campaign, another activist group, calls it “a right-wing theory.” A group of professional organizations put out a statement urging clinicians to eliminate the term from use.

Nobody knows how many young people desist after social, medical or surgical transitions. Trans activists often cite low regret rates for gender transition, along with low figures for detransition. But those studies, which often rely on self-reported cases to gender clinics, likely understate the actual numbers. None of the seven detransitioners I interviewed, for instance, even considered reporting back to the gender clinics that prescribed them medication they now consider to have been a mistake. Nor did they know any other detransitioners who had done so.

As Americans furiously debate the basis of transgender care, a number of advances in understanding have taken place in Europe, where the early Dutch studies that became the underpinning of gender-affirming care have been broadly questioned and criticized. Unlike some of the current population of gender dysphoric youth, the Dutch study participants had no serious psychological conditions. Those studies were riddled with methodological flaws and weaknesses. There was no evidence that any intervention was lifesaving. There was no long-term follow-up with any of the study’s 55 participants or the 15 who dropped out. A British effort to replicate the study said that it “identified no changes in psychological function” and that more studies were needed.

In countries like Sweden, Norway, France, the Netherlands and Britain — long considered exemplars of gender progress — medical professionals have recognized that early research on medical interventions for childhood gender dysphoria was either faulty or incomplete. Last month, the World Health Organization, in explaining why it is developing “a guideline on the health of trans and gender diverse people,” said it will cover only adults because “the evidence base for children and adolescents is limited and variable regarding the longer-term outcomes of gender-affirming care for children and adolescents.”

But in America, and Canada, the results of those widely criticized Dutch studies are falsely presented to the public as settled science.

Other countries have recently halted or limited the medical and surgical treatment of gender dysphoric youth, pending further study. Britain’s Tavistock clinic was ordered to be shut down next month, after a National Health Service-commissioned investigation found deficiencies in service and “a lack of consensus and open discussion about the nature of gender dysphoria and therefore about the appropriate clinical response.”

Meanwhile, the American medical establishment has hunkered down, stuck in an outdated model of gender affirmation. The American Academy of Pediatrics only recently agreed to conduct more research in response to yearslong efforts by dissenting experts, including Dr. Julia Mason, a self-described “bleeding-heart liberal.”

The larger threat to transgender people comes from Republicans who wish to deny them rights and protections. But the doctrinal rigidity of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is disappointing, frustrating and counterproductive.

“I was always a liberal Democrat,” one woman whose son desisted after social transition and hormone therapy told me. “Now I feel politically homeless.”

She noted that the Biden administration has “unequivocally” supported gender-affirming care for minors, in cases in which it deems it “medically appropriate and necessary.” Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told NPR in 2022 that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera — about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”

Of course, politics should not influence medical practice, whether the issue is birth control, abortion or gender medicine. But unfortunately, politics has gotten in the way of progress. Last year The Economist published a thorough investigation into America’s approach to gender medicine. Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor, put the issue into political context. “If you look internationally at countries in Europe, the U.K. included, their medical establishments are much more concerned,” Beddoes told Vanity Fair. “But here — in part because this has become wrapped up in the culture wars where you have, you know, crazy extremes from the Republican right — if you want to be an upstanding liberal, you feel like you can’t say anything.”

Some people are trying to open up that dialogue, or at least provide outlets for kids and families to seek a more therapeutic approach to gender dysphoria.

Paul Garcia-Ryan is a psychotherapist in New York who cares for kids and families seeking holistic, exploratory care for gender dysphoria. He is also a detransitioner who from ages 15 to 30 fully believed he was a woman.

Garcia-Ryan is gay, but as a boy, he said, “it was much less threatening to my psyche to think that I was a straight girl born into the wrong body — that I had a medical condition that could be tended to.” When he visited a clinic at 15, the clinician immediately affirmed he was female, and rather than explore the reasons for his mental distress, simply confirmed Garcia-Ryan’s belief that he was not meant to be a man.

Once in college, he began medically transitioning and eventually had surgery on his genitals. Severe medical complications from both the surgery and hormone medication led him to reconsider what he had done, and to detransition. He also reconsidered the basis of gender affirmation, which, as a licensed clinical social worker at a gender clinic, he had been trained in and provided to clients.

“You’re made to believe these slogans,” he said. “Evidence-based, lifesaving care, safe and effective, medically necessary, the science is settled — and none of that is evidence based.”

Garcia-Ryan, 32, is now the board president of Therapy First, an organization that supports therapists who do not agree with the gender affirmation model. He thinks transition can help some people manage the symptoms of gender dysphoria but no longer believes anyone under 25 should socially, medically or surgically transition without exploratory psychotherapy first.

“When a professional affirms a gender identity for a younger person, what they are doing is implementing a psychological intervention that narrows a person’s sense of self and closes off their options for considering what’s possible for them,” Garcia-Ryan told me.

Instead of promoting unproven treatments for children, which surveys show many Americans are uncomfortable with, transgender activists would be more effective if they focused on a shared agenda. Most Americans across the political spectrum can agree on the need for legal protections for transgender adults. They would also probably support additional research on the needs of young people reporting gender dysphoria so that kids could get the best treatment possible.

A shift in this direction would model tolerance and acceptance. It would prioritize compassion over demonization. It would require rising above culture-war politics and returning to reason. It would be the most humane path forward. And it would be the right thing to do.

*~*~*~*~*~*

For those who want tor ead more by those fighting the cancellation forquestioning, read:

Graham Lineham, who's been fighting since the beginning and paid the price, but is not seeing things turn around.

The Glinner Update, Grahan Linehan's Substack.

Kellie-Jay Keen @ThePosieParker, who's been physically attacked for organizing events for women demanding women-only spaces.

REDUXX, Feminst news & opinion.

Gays Against Groomers @againstgrmrs, A nonprofit of gay people and others within the community against the sexualization, indoctrination and medicalization of children under the guise of "LGBTQIA+"

[balis77]

Meanwhile, in New Phyrexia...

Ixhel: *Frantically putting Urabrask back together* “Ok, good, you’re awake. Look, you’re the only Praetor with enough parts to put back together, so I’m gonna need you to help me get control of this whole... situation.”

Urabrask: “What happened?”

Ixhel: “The invasion failed and I’m pretty sure we’re permanently cut off from the rest of the multiverse... oh and all the other Praetors died.”

Urabrask: “Serves them right... so what’s the problems here?”

Ixhel: “The Hunters Maze is on fire, the Progress Engine doesn’t even know what to do anymore, the Dross Pits are in complete anarchy, the Quiet Furnace is... kinda the same really, and with Mother and Norn dead the Machine Orthodoxy is under new management and it’s... not going well.”

Urabrask: “Who replaced them? Ivor? Mondrak?”

Ixhel: “Uh...”

*At Elesh Norn’s old statue throne*

Skrelv: *Maniacal laughter*

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

“Many of the women in Heterodoxy moved in corresponding circles and maintained similar beliefs. They were “veterans of social reform efforts,” writes Scutts in Hotbed, and they belonged to “leagues, associations, societies and organizations of all stripes.” A large number were public figures—influential lawyers, journalists, playwrights or physicians, some of whom were the only women in their fields—and often had their names in the papers for the work they were performing. Many members were also involved in a wide variety of women’s rights issues, from promoting the use of birth control to advocating for immigrant mothers.

Heterodoxy met every other Saturday to discuss such issues and see how members might collaborate and cultivate networks of reform. Gatherings were considered a safe space for women to talk, exchange ideas and take action.”

In the early 20th century, New York City’s Greenwich Village earned a reputation as America’s bohemia, a neighborhood where everyone from artists and poets to activists and organizers came to pursue their dreams.

“In the Village, it was so easy to bump into great minds, to go from one restaurant to another, to a meeting house, to work for a meeting or to a gallery,” says Joanna Scutts, author of Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club That Sparked Modern Feminism. Here was a community where rents were still affordable, creative individuality thrived, urban diversity and radical experiments were the norm, and bohemian dissenters could come and go as they pleased.

Such a neighborhood was the ideal breeding ground for Heterodoxy, a secret society that paved the way for modern feminism. The female debating club’s name referred to the many unorthodox women among its members. These individuals “questioned forms of orthodoxy in culture, in politics, in philosophy—and in sexuality,” noted ThoughtCo. in 2017.

Born as part of the initial wave of modern feminism that emerged during the 19th and early 20th centuries with suffrage at its center, the radical ideologies debated at Heterodoxy gatherings extended well beyond the scope of a women’s right to vote. In fact, Heterodoxy had only one requirement for membership: that a woman “not be orthodox in her opinion.”

“The Heterodoxy club and the work that it did was very much interconnected with what was going on in the neighborhood,” says Andrew Berman, executive director of Village Preservation, a nonprofit dedicated to documenting and preserving the distinct heritage of Greenwich Village. “With the suffrage movement already beginning to crest, women had started considering how they could free themselves from the generations and generations of structures that had been placed upon them.”

Unitarian minister Marie Jenney Howe founded Heterodoxy in 1912, two years after she and her husband, progressive reformer Frederic C. Howe, moved to the Village. “Howe was already in her 40s,” says Scutts, “and just got to know people through her husband’s professional connections, and during meetings and networks where progressive groups were very active at the time.”

Howe’s mindset on feminism was clear: “We intend simply to be ourselves,” she once said, “not just our little female selves, but our whole big human selves.”

Many of the women in Heterodoxy moved in corresponding circles and maintained similar beliefs. They were “veterans of social reform efforts,” writes Scutts in Hotbed, and they belonged to “leagues, associations, societies and organizations of all stripes.” A large number were public figures—influential lawyers, journalists, playwrights or physicians, some of whom were the only women in their fields—and often had their names in the papers for the work they were performing. Many members were also involved in a wide variety of women’s rights issues, from promoting the use of birth control to advocating for immigrant mothers.

Heterodoxy met every other Saturday to discuss such issues and see how members might collaborate and cultivate networks of reform. Gatherings were considered a safe space for women to talk, exchange ideas and take action. Jessica Campbell, a visual artist whose exhibition on Heterodoxy is currently on display at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum, says, “Their meetings were taking place without any kind of recording or public record. It was this privacy that allowed the women to speak freely.”

Scutts adds, “The freedom to disagree was very important to them.”

With 25 charter members, Heterodoxy included individuals of diverse backgrounds, including lesbian and bisexual women, labor radicals and socialites, and artists and nurses. Meetings were often held in the basement of Polly’s, a MacDougal Street hangout established by anarchist Polly Holladay. Here, at what Berman calls a “sort of nexus for progressive, artistic, intellectual and political thought,” the women would gather at wooden tables to discuss issues like fair employment and fair wages, reproductive rights, and the antiwar movement. The meetings often went on for hours, with each typically revolving around a specific subject determined in advance.

Reflecting on these get-togethers later in life, memoirist Mabel Dodge Luhan described them as gatherings of “fine, daring, rather joyous and independent women, … women who did things and did them openly.”

Occasionally, Heterodoxy hosted guest speakers, like modern birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, who later became president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and anarchist Emma Goldman, known for championing everything from free love to the right of labor to organize.

While the topics discussed at each meeting remained confidential, many of Heterodoxy’s members were quite open about their involvement with the club. “Before I’d even heard of Heterodoxy,” says Scutts, “I had been working in the New-York Historical Society, researching for an [exhibition on] how radical politics had influenced a branch of the suffrage movement. That’s when I began noticing many of the same women’s names in overlapping causes. I then realized that they were all associated with this particular club.”

These women included labor lawyer, suffragist, socialist and journalist Crystal Eastman, who in 1920 co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union to defend the rights of all people nationwide, and playwright Susan Glaspell, a key player in the development of modern American theater.

Other notable alumni were feminist icon Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose 1892 short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” illustrates the mental and physical struggles associated with postpartum depression, and feminist psychoanalyst Beatrice M. Hinkle, the first woman physician in the United States to hold a public health position. Lou Rogers, the suffrage cartoonist whose work was used as a basis for the design of Wonder Woman, was a member of Heterodoxy, as was Jewish socialist activist Rose Pastor Stokes.

Grace Nail Johnson, an advocate for civil rights and an influential figure in the Harlem Renaissance, was Heterodoxy’s only Black member. Howe “had personally written to and invited her,” says Scutts, “as sort of a representation of her race. It’s an unusual case, because racial integration was quite uncommon at the time.”

While exceptions did exist, the majority of Heterodoxy’s members were middle class or wealthy, and the bulk of them had obtained undergraduate degrees—still very much a rarity for women in the early 20th century. Some even held graduate degrees in fields like medicine, law and the social sciences. These were women with the leisure time to participate in political causes, says Scutts, and who could afford to take risks, both literally and figuratively. But while political activism and the ability to discuss topics overtly were both part of Heterodoxy’s overall ethos, most of its members were decidedly left-leaning, and almost all were radical in their ideologies. “Even if the meetings promoted an openness to disagree,” says Scutts, “it wasn’t like these were women from across the political spectrum.”

Rather, they were women who inspired and spurred each other on. For example, about one-third of the club’s members were divorced—a process that was still “incredibly difficult, expensive and even scandalous” at the time, says Scutts. The club acted as somewhat of a support network for them, “just by the virtue of having people around you that are saying, ‘I’ve gone through the process. You can, too, and survive.’”

According to Campbell, Heterodoxy’s new inductees were often asked to share a story about their upbringing with the club’s other members. This approach “helped to break down barriers that might otherwise be there due to their ranging political views and professional allegiances,” the artist says.

The Heterodoxy club usually went on hiatus during the summer months, when members relocated to places like Provincetown, Massachusetts, a seasonal outpost for Greenwich Village residents. As the years progressed, meetings eventually moved to Tuesdays, and the club began changing shape, becoming less radical in tandem with the Village’s own shifting energy. Women secured the right to vote with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, displacing the momentum that fueled the suffrage movement; around this same time, the Red Scare saw the arrests and deportations of unionists and immigrants. Rent prices in the neighborhood also increased dramatically, driving out the Village’s bohemian spirit. As the club’s core members continued aging, Heterodoxy became more about continuing friendships than debating radical ideologies.

“These women were not all young when they started to meet,” says Scutts in the “Lost Ladies of Lit” podcast. “You know, it’s 20, 30 years later, and so they stayed in touch, but they never really found the second generation or third generation to keep it going in a new form.”

By the early 1940s, the biweekly meetings of Heterodoxy were no more. Still, the club’s legacy lives on, even beyond the scope of modern feminism.

“These days, it’s so easy to dehumanize people when you’re only hearing one facet of their belief system,” says Campbell. “But the ability to change your mind and debate freely like the women of Heterodoxy, without any public record? It’s an interesting model for rethinking the way we talk about problems and interact with other people today.”

[gemsofgreece]

TIL from a podcast featuring historian and Byzantine archaeologist Yannis Theoharis:

Athens was one of the most religiously conservative cities of the Byzantine Empire. It adhered to the ancient Greek religion for longer than most other areas. Contrary to popular belief, its eventual conversion to Christianity did not happen violently. Christianity was getting more and more ground amongst the believers progressively. Meanwhile, the ancient temples and shrines were progressively emptying but as long as there were believers they were functioning properly and had guards and went through restoration works and all, as stated by Neoplatonic philosopher Proklos (with the exception of nude sculptures which had been destroyed already by proto-Christians). The historian also claims the conversion of the temples to churches happened later than what was previously believed, around the 7th-9th centuries. As the vast majority of the population had eventually converted to Christianity, the temples were left abandoned. The empire ordered their conversion to churches so that funding their preservation could be justified. Furthermore, there wasn’t as much of violent banning of ancient schools as it was thought. Justinian did not ban the function of the Neoplatonic school in Athens but ceased the state funding unless the school accepted to add Christian theology to its curriculum. The Neoplatonic school refused but it was not banned. It kept functioning using its own private funds until this wasn’t enough and the school had to close. Evidence for this is that it is documented that the school functioned for several decades or more than a century (don’t remember exactly) after Justinian’s imperial command, which was previously viewed as an immediate or violent shutdown. Meanwhile, the Neoplatonic school in Alexandria (in Egypt) agreed to add Christian theology to its curriculum and it kept functioning undisturbed until the 7th century and the Arab conquest.

Also, he has more insight into the similarities observed between Eastern / Greek and even all Orthodoxy and the Ancient Greek religion, such as idol / icon worship, lesser deity / saint worship, virgin female deity / super saint worship, patron gods / saints etc He says there was an interesting cycle of Christianised Hellenism followed by Hellenized Christianity. Some of these elements of Christian Orthodoxy were emphasized more than in the early years of Proto-Christianity or even exaggerated by the Byzantine Greek Christians in order to attract the pagan Greeks and make them understand more easily the philosophy of the new religion and find common ground between them. It worked.

Lastly, he disputed the dated assumptions that the Visigoth king Alaric I was assisted by monks to destroy Athens during his invasion in 396. This was falsely concluded because in documents it was found that Alaric was accompanied by men clad in black. Theoharis says these were actually Thracian soldiers (Alaric indeed fared long in Thrace and the Thracians were by large mercenaries) and supports it is very unlikely based on historical evidence of the time that Athenian or Greek Christians would collaborate with a Visigoth invader to help him destroy historical areas of Athens, even if they were pagan.

These are the most important bits from memory, I am linking the podcast here, it is in Greek.

[iammeiamwe]

So, finally, the continuation of this post here.

The first thing I want to say is that I was pleasantly surprised at how many people actually liked the previous post and wanted to see more - so thanks so much to all of you, I've never thought that so many people would be interested in me talking about the design and my country's culture🩷 (and yeah thank you @signanothername for your kind words again)

I'm sorry this post took so long, but I actually struggled a lot with Nightmare design. Everything just felt wrong for some reason and I literally couldn't finish it. I even took a break at some point, and it actually worked in a surprising way.

You see, I like the Dream design I made previously. But I always felt like something was missing. The design was beautiful, and the different ornaments actually had meaning that fit Dream well, but it was lacking... a story? Like, it wasn't completely accurate, and I could really imagine a person looking like that living somewhere in the ancient Russia, walking in the streets. It was a good representation of different russian cultural elements, but that was the only thing that it was really.

So instead of thinking what russian culture elements can I include in a design I started thinking about a completely different thing.

Can I possibly imagine the dreamtale brothers in the setting of Russia in the past? What would they look like? How would they live? Can I somehow "adapt" their powers and turn them into something more related to the russian culture of that time?

And well, I made a completely different concept with completely different designs.

Now, I wanna say that this post still contains an enormous amount of text, but know it's not only about the russian culture, but mostly about the kinda au that I made? It's still in the development, I'm still thinking about the details, I mean, I haven't even got a proper name for it yet... But I just haad to write about my thoughts and share some artwork that I did so here we are.

The whole thing is inspired not only by the russian culture, but also by the Black Book game which I mentioned in the 1st part and which gave me a general direction of where to go with this.

So, the setting is somewhere around the 19th century, in a quite ordinary russian village. Both Dream and Nightmare are children from a family of villagers. Here are some examples of 19th century russian villagers clothing that I took inspiration from:

At first it looks quite simple, but it has some interesting small details and looks quite unique:)

One of the reasons I chose 19th century is that despite being quite a "modern" time, with different new technologies and overall progress it was a time when many russians (especially in villages) still believed in different myths, sayings, tales and epics. Russian culture and mythology still played a big role in ordinary people's lives, changing and transforming through the minds of different people to better fit the ever changing reality and new technologies being introduced. Russian paganism, orthodoxy and local beliefs finally began to coexist organically with each other, in some ways even blending in together creating some unique traditions, customs and overall culture.

So now, about their magic.

One of the questions I asked myself was: What kind of magic would Dream and Nightmare wield if they lived in the traditional old russian village settings? Was there even a concept of "magic" in old Russia that could be suitable for the brothers?

And while I can't say that I've found a perfect alternative, and what I'm about to tell you might seem not fitting at all at first, I think the concept I'm about to show and especially the idea it can convey is not that far from the whole "positive and negative emotions" thing.

So, as it turns out, the concept of magic or paranormal abilities in old Russia is quite unique and different. There actually were people who were considered "magicians", or rather witches and withchers, but. The whole idea of magic itself was tightly connected with different mystical creatures that inhabited the whole country in minds of russians (and there were many. like MANY) and the ability of a person to talk with them, connect with them, correctly perform various rituals related to them and basically ask them to do certain things.

In other words, a witch or a witcher in old Russia is not a person inhabiting magical powers all by themselves, but a person who can "deal" with spirits and mystical beings of different kinds, ask them to do the magician's biddings or help them in a way needed.

And let me tell you, there are many different types of beings, creatures and spirits in russian culture, all of them fulfilling their own purposes. There aare the classical spirits of the forests, of the rivers and lakes, but we also have creatures living in people's houses (spirits that look after the well-being of the house), beings living in every banya (a small russian bathhouse located near the house), spirits of field, arable land, sowing season, winds (northern and southern separately) and many more. And don't get me started on the evil spirits and different types of demons like bisi and chorts, that's a whole another category.

What I've noticed is that the different beings of russian mythology are mostly either the ones connected with nature, like keepers and protectors of forests, lakes and etc, or the so called "evil spirits", different types of demons and devils or other beings that are overall considered dangerous, which are often portrayed to have connection with human routine and different temptations and sins.

And well, here comes my idea and the whole concept. What if Dream had the power and natural talent for connecting with the different spirits and beings of nature, while Nightmare had the natural talent for connecting with the so-called "evil spirits".

Maybe you already think it's fitting, but wait, there's more. You know, I (and probably many others) always thought of positive and negative emotions as a neutral concept. Emotions aren't bad or good themselves and both types can lead to good or bad things depending on the situation and the person who is experiencing those emotions. Guess what? (And I was surprised too when I found out during my research!)

There IS a similar concept with the russian mystical creatures and magic wielders. While people who can connect with "evil spirits" were quite often viewed in a more negative light (like the situation with negative apples and Nightmare), those people could (and actually did) use their abilities and knowledge for good purposes! Of course there were people who used such abilities for their own gain and evil deeds (especially when there was always a threat of being tempted and corrupted by the forces such people were working with). But there were other uses for such powers, people like that could help and save people from the evil spirits, tell them what to do to avoid getting "on the bad side" of dangerous beings, cure people from different illnesses and being possessed by demons, etc. For example, while it was partially done out of fear of a witcher rage and revenge, people used to invite people who had connections "with the darker powers" on their weddings so that they can protect the important event from different kinds of dangerous beings and spirits, to protect newlyweds from various misfortunes in their future life together. Even shepherds were believed to have connections with different kinds of low rank demons, and used them to watch over the herd, prevent other evil beings from stealing the animals.

On the other hand, the practice of talking to and performing various rituals involving spirits of nature was viewed more positively, since it was mostly used to please such beings and ask them for a good harvest, catch off fish, successful hunting, safety during travels and etc. But such powers could also be used with evil goals. Such people could easily affect the weather, cause different natural phenomenon and even poor harvest and famine.

So, we have a situation where there are two types of powers that are overall kind of similar, are actually completely neutral by themselves, can both be used for both good and bad and completely depend on the user, but one power is mostly viewed positively while the other is considered to be rather dangerous and evil. Yeah, I feel like I've seen that somewhere.

Now, let's talk about Nightmare and Dream separately (and the children designs I made for them)

Starting with Nightmare:

• She/her in this. I don't know why, I just see Nightmare as a girl in this and Dream as a boy. She is also inspired by the main character of Black Book who is female, sooo

• She and Dream were born in a small village in a family of a skilled hunter and a powerful witch, who wielded a mysterious artefact - a book containing a huge number of spells, rituals, descriptions of various creatures and other knowledge. She was able to connect with both types of spirits and beings and often helped the villagers out. Unfortunately, while there were no problems during the birth of Dream, the process of giving birth to Nightmare was hard and the witch passed away soon afterwards.

• As already mentioned, has a natural talent for communicating with "evil" and "dark" spirits and creatures. The villagers already thought of her as cursed since in their minds she was the reason the village's beloved witch died, and when they found out about her dangerous abilities (especially since connecting with dark spirits was considered a difficult art that people learned and studied, and being born with such ability on a good level was rare), well yeaah, she doesn't have the best reputation.

• So, this is actually a cool one imo. When I was creating this whole mess in my head I thought that them being named Dream and Nightmare was, well, not the most fitting and authentic for my traditional russian au thing I'm trying to do... So I thought that maybe I can find them some cool ancient russian names that have a meaning suitable for them? And I did. So they have ancient russian names now too! So, the original Nightmare's name (the one her mother gave her) is Tihomira (Тихомира) or Mira (Мира) for short, which means "a calm and quiet, reserved person".

• But eventually the villagers gave her another name (more like a nickname) - Zloba (Злоба), which literally means evil and malicious :'(

• She was always surrounded by rumours about her and the death of her mother, she obviously doesn't remember her mother but misses her dearly, she always looks at photos of her parents together with eyes full of longing.

• Her and Dream's father shuts down after the loss of his wife, he's rarely at home at spends most of the time hunting, Mira has to stay at home to work around the house most of the time.

• In search for explanation of her abilities, as well as trying to prove to herself that she's not the cause of her mothers death, she actively seeks out all the different object, photos and painting, anything that once belonged to her. And one day, she finds the book.

• By the way, unfortunately, the father doesn't really like his daughter too. Sometimes he looks at her and really struggles not to see the reason of his lovely wife's death in her. Actually he knows about Mira's slight obsession with her mother's things, he finds it unnatural and even creepy, he tries to hide all of the witch's belongings, especially the book, thinking it can be really dangerous in Mira's hands. Well, she finds the book eventually anyway.

• I know that some people don't really like the canon concept of Corrupted not being Nightmare but rather a completely different being. I don't like that too, but I don't want to completely get rid of Corrupted as a character, so they are both present in this story as separate characters, Corrupted being an evil spirit sealed in the book (you can see him in the background of the art).

• At first Mira tries to use the knowledge in the book to prove to the villagers that she can also do good with this power, but the book eventually influences her and corrupts her.

• The apple incident is now the book incident :/

• Corrupted and Mira remain to be separate beings even after the incident, although they heavily influence each other, I'll probably talk about the incident and what happens after it in the next post after this, I still have to develop their adult designs too.

Now I'll give you a couple of examples of different creatures this Nightmare can interact with:

Actually, I need to put a warning here for descriptions of gore, death and violent actions since russian mythology is not just a couple of happy fairytales an can actually travel to some dark themes, so be warned ( if you don't want to read just skip to the Dream part)

1. Kikimora:

Kikimora was described as a short, crooked, slovenly and ugly old woman, a long-braided girl or woman. According to various other descriptions, a kikimora can be very small and thin, with a large head, long arms, short legs, bulging eyes, hairy paws, horns, a tail, and covered in feathers or fur.

It was believed that Kikimora could appear in a house after the death of one of the family members, but she could also be sent into the house by a witch or a witcher using a ritual artifact in the form of a small doll.

It was commonly believed that kikimoras cause great harm to people and can be dangerous: they prevent them from sleeping and frighten them with various sounds, annoy small children, pounce on and strangle them at night, throw various objects, drop and break things, pull out or cut out hair from people, wool from cattle, feathers from poultry in their sleep. The activity of kikimoras could even force owners to leave their home. There are stories in which kikimoras brought people to death.

Kikimora's favorite tool in the house is a spinning wheel. At night, Kikimora often spun, making a lot of noise; any things spun by her were considered cursed. If the owner of the house noticed Kikimora doing this at night, it could be a sign of imminent death. Most often, people did not see this spirit, but they heard her noise and felt her presence; it was possible to drive her out of the house only with the help of strong spells and rituals performed by a witch or a witcher.

2. Likhoradka (fever)

Likhoradka (which means fever in russian) is a disease personified in the form of a woman in russian mythology, invading a person and causing either chills or fever.

A distinctive feature of Likhoradka is her multiplicity. Most often, this spirit came in the form of several women at once (7, 9, 12). It was believed that Likhoradka crawled under a person's skin, causing illness, and after the death of a person, it jumped into the body of another. Likhoradka spread very quickly, sometimes taking many lives throughout the village. She can be driven out either by strong spells or by curing all the sick with special decoctions. If Likhoradka was driven out, then most often it was "sent" to the forests, fields, swamps.

3. Bannik and Bannica

Bannik lives in the banya ( russian bathhouse); usually invisible, sometimes takes the form of an old man covered in dirt and leaves from a broom, or a man with long hair, and also turns into a boar, a dog, a cat, a frog, a white hare. A female Bannik is called a Bannica, or an Obderikha. An Obderikha is a shaggy, scary old woman.

In general, Banniks are quite peaceful spirits, but only if a person follows all the rules during a visit to the bathhouse and does not forget to make offerings to the spirit. To appease Bannik, people leave him a piece of rye bread with a large amount of coarse salt, and also leave some water in the tub and a piece of soap nearby.

If a person angers the Bannik, he turns into a dangerous and malicious spirit - he can burn people with boiling water in the bathhouse, throw stones at them, and also knock on the wall, frightening those taking a steam bath. If a person has violated very serious prohibitions, the Bannik can cause great harm: he can peel off the skin or steam a person to death. People often came to witches for advice on how to properly appease the spirit, what should and should not be done in the bathhouse, and also asked for help if the spirit was angry.

Now let's talk about Dream:

• He/him

• His russian name is Peresvet (Пересвет), or Svet (Свет) for short, which means "the one fighting for the light". I know, it's really cool😅

•As mentioned, has a natural talent for speaking and connecting with different spirits and beings of nature.

• The villagers though of him quite well, especially compared to his sister. When they found out about his powers, they started to value him even more since he could help out villagers and perform various rituals which would bring a good harvest, protect crops, bring good weather, etc.

• He actually has sort of a hobby collecting different plants he find beautiful, one day villagers started noticing that all the flowers and plants he bring are actually either medicinal herbs that are good for curing different diseases or are used in some useful rituals. It's actually not because he's just lucky, some spirits of nature are actually helping him find them from time to time. It's after many such occurrences that the villagers started suspecting about his powers.

• Opposite to Mira, Svet is almost always outside, either just playing with other children, helping villagers with his powers or learning more about them.

• On the contrary to his sister, is not really interested in developing his powers or learning more about them and all the rituals, he mostly wants to have a simple happy childhood like other children, he also dreams of becoming a simple herbalist in the future, not a witcher, but he feels like he has to do all that to help the villagers and be a good person, so he tries his best to practice and study anyway.

• Is actually quite close to his father, well as close as you can get to a shut person like him, sometimes the father takes him to some walk in the forest with him, he tells him about different plants in the forest and how to properly survive there since he's a hunter. Svet cherishes such rare interactions quite a lot.

• Doesn't understand his sister's troubles and doesn't spend much time with her, the villagers are always demanding him to be outside, to help with some rituals or collect some herbs. But he actually wants to spend more time with her, he just doesn't know how to say no to the villagers.

Some examples of the spirits Svet can connect with:

Actually, there are no descriptions of gore here or anything, but some darker themes like death and being lost are present so please proceed with caution

1. Leshy

Leshy is the spirit-master of the forest in russian mythology. In mythological stories, Leshy appears as a plant, animal or anthropomorphic creature. It is also common for the leshy to appear in the form of relatives and acquaintances. The leshy was sometimes described as a giant, sometimes as a dwarf; there are beliefs that he could change his height.

As the master, the leshy takes care of the forest, protects it, and is the patron of forest animals and plants. The leshy was considered a fair master of the forest, who would not harm without reason, but could punish people for inappropriate behavior in his domain, or if a person behaved,he could help them. According to popular belief, the leshy could ensure good luck in hunting and safe grazing of cattle, but for this to happen, hunters and shepherds needed to make an agreement with him.

Such an agreement was called a "forest charter", people (usually with the help of a witch) wrote their requests on birch bark, asking Leshy to help in hunting and not to harm the village. In order for Leshy to accept such conditions, he was appeased and brought offerings: various foods, bread, milk, sometimes coins. However, Leshy punished people who violated the forest's prohibitions - he could kidnap them, make them wander and get lost in the forest, from where people rarely returned and usually died wandering in the forest.

2. Gamayun

Gamayun is a mythical bird of paradise in Russian culture. In literary works of the 17th-19th centuries, it is a bird that flies in from paradise and flies forever with the help of its tail. In the culture of the 19th-21st centuries, there were two main directions in the development of the image: as a bird of paradise, which is associated with ideas of happiness and bliss, and as a mythical bird that foretells trouble. Depending on which side it flies over a person's head, either luck or misfortune can await them.

...

Yay, I actually found some time today to finish this! Of course that's not all, and I have a lot more to tell you: about the specifics of russian spells, about the book, the incident and what happened after (I still need to do the adult designs), who knows, maybe I'll even add other au sanses to this. I also will certainly do more fanart for this, tell about the traditional russian house called izba, I'll also talk about more mystical creatures (I actually wanted to tell you about one more here that Dream can interact with but I cannot put any more pictures). So stay tuned for updates for this!

(i really gotta think of a good name for this au...)

(actually all the research, drawing my own art, finding pictures and materials as well as translating everything so that it would be understandable to non-russian audience takes quite a lot of time, especially since making one art piece can take me anywhere from two hour to several days, so please be patient since the next part probably won't be posted soon. anyway you are free to ask any questions about the au or russian culture as a whole while you wait, i'll try my best to answer them)

[littjara-mirrorlake]

It's that page-filling time again! Weird Phyrexians 14-20! (Sorry for the weird light effect, I couldn't get a good angle on the whole page, so I'm reattaching a better photo of the top two below.)

14: Along the lines of tome lackeys, mites, and other small scurrying Orthodoxy servants, this one was simply made to be a bowl, carrying ichor or other liquids to partake in holy rituals.

15: This wiry creature has wrapped itself in stinking, decaying piles of discarded gore from the Orthodoxy's compleation chambers, topping it all off with a pilfered faceplate. Now, it wanders the rare dark corners of the Basilica looking for more flesh to add to its hoard.

16: Combination survey instrument and grappling hook, this Progress Engine device is used for detaining unwanted intruders. It features a prominent eye in the center, with its optic nerve wrapping up along the tentacle "arm". Smaller nerve bundles connect the eyes on the three claws to the center.

17: It's not too clear what this soft and goopy creature actually is, as it's a shy, quaking thing that's cloistered itself in the toughest shell it can find and added spikes and teeth to scare off others from investigating. Unfortunately, the ichorous tear trails it leaves behind make it easy to track. The poor thing has anxiety.

18: A helpful tool assistant from the Quiet Furnace, complete with tiny arms to hand off supplies to busy artisans.

19: This skite was of plot relevance in the New Phyrexia campaign I DM. It sucks up oil through its syringe and processes it in its abdomen, before the bulbs on its body change color to indicate the oil's mana affinity. It's how a core-born Swarm PC learned that she was in fact of Gitaxian descent.

20: Like a proto-Dominus, this being coalesced as an avatar of faith... but not the kind the Orthodoxy likes. Despite being white-mana-aligned, it shows itself to be something of a free spirit, and represents the faith of Phyrexians in themselves. This is deeply inconvenient to the Orthodoxy.

[theculturedmarxist]

thoughts on the democrat party

Personally I think the Dems are doing "their best" with Biden. From what I can see the shape that American society has taken due to corporate monopolization has influenced the party in such a way that it has divested itself from the necessary talent to either govern or develop a new intellectual framework to deal with emerging circumstances. Biden is the best they've got because party power has been monopolized by all the geriatric party bosses, who have spent decades weeding out any potential party rivals and self selecting for mediocrity and the kind of intellectual narrowness necessary to carry the nebulous Dem party line.

The Dems have been outfoxed at every turn in spite of their comparative popularity to the Reps because as awful as it is, the Reps at least have a vision of the future and how to get their, which the Dems absolutely lack, and you can't beat something with nothing. So the Dems default to the "norms" set by the Republicans whenever the Ds manage to get power, which only serves the Republican agenda as eventually they'll just get in power again and pick up where they left off.

Biden is actually the best they can do, because they have no one of any vision to energize the base, and even if they did they don't have the clout to either direct the party or attract investment from donors. The fact that an octogenarian with dementia is at the head of the party and nothing can be done about it points to how serious the problems in the party have become.

>At what point do the Dems just collapse from the institutional rot you're describing?

I'm not sure, really. I haven't really thought about it.

I suppose we might be seeing the first indications of such a collapse now. I think the marks of a healthy institution are for it to a) be able to identify, incorporate, and cultivate new talent, b) to have an internal well of theoretical and practical knowledge to draw from, and c) to utilize the previous two in novel ways in order to work towards some kind of future ideal and/or to deal with novel circumstances, both benign and malignant.

It's much more complicated than just Trump as a person, but him and the circumstances surrounding him are a novel, malignant circumstance as far as the Democratic Party is concerned, and one that it had failed to deal with after 8 years of wrangling with it. Bernie Sanders is another facet of this malignant novelty, and the party's manner of dealing with him is ironically why they're incapable of dealing with Trump. As far as the party runners are concerned, Sanders and other members of the 'progressives" in the party are a tumor to be combated. Even their mild reforms run counter to party orthodoxy and are not to be tolerated, and anywhere they might seriously challenge that orthodoxy, like we saw when they prevailed in Nevada, they have to be crushed. They're allowed to showboat and make their little tirades, but when it comes to any sort of actual challenge to party policy there are various means of chastening them, like we saw recently with AIPAC crushing the "squad" and making AOC cry.

So this rigidity has made adaptation and innovation basically impossible. There's just the status quo, and if you want to get anywhere in the party you have to serve that status quo with a practically religious devotion. The party is now overflowing with empty suits like Kamala and Buttigieg, the sort of mediocrities that have no real values, no real intellect, and whose only talent is being able to say with some level of conviction whatever currently serves the party's interests. Unfortunately for them, the party's interests are diametrically opposed to the general population's interests, so while they might be able to get up in front of a tv and deliver a speech someone wrote for them which will make PMC types on twitter and the MSNBC hosts they follow swoon, there's nothing there to attract average people and convince them to vote for them. They've heard it all before and because there's very little material difference to them in being fucked by a Republican or Democrat president, they don't really care.

So the crisis now is that they have nothing to beat Trump with, and no way to fix this situation. Even if they had the talent to fall back on, Biden himself represents a significant amount of clout within the party itself, and the party's convention rules mean that all the delegates they gave him are his to do with as he pleases, and for whatever reason refuses to give them up, probably because he's a) a bastard and b) his progressing dementia is bringing out all his worst qualities, and making the magnanimous play for the benefit of others is not something that Biden would ever, ever do.

Right now we're witnessing all the powers and interests behind the party trying to come to grips with these circumstances. The young, attractive party members that would be worth funding like AOC are unacceptable because the donors won't accept their politics, so giving them actual power within and over the party is out of the question. The old party hacks like Clinton or Pelosi wouldn't accept this either because it would threaten their own power and security. Anyone that would be acceptable to the party bosses lacks the ability to attract enough sections of the party donors and voters to be viable. They lack the charisma to appeal to the people, and Obama's ability to line them up behind themselves with "it's me or the pitchforks" type of rhetoric.

However this election shakes out, it won't change the fact that the Democratic party is in the grip of a small number of extremely powerful party bosses that can't be dislodged for various reasons, and that as long as they're alive they're going to do whatever it takes to maintain their positions. As long as they do, no one of any real talent is going to make it anywhere in the party, and as long as that's true it's only going to continue to stagnate. And even if Obama, Pelosi, Biden, Clinton, and the rest of the bosses died tomorrow, that still wouldn't bring much effect because the ideology of the bourgeoisie behind the party is rigidly devoted to the status quo out of political and economic necessity. With all that said, their party remains viable only as long as the status quo remains viable, and that is quickly becoming not the case. They've been able to indulge in this stagnancy only because they've been able to minimize or externalize all the worst effects of it, but between climate change, the ascendancy of BRICS, the war in Ukraine they're losing, the war in Palestine they're losing, the cold war over Taiwan they're losing, the ongoing COVID pandemic, the incipient Avian Flu pandemic, and many, many other very severe problems developing in and around the country, that indulgence becomes increasingly untenable.

So to sum up, we might be witnessing the early stages of an ongoing and possibly irreversible collapse at this very moment.

[tarotfairy0919]

⋆.ೃ࿔*:･Major Arcana - 5. The Hierophant

©tarotfairy0919 - all rights reserved. do not copy, translate, alter or repost my work.

Please REBLOG if you find this information useful! ༄˖°🪐.ೃ࿔*

Astrological sign or planet - Taurus the bull

Element - earth

Key meaning - education, unity, spiritual and direction

MAYBE card

🔮 Qualities of the card - religion, values, tradition teaching 🔮 Associated object and location - a library, a Bible, a church, a school, a cross

the figure of religious orthodoxy

he is the bridge between heaven and earth

maintainer of traditions and values

stability and security

- married man, marriage, union, priest

- all means of communication, desire to communicate, new communication

✷Upright meaning

support

self-validation and expansion

time to commit to relationships

opportunity to integrate mind and spirit and ascend to a higher plane of awareness

offers an opportunity to question and define your values

shows you the path to follow in a community(joining a study group or learning new skills)

a teacher or educator

home - expanding your property, inviting people into your home to share your interests

relationship - committed partnership, marriage, celebrating the sacred in your relationship

career and money - progress in your organization, inspired leadership and growth

✷Reversed meaning

poor leadership

maybe misled by an incompetent or egoistic individual at work on your spiritual path

wrong decisions with moral repercussions

finding your own path in non-traditional ways - learning doesn’t only come from textbooks

possibly a hasty decision made for personal gain

Reflections

+ 9 of Wands = defending your faith at any cost; protecting what is known

+ 2 of Cups = love, partnership

+ 6 of Cups = familiarity, harmony, the past

The above dividers don't belong to me, credits to their respective owners.

[phyrexianphamily]

Would you like know why I hate newtdays, Elesh? Would you? When you grow up as a blue creature, nobody shows up to your party. Newtdays are a constant reminder that out of the Bay, I'm just a scary, good-for-nothing... nerd. Yeah. But nothing compares to having the one sibling, the one sibling I thought I could trust... stab me in the back.

Jin-Gitaxias (waving his torn arm) to Elesh Norn, March of the Machine

[monratarot]

Major Arcana - 5. The Hierophant

Please like and reblog if you find this information useful! 🌸🎀💕

Astrological sign or planet - Taurus the bull

Element - earth

Key meaning - education, unity, spiritual and direction

MAYBE card

♦ Qualities of the card - religion, values, tradition teaching ★ Associated object and location - a library, a Bible, a church, a school, a cross

the figure of religious orthodoxy

he is the bridge between heaven and earth

maintainer of traditions and values

stability and security

- married man, marriage, union, priest

- all means of communication, desire to communicate, new communication

✷Upright meaning

support

self-validation and expansion

time to commit to relationships

opportunity to integrate mind and spirit and ascend to a higher plane of awareness

offers an opportunity to question and define your values

shows you the path to follow in a community(joining a study group or learning new skills)

a teacher or educator

home - expanding your property, inviting people into your home to share your interests

relationship - committed partnership, marriage, celebrating the sacred in your relationship

career and money - progress in your organization, inspired leadership and growth

✷Reversed meaning

poor leadership

maybe misled by an incompetent or egoistic individual at work on your spiritual path

wrong decisions with moral repercussions

finding your own path in non-traditional ways - learning doesn’t only come from textbooks

possibly a hasty decision made for personal gain

Reflections

+ 9 of Wands = defending your faith at any cost; protecting what is known

+ 2 of Cups = love, partnership

+ 6 of Cups = familiarity, harmony, the past

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Don Moynihan at Can We Still Govern?

The Tocquevillian view that civil society, including it’s associations, are essential bulwarks to protect democracy is such well-worn truism as to be incontestable.

Or so you would have thought. But we live in an age where serious people, serious advocates of free speech mind you, are very anxious to shut down such speech they disagree with. They are not just happy to lobby government to use its power to shut down such speech, but are entirely indifferent to grotesque hypocrisies as they use their own speech rights to silence others. Trump and his supporters are already threatening civil society with investigations, lawsuits and intimidation. In the aftermath of student protests, leaders of higher education are increasingly retreating to a position of “institutional neutrality.” Studied indifference to the issues of the day makes a great deal of sense for those seeking to manage organizational reputation and avoid blame, but it is a less than inspiring vision as higher education as a set of institutions willing to speak truth to power.

The right wing wants to go further, and is now targeting professional academic associations from making public statements. The American Enterprise Institute is leading the charge. A recent report presents it as a scandalous that many academic associations have made some sort of statements about race, affirmative action, climate change, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Israel-Hamas, or immigration. To be more precise, AEI views such actions as problematic because “these statements almost uniformly reflect progressive orthodoxy” and it calls on government to not allow public funds to allow people to join professional associations.

This idea might seem outlandish, but it was featured in some of the standard right wing locations, such as The College Fix, The Washington Examiner, and The Wall Street Journal. And we are in a moment when Republican officials are looking for ideas to undermine academic freedom. So, if you are an academic, or just a citizen uncomfortable with the idea of silencing some very specific associations because of the content of their speech, you should be worried about this.

I want to address this attack on professional associations on three levels. First, the basic logic that AEI is proposing is simply false. Second, it is not based on any true defensible principle beyond “free speech for me, but not for thee.” It is a call for government to target speech by associations that AEI disagrees with. And third, it is massively hypocritical. AEI, and other organizations trying to silence professional associations are doing precisely what they say should be forbidden: taking taxpayer dollars to engage in issue advocacy.

[...] First, academic associations have professional expertise on certain topics. And because those associations are centered on scholarly values, that expertise is usually anchored in legitimate scientific values. You can find exceptions, of course, but when the American Political Science Association talks about democracy, or when environmental associations weigh in on climate change issues, you should probably listen to them. On their domains of expertise, they are more likely to be credible relative to AEI or other associations that present themselves as engaging in research, but whose activities are heavily tilted by an ideological lens. [...]

Second, academic associations are representative organizations. They are typically run by elected officers who seek to represent the views and interests of their membership. The structures of our institutions is inherently more democratic than, say, the structure of the AEI or other think tanks, which are necessarily more responsive to donors and partisans. We hear from individual members who express concerns on certain issues. It is incredibly rare for an association to engage in a public statement without prior pressure from their membership, or at least without the knowledge that the vast majority of their members share the expressed views. Again, this is perfectly Tocquevillian.

In some cases, the concerns members raise are not about abstract political values but about how public policies directly affect them. For example, members of an association might raise a concern about hosting events in states they can be prosecuted for going to the bathroom, or where they cannot count on reliable health care if their pregnancy runs into trouble. Academic associations are increasingly global, and US immigration policies can directly affect their ability to participate in their profession. For example, AEI singled out the American Statistical Association for raising concerns about President Trump’s travel bans from majority Muslim countries. Is this unreasonable? Not really if you consider that “one out of nine ASA members resides outside the U.S.” This is a straightforward case where associations are drawing attention to how a policy decision directly and negatively affects its membership. After all, what is the point of being a member of a professional association that refuses to represent you?

Don Moynihan with a banger of a piece on academic freedom.

[azspot]

Recent decades have seen private wealth multiply around the Western world, making us richer than ever before. A hasty glance at the soaring number of billionaires – some doubling as international celebrities – prompts the question: are we also living in a time of unparalleled wealth inequality? Influential scholars have argued that indeed we are. Their narrative of a new gilded age paints wealth as an instrument of power and inequality. The 19th-century era with low taxes and minimal market regulation allowed for unchecked capital accumulation and then, in the 20th century, the two world wars and progressive taxation policies diminished the fortunes of the wealthy and reduced wealth gaps. Since 1980, the orthodoxy continues, a wave of market-friendly policies reversed this equalising historical trend, boosting capital values and sending wealth inequality back towards historic highs.

The surprising truth about wealth and inequality in the West

[mariacallous]

In 2007 I published what was probably my most-read book What’s Left. It asked novel questions.

"Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal-left is against come from the liberal-left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don…Why, even in the case of Palestine, can’t those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see?

“After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a superior literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? And why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology from the ultra-right?”

In short, I asked why was the world upside down? In the past conservatives made excuses for fascism because they mistakenly saw it as a continuation of their democratic right-wing ideas. In the early 2000s, overwhelmingly and everywhere, liberals and leftists were more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements, with the exception of their native far-right parties. As long as local racists were white, they had no difficulty in opposing them in a manner that would have been recognizable to the traditional left. But give them a foreign far-right movement that was anti-Western and they treated it as at best a distraction and at worst an ally.

I say my questions were novel because, although socialism was one of the great political movements of the 20th century, few discussed the consequences of its collapse in the 1980s. The decline of the socialist religion had as profound and as perverse consequences as the collapse of Christianity in the late 19th century. But no one, or next to no one, wanted to think about them.

As a good atheist I hated to paraphrase GK Chesterton, but there’s no escaping the old Catholic apologist.  My argument boiled down to saying that what Chesterton said about God applies just as well to socialism.  When men stop believing in it, “they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

After dreams of socialism and communism vanished in the 1980s, large sections of the radical left preferred any enemy of the West to the West having no enemies at all: radical Islam, insane Sunni and Shia dictators, Putin’s Russia, violent misogynists and homophobes. As long as they were anti-western, and in particular the enemies of the US and Israel, the radical left was happy to form alliances.

Or as Judith Butler explained the new orthodoxy in 2006, “Understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.”That by any normal standard Hamas and Hezbollah were tyrannical, inquisitorial, and misogynist was irrelevant. They were anti-western and that alone made them “progressive”.

Not everything I wrote in 2007 stands up well today. In the 2010s we began to see Conservatives fawning over trash like Viktor Orban, and from 2016 on we have seen the wholesale abasement of the US right before Donald Trump. The lure of authoritarianism was by no means confined to the left

But overall, what I said remains true. And just to be clear, I did not then and do not now believe in the horseshoe theory. The far left is not the same as the far right. There is a huge difference between living in a country ruled by Donald Trump and a country ruled by Nicolas Maduro or between Iran and North Korea. The far left and far right target different people, and serve different interests.

It is better to think of radical Islam seducing elements of an exhausted radical left. The white western working class would no longer die for the revolution (truth be told, it was never that keen on dying for the revolution even at the best of times for the left). But young Muslim men would fight and kill Americans and Israelis. And if you could forget about the obscurantist religious tyranny, the hatred of every human right, the persecution and murder of Arab and Iranian leftists, they might in a certain light appear to be a replacement for the western working class that had let the far left down so badly.

When What’s Left came out respectable critics said words to the effect of “come on, Nick, you are just talking about tiny groups of post-Stalinists and post-Trotskyists. The real left was in the then Labour government, trade unions and charities and campaign groups.”

I replied with words to the effect of politics is downstream of culture. Look at academia, the comment pages of the Guardian, the organisers of demonstrations, the left trade unions and many of those supposedly respectable campaign groups and charities. They are getting drunk on a weird mixture of far-leftism, far-rightism and postmodernism. They will embrace medieval levels of superstition and regimes they would have no hesitation in describing as fascist if they were white.

I asked where this was leading. The far left provided an answer when, to the astonishment of my respectable critics, it took over the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn.

Now the Gaza war has led to another pact being formed between the western far left and radical Islam. Over at Quillette,  an American academic, Susie Linfield, has gone through the whole hideous detail of how leftist thought leaders and academics celebrated the murderers. Some of those she indicted are so predictable you would miss them if they were not there.

Linfield notes that in the New Left Review, Britain’s leading Marxist journal, Tariq Ali praised the terrorists for “rising up against the colonizers” and implied, bizarrely, that the murders resulted from Palestinian frustration with Israel’s recent enormous pro-democracy demonstrations against the Netanyahu government.

Elsewhere depression replaces tedium. Anyone who remembers the scrupulous work of Michael Waltzer on what constituted just war will be appalled about what has happened to Dissent, the journal he edited.  Dissent used to believe that the deliberate targeting of civilians was a war crime. Not so now when the civilians are Jews. In its pages, one writer  described Israel as a ‘genocide machine’ and argued that Israeli victims should not be grieved.

“It is not possible to publicly grieve an Israeli Jewish life lost to violence without tithing ideologically to the IDF—whether you like it or not.” So grief is impermissible. Indeed, it’s worse than that: grief is colonialist.

 Elsewhere tenured academics were unable to contain their enthusiasm: the attacks were “innovative,” “astonishing,” a “major achievement,”  “awesome,” “incredible,” and “a stunning victory,’’ one wrote.

Ah professors. They write in ink and dream of blood.

The essential point to bear in mind is that these expressions of joy at the death of Jews on 7 October was almost instantaneous. It came before a single Israeli bomb fell on Gaza. It was not a condemnation of Israel’s disproportionately violent response. That was still to come. Instead of rational protest there was a celebration of the mass murder of Jews by Hamas, a terrorist group inspired not only by Islamism but by European fascism.  As if to confirm my argument in What’s Left the far left was cheering the far right because it has no one else to cheer.

The same question I asked in the early 2000s can be asked now: where is this heading?

I do not go along with the view among conservatives that all who march with Islamists and their leftist allies are antisemites by definition. From the start of this war, I have said that Israel’s aim of destroying Hamas is impossible. I was going to say that it is impossible without unacceptable civilian casualties. But in truth it is impossible in all circumstances. The Israeli forces simply cannot find Hamas fighters as they melt into a population of two million disorientated people. This is not simply my view. Military specialists are noting the low level of Israeli casualties and the small number of Hamas kills the Israeli Defence Forces are claiming to have made.  The odds are that Hamas is refusing to opt for a direct confrontation, and allowing civilians to pay the price. It is always reasonable to protest against futile wars and needless suffering, and this war is no exception to the rule.

And yet before I turn too accommodating, let me say there is no other area of progressive life where liberals and leftists ally with racists and don’t show even the smallest embarrassment about their behaviour.

Here’s a thought experiment. There is a growing concern on the western far right about low birth rates. Rather than allow immigration, Viktor Orban in Hungary is offering tax exemptions to women who have four or more children. The left naturally wants higher welfare payments for mothers, too, and in the case of the UK wants to end a nasty Conservative policy which penalises families on benefits if they have more than two children.

For all that, no progressive would join a demonstration of neo-Nazis or alt-right supporters in favour of encouraging British mothers to have more children. They would think that there was a serious flaw in a campaign that attracted ultra-right white support. They would worry about inciting prejudice against ethnic minorities in the UK.  And yet they see nothing wrong in going along with campaigns that attract ultra-right Islamist support or in worrying too much about the UK's Jewish minority.

If the grim absurdities of the left of the early 2000s presaged Corbynism and the collapse of the Labour party, what do the 2020s have in store? I am trying to be objective and so won’t go off into long laments about the moral health of the sacred “Left”. I long-ago gave up worrying about that in any case.

First and most obviously the failure of the white left for more than a generation to oppose Israel while also opposing antisemitism has mainstreamed racial prejudices. The explosion in anti-Jewish attacks since 7 October is an inevitable consequence. I have never seen Jewish people feel so isolated. It’s not simply the far left and Muslim agitators who scare them. BBC presenters and others in the mainstream, who make their indifference to the massacre of Jews plain, foretell a future where Israel is a pariah state and Jews are damned by association and must pay the price. Perhaps that future is already here, and we will be permanently in a Corbynista world where Jews are seen as sinister agents in a Zionist conspiracy manipulating western policy.

Second, the uncritical treatment of Hamas naturally reinforces the most bigoted and reactionary elements in British Muslim communities. The consequences we can only guess at, but I think we can say by looking back at the last time the British left ran off with radical Islamists, they will lead us down new spirals of extremism.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Stephen Knight

Published: May 29, 2024

Comedy is becoming increasingly humourless and ideologically captured. So it should come as no surprise that the small number of comedians willing to make jokes about the ridiculous nature of trans ideology have become targets of fierce criticism. However, there is something especially pathetic about efforts to police what is acceptable in comedy when it is other comedians doing the policing. It’s like an ambulance being involved in a hit-and-run. It’s just worse.

Two particularly bad offenders are comedians Joe Lycett and Nish Kumar. Both have recently gone after Ricky Gervais, whose stand-up material pokes fun at trans activists. This week, Kumar took aim at Gervais on his podcast, Pod Save the UK, claiming that Gervais wants to ‘target and attack a vulnerable and marginalised community’. Similarly in February, Lycett appeared on The News Agents podcast, where he slammed Gervais for ‘doing material which is attacking trans people’ and ‘minorities’.

These attacks by Lycett and Kumar reveal that they either haven’t watched the material they say is so egregious – or worse, they didn’t understand it.

The routine that Lycett and Kumar are likely gesturing to is a bit from Gervais’s 2022 Netflix special, SuperNature. Far from attacking transgender people, the joke in question takes aim at the deranged disciples of trans ideology and gender self-identification.

The premise of the routine is that a trans activist becomes increasingly irate the more his belief that women can have penises is questioned. When a woman raises concerns about sharing the female toilets with a transwoman, asking ‘What if he rapes me?’, the trans activist becomes furious. ‘What if she rapes you, you fucking TERF whore!’, he screams.

The joke here is obviously that these gender zealots care more about a bloke with a penis being ‘misgendered’ than about the safety of a woman having to share loos with the penis-owning stranger. What Lycett and Kumar fail to understand from inside their ultra-progressive echo chambers is that this scenario isn’t just an invention of one comedian’s imagination. Any woman that has dared to defend their sex-based rights from the encroachment of gender ideology will be able to tell you about the rape and death threats and the risk of cancellation they face. Whenever they try to gather anywhere to protest for their rights, they are met with violent intimidation. In some cases, they have been visited by police.

Just this week, it was reported that the NHS is facing legal action after 26 female nurses complained about being forced to share the women’s changing room with a trans-identified male. One of the nurses in question, who was the victim of sexual abuse as a child, spoke of how ‘petrified’ she was to have this male in her space. Not least as the man repeatedly asked her when she planned on getting changed. The HR manager responded to these concerns by telling the female nurses they must ‘be more inclusive’, ‘broaden their mindset’ and ‘be educated and attend training’.

Worse still, in real life, the female victims of assault by trans-identifying men really have been compelled to recognise the ‘gender identity’ of their attackers. In 2018, a woman was required by a court of law to pretend her male attacker is actually a woman. In 2022, mainstream news outlets, including the BBC, edited the direct testimony of a rape survivor to avoid the unforgivable sin of ‘misgendering’ her rapist.

Just look at the ordeal Roz Adams has faced. Earlier this month, an employment tribunal concluded that she was unlawfully discriminated against and unfairly dismissed from her job at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre. Why? Because she believed that the victims of rape – who often understandably find being in close proximity with men traumatic – had the right to know and choose the sex of the staff member providing them with care. The tribunal concluded that management’s treatment of Adams amounted to a ‘heresy hunt’.

Such ‘heresy hunts’ are the backdrop for Gervais’s jokes about trans ideology. And it is the suffocating new reality regular people now find themselves having to navigate on a daily basis. The average person no longer has to contend with the authoritarianism of the church. They are more likely to fall foul of the blasphemy codes and dogmas invented by the new gender puritans in our midst.

Lycett and Kumar want us to believe Gervais has devolved into a chauvinistic, reactionary shock jock. In reality, he has always gone after quasi-religious ideologies that are hostile to science and the right to free expression. The new church of gender ideology is no different. It compels people to believe that men can become women simply by saying so and demands that all who disagree are financially, reputationally and sometimes even legally punished. Surely this gives any conservative, science-denying, crackpot church a run for its money.

Taking aim at trans ideology isn’t a regression for Gervais. It’s a display of consistency. It is just that he is joking about a worldview that the Lycetts and Kumars of this world simply aren’t equipped to think about critically. They imagine themselves as moral guardians of what is permissible in modern comedy. Unfortunately for them, the speed with which Gervais continues to sell out tours and break streaming records tells us that audiences still have the final say of what goes and which jokes land. And it seems that they have had their fill of censorious, virtue-signalling ‘progressives’ who are too toothless to leave the safety net of their right-on establishment views.

Thank God for comedians like Ricky Gervais, who refuse to play it safe. Most of us want a laugh, not a lecture.

==

At bottom, this is a complaint about religious blasphemy by a heretic.

There's no human right to not being offended. And demanding that you (or one group) alone get to be immune from comedy is demanding special privileges. Equality means you get to be treated as fair game like everyone else.