The Brits issue some sanity on underage transgender transition

The New Neo Posted on by

I hope the US follows suit. But here’s the new British position, which is a step in the right direction:

The United Kingdom’s National Health Service now says that most children claiming to be transgender may be going through a “transient phase.”

The NHS plans to begin restricting gender-affirming treatment of minors who claim to be transgender, according to a report in The Telegraph.

Restrictions will be placed on puberty blockers, and medical doctors — not therapists — will be expected to lead the provision of transgender services.

I’m not sure why doctors taking the lead would matter. Both therapists and doctors have become predominantly supportive of children’s medical transition these days, as far as I can tell. Or at least it has become very easy to find such doctors and such therapists.

As far as social – not medical – transition goes, there’s this:

The provided NHS plans go on to state that social transitioning — the changing of one’s name and appearance to be in line with self-perception — should only be considered when the young person is experiencing “clinically significant distress.”

Additionally, the child must be able “to fully comprehend the implications of affirming a social transition.”

No child is able to “fully comprehend” such a thing. I don’t think most children even partly comprehend it. For that matter, do adults? But adults are responsible for their own decisions and can give consent. Children are not and cannot.

Also, virtually all of these children are experiencing “clinically significant distress.” That distress is interpreted by the child as a need for transition. But it often masks distress emanating from other things such as fear of puberty, social contagion, abuse, loneliness, placement on the autism spectrum, family dysfunction, and generalized depression and/or anxiety. It used to be the job of therapists to sort this out, but that has been discouraged and self-diagnosis by children has been encouraged in recent years, and doctors and therapists have been instructed to affirm that self-diagnosis by the child.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Victor Davis Hanson on the party switch:

In sum, the party of old left-wing progressives has become one of rich regressives. And once country-club Republicans are becoming a party of middle-class populists. And the election will reflect both those changes.

However, Democrats also still own the black vote, although there have been some defections there. But the black vote is key to Democrat victories.

(2) Elon Musk gets ready to take over, and Twitter employees issue demands in a letter which sounds like a parody but apparently is not:

We, the undersigned Twitter workers, believe the public conversation is in jeopardy. Elon Musk’s plan to lay off 75% of Twitter workers will hurt Twitter’s ability to serve the public conversation. A threat of this magnitude is reckless, undermines our users’ and customers’ trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation.”

The letter also stated that Musk’s proposals, including laying off employees, “threaten our livelihoods, access to essential healthcare, and the ability for visa holders to stay in the country they work in.”

Someone please tell these people that they’re not in college anymore.

Also, that they work for a company, not the other way around.

(3) Meanwhile, Musk counters with this:

In a tweet, Mr Musk said he didn’t buy the firm “to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love”.

(4) Biden thinks black people need extra room on airplanes. Or something like that.

(5) Russia conducts large nuclear strike drill, claimed to be defensive.

And across the pond, Rishi Sunak is the new British Prime Minister

The New Neo Posted on by

Best of luck, Rishi. You’ve got your work cut out for you:

Sunak gave an address to Tory MPs, during which he ruled out calling an early general election – despite calls from opposition parties.

He later made a televised statement at Tory HQ, warning that the country faced a “profound economic challenge.”

He’s not kidding. Every Western nation – and many others as well – face such a challenge right now and for the foreseeable future.

The article says he’s the first “Asian” British PM – the Brits use the word to include people of Indian and Pakistani ethnicity, although we don’t use it that way in the US. He’s also one of the youngest: 42.

More on Sunak:

Sunak was born on 12 May 1980 at Southampton General Hospital in Southampton, Hampshire, to parents of Indian descent who migrated to Britain from East Africa in the 1960s. He was educated at Winchester College, studied philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at Lincoln College, Oxford, and earned an MBA from Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar. While at Stanford, he met his future wife Akshata Murty, the daughter of Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy. Sunak and his wife were the 222nd richest people in Britain, with a combined fortune of £730 million as of 2022. After graduating, Sunak worked for Goldman Sachs and later as a partner at the hedge fund firms The Children’s Investment Fund Management and Theleme Partners.

Sunak was elected to the House of Commons for Richmond in North Yorkshire at the 2015 general election, succeeding William Hague. Sunak supported Brexit in the 2016 referendum on EU membership. He was appointed to Theresa May’s second government as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Local Government in the 2018 reshuffle. He voted three times in favour of May’s Brexit withdrawal agreement. After May resigned, Sunak supported Boris Johnson’s campaign to become Conservative leader. After Johnson became Prime Minister, Sunak was appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Sunak replaced Sajid Javid as Chancellor of the Exchequer after Javid’s resignation in the February 2020 cabinet reshuffle. As Chancellor, Sunak was prominent in the government’s financial response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic impact, including the Coronavirus Job Retention and Eat Out to Help Out schemes. He resigned as chancellor in July 2022, followed by Johnson’s resignation amid a government crisis. Sunak stood in the Conservative party leadership election to replace Johnson, and lost the members’ vote to Liz Truss.

This exchange indicates that Sunak is a very sharp guy, at least in argument.

Did the Oz/Fetterman debate change any minds?

The New Neo Posted on by

That question interests me as part of my general interest in the phenomenon of political mind-changing.

Commenter “Brian E” agreed with the following Althouse quote:

Will anyone switch their vote from Fetterman to Oz because Fetterman struggled to speak in the debate last night?
I think not. What’s overwhelmingly important is which party gets the majority in the Senate, and every single Senate race could be the one that shifts the power one way or the other. All Fetterman needed to do was not seem dangerously incompetent, and he crossed that low bar. The rest is chitter-chatter. Good night!

Well, my chitter-chatter consists of disagreeing with what Althouse wrote – although I’m not sure she literally meant that no one would change his or her vote as a result of the debate. Of course some people will switch their votes. There are plenty of Independents who aren’t really affiliated with one party or other, and/or are low information voters who simply didn’t realize how handicapped Fetterman is but who saw it during the debate.

No loyal Democrat will switch, of course. They realize that a Fetterman victory could help the Democrats retain the Senate. The real question is whether there are enough Independents who will switch, enough to make a difference in the outcome. That is unknown, and it really depends on how close the race is at the moment.

The other huge question is, of course, whether the Democrats will be able to pull a significant enough amount of fraud to overcome any margin Oz might gain. It is highly important for them to win this race and I believe they will pull out all the stops to do so.

Here’s a post I just noticed on reactions to the debate. It quotes one vote-changer who fits the profile of the sort of Independent I’m referring to:

Where there’s one, there are more. But how many more?

And, as Jeff Goldstein writes:

In fact, Fetterman, like Biden before him, is useful precisely because he’s a mere vessel for an agenda, something that those with the capacity for independent and coherent thought — along with what remains of free will — can often problematize.

Further thoughts on the Oz/Fetterman debate last night

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) For voters who voted early – and there are plenty of them – the debate will have no effect. That’s one of the reasons I detest widespread early voting; things come out or get clearer as time goes on, and Election Day should be the same for everyone except a few who need to cast absentee ballots.

(2) I have little doubt that many many Democrats literally do not care whether Fetterman is competent or not. The only thing that matters is whether he’s able to say “yeah” or “nay” as the party dictates. He also can be replaced, and the gubernatorial Democratic candidate Shapiro is significantly ahead in the polls, and therefore probably would get to name Fetterman’s replacement, who would therefore be a Democrat. So voting for Fetterman makes perfect sense if a person’s goal is to try to preserve the Democrat majority in the Senate.

(3) Is Fetterman being exploited, and if so by whom? Despite Fetterman’s obvious cognitive difficulties, I believe he is fully capable of making a decision about running or not running. Therefore I believe it is his decision, and no one is exploiting him in that sense. The people who are helping him prepare for a debate, and promoting him in other ways, are operating under either the hopeful idea that he’ll recover physically and mentally (I think that’s a minority view) or under the more cynical but practical point of view outlined in #2.

(4) Note this exchange:

When asked about his prior opposition to fracking and outright calls to ban it, Fetterman became a deer in the headlights.

“I do want to clarify something,” said the debate moderator directing her question at Fetterman. “You’re saying tonight that you support fracking, that you’ve always supported fracking, but there is that 2018 interview that you said, ‘I don’t support fracking at all,’ so how do you square the two?”

Silence took over the studio as Fetterman froze.

“I do support fracking,” Fetterman said. “I don’t, I don’t, I support fracking and I stand and I do support fracking.”

But if not for the moderator’s question, I submit that this moment would not have occurred. In most debates I’ve seen, the Democratic candidates aren’t called on their lies or errors by the moderators. As an example of what I’m talking about, I bring you none other than Joe Biden, circa 2008, in his debate with Sarah Palin:

Then there was what might have been the biggest head-scratcher of the night. Said Biden of the Bush administration’s supposed Middle East follies:

“When . . . along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, ‘Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.”

Huh?

Assuming that Biden was referring to when, in 2005, American and French pressure helped the Lebanese people kick Syrian troops out of Lebanon, who ever thought NATO occupation of that deeply divided country was a good idea?

That linked NY Post editorial lists many other such moments in that debate, an encounter that occurred 15 years ago, before Biden had entered his present decline. Except for a brief detour as a result of his 1987 plagiarism, he’s gotten away with that sort of thing his whole life – as I noted yesterday.

(5) And speaking of Biden, his cognitive disabilities – and the excuses and coverup attempts for it – paved the way for something similar with Fetterman.

(6) In last night’s debate thread, there was a discussion about voting third party. I’m going to repeat the gist of one of my several comments there, which is this: a voter has a right to vote third-party or any other way that voter chooses to vote. But don’t confuse having a right to do something with whether that “something ” is a good idea or a terrible terrible one. Voting third party this year – especially in any close contest – is a terrible terrible one. For people who call themselves “conservative” or “Republican,” it is in my opinion an act of dangerous self-indulgent virtue-signaling that helps the Democrats win. It doesn’t “send a message” to anyone; all it does is act as a spoiler. Those who think otherwise live in a dreamworld. But elections and their consequences occur in the real world.

Debate night

The New Neo Posted on by

There were three big debates tonight: Oz versus Fetterman (Pennsylvania), Zeldin versus Hochul (New York), and Dixon versus Whitmer (Michigan).

That’s three too many debates for me. Regular readers may recall that I hate debates. The reasons? The moderators, the gotcha questions, and the tension – that is, they make me tense when I watch. So I didn’t watch any of these. In addition, with the Oz/Fetterman debate, I think it had the potential to be tantamount to abuse, because Fetterman is obviously still having major health problems. Then again, if he’s being abused, it’s with his own willing cooperation.

So no, I didn’t watch. But I do read, and the consensus on the right is that Fetterman did even worse than expected (see this as well as this). Even CNN can’t really sugarcoat it much, although they give it a weak try.

As far as the New York debate went, I haven’t read that much that indicates anything other than a predictable “he said, she said.” Zeldin played his strong suit, the anti-crime card (see this). I think in New York it will really come down to how many residents are fed up enough to vote Republican for once.

In Michigan, here’s a description. Whitmer has been leading Dixon in the polls all the way, but the gap has been closing steadily, although Whitmer is still ahead. One strange thing about this duo is that Whitmer looks like Dixon’s less attractive older sister. Same hairdo too, more or less.

If some of you watched any or all of the three, let us know what you think.

Biden’s just making stuff up now

The New Neo Posted on by

Then again, that was his practice long before his current cognitive decline. It appears to be a feature of his personality and it continued because it only came back to bite him very temporarily. He’s a silly braggart and bag of wind – but hey, it worked for him. In this regard he’s much worse than Trump, who actually achieved quite a bit before becoming a politician. Biden has done little else his entire life.

Even CNN 2.0 acknowledges this latest fib of Biden’s. But CNN doesn’t quote the details, although you can find them in The NY Post [emphasis mine]:

“You are probably aware I’ve just signed a law that’s being challenged by my Republican colleagues … what we’ve provided for is if you went to school, if you qualified for a Pell Grant, you qualify for $20,000 in debt forgiveness. Secondly, if you don’t have one of those loans, you just get $10,000 written off,” the president said.

He then wrongly claimed: “It’s passed. I got it passed by a vote or two, and it’s in effect.”

The president’s student debt relief initiative did not receive a vote in Congress. It was implemented through executive action, not congressional legislation.

The White House had quite a challenge trying to explain this one. Two choices: either “he’s lying” or “he doesn’t know what’s going on.” In other words, knave or fool? In the case of Biden it’s easy to answer: both. The White House’s answer is that Biden was actually talking about the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, even though he made it crystal clear that he was talking about the debt cancellation.

And to forget that debt cancellation was not passed by legislation, and to brag about the supposed legislation that never was, would be an especially egregious type of forgetfulness – in part because not only was it done through an executive order that never was put to a vote, but a federal appeals court temporarily blocked it just a few days ago. One of the big questions facing the court is whether Biden exceeded his powers by issuing it through executive order See this:

In September, attorneys general from six Republican states — Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina sued the Biden administration over the debt cancellation program, accusing the White House of overstepping its executive power.

They asked that the program be shut down, arguing that it is unconstitutional and is “not remotely tailored to address the effects of the pandemic on federal student loan borrowers.”

McConnell versus the MAGA Republicans of Alaska, who censure him

The New Neo Posted on by

I believe the censure is deserved – not that McConnell cares:

On Monday, the [Alaska] state Republican central committee announced the results of an overwhelming vote to admonish the national party leader over attack ads against Kelly Tshibaka, the candidate endorsed by the Alaska GOP who is challenging incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski. The final vote came to 49-8 in favor of a resolution censuring McConnell and the minority leader’s Senate Leadership Fund (SLF) which has pumped more than $5 million into the race to defend a key McConnell ally in the upper chamber.

Murkowski is probably the biggest RINO in the Senate, except perhaps for Mitt Romney.

“No one from Alaska wants big shots from the Lower 48 meddling in our elections, and they certainly don’t want D.C. Republicans lying about the candidate who’s been endorsed by the Alaska GOP,” Mary Ann Pruitt, an advisor to Tshibaka, told The Federalist. “Alaska Republicans are telling Mitch McConnell to stay out of it. But this goes to show you who Lisa Murkowski is aligned with.

Anyone who’s been paying attention for the past six years or more knows who Murkowski is aligned with. If not, this recent development should inform them:

On Friday, Murkowski endorsed the state’s Democrat Congresswoman Mary Peltola in the state’s House race over former Republican governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and Nick Begich, the other Republican in the contest…

Alaska’s new ranked-choice voting system, put in place by Murkowski operatives to avoid a competitive primary, opened the door for a Democrat to win the at-large House race.

McConnell has also pulled Senate Leadership Fund money from Masters in Arizona and Bolduc in New Hampshire, who are both behind in polls but very close to their opponents.

In Alaska, I would assume that McConnell’s excuse would be that Murkowski is ahead of Tshibaka in the polls and therefore the better candidate. However, Murkowski is only slightly ahead in most polls, with a couple of outliers in which she’s very ahead. The Democrat is far behind both of them, so the race appears to be between the two of them, but ranked-choice voting complicates things somewhat and it’s likely neither will reach the 50% threshold in the first round of voting. Here’s an article from one month ago saying the two are basically tied:

This election cycle marks the first time that Alaska voters are using the ranked-choice system, in which voters rank candidates and more than 50 percent of the total vote is needed to win. If no one reaches a majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes are redistributed to the voters’ next choice in subsequent rounds. The AARP poll, which imitated the voting system, asked likely voters to select their first-, second-, third- and fourth-choice candidates.

Respondents favored Tshibaka (43 percent) over Murkowski (35 percent) in the poll’s first round of voting, but both candidates polled at 50 percent by the final round.

What’s even better than election denial?

The New Neo Posted on by

Pre-election denial, says Hillary Clinton.

To wit:

“I know we’re all focused on the 2022 midterm elections, and they are incredibly important, but we also have to look ahead because, you know what, our opponents certainly are,” Clinton said in the video. “Right-wing extremists already have a plan to literally steal the next presidential election, and they’re not making a secret of it.”…

“Just think, if that happens, the 2024 presidential election could be decided not by the popular vote or even the anachronistic Electoral College but by state legislatures, many of them Republican-controlled,” Clinton said before promoting Indivisible’s Crush the Coup campaign.

“Crush the Coup” has a webpage, of course, which you can easily reach by doing a search. Its rationale is that Republicans (MAGA Republicans, that is) must be defeated at the state level in 2022 to avoid an election steal by the Republicans in 2024 at the presidential level. It focuses on the key states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona. Here’s their reasoning, such as it is:

In June, the Supreme Court announced it would hear Moore v. Harper this fall, with a decision likely coming next year. Right now, right-wing advocates are urging the Supreme Court to adopt an extremist and fringe legal doctrine, called “independent state legislature theory,” that would give state legislatures unchecked authority over election procedures and voting laws, and would grant broad power to gerrymander electoral maps, even if those laws blatantly violated the state’s constitution. An extreme ruling from the right-wing Supreme Court could have huge implications for how states run federal elections and ultimately give state lawmakers the power to overturn voters’ choice in presidential elections.

So what they’re saying is that their own failure to pass HR1 and wrest election control from the states, and the possibility of a SCOTUS ruling that yes, states set their own election rules (within Constitutional boundaries, of course), would somehow lead to each state legislature doing whatever it wanted in an election and overruling the will of the people.

What is the actual issue being decided by Moore v. Harper? This one:

Whether a state’s judicial branch may nullify the regulations governing the “Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives … prescribed … by the Legislature thereof,” and replace them with regulations of the state courts’ own devising, based on vague state constitutional provisions purportedly vesting the state judiciary with power to prescribe whatever rules it deems appropriate to ensure a “fair” or “free” election.

In other words, state legislatures have the express right to make laws regarding elections in their states, and yet in 2020 state court judges overruled legislatures and established their own rules. According to Hillary and the Crush the Coup people, the votes of the elected state legislative bodies are somehow less reflective of the people’s will than the decision of state judges (mostly unelected, I presume) and some also-unelected “experts” chosen by these judges.

More on the “independent state legislature theory” here:

In Moore v. Harper, the speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, Timothy Moore, asks the Supreme Court to consider what has come to be known as the “independent state legislature” theory — which holds that the Constitution gives state legislatures alone the power to regulate federal elections in their states, without the oversight of state courts. Moore notes that the Constitution’s elections clause states that the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” Moore argues that unlike other constitutional provisions, the clause does not refer to the state itself, but a particular institution of government.

Last November, the North Carolina legislature enacted a new map for congressional elections in response to the 2020 U.S. Census data. Respondent Rebecca Harper and 25 other North Carolina voters sued in state court to prevent the new map from taking effect, arguing that the map violated various provisions of the North Carolina constitution and represented an unlawful partisan gerrymander. In February 2022, the North Carolina Supreme Court enjoined the new map, concluding that although the state legislature “has the duty to apportion North Carolina’s congressional … districts,” the legislature’s “exercise of this power is subject to limitations imposed by other [state] constitutional provisions,” and “the state judiciary … has the responsibility to protect the state constitutional rights of the citizens.” The court further concluded that the map was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. On remand, the state trial court issued an order adopting a different congressional map proposed by three court-appointed experts.

Moore and other state legislators then filed an emergency application asking the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the North Carolina Supreme Court’s order invalidating the legislature’s map and to stay the state trial court’s order adopting the replacement map. The justices denied emergency relief. Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, filed a dissenting opinion, calling the independent-state-legislature theory “an exceptionally important and recurring question of constitutional law” and saying that “further review of the judgment below may be warranted once a petition for a writ of certiorari is filed.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred in the decision to deny the stay, but he agreed that “if the Court receives petitions for certiorari raising the issue, … the Court should grant certiorari … [and] carefully consider and decide the issue next Term after full briefing and oral argument.”

So the case is really about unelected judges, advised by an unelected panel of “experts,” redrawing the voting districts and usurping the power explicitly given state legislatures by the US Constitution. You’ve got to give Hillary and Crush the Coup points for creative “reimagining” of what a case is about.