Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) I wrote briefly last night about the successful recall of San Francisco’s DA Chesa Boudin, and I’ve written about him previously as well. I just want to add that I first realized there was a good chance that the recall effort would work when, back in the fall, I was talking to some ultra-liberal friends who live in a San Francisco suburb and they spontaneously started to talk about their upset at the high crime rate. They were quite emotional about how awful it was, and although they didn’t say anything about Boudin and the recall, it made me realize that if people like this were so upset about it then an awful lot of people were going to be giving Boudin the boot. And so it’s happened.

Will his replacement be any better? Maybe a little bit.

(2) The drip drip drip of revelations about Hunter Biden’s dissipation isn’t something I’ve been covering heavily or even much at all lately. Who wants to wade through such a fetid cesspool? And yet it needs to be done. And today Ace has done yeoman’s work in a post entitled “Hunter Biden Made a Porno With a Druggy Hooker While Brandishing His Illegally-Purchased Gun.” It’s not just about Hunter’s sexual escapades and general dissipation; it’s also about how all his gun violations are being ignored by the oh-so-concerned left and our so-very-determined president, otherwise known as Hunter Biden’s dad.

(3) A guy who wanted to kill Justice Kavanaugh has been arrested:

An armed California man incensed about the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion expected to overturn Roe v. Wade was arrested near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Maryland home Wednesday after he hatched a plan to kill the jurist to “give his life purpose,” prosecutors said.

Nicholas John Roske, 26, was arrested by the Montgomery County Police Department at about 1:50 a.m. near Kavanaugh’s home in Chevy Chase and was charged later Wednesday in Maryland federal court with attempting to kill or kidnap a US judge, court records show.

Roske, who was dressed in black clothing and carrying a backpack and a suitcase, was spotted getting out of a cab in front of Kavanaugh’s home around 1:05 a.m. by two deputy US Marshals, who were stationed outside the residence, court papers state.

When he saw the marshals, who were standing next to their parked vehicle in the tony Washington, DC, suburb, he walked down the block and called 911 and told an operator he was having “suicidal thoughts,” had a firearm on him and wanted to kill Kavanaugh.

Doesn’t seem as though entrapment was involved here at all, unlike in the Michigan Whitmer kidnapping case. In the current incident, it seems as though the fact that Kavanaugh’s house had protection was the only reason this guy didn’t succeed or at least come a lot closer to succeeding in killing or wounding Kavanaugh and/or his family. The left is probably disappointed that he didn’t succeed, because if one or more of the SCOTUS justices on the right were to be assassinated, then Joe Biden would get to appoint a successor. This could change the course of history, and so the motivation is almost certainly quite strong. And since Kavanaugh in particular has been demonized from the start by the left and the Democrats, he’s a natural target for someone like Roske, who says he found Kavanaugh’s home address online.

See also a post entitled “The Schumer fatwa,” by Scott Johnson at Powerline.

(4) By the way, when is SCOTUS going to rule on Dobbs and thereby revisit Roe? Supposedly in late June or early July.

(5) The Washington Post is a hot mess. See also this as well as this. From the latter:

The state of the media industry is such that journalists are now incentivized to be as effusive as possible in professing how emotionally unstable they are. Why? Because it’s a surefire way to bolster their pleas for a redress of various workplace or personal grievances. No longer are these psychological issues thought to be best dealt with in the privacy of a therapist’s office, or among trusted confidants. Instead, these journalists create a public spectacle, beckoning colleagues to flood their tweet threads and affirm unstinting support. When Taylor Lorenz of the New York Times recounted her own emotional turmoil stemming from allegedly “violent” online criticism, the International Women’s Media Foundation, an NGO devoted to “[recognizing] badass female journalists and photographers whose courage sets them apart,” issued a rousing statement in her defense.

Subsequently, these journalists’ union representation will rush to amplify their grievances by echoing the therapeutic trauma jargon…

Most of these so-called jounralists are youngish women (well, they’re all young to me). They have probably been rewarded for this sort of behavior many times, and it seems to be continuing. The day of the hard-boiled reporter is long long gone.

Senator Stabenow is in love with her car

The New Neo Posted on by

Senator Stabenow of Michigan bragged about her electric car:

“I just have to say just on the issue of that at gas prices; after waiting for a long time to have enough chips in this country to finally get my electric vehicle, I got it and drove it from Michigan to here this last weekend and went by every single gas station. It didn’t matter how high it was.”

The Senator then added, “So I’m looking forward to the opportunity for us to move to vehicles that aren’t going to be dependent on the whims of the oil companies and the international markets.”

How nice for you, senator. That electric car of course cost a ton more then the non-electric cars most of us peasants drive,

Plus, you mention zipping past the gas stations (chortling with glee and self-satisfaction?), but what about the fact that you had to stop to – you know – charge your electric car? Or does it run on Hope and Change?

According to this website, electric cars must be charged every 250 to 350 miles depending on the make (the Tesla has the 350-mile range). A trip from Michigan to DC is about 720 miles, so that probably means two charging stops (if you start out with a full charge). Charging such a car is not expensive (see this), but a person must find a charging station and then there’s time spent charging.

How much time? A lot of time:

The time it takes to charge an electric car can be as little as 30 minutes or more than 12 hours. This depends on the size of the battery and the speed of the charging point.

–A typical electric car (60kWh battery) takes just under 8 hours to charge from empty-to-full with a 7kW charging point.
–Most drivers top up charge rather than waiting for their battery to recharge from empty-to-full.
–For many electric cars, you can add up to 100 miles of range in ~35 minutes with a 50kW rapid charger.
–The bigger your car’s battery and the slower the charging point, the longer it takes to charge from empty to full.

I don’t know which approach Stabenow used for her trip, full charge or topping off more frequently, but neither sound like great solutions for a lengthy trip such as from Michigan to DC.

I’ll add that her statement about gas prices being dependent on the “whims of the oil companies and the international markets” is inflammatory and ignorant. Does she really think the big bad oil companies and the international markets (or whoever runs them in her fevered imagination) just wake up in the morning and decide on whim to jack up the prices? That there are no market forces at work? I don’t believe she really thinks that. I believe she wants American consumers to think that.

Just for fun:

Lyrics here. An excerpt:

The machine of a dream
Such a clean machine
With the pistons a-pumping
And the hubcaps all gleam

When I’m holding your wheel
All I hear is your gear
When my hand’s on your grease gun
Oh it’s like a disease, son

I’m in love with my car
Got a feel for my automobile…

The banality of Arendt’s “banality of evil”

The New Neo Posted on by

Several commenters have called my attention to the fact that there’s a new Israeli film about Adolf Eichmann. It’s entitled ““The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes,” and it features interviews in which he describes how much he knew about the Holocaust (a great great deal) as it was happening, and how much he approved of it (a great great deal).

It’s been pointed out that this makes it even more clear that Hannah Arendt’s famous line about “the banality of evil” – based on Eichmann and his trial – is garbage:

When you watch Mozer’s film and hear Eichmann’s actual words from the old recordings, his persona is completely different from the figure of the dull bureaucrat he tried to present to the world at the trial. It is difficult not to be shocked by his haughtiness when admitting his crimes and boasting of them, and not to be appalled by the sheer indifference he displays, in view of the fact that he was directly responsible for the deaths of millions, in complete contradiction to what he said during the trial.

In the interviews with Sassen, Eichmann admits that the Holocaust was carefully planned, and clarifies that he knew that many of the Jews that were sent at his directive to the camps were destined for extermination. He declares that he has no remorse about anything.

Arendt and others somehow were fooled by a combination of Eichmann’s lawyers’ defense of him at the trial, and his own demeanor on the stand. I’ve long been somewhat puzzled by all the attention paid to her views, but it’s always seemed to me that it has to do with the catchy phrase “banality of evil” rather than anything especially compelling about her arguments. I have thought for quite some time that what fooled her was “the banal-appearing facade that evil can sometimes wear.” That fooled her into thinking the facade was real, and that it was deeper than a facade.

As for my own views about evil, I’ve written two posts that are especially relevant, and I suggest you read them. The first is called “Understanding evil,” and it was first posted in 2007 and then again in 2019. The other is called “The ladder of evil,” and it was first posted in 2014 and then again in 2021. For a good discussion of Arendt and Eichmann and that “banality” quote, I recommend this essay by Thomas White, written in 2018.

The story told by the third teacher under siege at Robb Elementary, Arnulfo Reyes

The New Neo Posted on by

We hadn’t heard of his existence before, but now it emerges that there was a third teacher in one of the two rooms under siege at Robb Elementary, Arnulfo Reyes, and he survived although seriously wounded and still in the hospital. He told his story to ABC and it was featured today.

This man has been deeply deeply traumatized both physically and emotionally. The eleven children under his care were all killed and he alone survived to tell the tale. That’s already a heavy burden of survivor guilt for a man who really had no chance against a gunman. According to the newscasters at ABC, the interview was much longer than what they aired, but this is the segment they showed:

I’d be exceedingly curious to see the rest of the interview with Reyes, because as it’s edited it doesn’t answer a single question I would have wanted to ask this man. My own questions would have focused on what he actually perceived rather than his speculations about what the cops were doing outside the door, although he is understandably blaming them for delay without seeming to know anything more than we do about the details of why that happene. The aim of the ABC team is very very clear, and they have edited this suffering man’s interview to serve them well, and have asked leading question to elicit exactly what they want. For example, see minute 4:02 (interviewer: “Did you feel abandoned in that moment by police, by the people who were supposed to protect you?”).

That video piece is over nine minutes long, but a great deal of it isn’t the interview at all but is instead the rehashing of the “the police waited over an hour doing nothing” narrative, with no new facts at all. Reyes – and the interview we do see is heartbreaking because what this man went through was a nightmare – makes an impassioned plea at the end of his segment on the clip for more gun control, saying that no training would have helped. He doesn’t consider the possibility of firearms training for teachers, of course, but it seems to me that if he had had the opportunity for a firearm then he and his young students mightn’t have been such sitting ducks.

Although perhaps they still would have been, because no system is perfect. The gunman at Robb Elementary had the element of surprise – as Reyes tells the story, they had heard shots and they got down under a table and pretended “to be asleep,” but the gunman came into their room (111) through an adjoining door to 112 (as we already knew) and suddenly he was there. We don’t hear Reyes addressing the issue of whether he had locked his own door – I’m going to assume he did but it’s an odd omission in the interview – or whether he received the “Alert!” text calling for lockdown. Perhaps this was covered in the longer unedited interview, but it certainly isn’t covered in what we see. Nor does Reyes discuss the other teacher in the room – what she might have done, how she was killed. From his interview we still don’t know whether either of the other two teachers were in his room, or both in the other room, or one in each room.

The segment spends a lot of time blaming police, and Reyes does as well. The commenters at YouTube chime right in, too. Reyes’ feelings against the police are understandable, but his knowledge of what they in fact were doing out there during the wait may not be any better than ours. Just to take one example, he says at one point that they “went away,” but perhaps they just got quiet; how would he know they went away if he couldn’t see them? He also calls them “cowards” (ah, how the MSM must love that!) and addresses the officers this way: “You have a bulletproof vest. I had nothing.”

But did they have bulletproof vests? It certainly stands to reason they did – but did they? We know that the Border Patrol officers who finally entered had ballistic shields with which to protect themselves, and one was almost shot in the head nevertheless. We also know part of the wait had to do with getting the key from the janitor (and I’d like a ton more information about why that took so long). But the only thing I can find about bulletproof vests that day is this:

The [DOJ review of the Robb Elementary shooting] will also likely examine how well officers were prepared with gear like weapons and body armor. The shooter wore a tactical vest and was armed with an AR-15-style rifle, a powerful weapon capable of piercing basic bulletproof vests.

In previous shootings reviewed by the Justice Department, non-specialized law enforcement units did not have the kind of body armor needed to fully protect themselves.

It seems we don’t know what they had regarding such vests. Plus, not every bulky vest worn by law enforcement is a so-called “bulletproof vest.” And what does a bulletproof vest do against an AR15? I’ve already quoted information that it does not protect, and here’s more about that:

Body armor is meant to absorb impact of the projectile. Depending on the vest’s rating it may have stronger absorption than other vests. This does not make it bulletproof. Most manufacturers avoid the term when naming vests, even when the vest is up to the highest standard…

Keep in mind that the slower the bullet is, the better off the wearer is going to be. Bullets that have a hard tip or fired at a high velocity will get through the fibers and right through the bullet proof vest…

The highest possible level of ballistic protection possible for soft body armour is Level IIIA. Higher levels of protection from rifle ammo is only possible with aid of additional ballistic plates.

And even those plates don’t seem to work, according to this video demonstration.

I’m not blaming Reyes at all for what he said. As far as I’m concerned, he can say whatever he wants, and I have empathy and sympathy for his reactions to the horror he endured. My ire is for the news people who guide him, edit him, and shape his interview towards their own goals: to blame the police prematurely and to further the cause of gun control. They are happy to exploit someone’s enormous mental and physical anguish in that endeavor.

They are the ones who could have put out a simple sentence saying whether the police had “bulletproof vests” on and if so what kind, or whether we actually know (at 7:29 newscaster Robin Roberts repeats that the officers had bulletproof vests; I’d love to know whether she actually knows that or not). The news people are also the ones who could and should explain about such vests and what happens when they face an AR15. I’m no firearms expert, but it took me about 30 seconds to find the information I wanted on that. I bet they didn’t even try, because they’re not interested in telling a more complete or more objective story.

[NOTE: Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has called for “state leaders to move around $50 million in the state budget to buy bulletproof shields for school police officers.” That seems to be in line with previous reports that the police officers in Uvalde had to wait for Border Patrol to arrive in order to have access to protective ballistic shields.]

The California primary today is potentially very interesting

The New Neo Posted on by

Although it may end up with the same-old same-old.

First we have the governorship. The loathsome Newsom is the current officeholder, and he survived a recall election recently quite handily. Newsom would dearly love Republican Brian Dahle to win the primary among his opponents, because Newsom is aware that no Republican stands a realistic chance of winning against him in November.

However, one of the candidates is the considerably more unique Michael Shellengerger, who is non-aligned in regard to party but who used to be a Democrat. Prior to his California run in 2022, I knew of Shellenberger from this book that he wrote:

In June 2020, Shellenberger published Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, in which the author argues that climate change is not the existential threat it is portrayed to be in popular media and activism. Rather, he posits that technological innovation and capital accumulation, if allowed to continue and grow, will remedy environmental issues. According to Shellenberger, the book “explores how and why so many of us came to see important but manageable environmental problems as the end of the world, and why the people who are the most apocalyptic about environmental problems tend to oppose the best and most obvious solutions to solving them.”

Shellenberger was originally a Democrat but is now running with no party designation, and if you go here you’ll see some of the charts he’s emphasizing in his sharp critique of Newsom’s policies in California.

To give one example of his approach, here’s what Shellenberger had to say about San Francisco mayor London Breed’s proposal to favor the trans homeless over other homeless when getting benefits:

It’s not only totally unethical to discriminate against who gets shelter or medical treatment since the vast majority of homeless people on the streets are either addicted to hard drugs or suffering mental illness, it may be illegal…

The underlying problem is that California is completely without leadership at every level of government…Gov. Gavin Newsom refuses to shut down the homeless encampments, which are open drug scenes.

Sounds right to me, and not typical of the usual Democrat position.

More from Shellenberger:

“George Soros is the biggest donor of these radical left district attorneys and of Gavin Newsom. Their agenda is just to shut down the prisons, let the prisoners out without rehabilitating them first,” Shellenberger told “America Reports.”

“That’s why you see a crisis of chaos, the open-air drug markets, the fentanyl deaths. The people of California, we are very liberal people, but we do have our limits…we want to see law and order in the cities…the state.”

Interesting combination message: we’re liberals, but we have our limits.

And then there’s San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin, who is facing a recall. Here’s my very first post on Chesa, whom I called “the ultimate red diaper baby” when he was first elected as DA in 2019. It was a simple matter to predict that his tenure would be a disaster, and it certainly has been.

The real question is whether the vote today will be enough to get rid of him. If the polls are any indication he will be gone, but we all know that election results can surprise. I also have spoken over the last year to several people I know who live in San Francisco or its environs, and they are not at all happy with the crime increase. When I brought up Boudin, however, although they didn’t defend him they didn’t excoriate him either. So I don’t know.

[NOTE: I’d forgotten this article (I found the link in that Boudin post of mine from 2019), about the life and fate of a man who was wounded in Chesa’s parents’ crime. It’s quite a story.]

Report: the school police chief was not informed about the 911 calls from the children

The New Neo Posted on by

Earlier I suspected this might be the case, and now we have semi-official word that it is the case (of course, that can change after a more complete investigation as time goes on):

State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, D-San Antonio, said during a press conference the Uvalde school district’s police chief, Pete Arredondo, wasn’t made aware of 911 calls that students inside Robb Elementary School made around 30 minutes after the gunman entered, including a student begging for police to take action. The shooter killed 19 students and two teachers during his siege on the school.

Instead, Gutierrez said 911 calls were relayed to the Uvalde Police Department, which operates separately from the school district’s police, and Arredondo — who was leading law enforcement’s response on the scene — was left in the dark.

On May 27 I had written this:

…[A]bout the multiple 911 calls…My question is: were the police at the scene informed of the content of the calls? I’m going to assume that they were – which makes their behavior even worse – but do we know they were informed? They certainly should have been, but I’d like to know for sure before I assume that they were privy to that information…

I have no trouble criticizing and even condemning their decisions as I learn more, if such condemnation is warranted.

To me, it seemed hard to believe that Arredondo wouldn’t have been informed of the calls and their significance while the siege was ongoing. But on the other hand it seemed that a failure to inform him was a possibility, and that could end up explaining at least some of his behavior and decision-making process that day.

So now we do know he didn’t receive word – at least, it seems that we know. But we don’t know why he wasn’t informed. Was it because he may not have had a police radio on him? I don’t think it was necessarily that, because we are told he had a cellphone and was in communication with the station that way, and I’ve also read that other police officers in the hall did have radios. Was it that the people who designed the protocol for a school shooting had never envisioned a situation in which 911 calls would be coming from victims at the same time police were in the school, and therefore they didn’t relay the messages and instead followed some basic and yet inappropriate protocol? That’s hard to believe, and yet it might have happened that way. Was there a protocol about 911 calls in a situation like that, and was it not followed properly at the station? Was it the 911 operators who made the error? Or was there simply no protocol about it?

Each point of knowledge that we gain in turn seems to generate its own host of as-yet-unanswered questions.

Furthermore, what would have been done differently had the police at the scene known that there were children still alive in those rooms, both wounded and unwounded? What would they and what could they have done differently? Could they have gotten the key and the shields and entered the rooms much sooner? If so, that would be a huge failure that might have cost the lives of some children and teachers who were already wounded. But was that the case, and if so, whose failure would it be? “The system” of communication, obviously, but there are people behind all the decisions made:

“There is blame enough to go around,” Gutierrez said during the news conference. “There was human error and there was system error.”…

“We need to know what law enforcement was doing, what radio procedures were followed or not followed, who were the 911 operators and such,” Gutierrez said, emphasizing he doesn’t blame just one individual or entity for the situation.

Agreed.

And then there’s this report about a phone call supposedly from a wounded teacher to her husband (both of the people speaking in this interview are journalists) [emphasis mine]:

KELLY: Hey. OK. Tell me more about this phone call. This is from a teacher inside the classroom after she had been shot.

FLORIDO: Right, from Eva Mireles. She was one of the in this classroom. And after she was shot, she called her husband, Ruben Ruiz, who is an officer for the Uvalde schools police department. At some point, he was outside the school, but he couldn’t get in. And we now know, of course, that neither his wife, Ms. Mireles, nor her co-teacher inside that classroom, Irma Garcia, survived the shooting.

KELLY: Yeah. Do we know what she said in this call?

FLORIDO: Well, I’ve been speaking with people close to these families, and they tell me that Eva Mireles called her husband and told him that her co-teacher, Irma Garcia, was dead and that she had been shot and badly injured and that she needed help immediately.

I find this report odd. Is it possible that Eva Mireles, gravely wounded, called her police officer for help and he didn’t risk his life to go in, or even tell the officer in charge what was happening?

Also, the school police department had six members (plus the chief, I believe). Ruiz would have been one of those six. I believe (can’t find a link now) that the first officers who entered the school building only a couple of minutes after the shooter (and who later received fire from him) was composed of members of that department, as well as some regular police officers. So if Ruiz was and is a member of the school police department, he might have been inside the school very early on. What does the phrase “couldn’t get in” mean? Does it actually mean that Ruiz “couldn’t get in” the school at all, despite being a member of the school police? Or does it mean he “couldn’t get in” the classroom rather than the school? That would make a lot more sense.

Then there’s the phrase “people close to the families.” We seem to have second-hand or third-hand or fourth-hand information, and that has a good chance of being unreliable. Who are the “people close to these families”? This not only is not Ruiz himself speaking, but it’s not even family members speaking, or anyone close to Ruiz – it’s people close to some members of his family (how close? which members of his family?). That matters, but we are not told.

Another detail that puzzles me about this story is that it has been my strong impression, both from interviews with the surviving children and from official spokespeople, that although the two rooms involved (111 and 112) were connected by an inner door, they are actually separate rooms and one teacher was in each room at the time of the shooting. It seems to have been what used to be called a team teaching approach, in which they work separately for some things and come together for others. So if that’s true, and the teachers were not in the same room, how could Eva Mireles know that Irma Garcia was dead?

It’s certainly possible that all this happened as described in the interview – and if so, it’s another awful fact that points to grave errors in communication and leadership. But the interview doesn’t make sense to me from what I know so far, and the sources are potentially suspect as far as I’m concerned. We are not hearing it from the people involved, and we don’t actually know from whom we’re hearing it except it seems they are several times removed from the source.

This timeline and description indicates (as I said) that the classrooms involved were connected, and that the perp entered one of the rooms from the outside and shot people in both. It also indicates that he was in room 111 when he was killed. I’m pretty sure for most of the time the police were in the hall he was in 111, because most of the 911 calls came from 112 and a girl who made some of them (and survived) said the perp never came back into her room (112) after the initial minutes of shooting. But we don’t know which teacher was in which room, so we don’t know where Eva Mireles was.

In trying to make sense of all this, I wonder whether it might be that Eva Mireles may have actually called her husband Ruiz to say that the shooter was outside the building shooting in through the windows and that they were going into lockdown, and that they needed help. But I really have no idea. I just know that many stories conflict and very few are being told by the people actually involved, except for some of the surviving children who’ve been traumatized and whose stories are sometimes contradictory and changing (I plan to write a post on that in a while).

The type of reporting we’ve seen so far generally reminds me a great deal of the reporting on the shooting of Michael Brown and of Trayvon Martin, and also the death of Officer Sicknick after the January 6th incursion. We hear from unnamed sources who seem far from the actual sources and often get the all-important details wrong, details that then are very hard to correct in people’s minds even when more is later learned that contradicts them.

I repeat: I’m not saying this story is untrue. But I think before we accept it we need to know a lot more, including (but not limited to) who told it, what their actual words were, and we need to hear from Ruiz himself or from an official who debriefed him. It’s a terrible and heartbreaking story, and if true it just adds fuel to the idea that there was a huge breakdown in the official response to this awful and brutal event.

Boris Johnson: well, it may not be confidence exactly…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but it’s not no confidence:

…58.6% of Conservative MPs backed him — a worse result than former Prime Minister Theresa May, who had the support of 63% of her lawmakers (200, in a much smaller parliamentary party) when she faced a confidence vote in 2018.

May survived just six months further in the job, before ultimately being forced to resign.

A quick survey of the articles on this indicates that they say something similar: Johnson won narrowly, and it means he lacks political clout going forward.

I consider the parliamentary system somewhat difficult to fully understand. But it seems to me that 58% from his own party, although low, isn’t so very terrible and isn’t going to inevitably be fatal to his ability to hold on. That said, Johnson has been a big disappointment to me as PM. His fairly strict policies on COVID lockdown for the general public, as well as his relative lenience on the Floyd-type riots and their destructive nature in the UK, were two things I hadn’t expected of him.

At any rate, he lives to fight another day. He’s also continues to face a scandal that could help to sink him in the not-too-distant future. Here’s the story on that; it’s known as “partygate.”

Trans athletes, and the documentary “What Is a Woman?”

The New Neo Posted on by

This got some coverage yesterday:

In an attempt to devise an ‘inclusive’ event, the ThunderCrit organisers created two new non-binary [cycling] races called ‘thunder’ and ‘lightning’.

Its website said: ‘Thunder category is for cis men, non-binary people whose physical performance aligns most with cis-men, trans men and women whose physical performance aligns most closely with cis-men.

‘Lightning category is for cis-women, non-binary people whose physical performance aligns with cis-women and trans men and women whose physical performance aligns most closely with cis-women.’

Nice try – let’s not call them men and women, let’s call them thunder and lightening.

More:

The event on Friday finished with two transgender women in first and second places, with a young mother in third.

Gold in the ThunderCrit race at Herne Hill velodrome in South-East London went to Emily Bridges, a trans cyclist who was barred from a woman’s race in March and who had competed in men’s events only the month before.

There’s a photo at the link of the winners. If you didn’t know what it was about, you might call it “Two men, a woman, and a baby” (the baby was held by the third place winner, a woman, and it was her baby).

More:

Bridges and Chant competed in the lightning race, despite Bridges being barred by British Cycling from racing against five-times Olympic gold medallist Dame Laura Kenny in March after international sporting bodies claimed she was ineligible.

British Cycling is now reviewing its transgender policy.

Question: If a heavyweight boxer decides he identifies as a featherweight, can he compete in that category?

Which brings us to the movie “What Is a Woman?”, by Matt Walsh (not to be confused with Michael Walsh). It looks good. Walsh interviewed proponents of the idea that a transgender woman is a woman, period, and thinking makes it so. In talking to these advocates – some of them MDs, many of whom are fully behind treating children with drugs like puberty blockers – all Walsh really has to do is ask them simple questions and they show the impoverishment of their arguments and reasoning.

Here’s Walsh talking about the film, as well as a portion of one of the interviews:

Commenter “Cornflour” links to this essay by evolutionary biologist Heather Heying. Here’s an excerpt:

Women are adult human females.

Adults are individuals who have attained the average age of first reproduction for their species. They have reached the age of maturity. The term adult applies across many species, and is used to distinguish them from juveniles, who are not yet capable of reproduction.

Humans are members of the genus Homo. Our relatives in the genus Australopithecus, now extinct, are sometimes categorized as human as well. Every individual Homo sapiens is a human.

Females are individuals who do or did or will or would, but for developmental or genetic anomalies, produce eggs. Eggs are large, sessile gametes. Gametes are sex cells. In plants and animals, and most other sexually reproducing organisms, there are two sexes: female and male. Like “adult,” the term female applies across many species. Female is used to distinguish such people from males, who produce small, mobile gametes (e.g. sperm, pollen).

I would add that these things are obvious, and “man” and “woman” are categories that are easily defined biologically. However, there are two main reasons that the left can make what seems to the rest of us to be a preposterous claim that being a woman is whatever the person thinks it is. The first reason is that although these categories are clearly defined, there is a tiny number of people who are biologically intersex and/or hermaphroditic (the latter being only one of the conditions that can cause sexual ambiguity in the biological sense). I had to study that in graduate school, and it’s way too complex to go into here, but suffice to say that there is a very very small percentage of people who really are “assigned” sex at birth and in some instances it must be changed later on, and this is based on biological markers that are ambiguous and/or mixed.

But this has nothing to do with the categories man and woman themselves, which definitely exist and are far from arbitrary. However, I’ve heard the phenomenon of intersex people cited again and again by trans activists (don’t know if Walsh’s film interviewees get into it, however) to justify the fluid and completely subjective nature of the categories. There’s no logic to it, but some people find it persuasive or at least use it to try to persuade.

The second reason people are able to argue that being a woman is an entirely subjective thing is post-modernism. If all truth is relative and there is no objective truth, then perception is everything and anyone can claim to be anything on the basis of self-definition. There would be no need to answer the question “what is a woman?” in any way but the subjective one that Walsh keeps hearing: a woman is what the person believes it to be.

This answer seems absurd and circular to those who believe that there is objective truth, particularly in science. But it seems perfectly reasonable to those who don’t believe in such things.

[NOTE: It’s my recollection that it used to be that trans activists were quite content with the phrase “trans woman” or “trans man,” phrases which distinguished trans people from those biologically defined as being members of those sexes. It was enough to be called a man or woman even if “trans,” and I don’t recall that there was an insistence that trans people were men and women exactly and precisely as the others were, and that what’s more trans people always had been the sex they decided they were and never had been the sex they’d been “assigned” at birth.

It’s this later development, this insistence on “realness” and equivalence, that leads activists into the knotted and bizarre arguments and positions that Walsh documents in his film. Another flashpoint is that now children are treated medically for this, whereas in previous times (such as, for example, back when I went to graduate school in the 1990s) that was virtually unheard of and the very idea was frowned on in the therapy profession. There’s been an official 180 on that, although there are still holdouts in the profession adhering to the older position.]