"Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism. Arendt analyzed the huge lies and blatant reversals of language associated with the Holocaust. Havel documented the pervasive little lies, lies that everyone knew to be lies, of late Communism. And Orwell gave us the vivid “2+2=5.”
"Being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you’re powerless; it also makes you complicit. You’re morally compromised. Your ability to stand on your own moral two feet and resist or denounce is lost. Part of this is a general tool for making people part of immoral groups. One child makes a second abuse a third. The second then can’t think he’s any better than the first, the bully, and can’t inform. In a gang or the Mafia, your first kill makes you trustworthy, because you’re now dependent on the group to keep your secrets, and can’t credibly claim to be superior to them."
"But it will never come unstuck by itself, if we all, every day, continue to acknowledge, glorify, and strengthen it, if we do not, at the least, recoil from its most vulnerable point.
From lies."
"We are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say out loud what we think—this is scary, we are not ready. But let us at least refuse to say what we do not think!
This is the way, then, the easiest and most accessible for us given our deep-seated organic cowardice, much easier than (it’s scary even to utter the words) civil disobedience à la Gandhi.
Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin (and many see this line differently)—step back from that gangrenous edge! Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world".
I love this. Wisdom from someone who knew what real oppression felt like to live through, as opposed to some narcissistic bloke in a wig on the internet bleating about 'lived experience'.
Yes, I think you did. I have definitely posted them before. They have given me strength when I started to think I was the one in the wrong for not agreeing to lie to children
I got a notification saying the first was on your wall, but that's now gone? Ah well. I read the Solzhenitsyn one and it really is a clear step-by-step guide if or when we're unsure how to do this. It's brilliant. 'And from that day onward he will not' list might be hitting Twitter in the nads.
He's right, it's right and it's happening all the time. The trans rights lobby has successfully persuaded numerous organisations, including the police, to act as enablers and enforcers of atrocities. Simply challenging falsehoods can become hate speech, non criminal acts are treated as criminal acts and people found guilty of stating facts are made to suffer.
It's impossible to deal with an 'ideology' which can be continually modified to suit whatever objective and outcome is being sort. And I think by now it is clear that there's no such thing as enough, more will always be wanted and demanded. The impact it makes on women, children and LGB people isn't important. It doesn't matter, the people who could intervene and stop it are not allowing it to matter.
Genuinely though, this was one of moments that shocked me the most! A bunch of white men in dresses on Twitter saying, basically “if a black woman can be a woman, so can I.” And ALL of them had BLM in there profile. It was MAD.
It goes beyond this because now, to try and get around the fact of biology, trans women are said to be not only women, but females. This is a newer tactic in the fight to eliminate the difference between sex and gender, to replace the word sex with gender. Our institutions and governments cannot define the word woman and if the activists have their way, our institutions will no longer be able to define the word female either.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that too. But it'll be a harder task. In appropriating the word woman to themselves, trans needed only to bully women & their allies.
But since “female” is a biological term (like “sex,”) trans now also have to oppose biologists, botanists, medicine, etc. Not saying that scientists are made of firmer stuff than nonscientists, just that trans add to their collection of opponents with every new fiction they try to sell.
Trans ideology and its pracitioners are so far out on a limb they’re about to fall off. Fingers crossed.
In Twitter exchanges, oft rolled it is the statement that the "commonality between TW is that all are male." To address this, GI Ideologues/Deviants respond that "no, they are female." And this is the thing I am so alive to like many others - their claims are bullying at its finest, an affront to primary-level educated people, uncompromising demands to accept their unreality. It makes no sense whatsoever, it is just confrontative BS, seeking you believe and recite the absurd, change your opinions, abandon your integrity in doing so. I simply cannot understand why there is not more of a push-back against men predominantly who feel entitled to misrepresent themselves as females. I pity the Deviants and all the uninformed who sit on the fence and do not push back.
Thanks for posting this piece by Eliza Mondegreen. The comment section here is stellar. So many juicy quotes! Thanks everyone for fighting this fight. Forcing a rape victim to call her rapist by female pronouns is a complete mindf*ck, as Graham mentioned on TMWI yesterday, and an obvious instrument of psychological torture. It wasn’t until today reading this piece that I fully understood the purpose for the repetition of the TWAW phrase. Keep it up, everyone! We can’t afford to lose this war, as our very future depends on it.
"“Transwomen are women” is about the submission of reality to ideology."
Spot on. As Helen Joyce concluded, we have to treat gender identity ideology as a belief system, with all the absurdity of any extreme religious or secular belief system. This is incredibly important as it means we don't get bogged down in having to deny ludicrous claims, but "talk past it" and address the law and - as Maya Forstater demonstrated - non-belief is a protected characteristic in law.
Maya's excellent essay on Havel's "The Power Of The Powerless" is a fine companion piece to this essay, in that it also explains why forcing people to repeat an absurdity isn't even about whether or not they believe that absurdity, it's about making them display that you have power over them.
They don't know deep down. They simply all KNOW, period. This is not a matter of education. It's an innate knowledge - to differentiate between men and women - we're all born with, because human existence depends on it.
1996. Orgins of the word. It is worrying. A development apparently on the use of Trans Man in plays for women who played male characters in Shakesperean times. I conveyed my thoughts more eloquently on Twitter, that GI Ideology was conceived in a male w*nk tissue in the 90's, I wasn't wrong.
I know! I think next time I get a chance to talk to someone and get an opening on this subject, I think I want to say something like "OK, so if TWAW, then what is a woman?" Do they have a logical answer to that, because to me if TWAW then the word 'woman' is utterly meaningless.
I see the US is still awaiting its first female four-star Admiral then. If this is offensive and insulting to me as a man, I can't begin to imagine how women feel about it, especially female officers. It takes the absolute piss. Maybe Admiral Levine deserves their promotion on job performance, but claim he's the first female to reach that rank? Every kind of fuck off.
Dr. Levine was commissioned through a federal agency called United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, which falls under the rubric of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Of course, I'll amend my original comment then, there's enough misinformation around as it is. I'm still a bit confused - why do they use the term 'Admiral' if it's nothing to do with sea/coast?
Were I still a Petty Officer (non-commissioned enlisted rank) I would be obligated to salute and carry out the orders of Dr. Levine per Navy customs, courtesies, tradition and military regulations.
That I would do this is a testament to the professionalism that is the United States Navy and the United States Armed Forces in total.
It could have been any branch they adopted the uniforms and ranks on but they went with Navy which, as a former Navy man myself (best service in the Armed Forces ever) I actually approve.
The service adopted naval ranks in order to impose military discipline on the doctors of the service, and corresponded their service rank and grade with their medical title.
Jim, you are so rights and thank you for saying it. As a woman sometimes I wish I did not know the extent to which we are utterly disdained. How fucking DARE they?
This is why I get so angry that LGB people get yoked together with these mentally-ill fantasists. Equal rights for LGB people took nothing away from anyone. It didn't demand of everyone else to validate a delusion.
Quite right. LGB people also validate physical reality, as homosexuality is embodied same-sex attraction. Of course, except for those captured by the gender cultists. May they soon be delivered from evil. 🙏
So dumb. It makes no sense. It only makes people vote republican. I am so mad. I’ve been a lifelong democrat voter. But this and the trans swimmer, the tran surgeries of children…have completely pushed me to my breaking point. And I’m not allowed to say anything about this or I’ll be in trouble?? WTF.
I feel exactly the same about the Labour Party over here. With the exception of one very brave female MP who will probably lose her seat at the next election, the entire party has gone stark raving bonkers. If they can knowingly lie through their teeth that a man can be a woman just because he says he is, how can I possibly trust them about anything else?
I also went to the WPUK talk about prisons and Rosie Duffield said she's been approached by about 30 female MPs (sorry cannot remember which party but I seem to think it was Labour ones - are there even 30?) who agree with her but are too scared to speak.
On my daily walk the other day I looked up the stairs that I walk up from the vantage point of the street below. About a kilometer away near the top of the stairs was a woman. I realized at that stage just how easy it is to define a woman or a man from even that distance.
Typo fixed. So proud to publish Eliza, whose website is here. https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/
Straightforward and concise. Perfect.
Great piece. Exactly right. From Authoritarianism and Post-Truth Politics, by Jacob T Levy (https://www.niskanencenter.org/authoritarianism-post-truth-politics/)
"Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism. Arendt analyzed the huge lies and blatant reversals of language associated with the Holocaust. Havel documented the pervasive little lies, lies that everyone knew to be lies, of late Communism. And Orwell gave us the vivid “2+2=5.”
"Being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you’re powerless; it also makes you complicit. You’re morally compromised. Your ability to stand on your own moral two feet and resist or denounce is lost. Part of this is a general tool for making people part of immoral groups. One child makes a second abuse a third. The second then can’t think he’s any better than the first, the bully, and can’t inform. In a gang or the Mafia, your first kill makes you trustworthy, because you’re now dependent on the group to keep your secrets, and can’t credibly claim to be superior to them."
And the antidote? Live Not By Lies (Alexander Solzehnitsyn -https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies
"But it will never come unstuck by itself, if we all, every day, continue to acknowledge, glorify, and strengthen it, if we do not, at the least, recoil from its most vulnerable point.
From lies."
"We are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say out loud what we think—this is scary, we are not ready. But let us at least refuse to say what we do not think!
This is the way, then, the easiest and most accessible for us given our deep-seated organic cowardice, much easier than (it’s scary even to utter the words) civil disobedience à la Gandhi.
Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin (and many see this line differently)—step back from that gangrenous edge! Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world".
I love this. Wisdom from someone who knew what real oppression felt like to live through, as opposed to some narcissistic bloke in a wig on the internet bleating about 'lived experience'.
I think I asked you to keep posting these before GAFHYB, so I will again, please keep posting, they get better with each read :-)
Yes, I think you did. I have definitely posted them before. They have given me strength when I started to think I was the one in the wrong for not agreeing to lie to children
I got a notification saying the first was on your wall, but that's now gone? Ah well. I read the Solzhenitsyn one and it really is a clear step-by-step guide if or when we're unsure how to do this. It's brilliant. 'And from that day onward he will not' list might be hitting Twitter in the nads.
"Acceptance means recognizing and making space, not embracing fabrications and stealing rights" - I think I'll print that out and hang it on my wall
The atrocities resulting from an unthinking embrace of the absurd have already been perpetrated, with more to come.
'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
Voltaire
He's right, it's right and it's happening all the time. The trans rights lobby has successfully persuaded numerous organisations, including the police, to act as enablers and enforcers of atrocities. Simply challenging falsehoods can become hate speech, non criminal acts are treated as criminal acts and people found guilty of stating facts are made to suffer.
It's impossible to deal with an 'ideology' which can be continually modified to suit whatever objective and outcome is being sort. And I think by now it is clear that there's no such thing as enough, more will always be wanted and demanded. The impact it makes on women, children and LGB people isn't important. It doesn't matter, the people who could intervene and stop it are not allowing it to matter.
I wonder if anyone is writing a history of this?
It’s been amazing to me how fast the turnover of bad faith arguments has been.
It’s been ages since I saw a “but
clownfish” gambit.
Where have all the clownfish gone
Bad faith argument?
Where have all the clownfish gone
Long time ago?
Where have all the clownfish gone?
Junked by TRAs every one
Straight down the mem’ry hole
Straight down the mem’ry hole.
This is another song for my forthcoming “Gender: the Pantonime”.
So true!
And now “trans women are women” is something only the terfs sing. Apparently.
“Sex is a spectrum” is still top of the charts, though.
What other hits have there been?
My favourite has got to be 'transwomen are women like black women are women'.
Genuinely though, this was one of moments that shocked me the most! A bunch of white men in dresses on Twitter saying, basically “if a black woman can be a woman, so can I.” And ALL of them had BLM in there profile. It was MAD.
Using their racism to mask their misogyny.
Quite quite mad. And mad is scary when those in power are the ones saying it/going along with it.
Along with 'My imaginary [butch lesbian] friend got beaten up in the Ladies'
Ooh. Yes. Very strong contenders there.
Also “you can’t tell someone’s sex just by looking at them!”
It goes beyond this because now, to try and get around the fact of biology, trans women are said to be not only women, but females. This is a newer tactic in the fight to eliminate the difference between sex and gender, to replace the word sex with gender. Our institutions and governments cannot define the word woman and if the activists have their way, our institutions will no longer be able to define the word female either.
It was almost inevitable: they were allowed to 'take' woman, so they take 'female' too
Nothing will ever be enough.
No. I will not use the word transwoman anymore because of it. The word woman belongs nowhere near men.
Other people may choose to, but that is not my choice. My boundaries have been pushed too far now.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that too. But it'll be a harder task. In appropriating the word woman to themselves, trans needed only to bully women & their allies.
But since “female” is a biological term (like “sex,”) trans now also have to oppose biologists, botanists, medicine, etc. Not saying that scientists are made of firmer stuff than nonscientists, just that trans add to their collection of opponents with every new fiction they try to sell.
Trans ideology and its pracitioners are so far out on a limb they’re about to fall off. Fingers crossed.
In Twitter exchanges, oft rolled it is the statement that the "commonality between TW is that all are male." To address this, GI Ideologues/Deviants respond that "no, they are female." And this is the thing I am so alive to like many others - their claims are bullying at its finest, an affront to primary-level educated people, uncompromising demands to accept their unreality. It makes no sense whatsoever, it is just confrontative BS, seeking you believe and recite the absurd, change your opinions, abandon your integrity in doing so. I simply cannot understand why there is not more of a push-back against men predominantly who feel entitled to misrepresent themselves as females. I pity the Deviants and all the uninformed who sit on the fence and do not push back.
I do hope you're correct
Thanks for posting this piece by Eliza Mondegreen. The comment section here is stellar. So many juicy quotes! Thanks everyone for fighting this fight. Forcing a rape victim to call her rapist by female pronouns is a complete mindf*ck, as Graham mentioned on TMWI yesterday, and an obvious instrument of psychological torture. It wasn’t until today reading this piece that I fully understood the purpose for the repetition of the TWAW phrase. Keep it up, everyone! We can’t afford to lose this war, as our very future depends on it.
I used to be polite but not any longer. I think many, many people have lost the will to live over the online man tantrums
"mantrums"? ;-)
WELL, THAT’S GETTING UTILIZED!
Mantrum instead of TW
Ha! :-)
They get a bit testerical
Ha ha 😂
"“Transwomen are women” is about the submission of reality to ideology."
Spot on. As Helen Joyce concluded, we have to treat gender identity ideology as a belief system, with all the absurdity of any extreme religious or secular belief system. This is incredibly important as it means we don't get bogged down in having to deny ludicrous claims, but "talk past it" and address the law and - as Maya Forstater demonstrated - non-belief is a protected characteristic in law.
Maya's excellent essay on Havel's "The Power Of The Powerless" is a fine companion piece to this essay, in that it also explains why forcing people to repeat an absurdity isn't even about whether or not they believe that absurdity, it's about making them display that you have power over them.
Word.
Spot on. Thank you.
They don't know deep down. They simply all KNOW, period. This is not a matter of education. It's an innate knowledge - to differentiate between men and women - we're all born with, because human existence depends on it.
Hearing 'transwomen are women' always makes me laugh, which can be hazardous.
Transplants Are Plants
Ladybirds Are Birds
Seahorses Are Horses
etcetera etcetera
I’ve got like that too. Transwoman is like something invented by a sci fi writer
1996. Orgins of the word. It is worrying. A development apparently on the use of Trans Man in plays for women who played male characters in Shakesperean times. I conveyed my thoughts more eloquently on Twitter, that GI Ideology was conceived in a male w*nk tissue in the 90's, I wasn't wrong.
I know! I think next time I get a chance to talk to someone and get an opening on this subject, I think I want to say something like "OK, so if TWAW, then what is a woman?" Do they have a logical answer to that, because to me if TWAW then the word 'woman' is utterly meaningless.
I see the US is still awaiting its first female four-star Admiral then. If this is offensive and insulting to me as a man, I can't begin to imagine how women feel about it, especially female officers. It takes the absolute piss. Maybe Admiral Levine deserves their promotion on job performance, but claim he's the first female to reach that rank? Every kind of fuck off.
Levine isn't in the Navy.
Dr. Levine was commissioned through a federal agency called United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, which falls under the rubric of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Ah, I thought "Admiral" was a nautical term. I think the point still stands.
It is but we have to be very specific about the service because the Coast Guard also has admiral.
Of course, I'll amend my original comment then, there's enough misinformation around as it is. I'm still a bit confused - why do they use the term 'Admiral' if it's nothing to do with sea/coast?
Just to be clear, though:
Were I still a Petty Officer (non-commissioned enlisted rank) I would be obligated to salute and carry out the orders of Dr. Levine per Navy customs, courtesies, tradition and military regulations.
That I would do this is a testament to the professionalism that is the United States Navy and the United States Armed Forces in total.
It could have been any branch they adopted the uniforms and ranks on but they went with Navy which, as a former Navy man myself (best service in the Armed Forces ever) I actually approve.
The service adopted naval ranks in order to impose military discipline on the doctors of the service, and corresponded their service rank and grade with their medical title.
So he also gets off on wearing a uniform? Bless him
Jim, you are so rights and thank you for saying it. As a woman sometimes I wish I did not know the extent to which we are utterly disdained. How fucking DARE they?
This is why I get so angry that LGB people get yoked together with these mentally-ill fantasists. Equal rights for LGB people took nothing away from anyone. It didn't demand of everyone else to validate a delusion.
Quite right. LGB people also validate physical reality, as homosexuality is embodied same-sex attraction. Of course, except for those captured by the gender cultists. May they soon be delivered from evil. 🙏
So dumb. It makes no sense. It only makes people vote republican. I am so mad. I’ve been a lifelong democrat voter. But this and the trans swimmer, the tran surgeries of children…have completely pushed me to my breaking point. And I’m not allowed to say anything about this or I’ll be in trouble?? WTF.
I feel exactly the same about the Labour Party over here. With the exception of one very brave female MP who will probably lose her seat at the next election, the entire party has gone stark raving bonkers. If they can knowingly lie through their teeth that a man can be a woman just because he says he is, how can I possibly trust them about anything else?
There’s pushback, but it’s cautious & risky.
Are there any Labour MPs other than Rosie Duffield then?
Yes, Tonia Antoniazzi has spoken a couple of times in Parliament about women's sports and prisons.
I also went to the WPUK talk about prisons and Rosie Duffield said she's been approached by about 30 female MPs (sorry cannot remember which party but I seem to think it was Labour ones - are there even 30?) who agree with her but are too scared to speak.
There are Labour members.
Their lone voice of reason. I hope she stands as an independent or for another party.
On my daily walk the other day I looked up the stairs that I walk up from the vantage point of the street below. About a kilometer away near the top of the stairs was a woman. I realized at that stage just how easy it is to define a woman or a man from even that distance.