My protocol for dealing with sealions

“Sealion” is the term of art for a stranger who comes into your mentions on social media to grind an axe, named after this pointed, funny Wondermark comic about the pattern.

I have a personal protocol I try to follow when encountering sealions, which I will try to articulate here. This may be a living document, as I spot more principles behind how I do the dance.

Principles

DO IT FOR PEOPLE WATCHING

This is the most important principle, from which everthing else flows. One cannot “win” a debate with a sealion, much less persuade them; trying is a pointless waste of time. The only reason to engage with sealions is for the benefit of people watching the exchange, either in a public forum or in a shared private forum for a community I care about.

I am vulnerable to temptation, but I keep an eye on the ball. Every move in every sealion encounter is an opportunity to inform someone who is new to the topic, or to show support for allies whom the sealion is attacking. Keeping in mind the object — revealing to observers what the sealion really is and really stands for, communicating to observers what your position really entails — improves everything about how the exchange with a sealion goes.

One can live a better life forgetting all the other lore in this post and just remembering this key point.

Defend good faith discussion

The sea lion in the Wondermark cartoon, with its talk about wanting a “civil discussion” et cetera, exemplifies how sealioning weaponizes a fake version of discussing disagreements in good faith. Sealioning is actually even worse than that; sealioning attacks our shared ability to have good faith discussion at all. Sealions teach people to distrust when someone exercises the norms of good faith discussion of hard topics, because people have mostly encountered those norms applied deceitfully by sealions and other wreckers. Sartre rightly recognized this bad faith in the guise of good faith as chipping away at the foundations of society.

One can fight this degradation of The Discourse by responding skillfully to sealions. I have cultivated the skill out of deep commitment to the norms of Karl Popper / Isaiah Berlin Liberalism, which you can find summarized at the bottom of this post. Exercising those norms in a sealion encounter demonstrates to observers both how these norms work and why these norms are good.

Since sealions only understand the norms of good faith as a trick they can use, exercising those norms properly paradoxically accelerates them revealing that they are actually speaking in bad faith, and when that reveal comes the contrast is stronger for observers.

Plus once in a blue moon, it turns out I misread someone as a sealion, and they actually were coming to me in good faith. This protocol has made me some good friends. Some of those friends hold positions I deeply oppose, but we both benefit from better understanding how the other side thinks, and from helping each other sharpen our understandings of what we ourselves think. And sometimes I even persuade them, at least a little, that my position has merit.

Be a good forum citizen

I try to not just rigourously obey the norms of the forum on which these encounters take place but also to always employ certain good forum behaviors which are often unarticulated as rules:

Contain the discussion

I try to keep the exchange with the sealion from annoying everyone in the forum.

If the sealion shows up to a discussion with multiple people involved, I leave them tagged into the first few rounds of my exchange with the sealion, but once it becomes a dialogue between me and the sealion, I un-tag others so it does not keep showing up for them.

I resist the temptation to to expand the exchange by replying to the sealion’s parallel replies to other people; if appropriate, I will reply with a link saying “we are already talking about this over here, if [third person] does want to join in.” It is good for people to see that they do not need to act to ensure that the sealion does not go un-challenged.

I will respond to a sealion subtweeting / vaguebooking elsewhere about their exchange with me, saying, “I presume that [sealion] is talking about this discussion [link], if folks are interested in what was actually said.” Again, this keeps the sealion from bullshitting unchallenged, while minimizing the spread.

This connects to specific move …

Resist forked threads

On any platform with threading, discussions with sealions can get bushy. Out of either incompetence or malice, sealions tend to create a lot of forks. This makes it hard for observers to see the whole discussion, and creates openings for sealions to grumble that you “ignored” a point they made.

I try hard to keep my comments on one main thread as much as I can. When something comes up on a fork, I respond to it on that main thread, then on the fork I link to where I replied to tie it off.

If the discussion escalates into a true social media shitstorm, this practice supports the most important anti-shitstorm principle: pursue clarity.

Respond in kind

Introduce as few things as possible

Sometimes one must introduce something important to the topic the sealion raised, but as much as possible I try to speak only to the points which the sealion introduces. Observers will eventually register that the sealion is trying to blitz the discussion with a flurry of points, moving the goalposts, and jerking the discussion around while I am responsing to them thoughtfully.

Among other advantages, this prepares for the common sealion tactic of asking, “Why are you so fixated on [point X]?” I can reply, “I did not introduce [point X], you did, then you refused to accept my response [argument Y] and move on. I keep responding to your counter-arguments against [argument Y] because [reason why Y is important].”

Stay at (or better, under) the sealion’s insult level

I try never to escalate an exchange of insults; if possible I try to keep my voice friendly even in the face of abusive language. I am not above calling a claim “stupid” or a position “cruel” if it is, but I try to reserve even these astringent descriptions for after the sealion has deployed them. Even when my feelings get the better of me a bit, or when I bare my teeth so I am not enabling bullying with my passive acceptance, I make a point of keeping my voice gentler than the sealion’s.

Most sealions start with the feigned polite reasonableness exemplified in the Wondermark cartoon, but few stick with it. As their insults grow increasingly mean-spirited, the disparity between their voice and mine shows observers what is really going on.

Seek the core disagreement

Digging out the fundamental question and seeking a shared understanding of it is Popper / Berlin Liberalism in action. Usually this boils down to a single important moral value plus a few points of fact. “You think evolutionary theory is morally degrading and grounded in a conspiracy of scientists; I don’t”. Moves like the Ideological Turing Test in pursuit of that ideal deliver a range of good results:

• If the sealion pushes back against moving toward more fundamental questions, it reveals the sealion’s disingenuousness to observers.
• Observers often get a clearer picture of why the sealion’s position is bad when I articulate its core.
• If the sealion embraces this move — which does sometimes happen — it produces a more substantive argument for observers to learn from.
• If reading the person as a sealion was a misdiagnosis of someone thoughtful, they will register what I am doing, embrace it, and we can get to a discussion I might actually learn from.

Moves

Ask crisp questions as much as possible

Sealions expect their targets to speak to them dismissively, and they have a pattern of using leading questions to shape the discussion. Asking them questions — and making them good, clarifying questions — disorients the sealion, helps make their question-asking pattern evident to observers, and accelerates the reveal of what their real agenda is. I like to use these patterns:

• When you say [thing they said], that seems to imply [ugly consequence] because [reason]. I assume that you do not mean that. Can you clarify?
• You seem to [always / never] [accept / reject] [thing]. Is that right? Or can you name an exception?

Grant points

I look for opportunities to show that I am not a stonewalling ideologue. So I look for opportunities to say stuff like:

• I agree with you about [Point X].
• I half agree with you about [Point X]: it is [right in Y way in Z situation], just [wrong about A in B way].
• Yeah [Case X] does exist. I am just focused on [Case Y] because [reasons].
• Thank you for catching the clumsiness of the way I put that. Allow me to clarify.
• FWIW, I am sure that [their Point X] is wrong but I respect it as a legitimate position that a reasonable person could hold.

This creates a useful contrast when I firmly hold the line. Observers notice that if I am willing to concede [Points X & Y] but not [Point Z], it means that [Point Z] is important … and that the sealion conceding nothing demonstrates that they are the stubborn blockhead.

Preëmpt sand traps

Most sealions are crackpots. They want to feel smart by making the people they harass respond by saying dumb things, (or things they think are dumb). They often try to produce that by offering familiar weak versions of their arguments, or teasing out motte-and-bailey bait.

When I see where the sealion is going, I jump directly to a crisp version of where they are going with patterns like:

• Am I right to think that you setting up a case for [where they are going]?
• I am familiar with [where they are going] and reject it for reasons I am sure you have heard before. If that is where you are going, what do we actually need to discuss?

Often observers find it clarifying to see a sealion’s frustration that they will not get the dance they wanted. I have a meme image I built to underline what is happening in those cases:

Apologize readily and well

I like to actively look for an opportunity to render an apology to a sealion. It demonstrates the difference between what a sealion does and genuinely speaking in good faith and extending charity. As I am human, I need not manufacture these opportunities; I will make a mistake.

We have a general No Apology Is Adequate problem. I try to stay ahead of that by explicitly apologizing and erring toward over-generously resting responsibility on my side. For example:

• I’m sorry I took you as saying [bad thing]. I saw it as implied in [thing they said] and obviously got it wrong. I want to avoid misrepresenting you. Would you correct my misreading by expanding on what you did mean there?
• I apologize. I see how you read [thing I said] as implying [bad thing X]. I was not clear. I should have been more careful to say explicitly how I [oppose / do not think] [bad thing X]. I should have said [refined version of thing I said] in the first place.
• I’m sorry I said something hurtful. I did not mean it to be, but it was my responsibility to be more careful.
• I’m sorry I did not respond on that particular point. I should have registered its importance. [Reply to the point.]

I enthusiastically refine these apologies in a second round if the sealion demands one on remotely reasonable terms.

This tends to soften sealions’ escalation to uglier rhetoric early in the exchange, but it does not stop it, because they want to get me to escalate to prove that they are right & reasonable; my willingness to apologize denies that to them.

It also draws a contrast between the times when I have an error to admit, or to offer as a generous interpretation of a bad turn, in comparison to points where I have nothing to apologize for and can point to how their accusation of my failing is disingenuous. That I will apologize and clarify underlines how I did nothing wrong when I do not.

Of course sealions tend to neither apologize nor accept apologies. Observers will register the difference.

Name when the sealion acts as predicted

Sealions often respond to any analysis of the implications of what they say as “unfair”, but when I give them enough rope they almost always say — or refuse to say — something which proves my point. When it happens, I point back to where I called it.

Announce when the sealion Blocks you

A Twitter post by the astringent Josh Ellis got me started on this post:

Lemme explain something that should be obvious: if you go after a stranger on social media and they block you, that’s not cowardice. They just don’t wanna talk to you.

When you go after someone, and they absolutely body you for it, and then you block them?

That’s cowardice.

It’s the equivalent of swinging on a total stranger at a bar and then running away crying when they tag you back. It’s a bitch move.

If you can’t leave people alone, don’t complain when they paddle your soft little ass for it. Cowboy up and take your whipping like an adult.

Sealions have a strong tendency to respond to the protocol I describe here by engaging for quite a while … and then they suddenly Block me. Observers need to know what happened, so I do a wrap-up saying:

I see that [sealion] Blocked me. They came into my mentions, I tried to address as many of their points as they could, and they ran off when it did not go their way.

I confess that this also feels good. It is as close to winning as these maddening exchanges can get ya.

Related

A long, useful guide to counter-BS strategy I like.

You can see examples of how I respond to sealions transcribed on my posts about crafting good policy for handling antisemitism and how the political right does not see people as equal.

I have posts about how I handle discussions in my space and social media shitstorms relevant in my space and elsewhere. That last includes a summary of principles relevant here:

I believe in the liberal-as-in-liberal-democracy approach to the Paradox Of Tolerance, which says that we need all six of these principles working together.

1. Honesty — always speak in good faith, telling the truth as well as one knows it, especially about oneʼs own ideas and intentions
2. Generosity — start from a presumption that everyone speaks & acts in good faith
3. Vigilance — always watch carefully for bad actors
4. Skepticism — demand strong evidence before accepting that someone is a bad actor
5. Transparency — publicly document evidence of bad actors
6. Safety — ruthlessly exclude demonstrated bad actors

Princess Grace Hospital scandal BS debunked

A friend credulous about claims from opponents of trans liberation passed me a Twitter thread about the story that Princess Grace Hospital in the UK denied a survivor of sexual assault necessary healthcare because of her belief that trans women are men. It had me going for a minute. Maybe she had been done wrong.

If you do not know what I am talking about, jump ahead to my transcript of the twitter thread, then follow the link to jump back up here. If you have heard the story already, then let us take a closer look.

Of course the thread was bullshit. Opponents of trans liberation deceive systematically as a deliberate strategy. I know this not because I found a source debunking the story, but because I read the screencaps of the email exchanges between the woman and the hospital which were included in the Twitter thread, and discovered so many misrepresentations that it is hard to avoid concluding that the thread was deliberate deception, offering the screencaps as a theatre of rigor with the assumption that few would actually squint over them, given that they look like this:

Reading the emails screencapped in the widely-shared Twitter thread which got me interested, this seems to be what actually happened:

Four days before her surgery was scheduled, the patient went in for a pre-surgical exam and was troubled that a person whom she read as a trans woman looked at her while she was in the exam room. This inspired her to write a vigorously transphobic email to the hospital, saying that with narrow exceptions — her personal doctor’s team, “certified” doctors, and specific exceptions she deigned to allow — no one assigned male at birth should be permitted any contact with her during her care, underlining that she would insult any trans people she encountered. The hospital then contacted her doctor, and when the hospital had confirmed that doing so would not put the patient at risk, they day after the patient sent her email, the hospital replied with curt email telling her that her surgery appointment was cancelled because they could not meet her demands. An email exchange followed in which she insisted that she had done nothing wrong, while threatening legal action.

Advocates for trans liberation sound unhinged when we describe the bad faith which we have learned to expect from our opponents. This is why. Opponents of trans liberation reliably and shamelessly misrepresent events and outright lie. One must never trust them on a point of fact.

Since the Twitter thread misrepresents the emails it presents, offering them with confusing context, I have put together a clarifying summary timeline. Then below that I have the entire Twitter thread and the email screencaps it offered, transcribed for legibility, so you can see the details for yourself.

Email timeline

Teresa, the patient, was scheduled for surgery on Monday the 10^th.

Th 6^th — Teresa’s initial complaint

• During my initial assessment I told you how transphobic I was, with my demands for single-sex accomodations and my refusal to use trans people’s pronouns or to otherwise “engage” with “gender ideology”
• I am using a private hospital like yours because the are so many rapes at NHS facilities
• In just the last few years men have started watching so much gross porn that I am frightened that someone will snap kinky porn of me with their cellphone camera
• When I came in for a pre-surgical exam today, a creepy man in drag came into my exam room for a moment, uninvited, and looked at me
• This demonstrates that you do not take care to protect women
• Therefore I request that
  • no males other than doctors or my doctor’s team may have direct contact with me unless I give permission
  • I get a private room and bathroom
  • you log that person coming into the room as a Patient Dignity Lapse
• Really you ought to offer a single-sex care team like this to all women

Fr 7^th — the hospital (CEO?) cancels the surgery

• We do not share your beliefs
• We cannot do what you asked
• Your surgery is cancelled
• We told your doctor
• We did this because we have an obligation not only to protect you but to protect our staff

Sat 8^th — Teresa threateningly asks to keep her appointment

• I did not get the medication you promised me for prepping for the surgery
• I am not a bigot, there is nothing wrong with anything I said
• You are illegally discriminating against me, and I am a lawyer
• I really need the surgery
• I want to keep the appointment

Mon 10^th — The CEO explains cancelling the surgery

• The incident with someone coming into the room during your exam does sound bad; we are already investigating
• After surgery you would spend some time in the ICU, where we are just not equipped to give you your own bathroom or to ensure that you will not come in contact with male people
• You can believe what you want, but given your comment about not using pronouns, I also have to protect my staff from you harassing them
• Before we cancelled your surgery, we checked with your doctor; your health is not endangered by our decision, as there are plenty of other places where you could get this surgery
• If you still want to get the surgery here, I stand ready to discuss it with you

Later — Teresa complains

• How dare you pick up my implication that the uninvited visitor showed up during the most awkward part of my exam; it was at a different time in the exam room
• I do not believe that you are not equipped to give me what I want
• I am a good person; how dare you suggest that I might “harass” someone or “discriminate” against anyone
• It is you who are discriminating against me
• You should have called me to talk this out, rather than talking to my doctor behind my back
• I am going to make legal trouble for you

The Twitter thread

Here is the deceptive Twitter thread from @ripx4nutmeg, with the text of the attached screenshots of emails transcribed. I put the original thread, formatted with individual tweets as paragraphs, in yellow boxes. The email transcripts appear in white boxes in the yellow boxes where @ripx4nutmeg put them; I have added the titles of my summaries above to those, so you can connect summary to source. I add a few interjections in regular text like this, to point to disjoints between what @ripx4nutmeg says and what the email screencaps in the thread say.

In one of the most shocking stories you could read, a London hospital has cancelled a woman's life-saving operation at the last minute because it doesn't 'share her values'. That 'value' she had was that she wanted the aftercare nurses to be female

Former solicitor Teresa - @XXFemaleOnly - needs urgent, rare and highly complex, colorectal surgery. She selected the private Princess Grace Hospital, which specialises in women's healthcare, for it specifically because she didn't want to be in a mixed-sex facility

A victim of sexual assaults, Teresa made it clear to the hospital how important this issue was to her, by both requesting a single-sex room and bathroom, and stating she would only answer questions on forms about her sex, not her 'gender identity'

During a pre-operation intimate procedure, a male member of staff, wearing a blonde wig and bright lipstick, opened the door uninvited, and peered in. He made eye contact with her, before leaving. Teresa wondered if she was being targeted due to her requests

Feeling frightened and vulnerable, Teresa reported the incident as a 'patient dignity breach', and issued a request that her nursing care from now on must be from females only, and not men who 'ID' as women, something that is allowed under the Equality Act

Th 6^th — Teresa’s initial complaint

Dear Staff

I attended Princess Grace Hospital today for a pre-op assessment. My surgery is due on Monday 10th October.

Before attending the assessment, I completed a questionnaire in which I explained that:

1. I wanted single sex bathroom / accommodation facilities during my stay, as per my rights under the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulation 2014) as updated in 2022, and the CQC Fundamental Standards of Care relating to Dignity and Privacy, and in accordance with the Equality Act Schedule 3 Single Sex Exemption; and

2. that I would not agree to use pronouns or otherwise engage with such manifestations of gender ideology. This is in accordance with my beliefs which are deemed to be “worthy of respect in a democratic society” (as per the judgment in Forstate v CGD) and are also listed as one of the nine protected categories (Religion / Beliefs) under the Equality Act 2010.

I selected a private hospital specifically to avoid the NHS, because of the Annex B policy scandal, which has resulted in sexual assaults and rapes in mixed sex facilities, on an industrial scale, as recent FOI enquiries have made clear. I know this, because I am part of an enquiry into it. It is a fact that mixed sex hospital facilities are unsafe for women.

Only five years ago I would not have worried about this; however, the reality is that in the last few years, the use of online porn has grown exponentially. There are a myraid of porn genres (which have been monetised) and no end to the depths of depravity online. 2.8% of heterosexual men have a paraphilia of some kind. Everybody has a mobile phone. I do not wish to be exposed to risk while I am immobilised when I am in ICU following my surgery.

This matter is of sufficient importance to me that I regard the two requirements above as a condition of my contract with HCA.

The pre-op assessment which I had this afternoon at the Princess Grace Hospital included intimate procedures including [redacted]

Towards the end of my assessment, somebody knocked at and simultaneously opened the door without waiting to be invited to enter. The door opened onto a corridor. A young male in what appeared to be a blonde wig, wearing full evening make-up including bright scarlet lipstick peered at me. I am not sure wht his role was or what he was doing there. He made direct eye contact with me (which in itself was quite brazen and so disconcerting), then said something to the nurse and looked away.

I was horrified and shocked that any male member of staff would feel entitled to breach the privacy of a woman patient in such a way in these circumstances. It was especially egregious that this happened in the light of the advance notice I had given to the hospital.

All male staff should be required to knock at a door and WAIT for permission to enter before opening a door when a female patient is in a state of undress. This person obviously feels sufficiently entitled to walk in on a female patient and I find this to be very alarming. This transgression suggests that there is a lack fo discipline / training of male staff to respect the boundaries of female patients at HCA. Although this is following a societal trend (see above) I did not expect to encounter this in a central London private hospital. It makes me feel very nervous about aftercare.

None of this augurs well for women who are vulnerable following major surgery.

Accordingly I have to make the following requests:

1. While I naturally accept that Professor Faiz’s surgical team is mixed sex, I am again stating my wish that the nursing, auxiliary and support staff with whom I will be in immediate contact following surgery are FEMALE ONLY. Please note that trans-identifying males are NOT females.

2. I will accept male staff entering my room ONLY if they are qualified doctors unless by prior agreement with me.

3. I assume that I will have a private room with a private bathroom.

4. I insist that the above incidence is registered as a Patient Dignity Lapse on the hospital incident recording system.

Finally, in light of the above, I do feel that the hospital should follow a protocol of offering ALL women patients single-sex nursing care. Please do not make life difficult for women when they are at their most vulnerable by forcing them into uncomfortable and embarrassing situations. I cannot believe that I am the first patient to have raised this with you.

What are you doing to reassure female patients as to their privacy, comfort and dignity in accordance with the CQC Fundamental Standards in this regard. Does HCA guarantee same sex care to it women patients?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours faithfully
Teresa [redacted]
Solicitor (retired)

She then had to go home for three days to prepare for the operation, in which pre-op medication was to be couriered to her. Nothing arrived. She called the hospital and was told the operation had been cancelled, with no explanation given why

She then found an email had been sent to her by the CEO of the hospital saying the operation, which was due the next working day, had been cancelled due to a 'lack of shared values' and to 'protect staff from unacceptable distress'.

Fr 7^th — the hospital (CEO?) cancels the surgery

From: [redacted]
Sent: 07 October 2022 19:36
To: [redacted]
Subject: Response from the Princess Grace Hospital

Dear [redacted]

Thank you for your email dated 6^th October 2022.

We have reviewed the content of your email. We do not share yor beliefs and are not able to adhere to your requests and we have therefore decided we will not proceed with your surgery at The Princess Grace Hospital on Monday 10^th October 2022. We have shared our decision with Professor Fiaz and recommend you make alternative arrangements.

I appreciate this is not the communication you were expecting to receive, however HCA is committed to protecting our staff from unacceptable distress and we believe the cornerstone of good patient care is based on mutual respect and trust.

Notice that @ripx4nutmeg implies that Teresa received the cancellation after three days incommunicado, on the eve of her planned surgery, while the email informing her is dated the 7^th (the day immediately after Teresa’s email above) not the 9^th (the day before the planned surgery). Then @ripx4nutmeg leans on this deception about the timeline in the next tweet … which attaches a screencapped email from Teresa contradicting the implication, describing how she saw the refusal the morning of the 8^th:

The life-saving operation would have involved two leading surgeons, their clinical entourage, two surgery suites, a robot, a place in ICU and a patient bed for seven nights, and this was all cancelled at the last minute

Sat 8^th — Teresa threateningly asks to keep her appointment

Dear [Redacted]

I refer to your email of yesterday evening that I opened this morning (Saturday). It has caused me significant anxiety and concern only two days before a major surgical proceedure for my acute medical condition.

Your staff member (Ms Katie Jones), as late as 16:30 yesterday, assured me that my prophylactic prescribed medicine would be couriered to me this morning (due to widespread local unavailablitiy yesterday). I have relied on this statemenet accordingly.

It appears that you and your colleagues have completely misunderstood/misinterpreted my reasonable advance directive provided during the pre-admission session on Thursday, along with the points made in my email below.

I am a liberal left-of-centre Labour voter and do not object to anyone identifying in any way they wish. That does not mean that I must agree to nursing care from biological males while I am immobilized following major surgery. I am a former solicitor, a former biochemist, and a rationalist. My beliefs on this subject are ordinary, mainstream, and a protected belief under English law. I have always championed minority rights and all aspects and principles of diversity and inclusion. Indeed, my husband is a partner in a major law firm which is a Stonewall Diversity Champion.

My request for post-operative care is no different from the requirements of many female patients of Middle Eastern/Asian heritage, and it is not unreasonable to expect to be accomodated similarly.

As per the Equality Act 2010 and HCA Healthcare UK’s own Code of Conduct (the “Code”), which have mandatory application to this matter, my belief is one of the nine protected characteristics described by HCA. I respectfully suggest that cancelling my proceduere is a discriminatory decision, made in error and haste.

As per the Code a patient has a right to request advance directives regarding treatment. The Code states that they “are honoured within the limits of the law, and our organisation‘s missions, philosophy, values and capabilties”. There is nothing in my own values and beliefs that run contrary to the foregoing. Denying my scheduled treatment without discussion because I have made a complaint about a transgression of boundaries by a member of staff is totally unethical, and contrary to HCA's stated values.

I am greatly concerned that my reasonable request and points in my email below that reflect my legally protected belief have been misrepresentated as unlawful or unreasonable both within HCA and externally to my clinician and his staff. I fully agree that all staff must always be protected from unacceptable distress. However, there is nothing in my request that in any way could be reasonably construed as a cause, or as an intention to cause, such distress. Nothing could be further from my stated intentions.

Futhermore, your decision is breaching the Code under the heading of Patients’ Rights by dismissing my Patient Dignity complaint and request for same sex care:

‘In the promotion and protection of each patient’s rights, each patient and his or her representatives are accorded appropriate confidentiality, privacy, security, advocacy and safeguarding services, opportunity for resolution of complaints and pastoral care or spiritual care.’

Your response is evidently based on an incorrect understanding of the facts of the matter, and has resulted in a rushed and disproportionately harmful denial of my urgent clinical needs. You have not given me an opportunity to discuss the matter or attempt to resolve this misunderstanding. That is a breach of the Code and is unreasonable by any objective standard.

The cancellation of a critical proceedure on Friday evening, when I am due to take medicine tomorrow for a procedure scheduled for Monday, if not reversed (i.e. re-scheduled in the very near future) may have significant implications for my clinical outcome. I have already had one emergency admission with a perforated intestine recently. A delay at this stage increases the risk of a further emergency and so is creating an unnecessary risk to my health. My procedure is particularly complex and requires a robot and two surgeons. I am unwell and the condition is life-threatening.

Accordingly, I would respectfully but strongly urge you to re-consider your decision. I can assure you that I am a wholly reasonable person who appreciates the absolute need to treat everybody in all circumstances with mutual respect and trust.

I look forward to hearing from you as soon as practicable in light of this urgent situation.

I reserve all my rights in this matter.

Yours sincerely
Teresa [Redacted]

The hospital CEO also, in contravention of healthcare regulations, failed to confirm that she would register the patient dignity breach and did not offer to investigate it

@ripx4nutmeg attaches to this last tweet another screencapped email which directly contradicts its claim, since in their email the CEO recognizes the “dignity breech” as wrong and says they are already investigating it.

The hospital CEO also, in contravention of healthcare regulations, failed to confirm that she would register the patient dignity breach and did not offer to investigate it

Mon 10^th — The CEO explains cancelling the surgery

Dear Ms [Redacted]

Thank you for your email which I read this morning on my return to the hospital.

Your email of 6 October, timed at 23:51 that night, expressed concerns over an incident which occurred earlier that day and included a number of ‘requests’ and ‘requirements’ relating to the surgery which was scheudled for the following Monday (today, 10 October). The incident you described in that email - where an individual entered into the room whilst you were [redacted] in advance of your planned surgery - should not have happened and is under investigation. We will come back to you once that investigation is complete.

Your email also advised (my words):

• you wanted a private room with a private bathroom
• you wanted all nursing, auxillary and support staff with whom you would be in immediate contact following surgery to be female only, with male stafff only entering your room if they were qualified doctors or you had previously agreed

You also noted that you would not agree to use pronouns or otherwise engage with “such manifestations of gender ideology”.

Our hospital wards comprise single rooms with ensuite facilities, and you would be admitted into one of these rooms once assessed as ‘fit’ to return to the ward, would be nursed in such a room until your discharge from the hospital. However, our intensive care facility does not comprise single rooms with ensuite facilities and we do not have single sex intensive care facilities at the hospital. We would not therefore be able to meet your request always for a private room with a private bathroom.

I would also note that the Hospital’s staffing is mixed sex. This includes the doctors that work here, as well as our nursing staff, radiotherapists, pharmacists and phisiotherapists and we would not therefore be able to meet your request that you be cared for only by female members of staff or ‘prior agreement’ as to specific male members of staff.

As regards your comment around pronouns, whilst I acknowldge your belief, I have a responsibility to protect our staff from discrimination and harassment.

I should note that before making our decision to cancel the surgery that was planned for today, our team liased with your Consultant to confirm that there would be no risk to your physical health. I also understand that it would be possible for you to have the surgery elsewhere. Having said that, I note from your emails that you would pefer to have your procedure in the private sector, so noting my comment above, I wonder if you might find it helpful to meet with me to discuss how (and if) we might be able to work together to accomodate an admission for you under mutually accepted terms? If you would like to do that, then I will ask my assistant to let you have some dates where I, as well as some of my senior nursing team and your Consultant could meet.

Regards
Yours sincerely
[Redacted]

With this all gone, probably the only alternative available to her at this, now, late stage, is open surgery, something her surgeon did not recommend as the best option

@ripx4nutmeg attaches to the last tweet there a screencap of Teresa’s email to the CEO which does not demonstrate the medical consequences the tweet names; it does not even make the assertion. It says instead that the CEO’s email has her feeling disrespected, so she threatens legal action.

With this all gone, probably the only alternative available to her at this, now, late stage, is open surgery, something her surgeon did not recommend as the best option

Later — Teresa complains

Dear [Redacted]

Thank you for your email below.

First, there is an inaccuracy that I feel compelled to correct right now before any investigation takes place, which is that you appear to have misread my Patient Breach complaint. I never said that it took place while intimate swabbing was occurring. I said that it took place during an assessment which included intimate swabbing. That is not the same thing. We must ensure that your trans-identified male employee will not be exposed to ‘unnecessary distress’ by a false claim. Please do not inadvertantly lend the lie to my honest account.

There is no point in going around in circles on the minutiae of the hospital layout and facilities regarding my requests, suffice to say that I don't agree with your analysis below. You have further muddied the water by using your own words and not mine.

Most importantly, I am of good character and particularly resent being portrayed as some kind of hazard to staff. You don’t appear to understand the meaning of the very loaded words that you employ. ‘Harassment’ is an example. It’s a criminal offense. Obviously, as a sex-realist and a lawyer, I have checked the legal position on engaging with pronouns or otherwise. Not using pronouns, or identifying a third-party male, as a male, for example, is not tantamount to harassment. I know exactly where the line lies and never cross it. Kindly refrain from stating, expressly or impliedly, that such a word applies to me.

Neither is expecting same sex care ‘discrimination’ against anyone, and I don’t understand why you consider it to be so. In fact I am the party who has been discriminated against. Your bias in this matter is very telling. There are nine protected categories under the Equality Act 2010, and that there is no hierarchy of rights. Gender reassignment does not take priority over the eight other protected categories. I have three protected characteristics, Sex, Religion / Belief, and Age. Proportionality is key.

Obviously, in the light of the patient dignity breech, I found myself in an invidious position where I had to set my own boundaries as PGH did not appear to have adequate ones in place. Hence the updated request for single sex care. For example, if staff are allowed to chat around the door of the assessment suite straight off a corridor, why not have a screen around the patient? That would have been fine with me.

All these issues could have been resolved if you had followed the mandatory HCA Code and rang me on Friday for a conversation before making a final decision about my proceedure. The correct first step would have been to apologize for any upset for the breech and promise an investigation. If you had said that the person was sorry and it was a genuine error, I may well have let it go. The second step would have been to explain the hospital’s position regarding my requests. I am sure we would have found some form of compromise, it would have been in my interest to do so.

Instead, you appear to have discussed the cancellation of my procedure with everyone except me; I merely received a thoroughly unpleasant emailed notification at 7:30pm. You ensured that no reply to the email could get through over the weekend as you switched on your auto-response facility (as you were no doubt entitled to do); however, you did not supply any alternative contact details for a member of staff that I could talk to over the weekend. I feel that I was dismissed and treated like some kind of pariah, with utter contempt.

I did not pick up your email until Saturday. I was still expecting my prescription and was chasing PGH. That saga was another incredibly stressful PGH service failure. In the course of chasing, I was horrified to be notified that my procedure had been cancelled - by a PGH receptionist. I asked for a senior member of staff at PGH to return my call, but nobody did, which was callous and unprofessional. I was extremely distressed and upset; it made me ill over the weekend.

I can honestly say that I have never encountered such a lack of professionalism and failure to follow due process or protocol as I have experienced while trying to arrange the proceedure. Aside from the total disregard of my interests, I cannot believe that any reasonable person would think it proportionate to lay off two of the UK's leading surgeons and their clinial entourage without notice and leave a robotic suite redundant along with a patient bed for seven ights, on such a ridculous premise as you did. The wasted costs must have been astronomical.

All of this sends a very clear message to women who are concerned about their privacy and dignity, about the priorities and values of PGH. On the basis of my experience, I am certain that I am most unlikely to receive fair or reasonable treatment from you.

Accordingly, I am escalating this matter as a next stage complaint to HCA.

Yours sincerely
Teresa [Redacted]

Just four days after the operation was due to take place, last week, her condition began to deteriorate and Teresa ended up in A&E, in considerable pain. She has rapidly lost weight and may now be too weak to have the open surgery

As she says: "The material reality of my serious illness is being totally disregarded by Princess Grace Hospital in order to protect the feelings of a male member of staff who committed a breach of patient dignity". Read the story here:

Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE: Hospital refuses to operate on sex attack victim after she requests all-female care because she fears mixed sex facilities are unsafe for women

• The patient - a sex assault victim - had requested all-female facilities due to concerns over mixed areas
• She was stunned when someone she believed to be a transgender male opened door in pre-op assessment
• It prompted her to complain and make a request for all-female nursing care at Princess Grace Hospital
• The hospital then cancelled the surgery, claiming it was ‘protecting staff from discrimination and harassment’
• Women's rights campaigners have savaged the hospital’s act, branding it ‘a movement of misogyny in heels’
• Hospital said requests for ‘single sex care’ were particularly challenging, citing the 'diversity of colleagues’

Inviting misreadings

Is the thread really an argument in bad faith? Am I just quibbling over small particulars?

I submit that it is designed to support over-readings of what it says and what it demonstrates. The thread has been re-shared thousands of times, seen by countless more. At the time that I write the addendum, four days after the thread was initially shared, there are just shy of two thousand quote-tweets of the first tweet alone, many of them saying things which are simply not true. From the first six dozen QTs which Twitter offered me, I found these offering statements of fact contradicting the evidence of the thread:

The CEO of the Princess Grace Hospital is ignoring the single sex provisions of the EqualityAct, and, in effect is sentencing this woman to death by refusing allow robotic surgery to a person who no longer has the option of general surgery somewhere else.

The burgeoning practice of providing medical care only to the ideologically acceptable is unimaginably dangerous. #RespectMySex

London hospital will let a rape victim die unless she agrees to be touched by male staff.

Tells her it is so offensive to tell a man no that they cancel her operation instead.

Did I get this right?

Gilead hospital imposes possible death sentence to rape victim for crime of wrongthink.

We are now at a point where life saving care is being refused by a hospital because the patient's protected beliefs don't align with those they say they hold.

Principles

Same-sex care

An unfriendly interlocutor on Twitter asked whether I consider access to a same-sex care a reasonable request at all. I have to grant that this is an important question. So for the record:

As a matter of care for the comfort and psychological safety for patients, I vigorously support ensuring that as many medical facilities as possible have the capacity to offer same-sex exams to conscious patients, and to have facilities actively invite that request.

My support for trans liberation has me fundamentally skeptical about allowing requests specifically for care from a cis person, but I think the need for psychological safety for traumatized people trumps that skepticism. This makes facilities exclusively staffed by and in service of cis women an intriguing idea. I would criticize the theory — a staff of cis women is not the right way to ensure actual safety — but that does not mean that I would oppose their creation. And for obvious reasons not every facility could provide that level of exclusivity.

So if we set aside intensive care, a patient at a facility with mixed-sex staff requesting that the facility arrange to only have cis women enter their room? That is an even stronger request than requiring only cis women present for examinations. Again, the cultural politics of it make me uneasy, but I hesitate to call it morally wrong to ask. But it should be evident why this is logistically a heavy lift, not simply impractical for that particular hospital (as the CEO said) but impractical, period.

In her email, the patient suggests that this accommodation is a protected and routine right which she has been denied. Given just the logistics, I would be very surprised if that were true. So part of my objection to how this story has been told is that the hospital has been portrayed as refusing a reasonable expectation of a same-sex exam for a conscious patient — which I vigorously support! — when she has made a far more expansive set of demands.

Rights to care

As for a patient’s right to medical care whatever her behavior, the question of stakes and urgency is important. Even if a patient is making the worst insults or threats possible to their caregivers, the Hippocratic principle obligates those caregivers to deliver care preserving life & limb when urgently necessary. I take a universal right to medical care very seriously.

But without life & limb urgency, I do not see how medical caregivers are obligated to endure insults from patients.

And this discussion plug into much bigger questions about the ways in which we (if as a Yank I can include the UK in “we”) fail to support survivors of sexual assault, and people emotionally traumatized in general. One of my Twitter refrains is “we need a politics which is supportive of people who been traumatized and recognizes how people have incentives to exaggerate their trauma and recognizes how people have incentives to ignore and diminish trauma”.

All of this patient’s behavior reflects how that she has not received the support she deserves. We are seeing how a hospital simply cannot accommodate that need by itself; it requires a full-spectrum set of supports.

I vigorously resent the way that opponents of trans liberation have turned this broad-spectrum failure into a club with which to beat trans women. That does a disservice not only to trans people ... it is also a distraction from discussions of broader needs for support for the traumatized.

Shouldn’t they have just called her?

Many commentators suggest that the hospital should have phoned her to discuss after her first provocative email. They have a point: the hospital’s reply is unnervingly curt.

I strongly suspect that there are other elements under the water line here. I imagine them receiving that first email with its crackpottish particulars and not-so-veiled threats of legal action and talking over what they knew. Did they look at the initial intake assessment questionnaire she alludes to? Talk about other encounters the staff had already had with her? Ask people who were there about what actually happened in the exam room?

I imagine them dreading the risk of might happen once she was actually in the hospital for several days, the ways she would find to escalate. And given how the email exchange we can see proceeded, it seems that they called it right.

What of the patient’s legal rights?

I do not claim any expertise in law in general, in the UK legal system, or the particulars of this incident ... but Teresa’s legal argument in her emails sounds screwy to me.

She rests a great deal on her “legally protected belief”, but she then claims that this protects not just her beliefs but her latitude to make demands and to insult trans people. The bit where she says “Not using pronouns, or identifying a third-party male, as a male, for example, is not tantamount to harassment. I know exactly where the line lies and never cross it.” — is some chilling stuff. She is saying that she has premeditated plans to engage in as much harassment-in-the-colloquial-sense as she believes she can legally get away with.

Just the tweets

For folks new to this story, it helps to start by reading just the Twitter thread without the attached emails, the way I did at first:

In one of the most shocking stories you could read, a London hospital has cancelled a woman's life-saving operation at the last minute because it doesn't 'share her values'. That 'value' she had was that she wanted the aftercare nurses to be female

Former solicitor Teresa - @XXFemaleOnly - needs urgent, rare and highly complex, colorectal surgery. She selected the private Princess Grace Hospital, which specialises in women's healthcare, for it specifically because she didn't want to be in a mixed-sex facility

A victim of sexual assaults, Teresa made it clear to the hospital how important this issue was to her, by both requesting a single-sex room and bathroom, and stating she would only answer questions on forms about her sex, not her 'gender identity'

During a pre-operation intimate procedure, a male member of staff, wearing a blonde wig and bright lipstick, opened the door uninvited, and peered in. He made eye contact with her, before leaving. Teresa wondered if she was being targeted due to her requests

Feeling frightened and vulnerable, Teresa reported the incident as a 'patient dignity breach', and issued a request that her nursing care from now on must be from females only, and not men who 'ID' as women, something that is allowed under the Equality Act

She then had to go home for three days to prepare for the operation, in which pre-op medication was to be couriered to her. Nothing arrived. She called the hospital and was told the operation had been cancelled, with no explanation given why

She then found an email had been sent to her by the CEO of the hospital saying the operation, which was due the next working day, had been cancelled due to a 'lack of shared values' and to 'protect staff from unacceptable distress'.

The life-saving operation would have involved two leading surgeons, their clinical entourage, two surgery suites, a robot, a place in ICU and a patient bed for seven nights, and this was all cancelled at the last minute

The hospital CEO also, in contravention of healthcare regulations, failed to confirm that she would register the patient dignity breach and did not offer to investigate it

With this all gone, probably the only alternative available to her at this, now, late stage, is open surgery, something her surgeon did not recommend as the best option

Just four days after the operation was due to take place, last week, her condition began to deteriorate and Teresa ended up in A&E, in considerable pain. She has rapidly lost weight and may now be too weak to have the open surgery

As she says: "The material reality of my serious illness is being totally disregarded by Princess Grace Hospital in order to protect the feelings of a male member of staff who committed a breach of patient dignity". Read the story here: Daily Mail

Wow, she was done wrong, yes? That was how I felt when I read this. Spend a moment securing that thought in your mind.

Then jump back to the top of this post to learn what I found when I looked at the screencapped emails attached to those tweets.

Sam Harris

I do not pay attention to Sam Harris but hazily thought of him as a relatively-less-terrible exemplar of the Legion Of Famous Bonehead White Guy Intellectuals With Bad Priors. (Understand that I use the term “intellectual” here as descriptive of a position in the social process and a psychological type rather than as validation of his insight. Joe Rogan, f’rinstance, is a true intellectual in the sense that he loves ideas and really does think for himself … while being such an asshole and knucklehead that he is attracted to terrible ideas.) I took Harris as discernibly smarter than someone like Rogan, though hung up on a distinct Stubborn Asshole Atheism which made him a sucker for Islamophobia. But that praise through less-vigorous damnation comes to a close, because I just learned that a few years back, he said this:

As bad luck would have it, but as you’d absolutely predict on the basis of just sheer biology, different populations of people, different racial groups, different ethnicities, different groups of people who have been historically isolated from one another geographically, test differently in terms of their average on this measure of cognitive function. So if you’re gonna give the Japanese and the Ashkenazi Jews, and African Americans, and Hawaiians … you’re gonna take populations who differ genetically — and we know they differed genetically, that’s not debatable — and you give them IQ tests, it would be a miracle if every single population had the same mean IQ. And African Americans come out about a standard deviation lower than white Americans. A standard deviation for IQ is about 15 points. So, if it’s normed to the general population, predominantly white population for an average of 100, the average in the African American community has been around 85.

I recognize that song; it is thoroughly debunked bad faith racist far right The Bell Curve horseshit. Once again I should have recognized that these guys are all swimming in the same Intellectual Dim Web stew of bigotry.

Fascism is speaking in bad faith

It is important to understand that fascism is not a political ideology in the same way that communism is. Communists have a detailed policy program which they espouse and pursue. Fascists do not; their policy prescriptions are often outright incoherent.

Fascism is better understood as a political method. And a key part of that method is speaking in bad faith: falsely describing what they want and care about, as a way of disrupting the process of political discussion itself. The vigor with which fascists do this is difficult to understand unless one has encountered it.

I have talked about this before, when talking about Milo Yiannopoulos, the Alt Right, and free speech:

We should not defend that as free speech; we need to recognize it as an attack on free speech.
[⋯]

This is a method and it has a purpose.

If we look at the history of far right movements, we can recognize the basic pattern. These movements are not simply opposed to liberalism-as-in-the-Democratic-Party; they are opposed to liberalism-as-in-liberal-democracy. They oppose universal human rights and equality. They aim to discredit liberalism by turning its systems against itself, making them impracticable, perverting the meaning of words like “free speech”.

In this we see a continuity between the fascists of the early 20^th century and the fascists and para-fascists of today. Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive describes this pattern in a troublingly familiar way.

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play.

They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

This is not restricted to the specifics of antisemitism. It is a general rhetorical style. Here is Harry Frankfurt, the author of the wonderful short book On Bullshit summing up the method.

The distinction between lying and bullshitting is fairly clear. The liar asserts something which he himself believes to be false. He deliberately misrepresents what he takes to be the truth. The bullshitter, on the other hand, is not constrained by any consideration of what may or may not be true. In making his assertion, he is indifferent to whether what he is says is true or false. His goal is not to report facts. It is, rather, to shape the beliefs and attitudes of his listeners in a certain way.

I bet you can guess who Frankfurt was talking about in the essay where he said that.

To get a feel for how this works in governance, I vigorously recommend the (exceedingly fun) party game Secret Hitler, in which players pretend to be a parliament where fascists are trying to pass legislation and get their leader elected Chancellor. In the game, the fascists know who each other are but the liberals don't; this makes the gameplay include the fascists lying about their intentions and pretending to be liberals. The player who is their secret leader tries the hardest to appear to be a liberal.

The game is structured such that the fascists are always outnumbered. But they usually win.

Update

A telling example from 2025 from Brian Beutler:

⋯ Hasan asked Estelle: if you hate democracy so much, why are you engaged in public debate, a cornerstone of the democratic process?

“It is the means to support an end,” Estelle responded. “The reason we have free speech now is because we want to be openly talking about our opinions so we can get the state that we want. But it doesn't mean free speech after we win.”

Thanks to Estelle for his honesty. His means-to-an-end-style of bad faith in discourse is endemic on the right—not just among ascendant fascists—and has been for a long time. It’s just that most of them will never break character, and take false umbrage if you question their sincerity. But here Estelle lays out the method plainly: Rightists appeal to whomever they can with whatever false commitments they intend to break, knowing that, once delivered to power, they will pull the rug.

On Chait on Stein

Jonathan Chait's article Jill Stein's Plan To Stop Trump By Electing Him is making the rounds all over my feed, so I guess I have to take a minute to talk about why it is terrible.

There are a host of things that I think disqualify Jill Stein as a standard-bearer for the American left. I hope that in the years to come, Stein will not be one of the visible leaders of left criticism of the Democratic Party, not least because the quote at the heart of this piece demonstrates how she does not know how to speak well to people who are not already in her lefty bubble.

But this piece is reading her in bad faith.^*

What does Stein mean when she says “the answer to neofascism is stopping neoliberalism”? Her answer is sloppy, but it is not “gibberish”, and it is easy to understand if you've been paying any attention at all to leftist readings of the Trump phenomenon. That understanding hinges on getting what leftists have taken in recent years to calling “neoliberalism”.

Unhappily, too many folks have asked that word to do too much work, so it's been stretched almost out of usefulness as a precise term of art. It originally meant a school of economics and governance pioneered by the Thatcher administration in the UK, whose American manifestation was Reagan's policy program.

As leftists like Stein use it today, “neoliberalism” means the whole economic policy consensus that has reigned across both parties through the Clinton-Bush-Obama era:

• Federal Reserve policy willing to lift unemployment in order to prevent inflation
• Globalist economics that favors not just trade in goods and services but mobility of capital across international boundaries
• Weak regulation
• Private provisioning of social insurance as much as possible (401ks over Social Security, private health insurance over single payer, student loans over publicly-funded education, et cetera)

The strength and weakness of this analysis is that it elides the policy divisions between the Democrats and the Republicans and looks at what they have had in common for the last three decades plus.

As lefties tell the tale, neoliberalism has given us the current economic environment and trajectory affecting citizens' lives. Rising economic inequality. Stagnating or falling wages for most Americans, especially the working class who have suffered from the erosion of the manufacturing sector. Economic precarity. Weak public services. Et cetera.

In this reading, it is these consequences of “neoliberalism” that have discredited mainstream politics and policy, shaking Americans' sense that our institutions serve their interests. Disgust at neoliberalism and its fruits (married to perennial racism and authoritarianism) are the reason why Trump's quasi-fascist rhetoric has appealed to enough voters to net him the Republican nomination and make a plausible run at the Presidency.

So to Stein, neoliberal Clinton defeating Trump in November addresses the immediate threat of Trump's quasi-fascism, but will make the conditions that produced that quasi-fascist sentiment even worse. In order to defeat the impulse that Trump represents, we need to defeat the political ideology that produces the economic conditions that produce the hunger that Trump addresses. Thus to defeat Trump's quasi-fascism in the long run, we must defeat neoliberalism.

So no, Stein does not mean that defeating Clinton at the polls in November is the best way to stop fascism in the US; she means that defeating the neoliberal consensus that Clinton represents is the best way to stop fascism in the US. If Chait had been actually listening to the left, he would have known that and would not have written this bullshit article.

---

* I'd say the article was being willfully obtuse, but I've read a lot of Jonathan Chait, and I believe that his bafflement is as sincere as it is stupid. He can be very sharp on the political mechanics of the mainstream Democratic Party, and he's a good critic of the movement conservatism that has been the main animating force of the GOP since Reagan, but that is the limit of his range. Talking about radicals — whether it's Ta-Nehisi Coates or Trump supporters or Jill Stein — he just cannot bring himself to take them seriously enough to understand where they are coming from. And when it comes to the American left in particular, Chait is the poster child for the lefty critique that influential mainstream liberals hate the hard left, and would rather disdain leftists than win against conservatives if forced to make the choice.

Manhattan-ish projects

So today I saw yet another of these stories where “Politician X calls for a new Manhattan Project to Do Some Impossible Thing”.

I don't want to pick on this particular politician right now (though I am mightily disappointed), I want to talk about learning the wrong lesson from the Manhattan Project.

Many people seem to think that the Manhattan Project shows that you can just order up any breakthrough you want and if you give enough scientists enough money, they will just cook it up for us. “Here's a trillion dollars, go invent an antigravity machine.”

That's not how it works.

FDR did not wake up one morning and say, “Hey, wouldn't it be great if we had a bomb that could blow up a whole city? Let's get our scientists working on that.”

No, it was a thing physicists thought of, not politicians or generals. Grad students had been standing at chalkboards through the late 1930s working out the cross-sections of uranium nuclei, and the difference in mass between uranium nuclei and their fission products, and saying, “Huh, it ought to be possible to make a mind-bogglingly powerful bomb”, half-joking and half-horrified. “Boy, it's a good thing that to really build something like that you'd have to deal with a bunch of weird engineering problems that would be hugely expensive to solve,” they would say, nervously.

Then after a few years of that the US was at war with Nazi Germany. American universities, as a result, were hosting an awful lot of German Jewish physicists who had emigrated because they saw the writing on the wall. Physicists got to talking. Who was the one person in the world who was best-qualified to crack the problem of making a fission bomb not at a blackboard bull session but in real life? Werner Heisenberg, obviously. And where was he? Still in Germany. What was he working on these days? Nobody knew for sure.

Other pieces were falling into place, too. Better and better understanding of chain reactions. Better and better techniques for handling uranium.

Ominous.

So some physicists got together and wrote a letter to the President of the United States explaining the potential for fission bombs. They got the most famous and respected scientist in the world, a German Jew named Albert Einstein, to sign it. And that led, ultimately, to the Manhattan Project and the Bomb.

The Bomb is so stunning and counterintuitive and such a dramatic demonstration of the power of technology to bend the Cosmos to our will — and the Manhattan Project such a dramatic example of a big, expensive, resource-intensive project bearing fruit that changes the world — that it creates the impression that anything is possible. But that is the wrong lesson.

Remember: the scientists came to the politicians with the proposal. Not the other way around. Because the Cosmos does not coöperate with what we want, and scientists are not short-order cooks.

Committed people and Korman's Third Law

So there's a little aphorism I hate, attributed to Margaret Mead.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

On the face of it, it's a stirring message of hope. If you're like me, you picture Martin Luther King sitting around a kitchen table with Bayard Rustin and Ralph Abernathy and James Orange and Frederick Douglas Reese.

But looking at it closely, the aphorism rankles. It's vanguardist, almost anti-democratic: never mind most people and mass movements, it's the committed few who matter. It's Green Lanternism: will matters above all. And the romanticization of “changing the world”, which one sees a lot of in the tech industry, is not entirely wholesome. Change is inevitable and not all changes are good; I want to look to what will make a better world.

Plus, there's no evidence that Mead ever said it.

Plus — and this to my mind is most damning — thinking about who might draw inspiration from the thought of a small vanguard changing the world through he force of their will, and remembering Rhett's Law, I feel moved to offer Korman's Third Law:

If it makes a funny “Nazi-spiration” meme image, it's questionable motivational advice.

Update:

You cannot make this stuff up. Irony-impaired former Kent State student Kaitlin Bennett tweeted this:

Mis-remembering Vietnam

You know those stories you hear about hippie Vietnam War protestors spitting on military veterans at airports, just as those vets were returning home from the war?

Lies.

A historian named Jerry Lembcke did some digging and was unable to find any contemporaneous documentation that this actually happened. Instead we have urban legends that start turning up about ten years later. He wrote a book about it, Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam.

It turns out that not only is the legend untrue, it turns out to be a funhouse-mirror mis-remembering of what did happen.

Lembcke uncovered a whole lot of spitting from the war years, but the published accounts always put the antiwar protester on the receiving side of a blast from a pro-Vietnam counterprotester. Surely, he contends, the news pages would have given equal treatment to a story about serviceman getting the treatment. Then why no stories in the newspaper morgues, he asks?

Rick Perlstein describes how there was a group who may not have spat on Vietnam vets but did systematically disrespect their service: other veterans.

Jerry Lembke established that the only actual documented examples of the frequently repeated canard that Americans spat upon returning Vietnam veterans came from the kind of World War II veterans who wouldn't let their brothers back from Vietnam join local American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts beause they were seen as shameful, as polluted. (The New York Times reported on the phenomenon here.)

They were the kind of veterans who - Gerald Nicosia tells the story in his history of Vietnam Veterans Against the War - greeted the antiwar veterans who had marched 86 miles from Morristown, New Jersey to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, just like George Washington's army in 1777. The World War II veterans heckled them:

“Why don't you go to Hanoi?”

“We won our war, they didn't, and from the looks of them, they couldn't.”

A Vietnam vets hobbled by on crutches. One of the old men wondered whether he had been “shot with marijuana or shot in battle.”

Digby has a sharp commentary on Perlstein's article that garnered such surprising comments that I tucked them away, which is a good thing since the old comment system Digby used has been linkrotted away. Here are the two I saved:

When I returned from the Mekong Delta in 1972 (Navy, Binh Thuy) my dirty hippy friends were glad to see me. They welcomed me home and were very accepting of my hyper-vigilance and other quirks. I stopped in at an American Legion post just once. I had to leave before it was necessary for me to beat down those who told me that we, the troops, had lost Vietnam.

I never heard it from the hippies but, I sure as hell caught crap from any number of solid citizens with American flag pins in their lapels.

I have a close friend who served in the Vietnam war during Nixon's illegal invasion of Cambodia. He returned home on a chartered commerical flight that landed at a public airport. As the vets came into the airport they saw a small group from the VFW who they thought were there to welcome them home. Wrong. The VFW assholes were carrying signs that accused them of “losing the war” and being drug addicts. They shouted insults at the Vietnam vets. My friend responded in kind and one of the old farts spat on him. He is very fond of telling this story when some right wing barfly starts ranting about hippies spitting on troops.

I was reminded of all this because of something else from Rick Perlstein: The Story Behind the POW/MIA Flag, which reveals a similar kind of mis-telling of history.

.... Nixon invented the cult of the “POW/MIA” in order to justify the carnage in Vietnam in a way that rendered the United States as its sole victim. It began, as cultural historian H. Bruce Franklin has documented, with an opportunistic shift in terminology. Downed pilots whose bodies were not recovered—which, in the dense jungle of a place like Vietnam meant most pilots—had once been classified “Killed in Action/Body Unrecovered.” During the Nixon years, the Pentagon moved them into a newly invented “Missing in Action” column. That proved convenient, for, after years of playing down the existence of American prisoners in Vietnam, in 1969, the new president suddenly decided to play them up. He declared their treatment, and the enemy’s refusal to provide a list of their names, violations of the Geneva Conventions—the better to paint the North Vietnamese as uniquely cruel and inhumane. He also demanded the release of American prisoners as a precondition to ending the war.

This was bullshit four times over: first, because in every other conflict in human history, the release of prisoners had been something settled at the close of a war; second, because these prisoners only existed because of America’s antecedent violations of the Geneva Conventions in bombing civilians in an undeclared war; and third, because, as bad as their torture of prisoners was, rather than representing some species of Oriental despotism, the Vietnam Communists were only borrowing techniques practiced on them by their French colonists (and incidentally paid forward by us in places like Abu Ghraib): see this as-told-to memoir by POW and future senator Jeremiah Denton.

And finally, our South Vietnamese allies’ treatment of their prisoners, who lived manacled to the floors in crippling underground bamboo “tiger cages” in prison camps built by us, was far worse than the torture our personnel suffered. (Time magazine quoted one South Vietnamese official who was confronted with stories of released prisoners moving “like crabs, skittering across the floor on buttocks and palms,” and responded with incredulity that such survivors even existed: “No one ever comes from the tiger cages alive.”)

Be that as it may: it worked. American citizens enacted a bizarre psychic reversal.

Another false memory: during the Vietnam War, young people opposed it while older people supported it. Again, this turns out to be backwards.

There were many polls on public opinion during the war, and they show a consistent pattern by age. Young people were more likely to support the war at the beginning, when it was popular, and more likely to support it at the end, when it was not.

And of course, the greatest false memory of them all, the dolchstoßlegende that the US lost the war because political opposition to it in the US somehow undermined military effectiveness, which I have written about repeatedly.

Weren't the Nazis National Socialists, and therefore leftists?

Over at Crooked Timber, a useful long post by John Holbo Were The Nazis Right-Wing? – or – Weimar Culture: The Insider As Outsider explains that yes, the Nazis really were a movement of the right, despite the confusing name.

The point of the long quotes I started with is this: the reason the Nazis are regarded by historians as right-wing isn’t so much that it ended with the Holocaust. It’s the way it began in party politics in Weimar Germany. If all we knew about Hitler was the inside of a German concentration camp, and all we knew about Stalin was the inside of a Russian Gulag camp, it would indeed be mysterious why the one was ‘right’ and the other ‘left’. But that isn’t all we know. It’s impossible to narrate the ins-and-outs of the story of how the Nazis came to power without regarding them as, basically, an extreme right-wing party. There are features of Weimar politics that complicated the left-right binary. There are ways in which the Nazis defy our left-right preconceptions. But basically we can tell left from right. We know which side the Nazis were on. Basically, the Nazis were a right-wing party that tried, and failed, to sell its brand of ‘socialism’ to the working-classes, which preferred left-wing versions courtesy of the Social Democrats or Communists. But it succeeded in allying with old-line conservatives, despite being too radical and revolutionary for their tastes. The Nazis used the conservatives to gain respectability; the conservatives used the Nazis to gain an energized, activist base. In the end, the Nazis came out on top.

Since this is Crooked Timber, for once it's actually good to read the comments.

Malcolm Gladwell

I love the ketchup article as much as the next designer, but Malcolm Gladwell is poison.

Murky thinker.

Oversimplifier.

Blatherer.

Bad historian.

Apologist for smarminess.

Skeevy.

Really skeevy.

Actively disinterested in the truth.

No, really.

Enron apologist.

Steve Bannon apologist.

Big tobacco shill.

Corporate propagandist.

Civil rights revisionist.

Transphobe.

And lots more.

Propaganda about police use of force

Apropos of the horrifying video making the rounds on Twitter today, of a police officer shooting into a car full of passengers, a few days ago I was pointed at a Fox News segment including some police use-of-force training.

Check it out. It's a fascinating work of propaganda.

Consider what the exercise has Rev. Maupin do. Without any apparent training in preparation, Maupin is presented with a series of scenarios that are transparently designed to make him panic. First he encounters a possible car thief who surprisingly overreacts and suddenly shoots Maupin. It's startling, and primes him to be quicker to perceive threats. Then Maupin encounters an intimidating person who fearlessly advances on him despite him having his gun drawn. It's scary, and coming right after the previous scary exercise it inspires him to panic and shoot the unarmed man ... in a violation of police use-of-force rules.

I only know what I read on the internet about the police use of force continuum, but I strongly suspect that the exercises we see in the video are intended as the beginning of a responsible police training process, meant to demonstrate to cops how easy it is to do the wrong thing. “Those deadly mistakes you just made are why we are going to drill you hard in this training. So that when that confrontation comes on the street, you won't do what comes naturally, you will do what you've trained.”

This kind of preparation is one of the benefits of a police force, and part of why we respect good cops so much. They are skilled professionals who face stressful, dangerous situations that we know that ordinary citizens would screw up and can be expected to handle them well because of the preparatory training which they receive. In this, police are like firefighters and airline pilots and other people who need to be cool in the face of danger and surprises.

In the Fox News segment, the exercise is framed not as a cautionary tale but as a justification for police shootings.

Watching, one can easily sympathize with Maupin shooting an unarmed man in the exercise. The situation was scary, and it's easy to imagine doing the same thing. But Maupin is not a cop trained in multiple ways to handle a belligerent person, physically and otherwise, he's just a guy who was handed a fake gun and told to see how he would use it. So of course he reached for the obvious tool.

Notice how the exercise is chosen to reïnforce narratives conservatives have offered about the threats police face. Darren Wilson says that Michael Brown charged at him menacingly, despite being unarmed, and here we see that scenario portrayed as a situation which police are trained to handle. It helps to make the genre of Officer Wilson's bizarre narrative of his shooting of Michael Brown seem to make sense. I am well aware that cops have been shot at seemingly-routine stops like the first exercise, or that big scary guys advance on cops like in that second one ... but I also know that a cop is less likely to die on the job than a trucker, cab driver, farmer, or the guy who picks up your trash. On TV, cops get into gunfights every week, but in real life many police officers never have cause to fire their weapon.

Notice also how editing serves the narrative. Maupin says, “People need to comply with law enforcement officers for their own sake,” which sounds like he's endorsing the authoritarian view that I have heard from many commentators who say that if Black people who have been killed by police had just obeyed police orders, they would have been safe. But Maupin doesn't say that deference will ensure one's safety, or that deference is justified. He just says that it is prudent. I wonder what else he said. I wonder what he said immediately after that sound bite. “It's too easy for a trigger-happy cop to panic when you don't obey their orders”, maybe?

Fox News is, of course, propaganda. But it's chilling to see it work as propaganda not just for the Republican Party but for the idea of an authoritarian police state in which police are justified in shooting unarmed civilians.