It's Not So Simple ...

 I hate seeing headlines like CBC's this morning in the wake of the US attack on Iran:  "In Wake of US Attacks, Iran Faces Pivotal Choice: Dash to Build a Weapon or Negotiate".

Very little in the world of foreign affairs can be characterized in such simplistic terms.  It's not "either/or", and in fact Iran has a number of options open to it that this ignores.  

Does Iran already have a nuclear weapon?  Officially the answer is "no", but that's inference based on the fact they have never openly tested such a device.  On paper Israel hasn't tested nuclear weapons either, but it is broadly understood to have a cache of nuclear warheads.  I don't have access to sources that could confirm or deny Iran's possession of nuclear assets.  At this stage, they could easily run a "test fire" to augment their "negotiating position, or just to make themselves less desirable as a target. 

The other aspect of Iran's nuclear capability is the ability to create so-called "dirty bombs" (basically a conventional warhead with a "surprise package" of nuclear waste wrapped around it).  Those are trivial for any country with a handful of reactors used for power generation to create, and are potentially just as deadly - especially if detonated high in the atmosphere. 

We also should not ignore the probability of Iran having covertly purchased nuclear weapons from other states.  It's quite possible that they have weapons purchased from elsewhere.  

Iran has many paths through which it could acquire nuclear weapons capability, not merely through its own program of development.  

Much has been made of "we must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons", but like North Korea, such threats do little to stop a country that is determined to develop that technology for itself. 

Is this a "negotiate or else" situation?  Not even close.  Iran has many paths forward - it may choose to "negotiate", while concurrently "sprinting to build a bomb", or it may choose to reveal weapons it has already in its hands to make its "hand" stronger at the negotiating table.  

Similarly, because there are significant religious components to this situation, we can also suspect that they may choose to go "scorched earth" and simply unleash the most destructive weapons they have on hand.  

Of course, all of this is speculative on my part - I don't have any information not in the news media, and I merely infer from what I do see.  By no means should we assume that Iran is "cowed" by recent events, nor do I see a willingness on the part of Israel's government to engage in any kind of good faith negotiations. 

Recognizing Bias and Deceptive Journalism

The Telegraph published this piece of drivel decrying the number of "biological males" who undergo gender reassignment surgery (GRS) in the UK.  It's trash journalism at its worst, but it is a good example of what to look for in detecting bias because it's loaded with all kinds of "weighted wording", dubious narratives, and sources that are not in the least bit authoritative on the subject. 

Structure and Wording

The structure of the article is itself an interesting example to consider.  It starts off with a review of some statistical information drawn from the UK's NHS.  From there it dives into arguments about de-transition, the claimed lack of evidence that GRS helps with Gender Dysphoria, and winds up with talking to the founder of a known anti-transgender organization.  

Note that in the entire article, there is absolutely no effort whatsoever to describe the scope of what transition means and the role of GRS in that much bigger picture. 

Just for fun, the article is full of scare wording designed to portray GRS in the worst possible light:  "penis cut off" is one such phrase (which is a crude and inaccurate description of the most common surgical technique used).  Add to that a focus on the surgery being "irreversible" (most surgeries are like that), and "causes infertility" (well - duh - although I do need to point out that by the time most transgender women have surgery, they've been on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) long enough that they aren't producing sperm anymore, and won't if they stop HRT either).  

Bogus Arguments

The article then leaps into a series of utterly bogus arguments.  The first is, of course the "what about regret / detransition" trope.  Yes, some people attempt transition, and discover that it's not for them.  That's been true for a very long time.  However, the portrayal of things is troubling - as it implies that the person was "railroaded" into having surgery, and I know that isn't how things work.  The NHS is particularly notorious for delays and extended waiting periods that render any accusation of "I didn't have a chance to back out" utter nonsense. 

They then claim that "there was never an opportunity to deal with other mental health issues".  Okay - but that raises the very clinical question - did those issues come up in discussion during assessment?  Clinicians aren't telepaths - if there is no indication of other mental issues, why would they assume that those issues exist? 

Then they go on to talk to someone who asserts that "there's no evidence that those surgeries do anything to alleviate gender dysphoria".  Of course that claim is false on its face.  The regret rate for people who pursue transition and do undergo GRS is low - much lower than that for most other kinds of surgery. 

Lastly, they talk to a founder of TransgenderTrend, a known anti-transgender lobby organization who makes a number of misleading statements.  

Missing

What is missing from this article?  Credible, unbiased sources.  It's riddled with anecdotes cast in a particular light, and utterly devoid of any attempt whatsoever to engage with sources with actual expertise in the matter. 

Did they portray transition journeys accurately? No.  Did they portray GRS accurately? No.  Did they even go so far as to cite a standard of care document?  No.  

This is an article that should be dismissed for being utterly inaccurate.

Alberta “Separatism”

 I’m old enough to have lived through both Quebec referendums (to date) on sovereignty, and I’ve watched the sleazy grievance politics of “Western Alienation” attempting to ape Quebec’s situation.  I remember Elmer Knutson and Doug Christie running around western Canada in the late 70s yammering on about how “Ottawa was so terrible to Alberta, and things would be so much better if …”.  More recently, the Premiers of Alberta and Saskatchewan have taken up the banner, mostly at the behest of groups like “Take Back Alberta” and a handful of “oilbros” who see their fortunes as threatened by the upsurge in patriotism in the wake of Donald Trump’s return to power. 

Dealing With MisInformation and Bias In The Media Sphere

One of the bigger takeaways in the 2025 election cycle is the difference between journalism and the partisan slop that is served up by various obviously partisan “news” orgs.  This needs to be brought to heel now.  

The antics of Ezra Levant’s “The Rebel” at the leader debates were disgusting.  They ultimately denied Canadians of the Q&A back and forth that was desperately needed.  

How To Respond To the UKSC Ruling On Trans People

 This week, the United Kingdom Supreme Court (UKSC) issued a ruling that on the face of it invalidates transgender women’s rights under the law.  I haven’t finished reading through the entirety of the ruling (I’m also not a lawyer - so reading this stuff is often slow going for me!), and I’m sure that others will have more clear headed things to say about the ruling itself.

However, my objective here isn’t to perform a deep dive into the ruling.  This is more about how a ruling like this can be turned back on itself.  The objective of these cases is clearly to shove transgender women (in particular) out of public life.  To do so, proponents of these suits often dive behind what they think of as “scientific wording” - in this case, the phrase “biological woman” comes to the fore very quickly. 

In a sense, such simplistic phrases are perfect for weaponizing, and they can be weaponized very effectively by transgender people and their allies.  Even the UKSC ruling, while it adopts this language doesn’t attempt to provide any kind of meaningful definition of what this means.  

A trivial version of taking it apart is a bit like the snarky quip about “organic vegetables”:  It’s clearly a vegetable, and by definition it is organic in that no human being assembled it.  Similarly, a transgender woman might well say “I’m biological, and I’m a woman - I don’t see a problem here”.  It’s a bit facetious to do so, but given the approach being taken by the anti-transgender panic brigade, not entirely wrong. 

The other end of it is when cases get before the courts, (and they inevitably will), we start off with bringing in biologists and have them give lessons to the court on the complexity of human biology when it comes down to reproductive biology and sex development.  It’s strange - oh so strange - and efforts to treat it as some kind of rigid dichotomy are hugely problematic.  

Pretty much every time you hear “biological woman”, you know you’re talking to someone who has absolutely no idea what they’re saying - biology isn’t simple, and it’s beyond laughable to try and reduce any human being to “the bits between their legs”.  Every time the antis bring up transgender people as some kind of abhorrent problem, slap them down with all of the exceptions that already exist even if transgender people didn’t.  

The logic they’re using is so rigid it’s brittle.  Twist it on them until it breaks at every turn. 

Will it be easy?  Nope.  But it needs to be done.  Every single argument the “antis” are making to justify shoving transgender women out of public life is based on falsehoods.  Their suppositions about transgender people are rigid and false, and that makes them vulnerable to attack - even when they think they’re backed up by the highest courts in the land. 

Pierre Wants To Eradicate “Woke Ideology”

 So, back in late March, Poilievre was unveiling his platform for Quebec, and in that speech he talked about eliminating “woke ideology” from university research. At first glance, you might look and say “meh, so what?”

The problem, of course, is that this puts the politicians in the position of being the arbiters of what is “worthy” of being studied.  As we have seen with Trump’s “campaign against Woke”, this goes much further than merely attacking research that involves transgender people.  No, in fact the Trump administration has published a list of words that it has now banned.  It is quite extensive - pretty much covering every area of discourse that conservatives have decided that they don’t like - climate change, equality, women, diversity, allergies, and even the analysis of applying science to either policy or medical treatment.  

At its core, the conservative assault on “Woke” turns out to be little more than re-litigating every rights and politics issue that they have lost the argument over in the last century.  “It’s gone too far!”, they declare.  They complain that the research itself should not be done because it offends their “feelings” about the subject.

But what price do these bans on certain subjects exact from society?  Well, in Trump’s America, it’s now next to impossible to study how drugs affect women versus how they work in men.  We have known for some time that women have very different responses to treatments than men do, and that’s in a wide range of topics including cardiac care.  But now that research is effectively halted in the US.  When Harper was Prime Minister, we saw him engage in overt suppression of climate science, even going so far as to prohibit scientists from speaking on the subject without political authorization. 

To posit a bit of a straw man, you might assert that Poilievre wouldn’t go as far as Trump has done on this file.  But what does that even mean?  Poilievre hasn’t shown us any evidence that he would moderate his behaviour, and in fact his willingness to emulate Trump on so many points suggests that in fact he would lift heavily from Trump.  

But think about it from a government policy perspective.  Do you think that a government should ignore science when forming policy?  Or should policy at least consider the scientific evidence in that domain?

To make a somewhat extreme example, consider the legislature deciding to pass legislation governing the treatment of heart attacks.  The evidence today around heart attacks is clear - treatment is urgent, and requires a combination of medicine and surgical interventions.  Long term follow-up is necessary, and the patient is encouraged to make major lifestyle changes, including exercise.  All of this has decades worth of research backing it up.  

Now consider the government decides in drafting its legislation that in fact all that research is wrong, and because the politicians believe that a heart attack is an event that the victim should “tough out”, they ban ambulances from responding to calls that are possible cardiac events. 

I would hope you would be outraged by such legislation, and you would be calling on the politicians to pay attention to the scientific literature on the subject.  Yet, that is exactly what we are seeing on so many levels with conservative politicians writing legislation on other matters - they are ignoring any kind scientific evidence in favour of their “feelings” about the subject.

To be clear, science doesn’t write policy, but science produces information that should be used to guide policy.  If a subject makes you uncomfortable, that doesn’t mean it should not be studied - in fact to me that makes it more important that it is studied actively.  Similarly, politicians should write policy, but not direct what _cannot_ be explored in research.

But what is this conservative “war on woke” really about? When I look at it broadly, it seems to boil down to unwinding equality because a bunch of white dudes are all butt-hurt that they aren’t the only ones with a say any more.

DEI - which is in many respects about dismantling the legacy of racism and marginalization that was pervasive in society even after the civil rights era supposedly made us all equal (it didn’t, it just knocked over the legal impediments to equality).  

Immigration - oh yes, the problem of “the immigrants”.  Whether this is “great replacement theory”, or other aspects of immigration like temporary foreign worker permits, at the end of the day it boils down to this existential fear that “white males” won’t be able to compete.  They might wrap it up in respectable looking terms, but it’s really just racism with a thin gauze of “concern” wrapped around it. 

Women’s reproductive rights - at its core, this is a matter of bodily autonomy.  The whole abortion fight has always been about regulating women’s bodies - a matter rooted in a myriad of ancient fears about the female body.  Medicine has gradually dismantled the superstitious beliefs that those fears once buttressed, but far too many still view women, sexuality, and pregnancy with deep mistrust.  But, as a central theme in conservative thinking, fighting abortion remains stubbornly consistent - even when the logic behind their claims is no longer relevant. 

Transgender people - like female reproductive rights, this is all about bodily autonomy.  The idea that transgender people exist poses a huge, complex problem for the conservative mind.  Not only does it connect back to women’s rights in general (because so much of women’s oppression in the past has to do with reproduction), but in fact transgender rights are inextricably connected because the transgender person represents a radical form of both bodily and social autonomy that centres on the individual. Conservatives tend to value conformity, and transgender people are the opposite of conformity.  In fact, transgender people push back on all the social pressures that they experience in the process of actualizing themselves as human beings.  

All of this connects back to an underlying fear on the part of conservative men that somehow these social changes make them “lesser” in society.  They don’t, of course - we still live in a society where being a white male carries an enormous amount of power and privilege.  Look at the people who are the biggest opponents of “woke” - almost inevitably they are anything but the “prime specimens” that they think themselves to be.  Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, Pierre Poilievre - none of them are ideal, and frankly if it weren’t for money or notoriety, any of them would be ignored as simply snivelling twits. 

The “war on woke” is really about restoring a social hierarchy that died out decades ago - and it’s being conducted at the cost of the rights and freedoms of real people. 

Why Dems Can’t See Through Fascism

This morning, I awoke to hearing an interview of Senator John Fetterman on the radio.  It was this interview:

 https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/john-fetterman-on-trumps-raw-sewage-and-what/id1050430296?i=1000694829127

To be clear, I don’t know Fetterman from any other US senator, and I have no engagement with him politically.  What I heard in this interview was a case study of why the Democrats have been so utterly ineffectual in countering Trump - they still think this is “normal politics”, and are treating Trump as “just a minor political disagreement”. 

Several times in the interview, Fetterman said “well - Trump can’t run again in 2028”.  I wanted to scream when I heard that.  Seriously - he said that … out loud … after so many clear signals from Trump that he doesn’t give a damn about the law, conventions, or other factors that represent a limitation on his personal powers.  

Then he walked through a whole bunch of issues - and he correctly identified that Trump has “filled the zone with 3’ of sewage”.  Sure he has.  What the good senator is overlooking is, of course, that the issue is in fact not the sewage, but the willingness of Trump and his allies to spew it. It is another variation on Goebbels’ “big lie” - pure propaganda and a smokescreen for their real objectives.  To borrow from the work of Paul Ekman, lies succeed because nobody does the work to identify them - Trump lies constantly, and the Democrats in particular haven’t bothered to even so much as call them out.

Democrats have convinced themselves that what we are seeing right now as little more than a “kindly argument over the height of the hedge”.  It isn’t.  The Trump Administration is actively moving to break the system of checks and balances that have held the abuse of power by any one branch of government in check. 

DOGE isn’t going to “make a more efficient bureaucracy”, its sole job is to break the bureaucracy and render the administrative aspects of government so ineffective that whatever privatized hellscape Musk is dreaming up will seem like a good idea.  Public health - nah - don’t need that (until the next outbreak of major disease…); food inspection?  - who needs that?  Vehicle safety?  Has anybody else noticed that Musk’s “CyberTruck” is basically a return to the standards of the 1950s, where looks and mass were the solution to things, and well if you got in a crash, good luck to you. 

Democrats need to realize that what is being installed in Washington is not “a neighbourly disagreement”, it’s closer to the arrangement that Putin has with his oligarchs than it is to any kind of recognizable democracy.  _IF_ there is any kind of election in 2028, it will not in any way be a “fair” election - it will be an election where every kind of cheating will be rampant - all in the name of ensuring that whoever is elected will be a willing accomplice to Trump.

If you think I’m joking, just remember that in the days following his loss in 2020, Trump was calling up governors and other state level officials demanding that they twist the results in his favour.  You think that’s gone away?  I don’t.  

Senator Fetterman argued that going after Trump for his conduct “didn’t work”.  Democrats DIDN’T go after Trump for his conduct.  They were too busy worrying about alienating Trump’s supporters.  Trump’s supporters are the people who needed to have the stinking pile of Trump’s misdeeds dumped on their front lawns at every turn.

Democrats LET Trump win by not calling out his misdeeds at every fucking turn.  While he was playing duck and weave to avoid being held criminally responsible for his actions, what were Democrats saying?  NOTHING.  They held their tongues - on the basis of “it’s before the courts”.  Yes, it’s before the courts - that is true.  That doesn’t stop the Democrats from calling it out for what it is.  Trump had no regard for the rule of law - in fact his game playing itself demonstrated that.  

Trump said during the campaign “you won’t have to vote again”.  Did the Democrats take that and run with it?  Nope.  They sat there worrying about offending his supporters.  

Democrats have themselves tied in knots over the idea that if they take a hard line on something, they’re going to “offend” their opponents. The Democrats are worried about offending someone if they complain about DEI, Critical Race Theory (CRT), or Gender Ideology.  Most of Trump’s supporters haven’t read a book in decades - they have no idea what these things are. The comeback for all of them is “So, you support oppression and discrimination against those you don’t understand?” 

A guy like Trump will weaponize everything in sight.  Democrats need to realize that it doesn’t matter what they say, a chronic liar will always find a way to turn it around on them.  They need to take a hard line and call Trump’s actions and words out at every turn. Not “oh, he’s just exaggerating”, or “it sounds bad, but he probably won’t do it”.  No.  If he says it, assume he’s going to do it in the most detrimental way possible and hammer him with it.  

In the legislature, use every legislative delaying tactic you can find - don’t worry about being painted as obstructionist - the GOP has been doing exactly that at every turn since Obama was elected in 2008.  Every stunt they have used, you can use too.  

Get mad. Show some emotion. This isn’t a dispute over the height of the hedge.  It’s far worse than that - and Americans deserve far better than the half-assed “well… maybe his supporters have a point” nonsense we’ve been getting.  His supporters don’t “have a point” - they’re either just as conniving and malicious as Trump himself, or they’re willing fools conned into believing Trump’s version of “The Big Lie”.  

Nothing less than democracy and freedom are on the line now.  It’s time for the Democrats and other parties in other countries to wake up to that reality and play hardball.