What Happened Today: Feb 22, 2022
What Happened Today: Feb 22, 2022
Putin ups the stakes; The People’s Convoy; The internet and transgender teens
The Big Story
By ordering Russian troops into breakaway regions of Ukraine Monday night, Vladimir Putin escalated Russia’s conflict with the United States and Europe and moved one step closer to a full-scale war with Ukraine—but without yet fundamentally changing the situation on the ground. Putin called the troops sent to Donetsk and Luhansk, areas that have been controlled by Russian separatists, “peacekeepers” and claimed they were necessary to defend ethnic Russians in the area from “genocide.” After the White House initially hedged on how to refer to the Russian advance, by Tuesday morning a senior White House official had declared it an invasion—a term with significant implications because President Biden had previously threatened severe sanctions if Russia invaded Ukraine. Officials in the United States, European Union, and several Asian countries have announced plans to impose sanctions, and on Tuesday afternoon British Prime Minister Boris Johnson approved targeted sanctions against five Russian banks and three people while calling for harsher economic measures against Moscow. Perhaps the most serious economic threat to Russia so far came from the German government’s announcement on Tuesday that it was suspending the operation of the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline that was built to pump natural gas directly from Russia to Germany. But that measure can easily be reversed by Germany once the controversy has passed. Putin seems to be acting on the assumption that Russia can afford to raise the stakes in the conflict because Western powers are reluctant to be drawn into a military conflict over Ukraine and unable to impose economic penalties that would outweigh what Moscow can gain through continued brinksmanship.
Read it here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/germany-halts-nord-stream-2-after-putin-orders-troops-to-ukrainian-breakaway-regions-11645529981
In The Back Pages: Escape from Womanhood
The Rest
→ In a long, emotionally charged speech delivered Monday prior to sending troops into Eastern Ukraine, Vladimir Putin denied Ukraine’s independence and historical legitimacy and reiterated long-held complaints about NATO expansion threatening Russian security. Russians and Ukrainians are connected by “blood” and “family ties,” Putin said, declaring Ukraine “an integral part of our own history, culture, spiritual space” while also claiming that “modern Ukraine was entirely and completely created by Russia: more precisely, Bolshevik, communist Russia.”
→ National Review writer Michael Brendan Dougherty notes a rather significant flaw in the U.S. State Department’s approach to the crisis.
→ Truckers occupying Ottawa, Canada’s capital, were forcibly pushed out of the city over the weekend as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the never-before-used Emergencies Act, a measure intended to be used for terrorism and other “existential threats that cannot be dealt with using existing laws,” as Canadian legal scholar Bruce Pardy explained to The Scroll last week. On Monday, Canada’s parliament passed a motion supporting the emergency powers with the backing of Trudeau’s Liberal Party and the left-leaning New Democratic Party. The act gives Trudeau’s government vast powers to create “no-go zones” and compel private financial institutions to seize protestors’ assets and property.
→ Meanwhile, the People’s Convoy, “a peaceful and unified transcontinental movement” protesting COVID-19 restrictions, will be leaving California tomorrow and arriving in Washington, D.C., on March 5. The caravan of truckers, which “demand[s] the declaration of national emergency concerning the COVID-19 pandemic be lifted immediately,” is an outgrowth of the larger “Freedom Convoy” movement that emerged in Canada in early 2022 to protest that country’s vaccine mandates.
→ Beginning this Thursday, England will dramatically scale back its COVID-19 restrictions. The changes include ending all stay-at-home isolation requirements and contact-tracing programs and limiting free testing to those who are most vulnerable. In a speech in the House of Commons on Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson argued that it’s time to shift from a model of “government restrictions to personal responsibility.” The announcement met strong opposition from health leaders and from the country’s Labour Party. A poll of National Health Service (NHS) leadership found that 79% disagreed with the decision to end free testing. “So much is uncertain still, including our long-term immunity and the emergence of future strains, which requires a solid testing infrastructure and clear guidance around self-isolation to remain in place,” said Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation. Sir Keir Starmer, the country’s Labour Party leader, called the plan a “half-baked announcement from a government paralysed by chaos and incompetence.”
→ Government officials did not consult their own security databases and failed to vet Afghan refugees entering the United States last August. According to a report published last week by the Pentagon’s inspector general, despite posing “potentially significant security concerns,” some 50 Afghans entered the United States—the majority of whom can no longer be located by government officials.
→ Capping an unusual trial, the three men convicted last year for the 2020 killing of Ahmaud Arbery were found guilty Tuesday of federal hate crimes. The Department of Justice originally tried to secure a plea deal, which is typical in hate-crimes trials, but after protests from Arbery’s family, the judge in the high-profile case rejected the plea offer. After four hours of deliberations, a jury determined that the three defendants in the case, Travis McMichael, 36, his father and former police officer, Gregory McMichael, 66, and their neighbor William Bryan, 52, had attacked Arbery because of his race, thereby violating his civil rights.
→ More than 60 people were killed and 40 wounded by an explosion at a gold miners’ market in Burkina Faso Monday. While many gold mines in Africa are overseen by international companies, small-scale or “artisanal” gold mines are increasingly common across the globe, producing roughly a sixth of the world’s total gold supply, worth some $27 billion a year. As the value of gold continues to rise, these “artisanal” mines—which employ 15 million to 20 million people worldwide and are notorious for dangerous conditions, child labor abuses, and polluting local water sources—have grown as well.
→ The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is hoarding critical hospitalization data on COVID-19 instead of sharing it with the public, according to a report in The New York Times. “Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country’s response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected,” multiple sources familiar with the data told the Times.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/20/health/covid-cdc-data.html
→ Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, set a new school and meet record when she collected her third title in three days on Saturday. Thomas is eligible to compete in women’s sports because she has undergone a year of hormone treatment to lower her testosterone levels, though she is ineligible under new rules announced this month by U.S.A. Swimming, which require athletes to suppress their testosterone levels for at least three years before competing with women. Second place at the meet was taken by Iszac Henig, a transgender male swimmer who competes on Yale’s women’s team
Escape from Womanhood: How the Internet led one teenage girl to believe that she'd rather be a boy
Helena Kerschner is a 23-year-old detransitioned woman who identified as transgender during her teenage years and was prescribed testosterone shortly after her 18th birthday. After being on testosterone for a year and a half, she realized that transitioning was a misguided way of dealing with her social and emotional struggles. Now, years later, she is interested in exploring the cultural and psychological factors that contribute to the sharp rise in the number of adolescent girls identifying as transgender and choosing to medically transition with hormones and surgeries.
In my efforts to understand the personal factors that led me to identify as transgender and eventually decide to mistakenly transition, I’ve always been struck by the overwhelming role the internet has played in my life.
Online pornography, which studies show most kids are now exposed to by the age of 13, has become virtually inescapable. Faster than we can even measure its impact, this new world of porn is drastically changing how young people form their perceptions of sexuality and adult relationships. It would be foolish to think that it wouldn’t have major consequences. In my own life, I can see how being inundated with pornographic imagery as a young woman, much of it violent, and being repeatedly told that this was normal and even cool led me instinctively to look for an escape from womanhood.
Pornography isn’t what it once was. Fifty years ago, young boys could find a stash of magazines and become enthralled by the sexual images within them. But these still photographs, which needed to be sought out, are only loosely related to the novel phenomenon of pervasive online pornography. MindGeek, the company that owns many of the most popular porn sites, including Pornhub, boasts 125 million daily visits and quietly collects massive amounts of data from its users, which it uses to sell targeted ads and to create content that appeals directly to younger audiences. Many porn users attest to a “tolerance” effect, whereby they no longer feel sufficiently stimulated by scenarios that were once arousing and are motivated to seek ever more extreme content. To keep their audience’s attention, the endless quantities of new porn being produced are eternally novel. Without even looking for it, anyone can now stumble on footage so grotesque and abusive to the people involved, a person who does not have a porn “tolerance” would likely be mortified.
Alongside this ever-increasing normalization of pornography usage by young children and adolescents, there has been an unprecedented explosion in the number of children and teenagers identifying as transgender. Official British government figures from 2018 show that in less than a decade, the country saw a more than 4,000% increase in the number of minors being referred for gender treatments, including hormone injections. Most of the increase was driven by girls. In the year 2009-10, only 40 girls in England sought gender reassignment, but by 2017-18, the number had ballooned up to 1,806. In the United States, a 2019 report from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons found that gender-confirming surgeries (GCS) were a “rapidly expanding field. Of all procedures recorded by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), GCS was among the most rapidly increasing from 2016 to 2017.” The most rapid increase, according to the ASPS, was among women transitioning to men: a 289% increase in one year.
As a young woman who both identified as transgender as a teen and grew up in a very online, pornography-influenced environment, I believe there is a profound connection between this new way of exploring sexuality and the identity confusion that we are seeing in so many young people today.
Many young girls today, including those that identify as trans as I did as a teenager, internalize a hyper-sexualized caricature of what a girl or a woman is. It mirrors the image of women as extreme sex objects that boys derive from porn, but whereas for boys that may be titillating, for some girls it becomes the reason why they feel they aren’t really a “girl.”
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