Humza Yousaf baffling tweet (TW: about s*xual assault)

[ValerieDoonican]

He can't really believe this can he?https://x.com/HumzaYousaf/status/1780538428158836800

Frankfurt's On Bullshit is relevant here.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose. [pp 55-56]

Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the way things are may become attenuated or lost. Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the respond of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. [pp 59-61]

https://www.edbatista.com/2020/03/on-bullshit.html

Online, men pretend to be 15 year old boys and groom 14 year old girls into meeting up with them. Men pretend to be the 14 year old girl and arrange a vigilante meet up with the "15 year old boy". You can be anyone you want online.

I can see men pretending online to be women being taken at face value by other men, who believe they're talking to a woman.

It all goes south when real life steps in and they realise its a man they've been flirting with. I'm sure some men pretending to be women online will get a certain thrill about being threatened with rape. They won't report it. They also won't be threatened with rape. They'll be threatened, but it'll be a beating, not rape.

I think it's women refusing to bend their necks to worship at the feet of men pretending to be women who will be reported and prosecuted. We don't threaten with rape, as a rule, but I'm sure simple refusal to worship will prove upsetting enough and will somehow reach the criteria for a crime to have been committed.

I'm so sick of the whole thing.

He’s lost the plot. Of all the things he could be tweeting about he chooses to come out with this utter crap??

Oh dear…
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I really feel so sorry for the Scottish people having such an imbecile governing them.

@RethinkingLife that does make a dismal kind of sense..but my goodness he must have surfed a long way up bullshit creek by now....

@SirChenjins it's astonishing

On the other hand, if a ‘transwoman’ such as ‘Karen White’ or ‘Barbie Kardashian’ threatens to rape women, women know very well what sex the ‘transwoman’ is.

Is he saying all tw pass, or is he saying the law will only apply to tw that pass? If a woman gets beaten but, it was dark and she had short hair, could the assailant side step the law by claiming he thought she was male? If a slight man gets beaten and, it was dark and the kilt he was wearing looked like a skirt, could the prosecution ask for the misogyny law to apply?

Will the police be recording non-crime misogyny incidents?

Today I've learned that Humza, in addition to now understanding what biological sex is, also doesn't understand how sexual assault works.

However given that he recognises no difference between men and women, I'm sure he'll be having a word with the Imam at his strictly sex-segregated mosque because that segregation is totally arbitrary and meaningless.

Yes I suppose you could twist it round to mean "a man would only threaten to rape a TW if he thought they were female". But that's naive at best .. as I 'm sure any TW sex worker could tell him?

What a fool the man is!

Alan Massie nailing it in today's Times.

Excellent point.

Seems fair @MorrisZapp

What I don't understand is why he is even tweeting about a subject that is highlighting his complete detachment from reality.

What's the quote? Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than speak and remove all doubt.

Maybe he's trying to distract from the Sandyford clinic pausing the prescription of puberty blockers.

And 'gender affirming' aka cross-sex hormones until age of 18 years.

Referrals from the Sandyford Sexual Health Services to Paediatric Endocrinology for the prescription of Puberty Suppressing Hormones have been paused for any new patients assessed by our Young Person’s Gender Service.
Patients aged 16 to 17 years old who have not been treated by Paediatric Endocrinology, but who are still seeking treatment for their gender incongruence, will no longer be prescribed gender affirming hormone treatment until they are 18 years old.
…
This service update follows research from NHS England and the publication of the Cass Review while we work with the Scottish Government to engage in research with NHS England that will generate evidence of safety and long-term impact for therapies.
We are committed to providing the best possible clinical care for young people accessing and understand the distress that gender incongruence can cause. While this pause is in place, we will continue to give anyone who is referred into the Young People Gender Service the psychological support that they require while we review the pathways in line with the findings.

https://www.sandyford.scot/sexual-health-services/gender-service-at-sandyford/gender-young-people-service/

I think the tweet is ill judged - it’s political and inflammatory to suggest that men are just as likely to rape a man who identifies as a woman - but isn’t this legislation just in line with the law on perceptive discrimination?

I would assume that a man called Alex who worked from home could be a victim of sexist discrimination or abuse if the perpetrator assumed he was female.

He may be a fool but his guide dog is lovely.

@RethinkingLife bloody hell, they were doing what??? 🤦

Humza is pretending to be a responsible politician capable of coherent policy.

Turns out he's shit at roll-play.

He’s not called Hamza Useless for nothing

We are seriously considering moving back to England, @Myalternate - not just because of the SNP government's line on Trans rights and misogyny, but also because of so many other issues, including the tax regime here, and the SNP's utter ineptitude - under their government education and healthcare standards have plummeted, and the Hate crime law is just the latest in a line of ill-thought-out policies - the bottle and can return scheme, the Named Person legislation, to name but two more.

And who can forget the ferry fiasco? It took 3.5 years, from laying down the hull to completion to build the QE2. It has taken the shipyard and the Scottish government 9 years from the cutting of the first steel, and neither ferry is finished and in service yet.

He knew what sexual assault was when he was complaining about Westminster Governments treatment of female refugees.

So a man threatening to rape someone can’t tell whether that person is a woman or a transwoman, yet Humza himself can not only tell that Isla is a transwoman, but also that ‘she’ is ‘at it’

Clearly he is gifted with some observational power he thinks others can only dream of