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Guest post: That’s the emergency backup system taking over

Originally a comment by Artymorty on The belief is mandatory.

Fred Wallace is of course the man who sends unsolicited dick picks to women. He also sends unsolicited pics of himself in flagrante at men’s fetish dens. I still can’t wrap my head around people who insist this man is a woman even when they know that he knows he’s a fetishistic man, and that they know that he knows that they know he’s a fetishistic man — so much so that he blatantly publishes pornographic pictures of himself engaging in his fetish.

Everybody knows he’s a man, and everybody knows that everybody else knows he’s a man. And yet.

It’s that two-regions-of-the-brain thing: first-order belief (“I believe x … Read the rest

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Guest post: That’s the emergency backup system taking over
By Ophelia Benson, February 27, 2026

Originally a comment by Artymorty on The belief is mandatory.

Fred Wallace is of course the man who sends unsolicited dick picks to women. He also sends unsolicited pics of himself in flagrante at men’s fetish dens. I still can’t wrap my head around people who insist this man is a woman even when they know that he knows he’s a fetishistic man, and that they know that he knows that they know he’s a fetishistic man — so much so that he blatantly publishes pornographic pictures of himself engaging in his fetish.

Everybody knows he’s a man, and everybody knows that everybody else knows he’s a man. And yet.

It’s that two-regions-of-the-brain thing: first-order belief (“I believe x … Read the rest

Archives
Bad Moves
Articles
Flashback
In Focus
Latest News
Letters
Notes and Comment Blog

Guest post: That’s the emergency backup system taking over 

Originally a comment by Artymorty on The belief is mandatory.

Fred Wallace is of course the man who sends unsolicited dick picks to women. He also sends unsolicited pics of himself in flagrante at men’s fetish dens. I still can’t wrap my head around people who insist this man is a woman even when they know that he knows he’s a fetishistic man, and that they know that he knows that they know he’s a fetishistic man — so much so that he blatantly publishes pornographic pictures of himself engaging in his fetish.

Everybody knows he’s a man, and everybody knows that everybody else knows he’s a man. And yet.

It’s that two-regions-of-the-brain thing: first-order belief (“I believe x … Read the rest

The belief is mandatory 

The police are telling us we are not allowed to say that men are not women.

Based at Lewisham Police Station.

@MPSLewisham Officer Humphreys asked what had given rise to the doxing and I told him that I hold the position that men cannot become women.

He immediately, without taking a breath said “well, that’s

… Read the rest

They’ve unearthed 

Well here’s a malevolent bit of “journalism” to put in the record books.

Brilliant. Just brilliant. Pitch a fit about a chief medical officer and get him recused from the nightmare superfluous “puberty blockers trial” so that more kids can have their lives blighted by the fad for magic gender. Pat yourself on the back Cathy Newman.… Read the rest

No not that kind of trust and openness 

Yikes. The Lancet on Bad Kennedy’s war on HHS:

10 days after his speech about trust and openness, HHS rescinded a 54-year-old policy of soliciting public comments for new rules and regulations, silencing the voices of many of the stakeholders he pledged to serve. Kennedy has summarily dismissed advisers and experts, communicated policy changes on pay-walled media, fired a whistleblower, and overseen the revisions of guidelines and recommendations, contradicting decades of established science, often to the benefit of industries he formerly condemned. Under Kennedy’s leadership, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) shuttered programmes studying the health effects of air pollution, HHS withheld a report linking alcohol consumption to cancer, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) withdrew warnings of

… Read the rest
IDs that reflect who they are (no not that kind) IDs that reflect who they are (no not that kind) 

But…

But what he means is IDs that don’t reflect who they are – or at least that don’t declare who they are. The whole point of IDs is to verify that the ID-haver is who she/he says she/he is. Because that’s the whole point, the information has to be accurate. The ID has to have the right date of birth, the right height and weight, the right citizenship – and the right sex. A driver’s license or … Read the rest

Pointed 

Meidas Touch:

BREAKING: As Hillary Clinton heads into a closed-door deposition related to the Epstein investigation, she released a pointed opening statement, making clear she knew nothing about Epstein and slamming the Republicans for not allowing her to testify in public.

Below is her full, unedited statement:

I’ll excerpt.

Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member, Members of the Committee… as a former Senator, I have respect for legislative oversight and I expect its exercise, as do the American people, to be principled and fearless in pursuit of truth and accountability.

As we all know, however, too often Congressional investigations are partisan political theater, which is an abdication of duty and an insult to the American people.

The Committee justified its subpoena

… Read the rest
We require that all members believe We require that all members believe 

How indeed?

Manchester Green Party:

In other words, we of Manchester Green Party require that all members affirm a conspicuous and absurd lie. We regard refusal to do so as irrational hatred. We affirm that such refuseniks are not welcome as members of Manchester Green Party.

It’s Trumpian. Why does Manchester Green Party want to be Trumpian?… Read the rest

Crook fires more cops 

When the crook is empowered to fire the cops.

At least 10 FBI employees who worked on former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into President Trump’s retention of classified records after he left the White House in 2021 were fired on Wednesday, multiple sources told CBS News.

The firings came after Reuters reported that the FBI had subpoenaed records of phone calls made by FBI Director Kash Patel and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles when they were still both private citizens as part of Smith’s probe into Trump.

The Reuters article quoted Patel, who alleged that the FBI had secretly subpoenaed his phone records “using flimsy pretexts and burying the entire process in prohibited case files designed

… Read the rest
The men’s team 

Sigh.

A “distasteful joke” by US President Donald Trump has overshadowed the achievement of female athletes at the Winter Olympics, says USA women’s ice hockey captain Hilary Knight.

USA won both men’s and women’s ice hockey gold for the first time at the Milan-Cortina Games this month.

The men’s team received a congratulatory call from Trump, who invited them to his State of the Union address and said he would have to ask their female counterparts as well or he “probably would be impeached”.

Sigh.

That’s not really a “joke” – not as normal people normally understand a joke. It might pass as a “quip” for people who like that sort of thing. A stupid gratuitous insulting “quip”.

It’s … Read the rest

It’s Brighton, Jake 

Women must not be allowed to meet without male supervision.

A row has broken out over an event’s single-sex attendance policy.

Rosie Hayes told the BBC multiple venues in Brighton had cancelled or stopped hosting trauma-healing classes organised by her group Sisters Heal for the victims of sexual assault, rape and domestic abuse, which were limited to “biological women only”.

Indeed. Women must be forced to talk about their sexual trauma in the presence of men. They have no right to keep such exciting chat to themselves.

Terf Watch Brighton, which describes itself as a grassroots collective of journalists reporting on “anti-trans efforts”, said it was not aware of any groups or networks coordinating opposition to Sisters Heal. It

… Read the rest
How pro-life 

Any opportunity to harm women is welcome.

Republicans in Tennessee have proposed a bill that would allow women who have had an abortion to be sentenced to death.

House Bill 570 allows for the death penalty to be imposed on women who have abortions, as well as charging women “involved in the homicide of her own unborn child” with homicide.

This is because love, you know. Tennessee Republicans love fertilized eggs so much they’re willing to kill adult humans for not allowing the fertilized eggs to take over their bodies.

The legislation would allow prosecutors to charge women who obtain abortions with fetal homicide. This crime is punishable by life imprisonment, life without parole, and in some

… Read the rest
The epic length 

Size is not everything.

Sometimes more is less.

Donald Trump himself forecast the epic length of the State of the Union address that he planned to deliver to Congress on Tuesday evening. “It’s gonna be a long speech because we have so much to talk about,” he had said beforehand.

No, it was gonna be long because he loves the sound of his own voice.

Trump is all about superlatives. Everything he does has to be the biggest, the strongest, the mostest. Who cares that he managed to say almost nothing with all those words?

Quantity over quality; that’s Trump in a nutshell. There’s lots of it and it’s all shit.

The problem for Trump at such a moment is

… Read the rest
Dig 

Banning transgender women from lesbian group could ‘undermine their dignity’, court hears

How fascinating. Now let’s think about the dignity of the women in the lesbian group.

Think think thinky think

Done that?

Here’s what I come up with: what about the dignity of the women in the lesbian group? Eh? What about them? Eh? Why is the “dignity” of men who want to force themselves on lesbian groups more important than the dignity of the women who don’t want them to?

Why is the purported dignity of men who pretend to be women so vastly more important than the dignity of actual women? Why do men get to hog the camera while women are pushed out into the shadows … Read the rest

Expanding hole in the dam 

More on the possible small or medium size hole in the dam:

These statements were released days after a woman named Fox Varian became the first person to win a malpractice case after undergoing gender transition care and later regretting it. Ms. Varian and her lawyer argued that her psychologist and plastic surgeon in suburban New York, despite her serious mental health problems and apparent ambivalence over her transgender identity, failed to safeguard her by going forward with a double mastectomy when she was 16.

That last clause should be “went ahead with a double mastectomy when she was 16, thus failing to safeguard her despite her serious mental health problems and apparent ambivalence over her transgender identity.”

In … Read the rest

A tiny hole in the dam? 

Jesse Singal in the NY Times:

Medical Associations Trusted Belief Over Science on Youth Gender Care

What even is “gender care”? I know what they mean by it, of course, but it’s so silly.

American advocates for youth gender medicine have insisted for years that overwhelming evidence favors providing gender dysphoric youth with puberty blockers, hormones and, in the case of biological females, surgery to remove their breasts.

It didn’t matter that the number of kids showing up at gender clinics had soared and were more likely to have complex mental health conditions than those who had come to clinics in years earlier, complicating diagnosis.

And there’s another thing: these younger kids grew up in a culture that was increasingly … Read the rest

Guest post: A post-analytical world 

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on After everything collapsed.

We are living in a post-analytical world on many issues and this leads to social ills that can’t be sustained for long. I fear that rising nationalism in the US and the UK is a symptom of a lack of trust in our institutions and the presumption that “someone must be held to account.” The rise of transgenderism is a result of the backlash against feminism, but once removed, as males who do not want to fit in with the toxic masculinity that prizes “alphas” over people are being led to believe that women have it easier because they don’t have to participate in that garbage (but of course … Read the rest

Deceptive headline strikes again 

Birdwatching group disbands after new members made shooting birds for target practice a priority.

In other news –

Manchester Women’s Institute to fold after members quit over new transgender ban

Really? Transgender ban? Or ban on men who claim to be trans?

Manchester Women’s Institute is to fold after a ‘majority’ of its members quit over new rules which exclude transgender women. 

Ah. There you go. It’s about men who claim to be women, not a “transgender ban”.

When you don’t have good reasons, lies come to the rescue.… Read the rest

Guest post: More complex and more ambiguous 

Originally a comment by What a Maroon on Use them or else.

Pronouns are like waiters: done right, they’re efficient but unobtrusive, showing up when needed, helping things flow smoothly, rarely drawing attention to themselves. English has a pretty good pronoun system, but with an obvious gap in the second person–the loss of “thou” in most English dialects has led to awkward, attention-grabbing workarounds like “y’all”, “youse”, “yinz”, “you guys”. Those are the waiters that loudly announce their names when they first approach the table, interrupt the flow of conversation, spill the pizza on your lap, and disappear when you most need them (which is to say, typical American waiters)*.

The whole pronoun movement is simultaneously attempting to make … Read the rest

What dignity? 

The grotesquerie is off the charts. Every word of this is drivel.

Transgender women could have their dignity “undermined” and be made to feel “inferior” if a lesbian group is allowed to ban them from events, a court has heard.

That makes no sense. How can men’s “dignity” depend on permission to join lesbian groups? It’s the other way around in fact. It’s grotesquely undignified for men to slap on some lipstick and demand to join lesbian groups.

The Lesbian Action Group (LAG) has been in the Federal Court this week, appealing a decision by the Human Rights Commission (HRC) that ruled the group could not legally exclude transgender women from its public events.

Which amounts to ruling lesbians … Read the rest

Removed or withheld 

I’m sure it’s just random.

Millions of pages of Epstein files have been released to the public, but an NPR investigation reveals a gap: The Justice Department has removed or withheld dozens of pages related to allegations that President Trump sexually abused a minor decades ago. The Justice Department declined to answer NPR’s questions on the record about these specific files, what’s in them, and why they are not published.

Well they would, wouldn’t they. Trump has power over them, and he’s not the principled type who would take great care not to meddle with the Justice Department’s files on him. He’s the opposite of that. He’s the type who would cut all their throats before letting them investigate … Read the rest