Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to set up a system in which the top boss can never be held to account because the top boss is the top boss. Why? Because even the top boss is just another human, and humans can do bad things. We need to be able to hold them to account, for our own protection. We can’t just assume they won’t exploit the top job to rob us blind and get away with it.

Lawyers for former President Donald Trump have asked a federal appeals court to throw out a case alleging interference in the 2020 election, arguing that he is immune from prosecution.

Like that. There shouldn’t be such a thing. People shouldn’t … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Sastra on Let us be clear about the difference.

YNNB #7 wrote:

Too many of us are under the illusion that we’re a self-made species.

The deceptive comforts of modernity responsible for this would not be complete I think without what appears to have ratcheted the illusion up to 11: the disembodied avatar worlds of the internet. While the theories of postmodernism and post colonialism formed before the average person had at least one personal computer, the plausibility of a human nature detached from its evolved biological origins no doubt got a major boost from a large part of the population—especially the younger part of the population — getting comfortable with entire worlds where we … Read the rest

Honestly legislators should not be this stupid. It’s an important job; they should not be this lost in the fog.

Schools and colleges SHOULD be respectful and tolerant places where bullying is never tolerated.

We SHOULD treat each other with compassion and consideration.

But unfortunately this hateful Govt are doing everything in their power to ensure that this is not the case. pic.twitter.com/B9n8VY8Mt6

— Kate Osborne MP (@KateOsborneMP) December 19, 2023

Thundering herds of bison that’s dumb. Of course people of any kind are not a theory or an ideology or a contested belief, and nobody says they are. The ideology/contested belief is that people can change sex, that people literally are the sex they are not, that people are … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on “Gender itself is a colonial introduction”.

That does not, of course, translate to “men are women if they say they are.” I suspect we’ll find that Butler relies on equivocating between the two – gender as The Rules and gender as “sexual dimorphism.”

I wouldn’t be at all surprised, as the entire genderist enterprise seems to be entirely dependent upon a combination of exactly that conflation, bait and switch (where a genderist will switch gears and meanings from one to the other mid-argument), and what Bjarte Foshaug has characterized as “bad puns,” such as TWAW. All heavily fortified with a generous heaping of “because SHUT UP!”

So much of this … Read the rest

Onward!

Lugones describes the process this way, and I quote: “Sexual dimorphism has been an important characteristic of what I call [hand goes up for an air quote] ‘the light side’ of the colonial modern gender system. Those on the ‘dark’ side were not necessarily understood dimorphically. Sexual views of colonizers led them to imagine the indigenous people of the Americas as hermaphrodites, or intersex, with large penises and breasts with flowing milk.”

The claim seems to be that colonizers saw themselves as sexually dimorphic and indigenous people as not.

But as Paula Gunn Allen and others made clear, intersex individuals were recognized in many tribal societies prior to colonization, without assimilation to the sexual binary. It is important to

So who is Maria Lugones and who is Anibal Quijano and what do they say? Have a JSTOR preview:

The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms “the coloniality of power” and “modernity.” The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by

Source! It’s this talk:

https://t.co/ba8jiVTySQ

— Ray Alex Williams (@RayAlexWilliams) December 23, 2023

So I’ll be on transcription duty for some time.

29:40:

…and that strong arguments have been made that it was actually colonialism and the kind of capitalism that it spawned that established the binary and heteronormative framework for thinking about and living gender for the first time. Indeed, if we consider the work of Maria Lugones, drawing on the work of Anibal Quijano, then colonial arrangements are the context and course of a wide range of issues that we think of as belonging to normative gender relations, including heteronormativity, dimorphic idealism, the patriarchal family, and the very norms that govern appearance. 30:24

So there we go, she … Read the rest

Furthermore, why is David Brooks a thing? I’ve been wondering that every time I’m reminded of him for twenty or thirty or a hundred years now. The latest reminder was accidentally seeing a few seconds of some pompous PBS chat show last night with him pompously saying words on it. Why? Who cares what he thinks? Why do the Approved Media keep asking for his input?

The Nation wondered the same thing last August.

Take heed, American reprobates! Your self-appointed spiritual doctor, David Brooks, is diagnosing your faults, sins, and self-serving moral evasions, and his findings are grim. In successive turns at the bully pulpits of The New York Times and The Atlantic, Brooks has detected a collective

I should add, however, that I haven’t been able to confirm that Judith Butler did say that.

Here’s one talk that fits the description:

But searching the transcript turns up no hits for “imposition” or “sexual dimorphism” and the hit for “colonialist” doesn’t match the quotation. Maybe there are other talks where she does say that, but I have my doubts. … Read the rest

Ok then let’s see you pee standing up without soaking your shoes.

In a talk for her upcoming book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender” Judith Butler says the sexual dimorphism of male vs female is an “observational imposition” of Christian colonialism.

This idea is the root rot of postmodern trans ideology, which actually believes the objective truth of…

— Ray Alex Williams (@RayAlexWilliams) December 23, 2023

If sexual dimorphism is an observational imposition of Christian colonialism then how have people managed to reproduce all this time? How have animals known how to reproduce all this time? How have genitalia been different all this time? What are ovaries and what are they for? Why don’t babies emerge from men? Why can’t gay … Read the rest

Oh you mean it’s malpractice? Huh.

fter Iowa lawmakers passed a ban on gender-affirming care for minors in March, managers of an LGBTQ+ health clinic located just across the state line in Moline, Illinois, decided to start offering that care.

The added services would provide care to patients who live in largely rural eastern Iowa, including some of the hundreds previously treated at a University of Iowa clinic, saving them half-day drives to clinics in larger cities like Chicago and Minneapolis.

By June, The Project of the Quad Cities, as the Illinois clinic is called, had hired a provider who specializes in transgender health care. So, Andy Rowe, The Project’s health care operations director, called the clinic’s insurance broker to

The Bridge to Total Freedom…

This is just Scientology's Bridge to Total Freedom, re-worked for the woke cult.
It's incredible that @wordfalcon is apparently not a satire account. pic.twitter.com/qWqo6Rk85B

— Arty Morty (@artymortyarty) December 22, 2023

… Read the rest

Dawn Butler v Mumsnet:

The founder of parenting message board Mumsnet has hit back at a Labour MP who has threatened to report the website to the Metropolitan Police after users on the site slammed her reaction to the Brianna Ghey murder trial verdict.

Dawn Butler told critics to ‘get a life’ after they hit out at her suggestion that the trans teenager’s death at the hands of two teenagers in Cheshire earlier this year had been driven by ‘hate towards the trans community’ from within the government.

They sure do love that “hit back slammed hit out at hit hit hit” trick at the Daily Mail, which I suppose is not surprising. Dawn Butler talked nonsense and people … Read the rest

Ah Joly. Never change. You’re comedy gold.

I'm beginning to think the Joylon twitter account is one of Andrew Doyle's comic creations. pic.twitter.com/rPYBniGFlS

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) December 22, 2023

This headline, in The Times, is flatly untrue. I have not been questioned by the police. At the judges’ [sic] request, they contacted me with her question. There has never been, as this headline suggest [sic], any police investigation.

Got it. He has not been questioned by the police, the police have merely asked him a question. Glad we got that straightened out.… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Sastra on An innate sense of bulllshit.

It comes from the deepest knowledge and understanding of someone’s own identity, their heart, their soul, their brain, their being. Themself

And yet both gender — and sex — are supposed to be social constructs.

It’s quite a contradiction, this denial of objective categories consisting of the objectively true coupled with an intense belief in the innate and immutable truth of one’s own Identity. According to Yascha Mounk ( in his book The Identity Trap) this circle was squared by what’s called “strategic essentialism.”

While it is important to bear in mind the theoretical fact that identity groups are socially constructed, for practical purposes the strategic imperative

Gender GP explains the science of gender.

We at GenderGP understand the true nature of gender incongruence where someone’s true gender identity is different to the one that society expects them to have based on their genitals.

Being transgender is not a lifestyle choice, a preference or a cool thing to do. It is an innate sense of self.

Wait. How are those different things? How is “an innate sense of self” not a lifestyle choice or a cool thing to do or a preference? What exactly is “an innate sense of self”? How does Gender GP know? How does Gender GP distinguish between “an innate sense of self” and what people grow up being told about the self … Read the rest

Chip chip chip slowly but steadily every gain women have made over the past 50 years or so is being taken back.

The Governor General of Canada has awarded a trans-identified male activist the Meritorious Service Medal for his work supporting "2SLGBTQ persons."

Morgane Oger successfully campaigned to have a rape crisis shelter defunded in 2019 for being women-only.https://t.co/wojRZY81iv

— REDUXX (@ReduxxMag) December 21, 2023

Canada rewards this disgusting pig of a man for defunding a rape shelter. A woman stands next to him while he gloats. He appears to be manipulating the levers on her back, probably trying to make her smile more energetically.… Read the rest

Good law guy apologizes to the court for potentially prejudicing a trial. What a genius.

Jolyon Maugham, the founder of the Good Law Project, has apologised after a judge castigated him for tweeting ­during the Brianna Ghey trial about the defendants’ supposed transphobia.

The barrister and staunch supporter of trans rights posted a series of tweets on November 27, the first day of the trial, in which he wrote that “the killers exchanged transphobic slurs”.

He’s not some random gossip on Twitter, he’s a barrister. He’s even a barrister who calls himself Good Law.

Following a complaint about the tweet from the prosecution, Mrs Justice Yip said that the comment was potentially in contempt of court, a crime that

Yet another deliberate insult.

There are simply no women who could do that. Not one. It just has to be a man in girly makeup.

He says he’s incredibly proud. I bet he is – women are incredulous too.… Read the rest

Even a Catholic college.

Saint Mary’s College, a Catholic women’s college in Notre Dame, Indiana, has reversed a new policy that would consider transgender women for admission following public outcry.

In November, a local student newspaper, The Observer, reported that Saint Mary’s had notified students of an update to its non-discrimination policy, which was approved in June. Saint Mary’s would have considered cis women as well as individuals who “consistently live and identify as women,” for admission beginning in fall 2024, according to the college.

Classic, isn’t it? The Catholic church keeps women down in every way it can think of, but when it’s a matter of men pretending to be women (and taking what belongs to women) … Read the rest