All entries by this author
Oct 9th, 2023 11:06 am |
By Ophelia Benson
It’s interesting that one way to poison people for $$$ is to tell them you’re a church. God and poison in one easy visit, hurrah!
A Florida man and three sons who used a business masquerading as a church to sell more than $1 million of a deadly bleach solution that they claimed was a “miracle” cure for Covid-19 and other diseases were each sentenced on Friday to several years in prison, federal prosecutors in Miami said.
Mark Grenon, 66, of Bradenton, Fla., and one of his sons, Joseph Grenon, 36, were sentenced to five years in prison for conspiring to defraud the government, while the two other sons, Jonathan Grenon, 37, and Jordan Grenon, 29, were sentenced to
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13 comments
Oct 9th, 2023 10:41 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Good to know Musk is careful with information at least.
As false information about the rapidly changing war between Gaza Strip militants and Israel proliferated on the social media platform X over the weekend, owner Elon Musk personally recommended that users follow accounts notorious for promoting lies.
“For following the war in real-time, @WarMonitors & @sentdefender are good,” Musk posted on the platform formerly called Twitter on Sunday morning to 150 million follower accounts. That post was viewed 11 million times in three hours, drawing thanks from those two accounts, before Musk deleted it.
Both were among the most important early spreaders of a false claim in May that there had been an explosion near the White House. The Dow
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6 comments
Oct 9th, 2023 7:38 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Nobel Prize in economics goes to a woman. Guess what her field is.
This year’s Nobel economics prize has been awarded to Claudia Goldin, an American economic historian, for her work on women’s employment and pay.
Prof Goldin’s research uncovered key drivers behind the gender pay gap, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
By “gender pay gap” the BBC means the fact that women earn less than men. Funny that it’s so taken for granted they don’t feel a need to spell it out.
And then the punchline:
She is only the third woman to receive the prize, and the first to not share the award with male colleagues.
Gender prize gap innit.
Isn’t it interesting that this … Read the rest
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21 comments
Oct 9th, 2023 6:04 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Grown-up news outlets shouldn’t be talking about manufactured babies this way:
This Is Going to Hurt author and ex-doctor Adam Kay is shattered, which is hardly surprising – he’s just been mopping up baby vomit and is clearly sleep-deprived.
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Kay and his husband, Games of Thrones producer James Farrell, share Ruby, aged 10 months, and Ziggy, six months, whom they had via surrogates.
They didn’t “have” anything. Two nameless women who obviously don’t matter did the having. Kay and his husband paid two women to carry and gestate and push out babies for them. It’s revolting to see an adult institution like the BBC prattle about babies that two men “had via surrogates.”… Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
4 comments
Oct 8th, 2023 5:49 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
A music festival before dawn in a forest clearing near Kibbutz Re’im in southern Israel:
The music festival, known as Nova, was so loud that Cohen, who is thirty-one and lives in Tel Aviv, saw the rockets before he heard their sound. A handful of police officers soon arrived and broke up the party, shouting “Color Red”—code in Israel for incoming rocket fire.
As partygoers scrambled toward their cars or lay on the ground waiting for the barrage to pass, another kind of fire began. Cohen watched as four pickup trucks filled with armed militants and gunmen on motorcycles encircled the road leading out of the event venue, which was bottlenecked with cars attempting to flee the area. “They
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6 comments
Oct 8th, 2023 11:59 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Sydney Morning Herald last month:
Hatred against trans people and a “radical precedent” in anti-discrimination law would flow from a lesbian group being allowed to invite only biological females to its events, Victoria’s peak union body has warned.
It’s not hatred for lesbians to have lesbian-only events. Women are the only people who can be lesbians; men can never be lesbians. Men who call themselves lesbians remain men. It’s not “hatred” to understand that men can’t be lesbians.
An application by the recently formed Lesbian Action Group to lawfully exclude trans women from a “Lesbians Born Female” event has caused a heated rift, with equality and inclusion advocates squaring off against women’s rights groups.
What about equality for … Read the rest
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16 comments
Oct 8th, 2023 7:57 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Vice tells us
…we are recirculating this article by British poet, model and activist Kai Isaiah-Jamal about how allies can make the world a better place for trans people.
But what if we have no ambition to “make the world a better place for trans people”? What if we’re not moved to single out that one particular (very small) set of people for extra concern and pampering? What if, on the contrary, we think they should stop making all these demands for extra special treatment?
Let’s cut the shit – there’s no positive way a cis person can dictate or speak on a life that you do not live and a world you do not have to navigate as
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24 comments
Oct 7th, 2023 9:32 am |
By Ophelia Benson
This. This is what I keep talking about. Self self self – it’s a trap! Get out of it! There’s a big huge enormous world out there that’s not You: go out and explore it, and do what you can to improve it in some way. Look outward. Let your “personality” and your “identity” and your “true self” take care of themselves. No one is as interested in them as you are, so wriggle out of the trap and embrace the bigger world.
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16 comments
Oct 7th, 2023 6:49 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Narges Mohammadi:
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Iranian human rights activist and journalist Narges Mohammadi. The award citation said Mohammadi received the prize for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and for promoting human rights and freedom for all.
The chairperson of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Berit Reiss-Andersen, made the announcement in Oslo. Reiss-Andersen began by quoting the slogan of Iranian human rights campaigners, in Farsi and English: “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi. Woman, Life, Freedom.”
Reiss-Andersen said that altogether the Iranian regime had arrested Mohammadi 13 times, convicted her five times and sentenced her to a total of 31 years in prison and 154 lashes. Mohammadi remains incarcerated in Iran’s notorious
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4 comments
Oct 7th, 2023 5:48 am |
By Ophelia Benson
What a sloppy evidence-free piece in the Guardian:
Belgium’s deputy prime minister, who ranks as one of Europe’s most senior transgender politicians, has urged Rishi Sunak not to join “the real bullies” after remarks made by the British prime minister at the Conservative party conference this week.
Transgender what? The fool reporter never says.
The prime minister’s comments came as it was revealed that the number of hate crimes committed against transgender people last year in England and Wales had climbed to a record high, with the Home Office suggesting in its report that the 11% rise may have been prompted by comments by politicians and media.
Climbed to what number? The 11% rise from what to what? How … Read the rest
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12 comments
Oct 6th, 2023 5:35 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Man who pretends to be a woman wins service award. What’s his “service”? Pretending to be a woman, of course.
Humbled? I bet he’s not a bit humbled.
Diversity! So much diversity! Large white man who pretends to be a woman: what could be more diversity??!
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12 comments
Oct 6th, 2023 4:49 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The NY Times:
Shortly after he left office, former President Donald J. Trump shared apparently classified information about American nuclear submarines with an Australian businessman during an evening of conversation at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The businessman, Anthony Pratt, a billionaire member of Mar-a-Lago who runs one of the world’s largest cardboard companies, went on to share the sensitive details about the submarines with several others, the people said. Mr. Trump’s disclosures, they said, potentially endangered the U.S. nuclear fleet.
Whose idea was it to put Elmer Fudd in charge of all this?
Federal prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, learned about Mr. Trump’s disclosures
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5 comments
Oct 6th, 2023 12:11 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Hmmm tough question.
Social norms don’t quite oblige us to address each other in certain ways, I would say. Social norms give us a menu of ways to address each other, but they’re not really mandatory, apart from the military and on the job and so on.
But, even if we agree for the sake of argument that the norms are mandatory or might as … Read the rest
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14 comments
Oct 6th, 2023 10:46 am |
By Ophelia Benson
But you can’t.
Gymnastics Australia has unveiled a new set of guidelines for the inclusion of transgender and gender diverse people.
The changes will allow individuals to choose uniforms, changing and bathroom facilities and compete in competitions which they believe best align with their gender identity.
GA boss Alexandra Ash said it was an important step to ensure all participants and stakeholders feel safe and included in the sport.
But it isn’t. It can’t be. It’s the opposite. By ensuring that men can intrude on women’s sports, they’ve ensured that women will never feel safe in their own sport. By including men in sports for women, they’re excluding women.
“Our commitment to transgender and gender diverse people involved in
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4 comments
Oct 6th, 2023 10:12 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Listy McListerson.
…which provides detailed bios of all those they consider to be disrupting the trans narrative.
If they’re looking for culprits guilty of “disrupting” the trans “narrative,” then they need look no further than trans activism itself, which is a disjointed hodgepodge of contradictory, unevidenced claims. For each and every claim of gender ideology, there is an equal and opposite claim that contradicts it. Find an appropriate pair of trans statements and most of the work is already done for you. It’s an extension of the principle that the best weapon you can use against trans activism is to quote trans activists.
Of course this list isn’t simply a … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Oct 6th, 2023 9:23 am |
By Ophelia Benson
What’s complex about it? Men are not women. Simple.
It’s a particularly creepy brand of self-flattery, that – declaring that it’s a “really complex conundrum” when women defend their rights, and that it takes kindness and civility – like his, of course – to find “a solution.” Behold, I, a man of kindness and civility, declare women’s rights too complex to figure … Read the rest
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5 comments
Oct 6th, 2023 8:34 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Amy Sousa on a new blacklist:
Evan Urquhart, founder of Assigned Media, has recently published the “Trans Data Library,” a list of people and organizations she considers to be dissidents to trans orthodoxy. This database, which went live on Wednesday morning, has now been featured in the popular LGBTQ+ news source, The Advocate.
Ah yes, Evan Urquhart. She did a hit piece on me in Slate back in 2015, based on a dishonest manipulative “interview.”
Evan is a woman who claims the identity of a “transman,” and together with two men who claim to be “transwomen,” she started a fundraiser in order to create a propaganda campaign to silence reasonable dissent. They raised over $12,500 with
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6 comments
Oct 6th, 2023 8:05 am |
By Ophelia Benson
I hate it that the left has gone all-in on fantasy so we have to turn to The Telegraph for reality.
The Science Secretary will on Tuesday unveil a review into the “utter nonsense” of public bodies being urged to collect data on self-identified gender rather than biological sex.
Speaking at the Conservative Party Conference, Michelle Donelan will sound the alarm at what she calls the “denial of biology and the steady creep of political correctness”.
It’s not even political correctness though. It’s not correct and it’s not political. It’s some other brand of bullshit – a noxious mix of idenniny and fannasy and narcissism. What in hell is “left” about any of that?
Ms Donelan has been moved
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