The gag order on Trump is back.

An appeals court on Thursday reinstated a narrow gag order on Donald J. Trump that bars him from attacking court staff in his civil fraud trial in New York. The former president has already violated the order twice, incurring a total of $15,000 in fines.

The order was first put in place by the trial judge, Arthur F. Engoron, in early October, after Mr. Trump attacked the judge’s law clerk on social media…

With their client barred from attacking Ms. Greenfield, Mr. Trump’s lawyers continued to take issue with her prominence…

Eventually, Justice Engoron placed a gag order on the lawyers as well, prohibiting them from commenting on his conferences and written

Will it be Jolyon???

Would pay to watch Owen Jones being represented by Jo Maugham as he sues people for calling him a psychopath or whatever

— Frances Weetman (@francesweetman) November 30, 2023

Owen Jones finds out online pile-ons aren't fun for the target. Women he's dragged through the mud for the benefit of his demented traaahns followers experience high levels of schadenfreude https://t.co/J3BsO9QqXQ

— Clive Simpson (@QueensSpeechUK) November 30, 2023

During MeToo, Owen Jones said we must always believe victims of sexual assault. Yet when he saw footage of a dead Israeli woman with her underwear removed he demanded more evidence that she was raped. What sickening double standards, says Brendan O’Neillhttps://t.co/50WDSg02DP

— spiked (@spikedonline) November 29, 2023

If you get mugged and beaten up in the street your birthday party will be cancelled.

No Hanukkah this year for Havering Council in London.

Havering Council, a municipality located in East London, announced today that the annual Hanukkah installation would not be taking place this year due to “conflict in the Middle East.”

In a statement, the council released: “The Council has taken the difficult decision to pause the planned installation of the Chanukah Menorah outside Havering Town Hall this year. We appreciate this is a hugely sensitive issue but in light of escalating tensions from the conflict in the Middle East, installing the candelabra now will not be without risk to the Council, our partners, staff and

Ok Jones has had enough now. He’s angry. You’ve been warned.

He’s taking advice. I wonder if it will be anything like “Dude you don’t have a case. The claims have to be false or else you don’t have a case.”… Read the rest

Yes, and?

Martina Navratilova Says Transgender Women Can’t Be Lesbians

Well of course they fucking can’t. Frying pans can’t be owls, cities can’t be paella, we could go on like this forever.

It’s The Advocate whining this whine. Not much of an advocate these days, is it.

Martina Navratilova, the renowned out tennis star, recently sparked controversy with her remarks on a tribute by Stonewall, a leading LGBTQ+ advocacy group in the U.K. Navratilova took to social media on Tuesday to voice her opposition to the inclusion of a transgender woman in Stonewall’s Lesbian Visibility tribute, bluntly writing, “a bloke cannot be a lesbian.”

Oooh how rude of her to be so blunt.

But we have to these … Read the rest

Endless spiral of opposites until we get lost in the not not not nots.

Again and again and AGAIN: TERFs are not misandrists, they are misogynists, specifically transmisogynists. They do not hate trans women because they see them as men. They hate trans women because they see them as a lower class of woman they can more easily exploit.

— Lee Shevek (@butchanarchy) November 29, 2023

You can shout “AGAIN” all you want but it’s still the opposite of the reality. The women you’re calling “terfs” are not misogynists (nor are we misandrists, for that matter). We’re women who know that men are not women. That’s all it is. Hate is an emotion; facts are not emotions. It’s not hate … Read the rest

The BBC breathlessly tells us that not letting men compete against women is a failure to be inclusive.

A top amateur cyclist says his sport is less inclusive and welcoming than ever after it banned transgender women from competing in the female category. Josh Jones, 31, from Cambridge, believes British Cycling’s new rules “fail the cycling community”.

But that’s stupid. Men can compete in the male category, which is only right, because they’re male. It’s not “less inclusive” to keep on having men compete against men instead of letting a few selected men invade women’s sports because they claim to be trans.

Jones, who has been competing for 12 years, has 44 wins across all disciplines and is currently 13th

How to diversity and inclusion: invent some diverse speakers to promote your conference and then on the day say they all have food poisoning.

After an event organizer, Eduards Sizovs, was accused of making up fake female speakers to attract high-profile speakers to an online developer conference called DevTernity, several of the event’s top-billed speakers promptly withdrew.

…

On Monday, Sizovs confirmed that the conference, DevTernity—which sold tickets for as much as $870 a pop and anticipated 1,300 attendees—was cancelled.

The controversy arose after Gergely Orosz, the author of a popular tech newsletter called Pragmatic Engineering, first posted the allegations on X on Friday. Orosz alleged that out of three women—Kristine Howard, Julia Krisina, and Anna Boyko—scheduled to speak at

The Telegraph on the NHS organ inventory lunacy:

Doctors are being asked to tick whether patients have a penis or vagina under a new NHS medical form being rolled out at some hospitals.  

Medics are being faced with “nonsensical” forms asking for a patient’s “organ inventory” at NHS hospitals using a new £450 million IT system.

The new “sexual orientation and gender identity form” makes up part of someone’s Electronic Patient Record (EPR) on the new system, regardless of the care or relevance to any treatment they are receiving.

It’s kind of like getting used to a new laptop – all kinds of bells and whistles you didn’t ask for and don’t want.

It asks for information around

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Personalized organ inventories.

There are default settings for men and women as “cisgender” if they do not express a trans identity.

This is like hearing hoofbeats and assuming zebras. They might as well just come out and call us all “non-trans.” We still haven’t gotten ourselves out of the age in which “male” was the standard and default for everything, with women being considered aberrant, non-standard, or flawed. Now “trans” is the standard, and everyone else is ho-hum, run-of-the-mill “cis.” It’s an attempt at normalizing the abnormal, of turning the impossible into mental wallpaper instead of a material and moral imposition.

To be honest, when I saw the title of … Read the rest

Malcolm Clark at Spiked is very amusing about luxury pronouns.

Remember when Doctor Who was fun? Watching it now is about as much fun as being publicly humiliated at work by some jumped-up nonbinary form-filler from HR who thinks he’s amazing because he’s painted one of his fingernails black.

A good example of this joylessness is a scene in the most recent special, ‘The Star Beast’, which has been treated by right-on broadsheet types as a moment of profound importance. Yet all that happened was a transwoman character – played by transwoman actor Yasmin Finney – lectured the Doctor about pronouns. In a moment of unforgivable Time Lord-cis privilege, the Doctor had assumed a diminutive alien called Beep the

Sex Matters reports An Epic crisis is unfolding in the NHS.

Since October, several NHS trusts in England have been using new £450 million NHS patient-data software produced by US-based IT company Epic Systems. This has been programmed by local teams to record the “gender identity” of babies. For adults, the system has been programmed to register patients according to their “legal sex” rather than their actual sex, and to record men and women who don’t express a trans identity as “cisgender”. It asks medical staff to complete “organ inventories” of the reproductive features of all patients. 

The new electronic patient record software was launched at the start of October at hospitals including King’s College Hospital, and Guy’s and

It can be hard to identify the facts in reporting of this kind, because of the usual careful obfuscation. Starting with the headline:

Broward high school principal reassigned amid investigation involving transgender athlete

What kind of transgender athlete?

The kind it always is, of course. The male kind. I wonder if the news media Five Families had a meeting at some point and agreed that male transgender athletes must always be identified as simply “transgender” with no mention of the m word. Why would they do that? Because women and girls have very obvious material reasons not to want males bouncing into their sports. Men and boys don’t have those very obvious material reasons. Therefore it must always be concealed … Read the rest

Owen Jones is still desperately trying to defend Hamas.

There is a video doing the rounds related to Hamas’s barbaric pogrom of 7 October that is difficult to watch. It is making viewers wince and recoil. It shows the madness that can flourish when people retreat from reason. I am speaking, of course, about Owen Jones’s reaction vid to the footage of Hamas’s atrocities; that arch Guardianista’s 25-minute YouTube musing over what he saw Hamas do. It is a disturbing watch. It provides the starkest proof yet of the collapse of moral reason and plain decency that has occurred on the middle-class left these past seven weeks.

And it doesn’t help that it’s Owen Jones doing it – the … Read the rest

Originally a comment by guest on We like to live in the just world.

All of these comments are making me realise what an excellent course this would make – a history of the causes of the Industrial Revolution/justification for current global economic inequality, from the canonical roll-call of clever Englishmen (and Scotsmen) through naturalistic, cultural and institutional explanations to the story emerging today based on new research methods, connections among disciplines and information sources. I cannot possibly be the first person to think of this (though you never know, I’ve been surprised before) – over winter break I’ll ask around and see if I can find people who have done this/are doing this, and if I do come … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Nasty snobbish gatekeepers.

iknklast:

In order to provide equity and justice in medicine, we must be aware of sex, ethnic background, country of origin, and other characteristics. We do not need medicine centered on those characteristics, though. We need medicine centered on medical expertise.

You’d think that obvious, but this ideology-first movement has been in action for a while now. Sort of like how the warnings of (some) lesbians and (some) feminists regarding nascent Genderism went unheard, so too have the warnings regarding the spread of Social Justice Lysenkoism. Here’s a Boston Review article from March 2021 entitled “An Antiracist Agenda for Medicine” that argues for “medical restitution”. One … Read the rest

More everything means the opposite of everything news:

Britain’s human-rights watchdog could be downgraded and blocked from United Nations rights bodies over its recommended definition of sex. The Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is set to undergo a “special review” by the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (Ganhri). This process could mean the removal of the EHRC’s accreditation as an “A status” National Human Rights Institution, meaning it would not be able to sit on the UN Human Rights Council.

The review comes after 30 LGBTQ+ and human-rights organisations expressed concern to Ganhri about the EHRC.

Let me guess. It’s because they know men are not women, isn’t it.

The EHRC’s role is to provide guidance

Just for fun.

Deborah Cameron explains exactly what was so enraging about that disembodied legs ad the other day.

The installation consists of five large display boards arranged in a line. Mounted on each of the middle three boards is a disembodied pair of crossed female legs. They’re like the legs you see on mannequins in the hosiery sections of department stores: long, slender, and carefully positioned for aesthetic effect. They begin at the top of the thigh and end in Barbie-style feet wearing high-heeled court shoes. They are “diverse” insofar as they represent a range of skin colours, but there is no diversity in relation to age, body-size or personal style. The imaginary woman these legs belong to is clearly young, slim,

Originally a comment by guest on Over in seconds.

Chipping in late, as I was away :)

The issue of slavery as a generator of wealth (which provides the ability to take advantage of ‘innovation’) has been considered at least since the 1960s.

Research is still ongoing – the initial findings of the Legacies of British Slavery project give the subject a surprisingly superficial treatment.

But I and others beg to differ – there is a lot more to say about the magnitude and direction of the ‘giant pool of money’ from slavery ‘compensation’ funds suddenly available for private investment in the 1830s. I believe a young man named David Turner is currently working on this.

With respect … Read the rest