All entries by this author

Real safety at work

Feb 12th, 2025 9:37 am | By

This guy…

[NC is Naomi Cunningham, the barrister representing Sandie Peggie; DU is Upton]

“Real safety” ffs – he’s a man, intruding on the women’s changing room, claiming to seek “safety” from a woman who doesn’t want a man in the women’s changing room.

Read the rest



Amateur hour

Feb 12th, 2025 8:50 am | By

Former Fox News personality says Ukraine just has to submit.

Donald Trump’s newly appointed defence secretary told allies on his first international trip that the US was no longer “primarily focused” on European security and that Europe would have to take the lead in defending Ukraine.

Pete Hegseth, speaking to defence ministers at a lunchtime meeting in Brussels, said Europe had to provide “the overwhelming share” of future military aid to Kyiv – and recognise that restoring Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders was unrealistic.

The Pentagon chief said he was “here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe”, though the language was notably

Read the rest


Efforts to slash

Feb 12th, 2025 8:37 am | By

The winnowing continues.

The next stage of the Trump administration’s efforts to slash the federal workforce is underway.

Agency leaders have been told to begin preparations for large-scale layoffs, known as reductions in force, or RIFs, under an executive order President Donald Trump signed Tuesday. They will work with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to carry out the mandate, expanding the role of the billionaire’s team in reshaping federal government operations.

Titled “Implementing The President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative,” the executive order also severely limits federal departments’ ability to bring on more staffers and mandates that agency heads closely coordinate with their DOGE representatives on future hiring plans. Once the hiring freeze that Trump put

Read the rest


All your words are wrong

Feb 11th, 2025 5:40 pm | By

The BBC repeats the lie yet again.

A transgender doctor is “only asking for basic respect” when it comes to having their gender identity accepted, an NHS employment tribunal has heard.

But it isn’t “basic respect” he’s demanding. It isn’t “basic respect” to pretend a man is a woman. It’s way beyond basic, and it’s not actually respect.

How about we start demanding some basic respect? Step one would be to tell these bullies to stop ordering us to pretend they are the opposite sex. We all have our own lives and concerns and goals, and we’re fed up to the back teeth with being told to waste a ton of intellectual energy on entitled brats who want us … Read the rest



Guest post: The tribe itself is the “individual”

Feb 11th, 2025 11:01 am | By

Originally a comment by Artymorty at Miscellany Room.

On the “berdache” thing,

A couple points to note about “gender roles” in indigenous cultures:

The most important distinction between indigenous cultures and modern Western culture is the deep social and psychological distinction between collectivism and individualism. Virtually all indigenous cultures were (and are, in the case of those that still exist) collectivist, which is to say that everyone within them was/is raised to conceive of themself as a part of a whole — that the tribe or community itself consists of the “individual” and that each of us serves a small role within it. In a tribal collective, we are only a small part of the “person” that is … Read the rest



Major Powergrabs

Feb 11th, 2025 10:04 am | By

Hahahaha Trump whined back in 2012 about Obama’s habit of…

wait for it

…issuing executive orders.

Snopes:

Claim:

In 2012, future U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted, “Why is Barack Obama constantly issuing executive orders that are major power grabs of authority?”

Rating:

Correct Attribution

It’s fine when a white guy does it.

Read the rest



A nightmare colleague like this

Feb 11th, 2025 9:37 am | By

What I keep saying. It’s all about the narcissism.

Trivial??? How very dare you??!!… Read the rest



The suggestion box

Feb 11th, 2025 9:33 am | By

Executive branch v courts:

Trump and key members of his administration are lashing out at judges who have blocked some of his second-term agenda, suggesting they don’t have the authority to question his executive power.

Parenthetically, why do journalists so often say “suggesting” instead of “saying”? I suppose it’s an excess of caution for the sake of peace, but at the price of enfeebling the journalism. Trump and his people are saying these things very loudly and explicitly, so to call it “suggesting” is both absurd and cowardly.

So far, the courts have pushed back on Trump’s attempts to end birthright citizenship, freeze federal grants, and the overhaul of federal agencies like USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Read the rest


No need to be impolite, missy

Feb 10th, 2025 3:36 pm | By

Peak Smug Male Jumps In to Lecture Women Who Know More About It Than He Does And Have Vastly More At Stake Than He Does chapter 87 billion.

Oh, gee, thank you, Peak Smug Male; as if we hadn’t already done that and only been punished for it anyway.

Read the rest



Share the room and like it

Feb 10th, 2025 9:58 am | By

But sir…

“You are a man.” “Disagree.”

You can’t “disagree.” It’s not an opinion or a guess, it’s a fact. It’s a very very basic fact that everyone knows pretty much from birth. You can’t just wave it away with “I disagree” because it’s not subject to “agreement.”

Read the rest


Whatever he wants

Feb 10th, 2025 9:30 am | By

Dashing into dictatorship:

While Trump and his henchmen deconstruct the administrative state, his lawyers are embracing the logic of dictatorship. The core argument emerging in their legal filings and executive orders — one without support anywhere in the Constitution or the law — is that simply by being elected, Trump has the power to do whatever he wants.

Trump’s imperial ambitions have made for some laughably thin legal theories. As Just Security noted, the government’s argument in defense of Trump’s birthright citizenship EO does not reference any citizenship statutes nor point to any authority that would give Trump the right to undo birthright citizenship via the stroke of a pen. Instead, after quoting the relevant part of

Read the rest


Once the structure of the Self is dismantled

Feb 10th, 2025 8:22 am | By

It’s useful to have philosophy people on the scene.

The reference to the ‘how many fingers?’ torture bit towards the end of 1984 is very interesting. There’s a similar case in Severance, where Holly has to read out an apology script over and over again, ‘until she means it’. It’s a kind of set piece in epistemology texts, about ‘doxastic in/voluntarism’. Can I

Read the rest



Some people have

Feb 10th, 2025 7:51 am | By

The Upton fella is having his turn at the tribunal.

NC points out that he knew some women would be unhappy having him in the room where they changed their clothes. He replies that some people – not women, of course, but the evasive “people” – have BIASED, MISINFORMED, UNPLEASANT OR BIGOTED OR TRANSPHOBIC VIEWS ABOUT TRANS PEOPLE.… Read the rest



The research cannot find the benefits

Feb 10th, 2025 1:22 am | By

Some fads are more destructive than others.

More than 1,000 patients a year are sent for transgender chest surgery on the NHS. Data obtained by The Telegraph show for the first time the number of referrals for taxpayer-funded “masculinising” mastectomies from specialised gender clinics.

As many as 80 per cent of people using those services are females between the ages of 17 and 25. The 1,000-plus referrals could be the tip of the iceberg, because many people have transgender surgery privately to bypass long NHS waiting lists.

100 percent of people getting “masculinising mastectomies” are females, because males already have the end result of a “masculinising mastectomy.”

Zhenya Abbruzzese, co-founder and senior adviser at the Society for Evidence Based

Read the rest


Boss of facts

Feb 9th, 2025 4:46 pm | By

But a fact is the very thing it isn’t. It’s the opposite of a fact. It’s a fiction, and a lie. It’s fatuous to claim that X is a fact when X is obviously not even slightly a fact. Stop doing it. Everybody stop doing it. Everybody stop pretending your increasingly absurd daydreams are “facts.” They’re not.

Read the rest



As refugees fleeing persecution

Feb 9th, 2025 10:18 am | By

Trump welcomes refugees. Some refugees. A particular brand of refugees.

Trump’s offer to rehouse white South Africans as refugees fleeing persecution may not spur quite the rush he anticipates, as even right-wing white lobby groups want to “tackle the injustices” of Black majority rule on home soil.

Trump on Friday signed an executive order to cut U.S. aid to South Africa, citing an expropriation act that President Cyril Ramaphosa signed last month aiming to redress land inequalities that stem from South Africa’s history of white supremacy. The order provided for resettlement in the U.S. of “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination” as refugees.

Afrikaners are mostly white descendants of early Dutch and French settlers,

Read the rest


Identifying as a victim of genocide

Feb 9th, 2025 10:00 am | By

Uh huh.

Read the rest



The progressives blindly went along with it

Feb 9th, 2025 9:05 am | By

Hadley Freeman tells an important truth:

I assume that, by now, most Sunday Times readers are au fait with gender ideology, which contends that a man magically becomes a woman simply because he claims to feel like one. Left-wing papers and politicians gasped in horror at Trump’s bill, and the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez insisted only “bigoted” people would see males in women’s sport as a presidential priority. But President Biden opened women’s sports teams to males on his first day in office. This led to the deluge of videos of males clattering their female opponents, which ultimately curdled public opinion. You can’t argue that the question of males in women’s sports teams is the civil rights issue of our

Read the rest


Everyone must adopt the minority belief

Feb 9th, 2025 2:20 am | By

Sonia Sodha puts it very well.

Some things are plain common sense. Female employees should not be expected to share changing rooms with male colleagues. They shouldn’t be socially shamed into undressing around them, or being in spaces where male colleagues get undressed in front of them.

Common sense, but at the same time, transphobic and evil and yet another bad thing women do.

…most people don’t need to read accounts of how uncomfortable mixed-sex changing facilities make some women feel, or statistics showing that voyeurism and exposure are two of the most common male sex crimes, to understand how wrong this would be.

But not managers at NHS Fife, it would seem. Despite the law of the land

Read the rest


Another explosion

Feb 8th, 2025 3:23 pm | By

Nope this is no good. Consumer financial protection is a good thing.

CNN:

Russell Vought took over as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Friday night and officials from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency deleted the banking watchdog’s X account, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.

Vought’s new role, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, came a day after he was confirmed by the Senate to lead the Office of Management and Budget.

The source told CNN that DOGE officials have been granted administrative access to CFPB systems, including content management system, back-end systems for the bureau’s website and the active directory of personnel.

Gee I wonder why guys like Trump and … Read the rest