Katha Pollitt on Elizabeth Gilbert’s self-cancellation:

Sometimes, the censors get lucky. The latest writer to cancel herself is Elizabeth Gilbert, the immensely popular author of Eat, Pray, Love and other memoirs, novels, and self-help tracts. On Monday, Gilbert announced on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook that she is “making a course correction” and pulling her upcoming novel, The Snow Forest, from publication. The novel, she explains, is about a Russian family that withdraws from Soviet society in the 1930s and remains isolated for many years in Siberia. “Over the course of this weekend,” she writes, “I have received an enormous massive outpouring of reactions and responses from my Ukrainian readers, expressing anger, sorrow, disappointment and pain about the fact that

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“The reason we haven’t defined hate crime in our bill banning hate crime is that then people would know what the crime is.” They’re going with that?

[Ireland’s Minister for Justice Helen] McEntee also defended the proposed hate crime and hate speech bill, and said she believes the majority of people want to see it enacted.

…

“Firstly, when it comes to the hate speech and the hate crime legislation, the reason that we haven’t defined hate is by defining hate and using another word, you then have to try and describe essentially what that means. And you’re potentially leaving a gap where certain prosecutions might fall or where it may be more difficult to have prosecutions under this legislation.”

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Dang, self-important much?

https://twitter.com/MavenOfMayhem/status/1668547072549699585

Definitely! So especially important for some boutique genderperson to cross the pond to rescue Britain from the parching lack of boutique genderpersons. Thank god she has arrived to do her advocacy work!!

https://twitter.com/MavenOfMayhem/status/1668699649362784256

Even Parliament is asking her what it should do! I’m impressed now.

https://twitter.com/MavenOfMayhem/status/1668747621161406465

Hmmmmmm. Do we think that really happened? Google News doesn’t even turn up news of her arrival. … Read the rest

Don’t bring up Anne Frank only to talk about something else.

Today is Anne Franks's birthday

In Uganda, Afghanistan & Somalia, LGBTs are being hunted like Anne was

They hide in rooms like she did – fearing arrest, torture & execution

In the name of #AnneFrank NEVER AGAIN!@benjamincohen @benjaminbutter @BenWeinthal @sanditoksvig pic.twitter.com/av7b1z3VPZ

— Peter Tatchell (@PeterTatchell) June 12, 2023

Uganda Afghanistan and Somalia are not havens of human rights, for sure, but if you’re going to talk about Anne Frank, then talk about Anne Frank. Don’t bring her up just to point to something else.… Read the rest

Fucking hell.

I am hoping the Metropolitan police will reconsider their decision on the criminality of the first tweet threatening to kill me in the light of the second tweet threatening not just my life but that of 2 other MPs @RosieDuffield1 & @JNHanvey https://t.co/WXJiJUjUQT pic.twitter.com/R9MD0c2RK4

— Joanna Cherry KC (@joannaccherry) June 14, 2023

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Trump says the law is not the law.

Hours after he was fingerprinted, booked and entered a “not guilty” plea in federal court in Miami, former President Donald Trump defied the very premise of the federal government’s case against him, claiming presidents have an “absolute right” to keep any and all documents they want. 

Which is funny because that’s the opposite of the truth.

“Whatever documents a president decides to take with him, he has the right to do so. It’s an absolute right. This is the law,” Trump said. 

The law is the opposite of that. The exact, clearly worded, explicit opposite. At noon on January 20 all presidential records become the property of the National Archive. That… Read the rest

News from Queensland:

Trans and gender-diverse Queenslanders will be able to change the gender on their birth certificates without having to undergo surgery, in a development that advocates have called “life-changing”.

Previously, people could only apply to change the sex on their birth certificates where they’d undergone sexual reassignment surgery – an invasive, costly procedure that isn’t readily available.

The new laws remove that provision and instead require people to supply a supporting statement from someone they’ve known for 12 months or longer.

Well let’s not stop with gender. Let’s have laws saying people can change their species on their birth certificates. First you’d have to make species a category on birth certificates, because as of now it’s just … Read the rest

The very first words of the Newsweek piece are a lie.

A small subset of conservatives online has expressed outrage at Johns Hopkins University over its non-binary-inclusive definition of “lesbian” in its glossary of LGBTQ+ terms.

The people outraged are far from exclusively “conservatives” and there’s nothing “inclusive” about defining women as non-men – especially when the Johns Hopkins definition of “gay” does not match that insulting (and useless) definition of “lesbian.”

The Baltimore-based university, a major hub of medical research in the U.S., maintains an extensive glossary of definitions for terms relevant to the broad LGBTQ+ community. The definitions are often updated with greater inclusivity in mind, and as the medical establishment’s understanding of gender and sexual identity evolves.

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Victory!

We won. Women still will be women. My guess is that the revelation that the author of the @JohnsHopkins LGBTQ Glossary was a transwoman activist erasing only women and not men sealed the fate of the glossary.

Never hesitate to fightback. Oh, and Happy Pride Month! pic.twitter.com/2vYFrE5rrH

— Fred Sargeant (@FredSargeant) June 13, 2023

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CNN goes through some of Trump’s lies about his activities:

In his speech in Georgia on Saturday, Trump mentioned a photo that was included in the indictment. The photo, which was taken at Mar-a-Lago, shows a toppled box from which papers had spilled out onto the floor.

Trump said: “I looked – it looked so orderly and nice. Somehow somebody turned over one of the boxes. Did you see that? I said, ‘I wonder who did that? Did the FBI do that?’”

Facts First: The suggestion that it’s even possible that the FBI might have turned over this box is nonsense. According to the indictment, the photo was taken in December 2021 by Trump aide and accused co-conspirator

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It’s all or nothing, I tells ya, all or nothing.

https://twitter.com/IndiaWilloughby/status/1668414189893828608

In the bin with her! She doesn’t do it abjectly enough so into the bin.

Yes – virtually your opening line. You don’t class me or others who’ve had to transition as a women or female. I and other trans peeps didn’t change gender, Jess. We changed sex to match the gender we were born with. Hiving trans women off as a group separate from women is wrong. pic.twitter.com/zbIVN9ynbj

— India Willoughby (@IndiaWilloughby) June 13, 2023

“You don’t pretend I am what I’m not, so into the bin with you. Saying men are a group separate from women is wrong. You have to utter the lies exactly as … Read the rest

Well when you put it that way…

The memes, tho #TrumpArraignment pic.twitter.com/jxfhjtRzNc

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) June 13, 2023

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This is an interesting little detail. Trump isn’t even paying Walter Nauta: he’s making the campaign pay him. I think we’ve been reminded that’s illegal via all the other ways Trump has flouted campaign laws.

When Trump left the White House, Nauta was part of the post-presidency transition, serving for another six months while still in the Navy. Trump indicated in a social media post that at some point, Nauta “retired” from military service and “then transitioned into private life as a personal aide.”  

Federal Election Commission records show that beginning in August 2021, Nauta was paid by Trump’s “Save America PAC,” compensation that included salary, travel expense reimbursement and bonus. He later appeared on Trump’s 2024 campaign payroll. He has remained

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So far I can’t find any news media reporting this. Speak Up for Women has a statement on Twitter:

Speak Up for Women statement regarding the granting of diversion for Albert Park assailant.

New Zealand has a shameful record of family and sexual violence. A main driver of this is that male violence is excused and minimised. This Court decision to grant diversion to the man who assaulted the 70 year old grandmother at the Let Women Speak event in Albert Park is part of a dangerous cultural shift the political class has endorsed – that the use of physical violence is to be expected and excused in retaliation for words or beliefs that don’t align with theirs.

Men

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For some reason Trump has been unable to hire new lawyers to help him clear up this little misunderstanding.

Trump and his legal team spent the afternoon before his arraignment interviewing potential lawyers but the interviews did not result in any joining the team in time for Trump’s initial court appearance scheduled for 3pm ET on Tuesday after several attorneys declined to take him as a client.

Trump has also seemingly been unable to find a specialist national security lawyer, eligible to possess a security clearance, to help him navigate the Espionage Act charges.

The last-minute scramble to find a veteran trial lawyer was a familiar process for Trump, who has had difficulty hiring and keeping lawyers to defend him

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It all makes sense now – straight people can be “queer.” Who knew?!

Just as it’s possible to be bisexual in a long-term relationship with someone of the same gender, it’s possible to be queer in a long term relationship with someone of another gender.

— Kirsty Blackman (@KirstySNP) June 13, 2023

Then what does “queer” mean? Interesting? Special? Better than all those boring beige people in long term relationships (commonly known as “marriages”) with someone of another gender?

Dennis isn’t having it.

This gets on my nerves.

Kirsty.

I am gay, I am married to a bloke.

So are you, that means you have a straight marriage and you're living a straight life mate.

Please stop co-opting my community

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Give that child a scholarship to a university of her choice.

https://twitter.com/veterans_i/status/1668490994994536449… Read the rest

Guest post by Jonathan A. Gallant

I invite truly virtuous individuals to join my new organization “Electron Justice”.  We are dedicated to decolonializing electricity by eliminating all the terminology of the colonialist, Eurocentric, heteronormativist old culture we must overturn.

For example, consider the coulomb, the unit of electric charge.  It is named after the engineer and electrical experimenter Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, who was also a militarist and a colonialist.   He served in the French army for 28 years, retiring with the rank of captain right after the French Revolution.  Part of his military service was spent overseeing military construction in Martinique, a Caribbean island where black slaves labored on plantations, and which remains a French colonial possession to this day.  … Read the rest

The Argus, a local paper in Brighton and Hove, reports:

Police have made an arrest after online threats to kill campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen.

A Twitter account in the name of Layla Le Fey posted threats to the campaigner also known as Posie Parker.

Here’s a surprise. The story had said police arrested a woman after the online threats. It said it just a few minutes ago, but now they’ve changed it. There were many objections and I’ll be damned for once someone paid attention. Unfortunately they do say “a woman” later in the story. Inch by inch by inch we’ll win this war.

One tweet said: “I’m a trans woman and I’m not ashamed to admit I’d be happy to physically

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Uhhhhh…for what purpose?

Dearie me! Maya Forstater every minute of every day if the alternative is you Willoughby. pic.twitter.com/c92cbmXfOa

— Jacky Holyoake (@JackyHolyoake) June 12, 2023

I guess we’re supposed to gasp and say “Wow Willoughby is so hot.” But that’s stupid. We know he uses filters and extremely heavy makeup…but anyway what woman age 57 posts selfies like that? He’s trying to look like a teenage beach bunny or some shit but we know it’s fake so why do it??? Why isn’t he embarrassed to do it? Why doesn’t he look at it and realize what a fool it makes him look?

That open mouth thing – we know why models and actors do that, and why photographers … Read the rest