The Independent goes out of its way to rub our noses in the fact that women don’t even get to have our own day any more:

Don’t tell me what a woman is, based entirely on what she is not

Says a man pretending to be a woman. Hey bub don’t tell us we don’t get to say that men are not women. You’re not a woman, based entirely on the fact that you’re a man.

Jordan Gray is the guy who played the piano with his penis on tv.

His first move is to gloat:

Indy Voices has asked me what it means to be a woman in 2023. I’m honoured by that question.

Of course he is. He … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Rev David Brindley on Do you wanna be a slave? Do you?

Apart from the bit about slavery, this is a direct copy of the Australian policy of the last 20 years.

We have people confined to places like Manus Island and Nauru, so determined are we that “if you come by boat, you will never settle in Australia”. We paid millions of dollars to Cambodia to take a handful of these poor, desperate people. The USA and New Zealand have taken some off our hands, but too many still languish.

Apart from the inhumanity, we are also losing great opportunities by not settling these people and taking advantage of the undoubted skills many can bring. … Read the rest

What are human rights?

If you come to the UK illegally:

➡️ You can’t claim asylum

➡️ You can’t benefit from our modern slavery protections

➡️ You can’t make spurious human rights claims

➡️ You can’t stay pic.twitter.com/026oSvKoJZ

— Rishi Sunak (@RishiSunak) March 7, 2023

It’s clearly meant to shock. What next? Rishi Sunak tweeting promises of concentration camps? Gas chambers? Mass graves?

The Guardian notes that it’s calculated…which is pretty clear if you think about it, because nobody more intelligent than Donald Trump would say that accidentally. Sunak is definitely not stupid, let alone as stupid as Trump.

The problem with the government’s illegal migration bill is not just that it is inhumane and unworkable. It is that

Glinner urges readers to try to buy a copy of Hannah Barnes’s book Time to Think. A reader reports on one such attempt:

So on Tuesday last week (28 Feb), I looked for ‘Time to think’ in Waterstones Broadgate (Liverpool Street station). I was told that they had one copy, but that it had been ordered specifically for a customer. I was told that the nearest branch with a copy was Gower Street. (I didn’t look there…)

One copy. Why just one copy? I don’t think that’s how these things work. I think normally bookstores get several (or hundreds if they know it will fly off the shelves). They seem to have just One Copy only when it’s a book … Read the rest

Yet another example of how we’re living under the rule of…Tucker Carlson.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Monday released security video from the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, using footage provided exclusively to him by Speaker Kevin McCarthy to portray the riot as a peaceful gathering.

So much wrong in that one sentence. A tucker carlson should not be in a position to “release” such security video. McCarthy should obviously not be giving it to him at all, let alone exclusively. Tucker Carlson should not be trying to portray the January 6 horror as a “peaceful gathering.”

Carlson acquired the tapes as part of a push by McCarthy, R-Calif., to win the speaker’s gavel.

At long last.

NHS must reinstate ‘woman’ in cancer and pregnancy webpages, staff demand

The NHS must reinstate the word “woman” in its cancer and pregnancy webpages, more than a thousand staff in the health service have demanded.

Yes! Finally!

At least 19 women’s health pages on the NHS website fail to mention women either at all or in addition to non-gendered language, including for guidance on ovarian and uterus cancer, menopause, childbirth and heavy periods.

As if those items were gender-neutral.

So now around 1,200 doctors, nurses and health practitioners have said stop doing that, pointing out that it harms women.

The NHS online overview for womb cancer previously opened by referring to “the female reproductive system”

Insulting tits guy has been placed on leave.

A Canadian teacher has reportedly been placed on leave after months of criticism from parents about her size-Z prosthetic breasts.

Kayla Lemieux, an industrial arts teacher at Oakville Trafalgar High School in Ontario, Canada, was reportedly photographed by a newspaper outside school, dressed as a man and without the prosthetics.

Dressed as a man? How could they tell? I was outside today dressed in black jeans, a turtleneck and couple of sweaters, and a windbreaker. Was I dressed as a man? (I know, it’s not fair – it’s easier for a woman to wear jeans and t shirts than for a man to wear dresses and high heels.)

At a board

Young-adult novelist and Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse takes the bold and original step of calling JK Rowling a bigot.

Things are said that sound reasonable. You would only know they were unreasonable — they were, in fact, wrong — if you had the patience to fact-check, or if you had the personal experience of counterevidence.

Like believing, or saying you believe, that men can be women? That kind of personal experience?

Is it common for transgender rights activists to virulently protest “feminist” conferences, as the podcast asserts?

To answer that last question, you would have to already know — because the podcast won’t tell you — that the “feminist” conferences protested by transgender rights advocates are typically gatherings

Ohhhhhhh yes it is.

Of course it’s a belief system. What else would it be? There is no physical test for it or physical symptom of it. It’s an idea. It’s a feeling, an interpretation, a story, an (attempted) explanation.

Also, yet another of those “reminders” that aren’t reminders because they’re not true. “Reminder that the sun is smaller than the earth.”

Also people don’t “just happen” to be trans. It’s about the least “just happen” way to be you can imagine. It’s something people decide to call themselves. They don’t “just happen” to make that decision; they make it because they’re alive now as opposed to a century ago or a century in the future, so they … Read the rest

The Washington Post on taboo teachings:

Excerpts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Passages from Christopher Columbus’s journal describing his brutal treatment of Indigenous peoples. A data set on New York police’s use of force, analyzed by race.

These are among the items teachers have nixed from their lesson plans this school year and last, facing pressure from parents worried about political indoctrination, administrators wary of controversy, and a spate of new state laws restricting education on race, gender and LGBTQ issues.

The “TQ” issues of course complicate things.

The quiet censorship comes as debates over whether and how to instruct children about race, racism, U.S. history, gender identity and sexuality inflame politics and consume

Oops, methane is leaking.

More than 1,000 “super-emitter” sites gushed the potent greenhouse gas methane into the global atmosphere in 2022, the Guardian can reveal, mostly from oil and gas facilities. The worst single leak spewed the pollution at a rate equivalent to 67m running cars.

Separate data also reveals 55 “methane bombs” around the world – fossil fuel extraction sites where gas leaks alone from future production would release levels of methane equivalent to 30 years of all US greenhouse gas emissions.

Methane emissions cause 25% of global heating today and there has been a “scary” surge since 2007, according to scientists. This acceleration may be the biggest threat to keeping below 1.5C of global heating and seriously

Men who pretend to be women are so INSPIRING.

Diana Sarosi is Director of Policy & Campaigns at Oxfam Canada. She retweeted Oxfam Canada’s obnoxious tweet about celebrating “the diversity of all identities” with an even more obnoxious version of “trans women are BETTER than women” bit of drivel.

I’m proud to work for an organization that is trans inclusive and has the superb @FaeJohnstone on our board! Her courage and determination inspires us all to fight even harder for the rights of all women.

Or to put it another way, “Fuck you, women.”

We’re supposed to be impressed and deeply moved by Fay Johnstone’s “courage and determination” to shove women aside and take center stage himself. We’re not. … Read the rest

Schools shouldn’t have “blasphemy” rules.

The home secretary has agreed to issue new guidance on ‘blasphemy’ incidents at schools, following concerns raised by the National Secular Society.

In a letter sent last week, the NSS asked Suella Braverman to work with the Department for Education towards “an improved understanding of blasphemy and its role in the wider threat posed by Islamism” in the context of state schools.

Writing in The Times this weekend, Braverman said schools should answer to “pupils and parents” rather than “self-appointed community activists”.

“I will work with the Department for Education to issue new guidance spelling this out”, she added.

Ms Braverman’s article continues: “We do not have blasphemy laws in Great Britain, and must

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Will we be queering queer?

Queer in the queer theory/new queer movement sense is the worst word, because it represents self-contradiction. It implies a confusing, a muddying, a cognitive dissonance built right into it. To queer a concept isn’t to prove it or disprove it; it’s neither hardening the rules nor softening them; it’s neither clarifying the boundaries nor eliminating them; it’s neither respectful or disrespectful. It’s putting something in almost a quantum state exactly so that it can’t be inspected accurately.

“Queer” is applied to sexual orientation by straight people most of all, because they both want to be a part of the gay rights movement (which would make them imposters), and they … Read the rest

Via What a Maroon I read a review by Jacob Brogan of a novel about lesbians which (as WaM noted) doesn’t use the word “lesbian” once. The word “queer” on the other hand appears nine times. I get that the word “queer” has been, according to some people, reclaimed or repurposed or seized or whatever you want to call it. There’s a parallel, I think, to the way the word “Negro” went out of favor to be replaced by its English language equivalent, “Black.” It was a move from the weirdly euphemistic to the blunt, because what the hell was there to be euphemistic about anyway? “Negro” came to seem tellingly squeamish. There’s also of course a parallel to the … Read the rest

In Argentina as in the US abortion is difficult or impossible to get.

María was 23 when she decided to have an abortion.

At the health centre where she had gone for treatment, she says she overheard one doctor saying to a colleague: “When will these girls learn to keep their legs closed?”

It’s always the girls who have to keep their legs closed, not the boys who have to keep their dicks in their pants.

María lives in Salta, a religiously conservative province in north-west Argentina, where many healthcare workers are still against abortion. She was eventually given a pill to end her pregnancy, but she says the nurses were reluctant to treat her and wanted to make her

A letter to the Guardian wants us to know that Mormonism IS NOT SILLY.

While it was heartening to read that Lucy Mangan found those featured in the documentary The Mormons Are Coming to be “lovely – gentle, kind, sincere” (TV review, 28 February), her comment that they were “fill[ing] people’s emotional voids with their lies” attempted to perpetuate the derogatory caricature that Mormons are hapless simpletons.

But supernatural religious claims are just that: supernatural.

The review took aim at what Mangan termed “the essential absurdity” of Joseph Smith’s claim to have received ancient records from an angel. I doubt such remarks would be used to describe Moses before the burning bush, or Gabriel’s appearance to the prophet

Washington Post cartoonist sums up:

https://t.co/ZhDwiPFbff pic.twitter.com/UGEH7teZ78

— Michael de Adder (@deAdder) February 18, 2023

… Read the rest

Trump took his show on the road yesterday.

The former president spent his wide-ranging, nearly two-hour remarks rehashing the “America First” agenda that has played well with his base.

With “wide-ranging” meaning rambling and incoherent.

“In 2016, I declared I am your voice,” he said. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

He’s downright biblical!

Speaking with reporters before the speech, Trump said he would stay in the race even if he is indicted in ongoing criminal investigations of his handling of presidential documents and his role in instigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

…

After months

That’s nice. That’s charming. Oxfam Canada thinks women don’t get to have a day for themselves. Other subordinated groups get to have a day for themselves, but women don’t. Why’s that? Because we’re such Karens? Is that it?

@OxfamCanada stands in solidarity with @FaeJohnstone and all trans folks, who are fighting for their rights everyday.

We recognize and celebrate the diversity of all identities, and will not tolerate any hate and bigotry.
Read our statement: https://t.co/udy5ND3IxK pic.twitter.com/PWiKwc2OtX

— Oxfam Canada (@OxfamCanada) March 3, 2023

Fighting for what rights? What rights do trans people – especially trans women – want that they don’t have? What rights do they have to fight for? The right to shove women aside and take all … Read the rest