Originally a comment by Sackbut on ACTUALLY you’re the racist.

This is a complicated issue to me.

I read what Adams said, and I think the way it’s being presented in the media is inaccurate. I don’t like Adams, I think he’s proven himself to be a jerk in oh so many ways, but I think that one quoted bit has a point, even if it’s a strained one.

I used to serve as a moderator on a couple of online discussion forums. One issue that came up frequently was whether to deal with individual posts or with patterns of behavior. For instance, to tell if Oswald is attacking Beatrice in violation of the rules, do we need to … Read the rest

Princeton historian Tera W. Hunter in The Nation:

When I was growing up, my Florida high school required me to endure a course called “Americanism vs. Communism.” I was hardly alone. Between 1962 and 1991, Florida mandated the class for all high school juniors or seniors in public schools. Each lesson had the same takeaway: “Americanism” was all good and “Communism” all bad.

No doubt an offspring of the House Unamerican Activities Committee. You’d think activities should be evaluated on their merits, right, not their location? It’s just dumb to label activities un-Swedish or un-Egyptian or un-Chinese or un-American. America has lots of activities, most of which it shares with other countries or land-masses – speaking of which, by … Read the rest

Boston Children’s Hospital again. They’re so creepy. So perky and cheery and soothing about the nightmare things they’re doing. “Many surgical centers require you to be eighteen,” [winsome tilt of head]; “at Boston Children’s Hospital for top surgery [bi-lateral mastectomy] we’ll see people as young as fifteen if they’ve been affirmed in their gender for a long period of time, and don’t really have any other life complications that make surgery inappropriate.”

Any other life complications like being too fucking young???

She brags about Boston Children’s eagerness to mutilate 15-year-olds, in a gooey sincere caring voice that would lead you to think she’s going to make that bad owie go away right this minute.

Updating to add: Sorry, … Read the rest

Blasphemy hunts continue:

Four pupils have been suspended from a West Yorkshire secondary school after a copy of the Quran was damaged by students.

Wednesday’s incident at Wakefield’s Kettlethorpe High School happened when a copy of the Islamic text was brought in by a Year 10 pupil.

Head teacher Tudor Griffiths said the book remained intact and there was “no malicious intent” from those involved.

There is no shortage of copies of Islam’s holy book. It shouldn’t be a news story that one copy out of billions was “damaged.” You might as well fret that a newspaper got torn.

Maybe if people do it out of malice they should be told to stop bullying, but other than that, nothing … Read the rest

Elon launches another “Hooray for racism!!” into the world.

Twitter and Tesla chief Elon Musk defended Scott Adams, the under-fire creator of “Dilbert,” in a series of tweets Sunday, blasting media organizations for dropping his comic strip after Adams said that White people should “get the hell away from Black people.”

Replying to tweets about the controversy, Musk said it is actually the media that is “racist against whites & Asians.” He offered no criticism of Adams’s comments, in which the cartoonist called Black people a “hate group” and said, “I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

He’s a busy man, he doesn’t have time to comment on what Adams said, he has time only … Read the rest

Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on Questions of bodily autonomy.

Medicalisation of children, and the surgical removal of healthy body parts which are necessary for a full and healthy adult life, aren’t an issue of ‘bodily autonomy’; they’re an issue of bodily integrity. Adults should be protecting children from harmful physical interventions which are wholly unnecessary, and equally should be protecting them from an ideology which is telling them that they need those interventions in order to ever be happy again.

We allow children a say in medical and surgical interventions according to age and competence. My son had no say in the procedure to give him some hearing at the age of four months, so I had … Read the rest

She sums the mess up nicely.

@IMissHitchSlaps pointing out that George Orwell was right about the left and #RepealTheGRA #LetWomenSpeak @standingforxxhttps://t.co/sNJm3k3rMk pic.twitter.com/WClLy1oTUl

— Emily Wilding Davison (@Wommando) February 26, 2023

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Questions of bodily autonomy.

It’s interesting how they mention the anti-abortion laws, but those immediately fall away. It looks like abortion rights are like anti-racism; they have become a tool for trans to use for their own interests, to tie trans to unrelated activism in order to tie their issues to other issues that really are issues of rights.

Indeed. We saw TiM speakers at rallies, which were ostensibly protests against the overturning of Roe v Wade, turn the fight for abortion rights into a subsection of trans demands for “bodily autonomy.” Women’s rights pushed aside for boutique demands. To complete the hijacking of women’s platforms, captured orgs like the … Read the rest

Andrew Sullivan on the war on dissenters:

Five years ago when I wrote “We All Live On Campus Now,” I noted how illiberal practices that originated in elite colleges — bullying, ostracism, public condemnation, speech shutdowns, purges of dissenters — were becoming common in every sphere of life, super-charged by social media. From 2020 on, that dynamic has intensified, especially in journalism, with the media purges of 2020 lifted straight from the campus woke playbook.

And this week, we saw another campus maneuver: an open letter from a thousand or so New York Times contributors, accusing the NYT of “follow[ing] the lead of far-right hate groups” in its coverage of transgender issues. Other campus tactics: a loud

But is it health care, or is it dangerous invasive tampering?

After a midterm election and record flow of anti-transgender legislation last year, Republican state lawmakers this year are zeroing in on questions of bodily autonomy with new proposals to limit gender-affirming health care and abortion access.

Calling it “gender-affirming health care” is tendentious at best. “Attempted sex-changing surgery and hormones” would be more accurate, though of course believers in the ideology would see it as an outrage.

You can’t change sex. You can change gender only if gender is being understood as entirely external and social, which is not how most people understand it. Either way it has nothing to do with health or health care. Assisting it … Read the rest

They're just chanting "terfs kill kids" pic.twitter.com/9qDNKmL9nO

—1) (@alexrubner) February 26, 2023

What does this remind me of? Oh yes…

The Blood Libel.

The term blood libel refers to the false allegation that Jews used the blood of non-Jewish, usually Christian children, for ritual purposes. The Nazis made effective use of the blood libel to demonize Jews, with Julius Steicher’s newspaper Der Stürmer making frequent use of ritual murder imagery in its antisemitic propaganda.

So, in a similar vein, terfs use the blood of trans women to thicken their energy drinks.

Blood libels, together with allegations of well poisoning, were a major theme in Jewish persecution in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern period.

Finally.

Transgender women convicted of violence will be barred from female prisons under new rules to be introduced on Monday.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is toughening its stance, meaning that not only transgender women convicted of sexual assaults but also those jailed for violence will no longer be able to be held in mainstream women’s prisons.

Violent offences will include murder, attempted murder, harming a child, assault with intent to cause serious harm or with injury, endangering life, and harassment. The new rules will also cover all transgender women with male genitalia and will apply regardless of whether transgender prisoners have a gender recognition certificate.

Because as women have said all along, the male genitalia and all that … Read the rest

Hmm. Staunch, or fanatical? Staunch, or one-eyed, clueless, venomous, poisonous?

Ruth Comerford on Clara Vulliamy:

Clara is a staunch Trans rights activist and is passionate about celebrating Trans and Non-Binary children in stories. She has been on the receiving end of horrific online abuse for her opinions. At the time of our interview, she had just locked her Twitter account again because the volume of threatening messages she was receiving was “getting ridiculous”.

Has she though? Horrific abuse? Any receipts for that? Any evidence for the claim of “threatening messages”?

I can’t see the reporter’s name without thinking of Aidan Comerford, but Google didn’t turn up any indication that they’re related, so I don’t know.

“I won’t say who,

We saw the other day that the LA news media reported a sexual assault on a girl of 10 as the crime of a woman when in fact of course the perp was a man who claimed to be a woman. I posted about it here and here.

Now we learn that the LA district attorney suspended a prosecutor for refusing to call the perp a woman. It’s only the right-wing media that are reporting on this.

Los Angeles district attorney George Gascon has suspended a prosecutor for allegedly referring to a convicted child molester and suspected murderer by his birth name and the pronouns that correspond to his sex, rather than the name and pronouns he adopted after

Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on Willoughby feels hunted.

One last thing: the information bar at the bottom gives the number of ‘hate crimes’ for the ‘year to March 2022’. That implies that it’s for the first quarter of 2022, when in fact it covers the year ending in March 2022; in other words, the twelve months from April 2021 to March 2022 inclusive.

There are figures here.

Hate crime is defined as ‘any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic.’ This common definition was agreed in 2007 by the police, Crown Prosecution Service, Prison Service (now the National

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic on Fox News and its contempt for everyone:

Right-wing political and media figures regularly level the accusation of “elitism” at other Americans. But new revelations from Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News and the Fox Corporation over claims of election fraud are reminders that the most cynical elites in America are the Republicans and their media valets.

Is Tucker Carlson out there picking tomatoes or cutting up chickens or driving a truck or teaching first grade or staffing an emergency room or chopping cotton? Tucker Carlson reads a script on camera, and he’s very very rich.

The garbled “elite” hoax has been a goldmine for the likes of Tucker Carlson and Donald … Read the rest

Also Tucker Carlson:

If you spend billions trying to make a place better, and it gets worse, you have an obligation to think about why. Maybe you’re doing it wrong. Maybe you’re not as powerful and clever as you thought you were. Maybe there’s a problem with your formula. 

But none of this ever occurs to people like Tom Nichols and Victoria Nuland and for that matter, Joe Biden. The more discredited they are, the more self-confident they become. They see every failure as evidence that their talents are more desperately needed than ever. What is this? Well, it’s called hubris.

Hmmmmmmmm. What does that remind me of. Something…it’s right there, I’ve almost got it. The more they get … Read the rest

Ok now I get it. Tucker Carlson on Fox tells us the Democrats hoaxed us about them there servers to cover up “The WikiLeaks scandal.”

The DNC’s servers, they claimed, had been hacked by the Russian military. The goal was to hurt Hillary Clinton, whom the Russians feared for her strength and wisdom, and to help Donald Trump, whom they controlled. Russia hacked the servers, in order to hack the election. That was their story. The Washington Post ran with it the first day, as if it were true.

Says the guy who runs with so many things, as if they were true.

But there was never any evidence that it was true. Almost seven years later, there is

Why did The Righteous People bully Christian Henson out? Because he “caused upset.” Oh dear. That’s very bad.

Christian Henson, the co-founder of British software brand Spitfire Audio, has taken to Twitter to share the news that he will no longer remain involved in Spitfire Audio, Pianobook and LABS operations. The announcement follows accusations of Henson espousing allegedly transphobic views.

…

Henson’s departure comes in light of a video essay posted by producer and content creator Jeremy Blake of Red Means Recording. In the video, titled ‘Spitfire Audio has a Transphobia Problem,’ Blake claims that Henson’s comments on transgender rights have caused upset among the music production community and Spitfire customer base. Spitfire collaborators Venus Theory and Skyscape

Another triumph for The Activists.

Henson is a media composer and the “episode” of course is something to do with accusations of “transphobia.” Now he’s being told NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

you quit instead of apologizing? bro. come on. there is nothing weak about owning up to mistakes. in fact that’s the strongest thing you can do. i urge you to challenge these prejudices with proper education on trans issues. we don’t want you to quit, we want you to see yourself.

We don’t want you to quit, we want you to stick around so that we can kick you some more.

Please, Christian, no… this isn’t what anyone, even your most ardent critics wanted. Please *talk* to people who