All entries by this author

The elements of style

Sep 10th, 2024 6:33 am | By

Tom Nichols on that guy:

Here is part of what he posted early Saturday evening over at his personal rantatorium, Truth Social:

CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that

Read the rest


Legal definitions

Sep 9th, 2024 11:33 am | By

What is a woman?

Anneliese Dodds, the Minister for Women and Equalities, has said in response to a written question asking whether the government plans to amend the legal definition of what a woman is:

“We are proud of the Equality Act and the rights and protections it affords women. The Government does not plan to amend legal definitions in the act.” 

Hundreds of women are coming to Parliament on Wednesday on a mission to change her mind as part of the Stand up for single-sex services campaign.

If “women” no longer means “women” then how can women have rights specific to women?

They are going to tell her, and other MPs, how the Equality Act is failing to protect

Read the rest


Already running into walls

Sep 9th, 2024 10:31 am | By

Oh how sad, people in Canada have to pay for some of their Magic Gender Care.

A new gender-affirming care provision under the federal government’s employee health plan — a change touted as a major win for transgender plan members — has turned into an ongoing struggle for some trans workers who say they’re rethinking future surgeries because they’re already running into walls getting claims reimbursed. 

I have to wonder why the government pays for mutilations in the first place.

Gender-affirming care encompasses a number of treatments, including mental health counselling, hormone replacement therapy, genital surgery, breast augmentation, pectoral implants and even something as basic as a haircut.

Genital surgery, they say cheerfully, when what they mean is amputation/mutilation.… Read the rest



Defaced by the spectacle

Sep 9th, 2024 8:54 am | By

Oliver Brown in the Telegraph:

After seeing the beauty of these Games defaced by the spectacle of Valentina Petrillo, a 51-year-old father-of-two, taking semi-final places in female sprinting from two women barely half the Italian’s age, you might have expected Andrew Parsons, president of the International Paralympic Committee, to commit – at the very least – to a review of the ridiculous policy that let this happen. Instead he seemed, at his closing press conference, almost to celebrate it as a watershed.

Parsons began these 11 days by spelling out his ambition for an “inclusion revolution”. Include everybody: that is the mantra. Even if it now means excluding women from their own category. This is not some

Read the rest


The two men tried to erase her

Sep 9th, 2024 8:31 am | By

Women are such a damn nuisance, you know?

Surrogate mother wins access to her biological son in landmark case

She’s not actually a surrogate mother, she’s a mother.

The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, won the case after the gay couple for whom she carried the baby for nine months tried to stop her seeing her own biological child and erase her from his life. The two men claimed that the little boy would be confused if he saw his mother because he lived with them in a ‘motherless family’ and was being raised within the LGBT community.

The couple told her there was ‘no vacancy’ for her ‘just because [he] has same-sex parents’ – even

Read the rest


The victim of entryism

Sep 9th, 2024 5:28 am | By

Continuing the theme, Jacky Davis in the Observer on Saturday:

he British Medical Association is both a trade union and a professional organisation. Professional activities such as its successful campaigns around seatbelt legislation and smoking have added weight to its standing as a union. It is not noted for drama and histrionics.

So there was significant surprise when its governing body, the BMA council, recently voted to reject the recommendations of the Cass review

BMA members were genuinely outraged. Letters to the BMJ accused the council of bringing “the BMA and the medical profession into disrepute”. One correspondent said they were “more shocked than anything I can think of in 40 years of practising medicine”. Some members, aghast

Read the rest


Politicize ALL the things

Sep 9th, 2024 5:09 am | By

When doctors clash:

The British Medical Association has threatened the reputation of all UK doctors by rejecting the findings of the landmark Cass review of transgender healthcare, a leading member of the BMA has told the Observer.

Dr Jacky Davis claims that the doctors’ union’s stance on the Cass review is “irrational”, has created a “fracture” between its leadership and the grassroots doctors it represents, and left the medical profession “in an uproar”.

What is that stance? Fingers in the ears shouting NONONONONO

The BMA refused to endorse the findings of Dr Hilary Cass, whose review was published in April and was widely welcomed. It claimed the review contained “unsubstantiated recommendations” and its council called on

Read the rest


Nah

Sep 8th, 2024 5:10 pm | By

Labour brushes off women yet again:

The Government will not carry forward plans to rewrite the Equality Act 2010 that were aimed at protecting single-sex spaces, the Minister for Women and Equalities has confirmed.

Anneliese Dodds said there were no plans to update the existing legislation, which the Conservatives had promised to reform ahead of the general election.

Because women don’t matter. Men matter, and men who pretend to be women really matter, but women are so much lint on the sweater of life.

The Tories planned to rewrite the Act in order to make it clear that “sex” in the legislation means “biological sex” instead of the gender with which a person identifies.

This would have allowed

Read the rest


Guest post: A human instinct to bargain

Sep 8th, 2024 4:48 pm | By

Originally a comment by Alan Peakall on Vice n virtue.

Certainty of paternity may be the ultimate material basis of the imperative for sexual control, but it does not account for religious taboos on non-procreative sexual acts. Possibly they are Gouldian spandrels emerging from cross firing of the supposed exchange instinct asserted to be disclosed by evolutionary psychologists’ study of Wason test experiments. Once humans have acquired the intellectual sophistication to recognise sexual pleasure as an inducement to reproduction, non-reproductive sex becomes a potential trgger for guilt/shame at cheating nature or Nature personified as a god. Religion as an institution then seizes on that guilt as a means of social control and incorporates it into a meme matrix. This … Read the rest



Vice n virtue

Sep 8th, 2024 11:23 am | By

Saeedullah Safi in the Irish Times on the demolition of women’s rights in Afghanistan:

“My voice is now a crime,” says Mariam, a teacher from Kabul province. Speaking over a shaky WhatsApp connection, Mariam (whose name has been changed for her safety) describes her life as a woman under new Taliban rules. “I am terrified to leave my house,” she says. “Not because I fear the violence in the streets, but because I fear my own voice might betray me.”

Last week, the Taliban’s supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, approved new “vice and virtue” laws, which include a total ban on women’s voices in public and further restrictions on their presence outside the home.

Because, you see, if a man … Read the rest



No joke

Sep 8th, 2024 11:13 am | By

Speaking up for the women of Afghanistan.

Read the rest



Hilarity

Sep 8th, 2024 10:51 am | By

Wow, what a funny joke.

https://twitter.com/ACBofficials/status/1832765832612520344 Bet you thought that was some stupid slag of a woman under there, didn’t you? DIDN’T YOU??… Read the rest


Election interference

Sep 8th, 2024 10:14 am | By

Trump issues threats:

Former President Donald Trump, who makes frequent false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen through rampant fraud, warned Saturday that he would attempt to imprison anyone who engages in “unscrupulous behavior” during the 2024 race results.

No he didn’t threaten to attempt to imprison, he said he would imprison. Trump never tempers what he says with an awareness of limitations on his power, he just issues the threatyest threats he can come up with.

The threat was issued in a post on Truth Social, his social media website, and repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, accusing Democrats of “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery.”

“The 2024 Election, where Votes have just started

Read the rest


Rich culture of hospitality

Sep 8th, 2024 5:58 am | By

How sweet.

Notice anyone missing?

https://twitter.com/ACBofficials/status/1832666909562593733… Read the rest


These relatively small cities

Sep 7th, 2024 4:35 pm | By
These relatively small cities

Urrgghh I did not know this – Trump has been campaigning in sundown towns.

Howell, Michigan. LaCrosse, Wisconsin. Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Mosinee, Wisconsin.

These relatively small cities — spread across midwestern swing states and far from dense metropolitan areas — all have one thing in common: They are former “sundown” towns, where threats of Jim Crow-era violence enforced racial segregation.

After a series of rallies in major cities to kick off his general election campaign, the Republican presidential candidate zeroed in on a handful of cities with familiar pasts.

That’s really really really disgusting.

Viral criticism across social media has argued that Trump’s latest campaign stretch isn’t a coincidence but a “dogwhistle” to racist supporters. Vice President Kamala Harris’s

Read the rest


The most important word

Sep 7th, 2024 11:00 am | By

Oliver Brown being sly in the Telegraph:

Valentina Petrillo, the Italian father-of-two who qualified on Friday for a second semi-final of these Paris Paralympics in women’s sprinting, has hit back at being called an “out-and-proud cheat” by author JK Rowling, saying: “I’ve never even read Harry Potter.”

Nicely done. The father-of-two in women’s sprinting, who retorts to criticism with a fatuous irrelevance.

Despite the backlash, Petrillo claimed: “There is so much transphobia in all this. The most important word in Olympic and Paralympic sports is inclusion.”

No it isn’t. Of course it isn’t. How could it be? Sports are about competition, which means there are losers along with winners, and in fact there are far more losers than … Read the rest



What about artificial hairdos?

Sep 7th, 2024 10:14 am | By

Trump zeroes in on the real cheating in elections.

He’s tall. That definitely means he should win.… Read the rest



Guest post: Compare and contrast

Sep 7th, 2024 9:10 am | By

Originally a comment by Acolyte of Sagan on The most important word.

Two incidents from last week at the Paralympics.

Partially-sighted Australian runner, Jaryd Clifford, accidentally let go of the tether linking him to his guide 4998 metres into the 5000 metres final. He was the only runner in that race to use guides, i.e. the ‘most’ blind runner in the field, finished in third place but was disqualified from recieving the bronze. Essentially, letting go of the tether at any point in the race, whether intentionally or not, suggests that the guide isn’t really needed and therefore the runner is gaining an unfair advantage. Clifford was disqualified because he broke the rules, and cheats don’t deserve medals, right?… Read the rest



Legal action over telling the truth

Sep 7th, 2024 2:25 am | By

The march of stupidity continues.

A Victorian breastfeeding expert is facing legal action over a series of social media posts denying that transgender women can breastfeed.

Jasmine Sussex is being taken to Queensland’s Civil and Administrative Tribunal by a trans mother after labelling attempts by transwomen to breastfeed their children “experimental’’ and calling it a “dangerous fetish”.

Ms Sussex raised concerns about Queensland trans mother Jennifer Buckley – who was born male but later transitioned into a woman – taking hormones to grow breasts and induce lactation to breastfeed her newborn baby.

No he didn’t “transition into a woman” – there is no such thing. He later started to pretend to be a woman.

The Victorian woman is preparing

Read the rest


More equipped

Sep 7th, 2024 1:39 am | By

The Irish Times:

A transgender woman, who was referred for gender-affirmation surgery in Germany, says she was unable to receive “basic healthcare” on her return to a Dublin hospital.

It wasn’t “basic” healthcare though. It was very specialized.

Paige Behan (26) from Ballyfermot, Dublin, felt “humiliated” and “devastated” when neither the urology, gynaecology nor plastics teams would treat her at St James’s Hospital – the largest acute academic teaching hospital in the State – last month, despite her being referred by her GP for a worsening wound infection at the site of her surgery.

What was his surgery? A “neo-vagina” – which is not basic healthcare, and is arguably not healthcare at all.

Instead she was advised to travel

Read the rest