All entries by this author
Jan 14th, 2023 9:23 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Is the long arm of the law finally reaching out to grab Trump by the shoulder?
Even as Donald Trump prepares to dial up his campaign to take back the White House, the former US president’s political and personal fate may already have been decided by the secret workings of a grand jury in Georgia.
The 23-member panel, convened to consider whether Trump and others committed crimes in trying to overturn his defeat in Georgia when it appeared the state might decide the outcome of the entire 2020 presidential election, was dissolved on Monday after submitting its conclusions and asking that they be made public.
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In November, the day before Trump announced he was again running for the White
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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Jan 13th, 2023 3:58 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
That’s…………..what we’re saying.
That’s the whole point. Gender-neutral awards=women being forgotten. That’s why there have to be awards specifically for women. If the Oscars didn’t have a Best Actress category women would have vastly fewer awards, because most movies have few women and those few women have few lines.
But
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6 comments
Jan 13th, 2023 3:45 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Out of the frying pan into the fire.
An NHS Trust taking over care of trans children from the Tavistock clinic is being trained by controversial charity Mermaids, The Telegraph can reveal.
Why go to all the trouble of removing care of trans children from the Tavistock only to get training from Mermaids? Why not find people who aren’t captive to a deranged ideology?
The charity, which is at the centre of a number of safeguarding rows and is currently under investigation by the regulator, will provide sessions for staff at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust (SLaM) starting this month.
It’s under investigation, but in the meantime – “Keep doing what you’ve been doing!”
Mermaids’ influence on
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2 comments
Jan 13th, 2023 11:09 am |
By Ophelia Benson
A genius comments on Joan Smith’s The Brits go gender-neutral and women disappear:
This is the real paradox of late stage feminism, by insisting that women can be equal to men in everything and anything they have forced women to compete in spaces and venues where Nature has given men genetic advantages – hence women are pushed down the hierarchy.
Yes indeed, women are genetically inferior to men in the writing novels departments, which is why we’ve never heard of Jane Austen or Emily Bronte or George Eliot or Charlotte Bronte or Edith Wharton or Willa Cather or Mary McCarthy or Margaret Drabble or Margaret Atwood.… Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
3 comments
Jan 13th, 2023 10:51 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Let’s drop the sex categories for the awards, they said! Let’s make the awards gender-neutral, they said! It will be awesome, they said!
Who could possibly have predicted that would happen? The top category in a major music award goes ‘gender-neutral’ — and this year’s nominees are all men. The Brit Awards scrapped the best male and best female categories last year, ignoring warnings that the decision would lead to the exclusion of women. Five male artists, including Stormzy and Harry Styles, are in the running in 2023, with not a woman — or a gender-neutral person — in sight.
Welllllllllll but then obviously that’s because women aren’t as good, isn’t it? Not at all because women just get … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
2 comments
Jan 13th, 2023 8:06 am |
By Ophelia Benson
How to suppress the vote:
When [Ohio] Gov. Mike DeWine last week signed what’s been called the nation’s strictest voter ID law, it raised fears that it would disenfranchise large numbers of voters in poor communities where people are less likely to meet the new requirements.
Why? Because strict ID is not wealth-neutral.
Those fears seem to be supported by a September report that estimates 1 million Ohioans have suspended licenses because of debts from things such as a lack of insurance, unpaid fines, and court costs. That’s in a state with 8 million registered voters.
The analysis, by the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, said the suspensions by far fall most heavily on impoverished urban communities of
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3 comments
Jan 12th, 2023 5:47 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Originally a comment by Sastra on Damn reaper, the post that reported the bad news that Harriet Hall had died suddenly.
This is very sad news indeed.
I was her official First Fan. I’d somehow come across several of her early essays (including iirc the “Tooth Fairy Science” one) and thought they were wonderful. James Randi’s second The Amazing Meeting was held that year in Vegas and he’d put up the names of all the attendees on a board in the lobby. I was thrilled to see “Harriet Hall” listed and spent the convention looking at the women’s name tags. No luck. Near the end of TAM we went to see Penn & Teller and afterwards a bunch … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
2 comments
Jan 12th, 2023 2:58 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
It’s been pouring rain all day and still is raining, though not quite so hard – but all the same there’s someone with a snarling backpack blower out there, the one who generally takes an hour or more to shift every leaf on the large property across the alley. I hate the sound noise of blowers even more than I hate the noise of mowers, weedeaters, hedgeclippers, edgers, and all the rest of the box of tricks.
I’m not the only one who hates the damn things.
It’s almost impossible to enjoy a quiet moment in many of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods without hearing leaf blowers. The engines alternate between bone-shaking rumbles and high-pitched whines that assault our ears.
It’s a … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
37 comments
Jan 12th, 2023 11:12 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The CBC on the suppression of Robert Wintemute’s talk at McGill:
Trans rights advocates stormed into a talk Tuesday afternoon at McGill University led by a speaker associated with a group they say is “notoriously transphobic and trans-exclusionary.”
Not a great lede. “Trans rights” always need to be specified, because most readers will think just “human rights for trans people” when in fact what’s meant is a set of novel “rights” that are incompatible with other people’s rights. The people storming the talk weren’t so much “advocates” as an angry shouty mob who physically prevented people from going in. The way they libel the speaker shouldn’t be just slapped down there in the first sentence as if it were … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
13 comments
Jan 12th, 2023 10:16 am |
By Ophelia Benson
What. the. hell.
I magnified to read the sign between the two so that you wouldn’t have to: it says “The nearest female WC is on the other side of the floor.”
PS fuck you and have a nice day.
Why do they do this? How can they not see how insulting and unfair and grotesque it is? How can they think it’s ok to give men toilets just for men while opening women’s toilets to anyone who feels like dropping in?… Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
10 comments
Jan 12th, 2023 9:14 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The dishonest reporting files:
Truthout:
Students at McGill University in Montreal Protest Anti-Trans Speaker
The speaker, Robert Wintemute, is a member of the anti-trans hate group LGB Alliance.
The students did more than “protest” and the speaker is not “anti-trans” and the LGB Alliance is not anti-trans and not a hate group. That’s a lot of lies for just the headline and subhead.
The story seems to have been written before the “protest” happened.
Lawyer Robert Wintemute is giving a speech at the university entitled “The Sex vs. Gender (Identity) Debate In the United Kingdom and the Divorce of LGB from T.” Wintemute is a member of the United Kingdom-based LGB Alliance, which claims to advocate for lesbian, gay
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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
9 comments
Jan 12th, 2023 6:18 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Why we can’t have anything nice ever:
Schools across the UK are encountering increasing numbers of pupils who admire [social media misogynist Andrew] Tate – and so teachers are having to work out how to respond.
Some are actively putting out guidance on how to talk about him, as part of a concerted attempt to tackle his influence.
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“A lot of the boys can see that there’s parts of Andrew Tate that they respect and admire, and then there’s parts that they don’t – they know that he says a lot of terrible things,” says Ms Carson, 46, who teaches Learning for Life and Work – Northern Ireland’s equivalent of PSHE in England’s schools.
They know he says … Read the rest
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5 comments
Jan 11th, 2023 10:36 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Male barrister who claims to be a woman calls Helen Joyce “this numpty”.
He also claims she got the spelling of “trans women” wrong because a third party quoted her as saying (not writing) “transwomen.” How can the male barrister be sure she didn’t say “trans women”? How can the male barrister be sure the third party didn’t misquote her? How can the male barrister be such a numpty?
… Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
7 comments