Amnesty is Thorry You Were Offen-ded.

Amnesty International has said it “deeply regrets the distress and anger” caused after it alleged that Ukrainian forces were flouting international law by exposing civilians to Russian fire.

We deeply regret your feefees but you’re wrong to have them.

Amnesty sparked outrage in Ukraine with the publication of a report on Thursday that accused the military of endangering civilians by establishing bases in schools and hospitals, and launching counterattacks from heavily populated areas.

The head of Amnesty’s Ukraine office resigned in protest, accusing the rights organisation of parroting Kremlin propaganda.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said the group had tried to “shift the responsibility from the aggressor to the victim”.

We see a lot … Read the rest

You don’t like the drought? Ok have a flood.

Photographer John Sirlin was in a canyon in the northeast part of Death Valley National Park late Thursday to shoot lightning in an expected thunderstorm.

Then the lightning petered out and the storm became a nonstop torrential downpour that lasted for hours, bringing near-record rainfall to one of the hottest, driest places on Earth.

Which isn’t what you want in drought conditions. You want slow steady non-torrential rain that has time to soak in, not a blast that washes away all the topsoil.

More analysis will be needed to determine whether climate change helped drive the storm’s intensity. But its extreme nature is consistent with what can be expected as

A reporter at Open Democracy sent For Women Scotland a “when did you stop beating your trans people?” set of questions, so For Women Scotland is sharing the obnoxious questions with us.

Dear Adam,

Thank you for your hugely revealing question set about our shadowy operation. I am only amazed that you forgot to ask about the top speed of our broomsticks and whether they were diesel or electric (0-60 in 20 secs), or, indeed, whether we favour Eye of Newt over Fillet of Fenny Snake (personally, I find Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting are best for date night!). I’m afraid that I must be brief as we are off to dance widdershins round a churchyard by moonlight and

Anti-Semitic dogwhistle, from a current Senator. Awesome.

The democrats just blocked my effort to try & force Soros backed prosecutors to put dangerous criminals in jail pic.twitter.com/alt5DZmiSS

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) August 7, 2022

… Read the rest

Drag doesn’t have to be misogynist or trans or groomerish. Monica Hesse in the Washington Post:

A not-small number of hours in my early 20s were spent attending drag shows in a basement-level gay club in Washington’s Dupont Circle neighborhood. What you would do is arrive around midnight when “Crazy in Love” by Beyoncé was playing, and by the time you’d heard “Crazy in Love” by Beyoncé for the eighth or 40th replay, it was time to go home.

In between were drag performers. Drag kings, mostly (this was ladies’ night), who would dress in fedoras or leather chaps and lip-sync to James Brown or Justin Timberlake. There was a performer who went by Ken Vegas. My friends and

I just listened to most of this Radio 4 item on drag queen story hour, in which Jo Bartosch argued against and some young guy who says “like” way too often argued for. The host was, predictably, somewhat flippant about the whole thing, but what really annoys me is that no one at any point stopped to ask why is this only one-way? Why is it monodirectional? Why is there no drag king story hour? Why is it all about men making a joke of women while no one is making a joke of men?

I would really like to know.

They talk about panto, and someone (I think the like-saying guy) mentions Shakespeare, meaning actually theater in general … Read the rest

David Frum on how it could play out:

[S]crape aside the audacity, the self-pity, and the self-aggrandizement, and there was indeed an idea in Donald Trump’s speech at a conference hosted by the America First Policy Institute: a sinister idea, but one to take seriously.

Trump sketched out a vision that a new Republican Congress could enact sweeping new emergency powers for the next Republican president. The president would be empowered to disregard state jurisdiction over criminal law. The president would be allowed to push aside a “weak, foolish, and stupid governor,” and to fire “radical and racist prosecutors”—racist here meaning “anti-white.” The president could federalize state National Guards for law-enforcement duties, stop and frisk suspects for illegal

I seized the opportunity presented by No Internet to read some of White Fragility, and found it not as terrible as I expected, but hardly a work of staggering genius. There is this air of unfalsifiability about the whole thing, because she treats any disagreement with her or challenge to anything she says as an example and illustration of WhiteFragility, which amounts to declaring herself always right from the outset. It’s quite like Freud that way. Your resistance simply shows how right I am.

John McWhorter of course makes the same point:

DiAngelo has spent a very long time conducting diversity seminars in which whites, exposed to her catechism, regularly tell her—many while crying, yelling, or storming toward

Originally a comment by Sackbut at Miscellany Room.

Among the comic strips I follow is Heart of the City, a charming strip about a young girl named Heart, her friends, and their lives in Philadelphia. It was created by Mark Tatulli, and he wrote the strip for many years. A few years ago he passed the strip along to Christina “Steenz” Stewart. She is Black, and she made significant changes to the strip over the few years, in addition to having a drastically different art style. Many characters were added, several faded away, the cast became much more racially diverse, and there was a bit more focus on the differences between the life experiences of girls and boys. I … Read the rest

“Inclusive” sport in Ireland:

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Never going back.

I have been thinking a lot about intellectually compelling problems vs. emotionally compelling problems lately: Considering that climate change – along with the strongly interlinked problem of ocean acidification, the mass-extinction of species, and the general toll the human economy is taking on ecosystems and the natural world – is the most dire existential emergency our species has ever faced, many have struggled to explain why – despite constant claims of “alarmism” and “hysteria” – there isn’t more alarm and public outrage around the issue.

The most obvious answer, and usually the first one that comes to mind – is that tackling the problem puts you on a direct … Read the rest

The Guardian does a long conversation with athlete and “LGBTQ+” activist Tom Daley:

Isn’t part of the problem that the LGBTQ+ community is at war with itself over trans rights? The level of fury between trans rights activists and gender-critical feminists astonishes me, I say. Daley nods, and says it’s dangerous. “The LGBT community is so fractured right now over certain issues. And that’s when the right are going to get us. They’re going to try to break us down. And if you think they’re just going to take away trans people’s rights, you’re wrong. It’s going to go much further than that, and we have to stick together as an LGBTQIA+ community to stop that happening.”

But it … Read the rest

Fun and games in Ireland:

An Irish “LGBTQ+ Inclusive” football team beat out the female competition in the 2022 Junior J Shield Final, claiming a significant margin of victory in every placing that many attribute to the fact a biological male was on the team.

For “many” read “all,” even if some of them wouldn’t admit it. Yes, Virginia, teams that are “inclusive” of males are going to beat the female competition.

Na Gaeil Aeracha, which bills itself as Ireland’s “first explicitly LGBTQ+ inclusive” football club was forced to lock down its social media accounts following backlash as sport fans noticed one of the players appeared to be an older man.

All “LGBTQ+ inclusive” means in this … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Laurent on Scoop: more men running for office!

We’re all non-binary.

I keep struggling with gender stereotypes themselves, and the whole issue clearly doesn’t clarify at all.

I really wonder what are the keystone gender norms that apply to the binary as a general inalienable truth, that almost everyone would acknowledge is actually what historically defines gender at core and still applies mostwhere, if possible independently of secondary cultural norms.

What I get is that it is not about lifestyle at all.

Men -. I was about to write down “none”, but admittedly there is one norm that became quite exceptional but may make an unexpected come-back in the future: obligation to go to war and … Read the rest

In Alex Jones news: $45.2 million in punitive damages.

Jones spent years telling his audience that one of the worst school shootings in American history was a hoax. Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, who brought the charges against Jones, told the court how he made their lives a “living hell” after Jesse, their 6-year-old son, was gunned down in the attack.

“I can’t even describe the last nine-and-a-half years,” Heslin said. “The living hell that I and others have had to endure because of the recklessness and negligence of Alex Jones.”

Not to mention the brutality and cruelty and total lack of empathy.… Read the rest

Hoo-boy…“unethical” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Researchers are openly recruiting trans athletes who *want* to show a loss of performance. This breaks every rule in the study book.

"If you feel unjust about the recent policies, why not provide your data to influence the next policy making decisions"https://t.co/TqjHZGnMLW

— FairPlayForWomen (@fairplaywomen) August 5, 2022

FPFW:

There are a couple of studies being done in British universities in an attempt to prove that “transition” from male to female reduces the male performance advantage enough to make it fair for those post-pubertal adult males to play and compete in women’s sport. It’s known that testosterone suppression reduces oxygen-carrying capacity, which reduces athletic performance a bit, though it’s

Fun at the swimming pool:

A senior woman who expressed discomfort regarding a trans-identified male in the women’s changing room at her local pool has been banned from using the facilities she frequented for over three decades. Julie Jaman, 80, had been a guest at the YMCA-run Mountain View community pool in her small town of Port Townsend, Washington for over 35 years.

Interrupting for a moment to say I know that small town. It’s on the Olympic Peninsula, the remainder of the state west of Seattle and Puget Sound; it’s on a bluff overlooking the water and features a lot of gorgeous Queen Anne-style Victorian houses. It’s a lovely place.

Speaking to Reduxx, Jaman revealed that on

U wot?

Young people who bleed across Wales? What do they do, open a vein in Fishguard and march bleeding all the way to Abergavenny?

Haha, silly me, no, they mean “people” all over Wales who shed their uterine linings once a month.

Our aim is to break the taboo around periods by encouraging conversation on one of the most normal, natural topics that half the world’s population experience.

Which half? Which half which half which half which half which half which half?

Of course they don’t say. Funny that they want to break one taboo by instituting another.

We’re immensely proud that Bloody Brilliant was created for the young people of Wales by the young people of Wales. 

Following

Let’s see…off the top of my head rather than looking in a dictionary…

-fer

-late

-ition

-parent (that pun is the title of a Netflix show of course)

-cendent

-itory

Quite a few words to render meaningless.

At first I thought it was a typo, but @GuardianAus is literally clipping the letters 'trans' from its tweets. pic.twitter.com/sWiJMKeTTC

— Stuart Palmer (@s_palm) August 4, 2022

And then there's the American Family Association which changed every occurrence of “gay”, even when used as someone’s surname… a report on athlete Tyson Gay ended up with the headline “Homosexual eases into 100m final at Olympic trials”

— Scott Matthewman (@scottm) August 4, 2022

H/t soogeeoh… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Never going back.

The situation is much the same in south-eastern Norway. For the first time ever this year the trusted spring flood due to snowmelt in the second half of May has been completely absent due to record-low levels of snow in the mountains. Combine that with the driest summer on record, and it’s becoming a major challenge for hydropower companies such as the one I’m working in to keep our power plants running. To the end consumers this has the effect of driving the already economy-breaking energy prices even further up. Factor in the European over-reliance on Russian gas that is no longer available, and we’re facing the real prospect … Read the rest