Allison won!!!

1/The Employment Tribunal found that Garden Court Chambers discriminated against me because of my gender critical belief when it published a statement that I was under investigation & in upholding Stonewall’s complaint against me. #AllisonBaileyWins

— Allison Bailey (@BluskyeAllison) July 27, 2022

3/In doing so the tribunal held that my protected gender critical belief also included the belief that "gender identity theory as proselytised by Stonewall is severely detrimental" to women, and to lesbians. #AllisonBaileyWins

— Allison Bailey (@BluskyeAllison) July 27, 2022

5/I have lost my case against Stonewall, but I have succeeded in exposing Stonewall’s conduct & the enormous & to my mind malign influence it wields in the workplace & in society more generally. #StonewallOut

—

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The moment when we stop.

Daniel Dennett once made a useful distinction between two very different types of “belief”:

1. You can believe in the actual descriptive content of a proposition, e.g. I believe that the sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning (as seen from my frame of reference).

2. You can believe in whatever a proposition happens to mean, e.g. I believe that E = mc².

The first kind of belief requires you to actually understand the proposition in question (you cannot believe in the content without knowing what the content is), whereas the latter does not*. I have a vague, general notion what “E = mc²” … Read the rest

More absurd than ever.

I have been contacted by numerous members of the public, both online and via @OPCCWiltSwindon, about use of police resources after a visit by @wiltshirepolice officers to provide a resident with words of advice.
My statement is below 👇 pic.twitter.com/NkF0sayvgh

— Philip Wilkinson: PCC Wiltshire and Swindon (@pwilkinson_pcc) July 26, 2022

He was “made aware of an incident on Sunday where officers visited an address to provide words of advice to a resident after they had published a video blog online which may have caused offence or distress.”

Where to begin. The officers didn’t “visit an address,” they went to Kellie-Jay Keen’s address to scold her. They didn’t go there “to provide words of advice,” … Read the rest

The pope has said sorry about those residential schools.

Pope Francis issued a historic apology Monday for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with Canada’s “catastrophic” policy of Indigenous residential schools, saying the forced assimilation of Native peoples into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations in ways still being felt today.

“I am sorry,” Francis said, to applause from school survivors and Indigenous community members gathered at a former residential school south of Edmonton, Alberta, the first event of Francis’ weeklong “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada.

The morning after he arrived in the country, Francis traveled to the lands of four Cree nations to pray at a cemetery. Four chiefs then escorted the pontiff in his wheelchair to powwow

An exchange on Twitter has got me thinking about belief in the trans ideology, and whether I ever had any. I don’t think I did. From what I can remember, I didn’t believe in it, but I tried to prevent myself from really grasping how thoroughly I didn’t believe it. But maybe that’s not quite right – maybe I did grasp it but just pretended I didn’t. Basically, I lied about it, but what I’m not sure of is how aware of the lying I was.

The exchange:

I left the “skeptic” online community years ago. But, since then it seems most have gone full in with the t trans ideology. What happened to those people??

— Gender Critical Witch

Oh how interesting.

How The CEO Of A Leading LGBTQ Rights Group Played A Role During The Opioid Crisis

By “played a role” they mean “helped make it worse.”

Amit Paley, CEO of The Trevor Project, was part of a team advising Purdue Pharma on how to boost sales of opioids during his time at McKinsey & Co., according to a trove of documents reviewed by HuffPost.

How to boost sales of opioids aka how to get more people addicted to opioids.

It’s all about the getting people to buy more and more and more drugs. $$$

In the summer of 2016, America’s opioid epidemic was raging, and Purdue Pharma, one of the drug manufacturers at the center of the

Stonewall thinks two-year-olds can be trans.

Your tweet said 2-year-olds can recognise their trans identity. Are you now withdrawing that claim? Your statement today doesn’t refer to it at all, but you haven’t deleted your original tweet. The only lack of clarity is in your present clarification https://t.co/oEdvPb42Vp pic.twitter.com/6iQPxjCK1R

— Simon Edge (@simonjedge) July 25, 2022

Ok let’s read their statement.

On Friday we put out a tweet that was unclear, relating to gender stereotypes and nursery age children, leading some supporters to ask us what we meant.

And others to say they’re dangerous loonies.

We were commenting on an article written by a parent reflecting on how their child was being cared for at nursery. The parent was

The left is split over sophie graces, the right is split over trump: hero or tyrant?

The Jan. 6 House select committee’s revelations have grown so overwhelmingly powerful that even some right-wing media figures have begun acknowledging their seriousness. This is fracturing conservative media: A few high-profile personalities and institutions are admitting the obvious, while many other outlets continue running outright propaganda on Trump’s behalf.

That’s been true all along, what with The Lincoln Project and George Conway and similar. But now some of the more rabid trumpies are wobbling.

This split became more visible over the weekend when Fox News anchor Bret Baier — unlike most Fox personalities — sharply denounced Trump over new revelations that Trump

Julian expands on his brief interview with “Sophie Grace” Chappell:

The published profile is short and allows Chappell to speak for herself with no criticism and minimal eyebrow-raising from me. The source interview, however, left me worried that mutual comprehension between the main actors this fight (for that is what is has become) is now almost impossible. (Supporters can listen to the entire interview here.) 

Mutual comprehension is indeed very difficult. I for one find it impossible to understand how so many otherwise reasonable people can believe (or at least constantly repeat) the core claim.

Listening to Chappell, you would think that the gender critical feminists – derogatorily called TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminist) – are almost always malign,

Julian Baggini talks to fellow philosopher Sophie Grace Chappell at Prospect:

Eight years ago, Sophie Grace Chappell came out as the UK’s first trans philosopher.

Well, not trans philosopher. Real philosopher in the sense of having the right academic credentials; no “identifying as” required. Trans woman, i.e. man who identifies as a woman. His self-renaming is interesting. He started out as Timothy David John Chappell, which is a lot of male names to have to deal with. For his transformation he chose two female names that are also flattery names – I wonder if he and Sophie LaBelle are friends or rivals. (If you’re wondering why “Sophie” is flattering, it’s because “sophia” in Greek means wisdom. Philosophers of … Read the rest

Judith Butler blows up her own argument in the middle of a sentence – and doesn’t correct it, even though it’s not a live conversation but an email exchange with a New Statesman writer.

When Justice Ginsburg established “sex” discrimination as a violation of the constitutionally guaranteed right to be treated equally, she underscored that equality was the basis for feminist legal victories. What if access to certain kinds of healthcare, including abortion, is a matter of equality? If men have adequate healthcare, and women do not, then women, or those who are pregnant, suffer discrimination. 

No, you can’t flip your own argument mid-sentence like that. You end up with gibberish. “If men have adequate healthcare, and women do … Read the rest

Texas lawmakers test just how much they can punish women for being women.

Republican lawmakers have sent legal threats to Texas organizations that offer to fund out-of-state travel for abortions, potentially setting up a showdown between abortion law and long-held constitutional rights such as freedom of association and freedom of travel.

The Texas Freedom Caucus, a conservative faction of Republicans in the state legislature, sent a letter on 7 July to a law firm that offered to cover employees’ expenses if they travelled for abortion. It threatened Sidley LLP with felony charges, claiming Texas can criminalize anyone who “furnishes the means” for an abortion, regardless of where the abortion occurs. The letter cites a 1925 law which was not formally

Ominous:

To those who track anti-democratic movements there is a chilling familiarity to this rich evocation of a president descending into an abyss of fantasy, fury and possible illegality. “The picture that the hearings depict is of a coup leader,” said the Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky. “This is a guy who was unwilling to accept defeat and was prepared to use virtually any means to try to stay illegally in power.”

Levitsky is co-author of the influential book How Democracies Die which traces the collapse of once-proud democratic nations – in some cases through wrenching upheavals, but more often in modern times through a tip-toeing into authoritarianism. Levitsky is also an authority on Latin America, a region from

Local residents astonished that desert basin is desert basin.

The few who live along the shores of Mono Lake are accustomed to the peculiarities of this high desert basin.

Famously strange limestone spires known as tufa towers rise from the water. The lake contains so much salt that it’s barren of fish. In the arid sands beyond, sagebrush thrives, and that’s about it.

But the alkali flats that are emerging from the lake’s surface, ghost white, aren’t just another nod to the uniqueness of this ancient place. They’re a sign of trouble. Amid a third year of drought, the sprawling lake on the remote east side of the Sierra Nevada is sharply receding, and the small towns and wildlife

So this is what it looks like when you build ever more new houses in a desert and the water dries up.

As the Southwest enters its second decade of megadrought, and the Colorado River sinks to alarmingly low levels, Rio Verde, a largely upscale community that real-estate agents bill as North Scottsdale, though it is a thirty-mile drive from Scottsdale proper, is finding itself on the front lines of the water wars. Some homeowners’ wells are drying up, while others who get water delivered have recently been told that their source will be cut off on January 1st. 

Because it’s a desert. Did anyone mention that it’s a desert before you bought new houses there? Did you look … Read the rest

Melted brains.

In the months before she started nursery, my four-year-old daughter would often say she was a boy. 

Little kids say they’re lots of things.

It came unprompted, bubbling up from somewhere pure and certain inside her.

Little kids can be certain of all kinds of things that aren’t true. Certainly is almost always a bad thing, and in a child of four it means nothing.

But the obstacles to her sense of self have started looming, ever since she started nursery in September 2021. 

After she’d been attending for a few weeks, she said to me again she was a boy. But then she looked troubled and added that her teacher told her she’s a girl, that

Another direct insult, as direct and insulting as nominating William “Lia” Thomas Woman of the Year:

The National Women’s History Museum’s current Biography page:

All three are men.… Read the rest

The pope “apologized” about the residential schools, but not really. (“About” rather than “for” is deliberate.)

Pope Francis made a public statement today to the delegations of Indigenous people who met with him this week to discuss personal experiences in residential schools or their harmful legacies.

His statement included the words “I am very sorry,” and is being reported as an apology for residential schools.

Journalism is so deferential to the popes. Why is that? The Vatican is a religious version of the Mafia; it’s not something to defer to.

There are several kinds of wrongs associated with residential schools. There were abusive and often criminal actions by individuals who worked in these institutions. Those in authority 

Yay let’s trans toddlers! What could go wrong?!