All entries by this author

Quality control

Jul 6th, 2022 11:03 am | By

The ACLU is really tanking.

They seem to have a very stupid very rude very belligerent person working for them and making them look bad on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/rebeccakmccray/status/1544024510982197250

Oh the irony – the lie is on the other foot. Pamela Paul (her op-ed is clearly the target here) didn’t say that. She said “woman” has become verboten, meaning in general, and then she quoted a comment on the Roe decision by the ACLU that carefully did not say “women.” She did not say “the ACLU forbids the use of the word ‘woman’.” The lie is hers, there is no fallacy, the purported “hate” is in her head.

https://twitter.com/rebeccakmccray/status/1544024512165019648

Please. Language matters. Feminism has always had a lot to say about … Read the rest



Looking on in dismay

Jul 6th, 2022 8:49 am | By

It’s not ideal that six people can doom the world to runaway planet heating.

The supreme court’s ruling that the US government could not use its existing powers to phase out coal-fired power generation without “clear congressional authorization” quickly ricocheted around the world among those now accustomed to looking on in dismay at America’s seemingly endless stumbles in addressing global heating.

The decision “flies in the face of established science and will set back the US’s commitment to keep global temperature below 1.5C”, said Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, in reference to the internationally agreed goal to limit global heating before it becomes truly catastrophic, manifesting in more severe heatwaves,

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Fairly mild examples

Jul 6th, 2022 8:28 am | By

The Guardian on today’s ruling:

A researcher who lost her job at a thinktank after tweeting that transgender women could not change their biological sex has won her claim that she was unfairly discriminated against because of her gender-critical beliefs.

Maya Forstater suffered direct discrimination when the Centre for Global Development (CGD), where she was a visiting fellow, did not renew her contract or fellowship, an employment tribunal found on Wednesday.

I think some local government policies are going to be in conflict with this ruling: the ones that state flat-out You May Not Say Thats on trans issues. There was a town council that came out with one just yesterday, I think; I’ve already forgotten which town it … Read the rest



Truth and free speech

Jul 6th, 2022 4:06 am | By

Maya’s statement to the press:

6th July 2022: Maya Forstater, who took a claim for belief discrimination against her former employer, the Center for Global Development, has been vindicated by a ruling that she was unlawfully discriminated against by her former employer on the basis of her protected belief.

This follows a ruling at an Employment Tribunal in June 2021 when Ms Forstater successfully established a binding legal precedent that gender-critical beliefs were in principle protected by the Equality Act. Following that appeal, her case continued at the Employment Tribunal, to determine whether she was unlawfully discriminated against by her former employer on the basis of her protected belief.

And the answer is yes, she was.

“My case matters

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Win!!

Jul 6th, 2022 3:27 am | By

Hey hey hey breaking news – Maya has won her tribunal!

https://twitter.com/bindelj/status/1544623965045506049

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Guest post: Conservatives have better Theory of Mind

Jul 5th, 2022 4:48 pm | By

Originally a Facebook post by an anonymous thoughts-haver.

Something about the way Matthew 6:5-6 (the bit about going into your closet to pray) is being shared around in the wake of the school prayer ruling has been bothering me, and I finally kind of figured out what it is. First, though, a disclaimer: I am an atheist who has read the whole bible more than once. I took some comparative religion classes in college, but I have never been a Christian and anything I say is coming from a theoretical understanding, not practical.

So, here’s a thing. The term “prayer” does not mean one simple thing. It doesn’t mean the same thing in all contexts, and it doesn’t mean … Read the rest



You can’t include everything

Jul 5th, 2022 11:08 am | By

Make your language more inclusive, or you’re a bad person.

The trouble with that is, language can’t be “inclusive.” If it’s inclusive it will stop meaning anything, and then it will be useless. We need language. It does so much work for us. Imagine being suddenly transported to a tiny distant country where you don’t know the language and the people there don’t know yours – … Read the rest



Don’t let them erase you!

Jul 5th, 2022 9:02 am | By

The outrage engine is overheating.

It’s possible that people are getting tired of hearing quite so much from “transgender people and their allies.”

https://twitter.com/iseult/status/1544283807225888769

“A few small healthcare cases”??? Give me a break.

https://twitter.com/BraddockBessie/status/1544099960475590656 https://twitter.com/Lachlan_Edi/status/1544055995667734530

“They had no skeletons pre-Enlightenment” hahahahahahahahaha

By the way what was that tweet?

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Goebbels, Stalin, and Roy Cohn

Jul 5th, 2022 8:34 am | By

The Willoughby dude is as usual doing his best to punish and exclude women.

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Remove the T

Jul 5th, 2022 8:21 am | By

Owen Jones talks of a “reversal on LGBTQ rights,” but of course what he means is mostly the T bit, which doesn’t belong with the LGB bit in the first place. As usual this ploy enables a lot of dishonest framing.

Even more terrifying is Texas’s banning of gender-affirming healthcare for young trans people, with their parents now legally defined as child abusers if they seek it.

But of course it’s not “healthcare.” Switch the frame and it’s mutilation and/or dangerous and damaging use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. It’s not healthcare as commonly understood at all. “Gender-affirming” is not a medical term – it’s a political one. No one can change sex, and “affirming” gender is just … Read the rest



Being very clear

Jul 4th, 2022 4:59 pm | By

I know, it’s just Twitter, but really the argument is so powerful I have to share it.

See what I mean?

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Bette

Jul 4th, 2022 12:45 pm | By

Now THERE is a message!

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More new evidence by the day

Jul 4th, 2022 11:14 am | By

It wasn’t just about her testimony, it was about the possibility that her testimony would draw more. That’s happening.

Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger has said that bombshell testimony given by Cassidy Hutchinson to the January 6 hearings last week has inspired more witnesses to come forward and the committee is getting more new evidence by the day.

“There will be way more information and stay tuned,” Kinzinger told CNN’s State of the Union co-anchor Dana Bash. “Every day, we get new people that come forward and say, ‘Hey, I didn’t think maybe this piece of a story that I knew was important, but now I do see how this plays in here.’”

In a separate interview,

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In just a few short weeks

Jul 4th, 2022 10:59 am | By

What if the pregnant rape victim is ten years old? Any concern for her?

The case of a 10-year-old child rape victim in Ohio who was six weeks pregnant, ineligible for an abortion in her own state, and forced to travel to Indiana for the procedure has spotlighted the shocking impact of the US supreme court ruling on abortion.

Dr Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, said she had received a call from a colleague doctor in Ohio who treats child abuse victims and asked for help. Indiana’s lawmakers have not yet banned or restricted abortion, but they are likely to do so when a special session of the state assembly convenes later this month.

Abortion providers like Bernard say

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Hi Philip, that’s her article

Jul 4th, 2022 10:26 am | By

Philip Pullman yet again.

As far as I can tell (replies are numerous and they go off into nested threads and subthreads and disappear into infinity) he never did: never specified and never apologized. Instead he pretended he wasn’t talking about Jo Bartosch’s article at all.

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Starring the ever-popular Person

Jul 4th, 2022 9:46 am | By

An interesting Facebook post (public) from last October (anonymously written) on pregnancy as a kind of battle:

I think it’s culturally time for us to re-frame how we think about the uterus.

It’s not a nurturing organ—it doesn’t need to be. A fetus is frighteningly good at getting the resources it needs to nurture itself. If they are implanted anywhere other than the womb (most often the fallopian tube, but also sometimes the bladder, intestine, pelvic muscles and connective tissue, and the liver) placental cells will rip through a body, slaughtering everything in their path as they seek out arteries to slake their hunger for nutrients.

Fetal cells will happily grow in any of these places, digesting and puncturing tissue,

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Guest post: Unmooring the language

Jul 4th, 2022 9:07 am | By

Originally a comment by Enzyme on The old style of fascist often hid behind tears.

[I]t just so happens that protecting this minority requires us to reform society by jettisoning the hard-won freedoms of assembly and expression, along with the presumption of innocence and the ability for a professional to disagree with whatever governing body claims the consensus to be.

I want to suggest that it’s worse – deeper, more radical, more sinister – than that. What’s being jettisoned is the stability of the language in which any claim to rights must be articulated.

Yes, rights of assembly and expression and so on might be under threat, but they’re still thinkable as rights. Suppose you live in a society … Read the rest



Just making it up

Jul 4th, 2022 5:35 am | By

Fox News is finding out that you can’t tell damaging lies about people and organizations with impunity. Who knew?!

In the months after the 2020 US presidential election, rightwing TV news in America was a wild west, an apparently lawless free-for-all where conspiracy theories about voting machines, ballot-stuffed suitcases and dead Venezuelan leaders were repeated to viewers around the clock.

There seemed to be little consequence for peddling the most outrageous ideas on primetime.

But now, unfortunately for Fox News, One America News Network (OAN) and Newsmax, it turns out that this brave new world was not free from legal jurisdiction – with the three networks now facing billion-dollar lawsuits as a result of their baseless accusations.

Dominion Voting Systems … Read the rest



Guest post: The old style of fascists often hid behind tears

Jul 3rd, 2022 12:15 pm | By

Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Entry points.

On one level, Julia Carrie Wong is correct — instrumentalising the concept of “transphobia”, as a particularly-potent example of the more general “phobia”-based political discourse which has come to dominate rhetoric over the last couple of decades, *is* a tributary that leads to a sort of popularist authoritarianism that is becoming the modern conception of fascism.

But of course Wong doesn’t see that it is she who, by attempting to direct the rivers of fear and hatred and contempt into controlling how other people express themselves and even what they are allowed to think, is the mouthpiece for modern fascism. Of course she is simply defending what she sees as … Read the rest



Entry points

Jul 3rd, 2022 10:34 am | By

A reporter for the Guardian US – she calls herself “senior reporter” but the Guardian itself just calls her a reporter, as far as I can see. At any rate it would be good if she had some kind of grip on reality.

That’s just a fucking stupid, uninformed thing to say. We know she’s talking about the radical feminists, not actual far-right street brawlers. She’s talking about Bindel and Stock and … Read the rest