All entries by this author

And beat him when he sneezes

Apr 8th, 2022 3:19 pm | By

A very subtle thinker here.

He’s convinced you, right?… Read the rest



Moral high ground

Apr 8th, 2022 2:50 pm | By

I hope this gets Junior a prison sentence for sedition.

“Moral high ground” ffs. How do you reckon?

CNN reports:

Two days after the 2020 presidential election, as votes were still being tallied, Donald Trump’s eldest son texted then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that “we have operational control” to ensure his father would get a second term, with Republican majorities in the US Senate and swing state legislatures, CNN has learned.

Translating “we … Read the rest



Go ahead, just make shit up

Apr 8th, 2022 10:30 am | By

“organized transphobic violence”

https://twitter.com/zugenia/status/1512415953140826114

She doesn’t “have to say” that of course; she chose to.

Arguing that gender is not something to celebrate but a system of oppression which should be rejected is not “organized transphobic violence.”

But this guy knows better.

Reading that gender is a system of oppression will encourage violence!

What must it be like being an academic now? Can you imagine having to teach students who believe all this crap? To say nothing of having colleagues who do.… Read the rest



At crisis point

Apr 8th, 2022 9:49 am | By

Oh yeah? And they’re the only ones, are they?

The Guardian reports:

The mental health of the UK’s transgender community is at crisis point, with many people “hanging by a string”, professional bodies and support groups have told the Guardian.

The stark warnings follow a week of intensified public discussion of transgender rights as the government moved to exclude trans people from a ban on conversion practices.

What are “transgender rights”? They’re so often mentioned and so rarely spelled out.

And, for the umpteenth time, “conversion” is the wrong word – the loaded word, the inaccurate word, the thumb on the scale word. It’s not a form of “conversion” to provide therapy and discussion before making permanent physical changes … Read the rest



He comes back to this point

Apr 8th, 2022 9:05 am | By

Another meeting at the corner of Inclusion and Fairness.

“And what this UK sport document says is,” says Ed Milliband at 1:00, “look, inclusion is important in sport but so too is fairness.”

But inclusion isn’t “important in sport” in any blanket sense, for the very simple and obvious reason that much of sport is competitive, which rules out being generally “inclusive.” Competition is necessarily, inherently, non-inclusive. Competition excludes.

You can of … Read the rest



Pants on fire

Apr 8th, 2022 4:54 am | By

A dishonest headline:

https://twitter.com/BBCSport/status/1512375270887628803

The usual lie told in the usual way – by concealing “men who identify as women” under the blanket “transgender.” Men can’t compete against women at British Cycling elite events.

They’ve now changed the headline, no doubt in response to a torrent of furious replies to that tweet. It now says:

Transgender women no longer able to compete at elite female events run by British Cycling

Men no longer able to force themselves into women’s races. Finally.

From the story:

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said earlier this week he did not believe transgender women should compete in female sporting events – a view he conceded might be “controversial”.

In response, LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall

Read the rest


Quite a find

Apr 8th, 2022 4:27 am | By

One day in North Dakota

Scientists believe they have been given an extraordinary view of the last day of the dinosaurs after they discovered the fossil of an animal they believe died that day.

Awkward sentence, but you get the idea. They think they’ve found a fossil dinosaur that was killed by the asteroid that smacked what’s now the Gulf of Mexico and wiped out nearly all animal life on the planet.

The perfectly preserved leg, which even includes remnants of the animal’s skin, can be accurately dated to the time the asteroid that brought about the dinosaurs’ extinction struck Earth 66m years ago, experts say, because of the presence of debris from the impact, which rained down only

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It happens in public

Apr 7th, 2022 5:46 pm | By

Hadley Freeman on the breaking of the spell:

The great advantage sport has over, say, prisons and refuges is that it happens in public: people can see it and they are interested in it. That’s why when historians write about that relatively brief but extremely toxic time when gender extremism gripped western countries, and they describe the moment when that grip loosened, they will start with the photos of Lia Thomas, the Ivy League trans swimmer, towering over her teammates. These caught the mainstream interest in a way feminist arguments about trans women in prisons never have: here is an issue where even Homer Simpson can see the obvious problem.

There aren’t the same kind of visuals coming out … Read the rest



Reviewed additional documents

Apr 7th, 2022 4:25 pm | By

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg says he hasn’t given up on the Trump investigation.

The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, publicly discussed his office’s investigation into Donald J. Trump for the first time on Thursday, insisting that the inquiry has continued despite the recent resignations of two senior prosecutors who had been leading it.

Did they just misunderstand?

Mr. Bragg said in an interview that his office had recently questioned new witnesses about Mr. Trump and reviewed additional documents, both previously unreported steps in the inquiry.

But citing grand jury secrecy rules, Mr. Bragg declined to provide details on the new steps in the investigation, which has focused on whether Mr. Trump committed a crime in inflating the value of

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Confirmed

Apr 7th, 2022 11:24 am | By

Adding

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Hang on, hang on, I’m sorry, Grace, Grace

Apr 7th, 2022 11:22 am | By

Lavery interview part 2 (I needed a break from transcribing).

At 35 minutes: Emma Barnett: “You have written ‘I’m quite sure that women’s rights are not, have never been, and must never be sex-based.’ [Lavery says “Yeah.”] But to those women who believe that they must have sex-based rights for a variety of reasons ranging from sport to women-only spaces for different purposes – you’ll be very familiar, our listeners will be as well – how can you say that with such surety?”

Lavery: “Well again I say it on the basis of twenty years of [? access? experts?], research, and teaching in the field, I have been doing this work for a long time.”

He’s an expert, you … Read the rest



Which is?

Apr 7th, 2022 10:50 am | By

All the points missed at once.

What does “chronically underrepresented in sport” mean? How “represented” should they be? How does Owen Jones know?

Maybe the kind of people who are trans simply tend not to be into sport. Some people aren’t, you know.

But also, clearly being trans throws up some obstacles to being “represented” in sport. It throws up some obstacles that are not incidental and … Read the rest



Male feminism classic

Apr 7th, 2022 10:07 am | By

Ok I listened to Lavery on Woman’s Hour. I’m relieved: Emma Barnett didn’t let him get away with much. It starts at 17:25 in case you want to listen.

20:10 Lavery: “I think what we’re really talking about is do we think the category ‘woman’ designates a class of biological being, or do we think that it’s a political category whose meaning can change over time. I think reasonable people can take different perspectives on that question, but historically speaking the people who have taken the position that it is a biologically essential category have tended to be on the side of patriarchy, and those who have claimed that it is a political category that has been deployed to … Read the rest



Violations

Apr 7th, 2022 9:19 am | By

The word is “suspend” not “expel” or “remove” so I assume that means it’s temporary, but anyway, there it is. Of course other flagrant rights-violators remain.

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This bloke on Woman’s Hour

Apr 7th, 2022 3:42 am | By

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Guest post: The politics of Nimbyism

Apr 7th, 2022 2:50 am | By

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on If they cannot answer a simple question.

Would Labour expect to go unchallenged if it had screwed over workers rights in favour of bosses, in the process espousing a mistaken and distorted view of relevant law promulgated by the bosses themselves?

That’s… pretty much New Labour though.

I mean, even from people who support that shift, you get the criticism that pre-Blair Labour “was mired in an ossified form of unionism and leftism that refused to recognise that the world had fundamentally changed. A spent political force facing oblivion” to quote Rob.

And there is some merit to that.

The British economy is 80% service sector. Contrast with 1950, when it was … Read the rest



What will it take?

Apr 6th, 2022 4:48 pm | By

Scientists are trying to get people to wake up and smell the smoke.

I’m a climate scientist and a desperate father. How can I plead any harder? What will it take? What can my colleagues and I do to stop this catastrophe unfolding now all around us with such excruciating clarity?

On Wednesday, I risked arrest by locking myself to an entrance to the JP Morgan Chase building in downtown Los Angeles with colleagues and supporters. Our action in LA is part of an international campaign organized by a loosely knit group of concerned scientists called Scientist Rebellion, involving more than 1,200 scientists in 26 countries and supported by local climate groups. Our day of action follows the 

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On the path

Apr 6th, 2022 4:28 pm | By

Navarro and Scavino:

The House voted on Wednesday to hold two of Donald Trump’s top advisers – Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino – in criminal contempt of Congress for their months-long refusal to comply with subpoenas issued by the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack.

The approval of the contempt resolution, by a vote of 220 to 203, sets the two Trump aides on the path toward criminal prosecution by the justice department as the panel escalates its inquiry into whether Trump oversaw a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.

The contempt citations approved by the House now head to the justice department and the US attorney for the District of Columbia, Matthew Graves,

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Guest post: If they cannot answer a simple question

Apr 6th, 2022 2:54 pm | By

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Lost in the fog, with added emphasis.

… political enemies who care much less about the issue than they enjoy watching Labour fall apart.

Maybe a party whose members and leader are unable, or unwilling, to define one of the classes of people whose protected characteristics are enshrined in UK law isn’t really ready to govern. If they don’t know what a woman is, they’re not fit for office. If they know what a woman is but are afraid to say it then they are even less fit for office. Sometimes standing up and saying “no” is more important than being “kind” (or “kind of scared.”)

Many (if not most) … Read the rest



Lost in the fog

Apr 6th, 2022 11:30 am | By

I don’t think I’ll ever understand where people get the confidence to talk this kind of confused nonsense.

 Why, at this moment of both national and international crisis, has the media decided that the most important question for a party that hasn’t been in government for 12 years, is a hypothetical one about genitals?

One, they haven’t – media questions are not exclusively about genitals, or gender. Two, news flash: women’s rights still matter.

It’s not really about vaginas, it’s a quest for the “gotcha” moment, the inescapable trap of deliberately twisted logic which merits unpicking.

It’s not really about vaginas perhaps, but it is really about women. If white people were furiously agitating to be “validated” as Black … Read the rest