One of those random headlines you see, and almost don’t notice, and then back up to look at again…

Why Gascón reversed himself on sentencing of woman who assaulted 10-year-old

Wait, woman who what? What who assaulted a 10-year-old? What was that again?

Of course. The headline lies about it, the body tells the truth.

As he’s faced increased criticism from law enforcement, elected officials and his own staff, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón has staunchly defended his handling of a politically fraught case: the prosecution of a transgender woman charged with sexually assaulting a child in a Denny’s restroom.

Right. So don’t call him “woman” in the headline. Women don’t sexually assault children in Denny’s restrooms. They … Read the rest

Paul Farmer:

Dr. Paul Farmer, global health champion, Harvard Medical School professor, anthropologist and co-founder of the nonprofit health organization Partners in Health, has died at age 62. PIH confirmed his death in a tweet on Monday.

According to the tweet, Farmer “unexpectedly passed away today in his sleep while in Rwanda,” where he had been teaching for the past few weeks at the university he co-founded. A source close to Farmer said he had been in Rwanda for the past several weeks teaching at the University of Global Health Equity, the medical school that he helped found with the country’s former minister of health, Dr. Agnes Binagwaho.

…

In addition to starting hospitals in Rwanda and Haiti, Farmer

… Read the rest

The Free Speech Union writes to the Minister for Education about a situation at Cardiff University:

We’ve written to Jeremy Miles MS, Minister for Education, urging him to intervene in the situation at Cardiff University where several of our members and their colleagues, all academic staff, have been targeted by trans activists in a long-running campaign of intimidation. It began in June 2021 after the academics urged Cardiff to reconsider its continuing participation in the Stonewall Diversity Champion scheme. Following this, a leaflet was distributed on campus picturing a woman holding a gun, the names and pictures of the signatories, and the caption “ACT NOW”. A student whistleblower then revealed violent threats being made on the Facebook page of the

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Papito on People’s Republics.

“Me,” the most charitable interpretation anyone could make of your remarks is ignorance. I will try to be charitable. I will lay out the fundamental reasons, as I see it, that opposing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is in the national interest of all Western democracies.

Nobody here believes Washington always has the interests of everybody in the world at heart. Such a belief would not be supported by historical events. The American government has done terrible things the world over. However, nobody except the most insular of right-wing zealots believes that Biden – a man who has spent his life in service to his country – hates America. If one claims … Read the rest

Suzanne Moore rebukes the New York Times:

[T]his New York Times ad is more than idiotic – it is dangerous. Imagine a world in which JK Rowling did not write the books we know she did. What happens to the author in this scenario, her intellectual property? Will her creation be removed in some Maoist obliteration? Imagine she does not exist. What does that actually mean? Let me spell it out.

Every death threat I have ever had, every woman I have spoken to about being stalked or abused, has heard these words. They have “no place”, they have “no right to exist”. It is a threat, and I felt sick when I saw that fox-killing egomaniac lawyer, Jolyon

… Read the rest

The BBC did a story on the Ukraine famine last week.

Resentment of Moscow in Ukraine has deep historical roots. In the Great Famine of the 1930s, as many as four million Ukrainians died during the forced collectivisation of farms by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The BBC’s Fergal Keane has been to the eastern city of Kharkiv, close to the Russian border, and met some of the last survivors of the famine.

…Petro Mohalat, now aged 95, remembers the first food raids in the winter of 1932.

He was five years old when the communist “brigade” arrived in the village. His grandmother told the children to hide anywhere they could.

“It was very scary. The brigade had pitchforks and they

… Read the rest

The Atlantic October 2017: Anne Applebaum on the famine Stalin created in Ukraine:

In the years 1932 and 1933, a catastrophic famine swept across the Soviet Union. It began in the chaos of collectivization, when millions of peasants were forced off their land and made to join state farms. It was then exacerbated, in the autumn of 1932, when the Soviet Politburo, the elite leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, took a series of decisions that deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside. Despite the shortages, the state demanded not just grain, but all available food. At the height of the crisis, organized teams of policemen and local Party activists, motivated by hunger, fear, and a decade of hateful

… Read the rest

Misogyny spotted in the wild.

https://twitter.com/mcashmanCBE/status/1495488332733759495 https://twitter.com/mcashmanCBE/status/1495501574608723970

Speak out, the man says, so a woman speaks out, and he swats her away as if she were a mosquito. I do not like this Michael Cashman.… Read the rest

Internecine war continues.

https://twitter.com/Jebadoo2/status/1495878804719513606

Is he?

Yes.

https://twitter.com/mcashmanCBE/status/1495524750784970758

Not wrong. Claimed rights of trans people – that aren’t actually rights, but the ideology insists that they are – to be “validated” as the other sex and to take over the other sex’s spaces and prizes and sports and jobs do indeed conflict with the rights of women. Lia Thomas is one current illustration of how that works. Cashman is either wrong or lying when he says trans rights don’t conflict with the rights of women. No skin off his ass is it, since they’re not his rights.

3/ It is clear, yet again, that the gender zealots at Stonewall have now determined they will harass a woman.
Quel surprise

For

… Read the rest

Hadley Freeman on why she stopped being a good girl, i.e. a people-pleaser. The shift began in 2014.

I was reading the New Yorker one evening and came across an article with the headline “What is a Woman?”. It was, according to the standfirst, about “the dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism”, a subject about which I knew nothing. I read it, vaguely interested in the social shift that meant being “transgender” no longer refers to someone who has undergone a sex change operation, but is now “how someone sees themselves”, as the writer Michelle Goldberg put it. This meant, Goldberg continued, that women-only spaces were increasingly changing to women-and-transwomen spaces, even if those transwomen still had

… Read the rest

Putin’s going to do a tv talk soon.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is due to give a televised address soon and he’s expected to speak on whether to recognise the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics”.

Russia-backed rebels in those areas – located in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region – have been fighting the Ukrainian military since 2014 but Moscow has not officially recognised their self-declared republics.

Step one. Step two is sending in Russian soldiers to defend the new “republics.”… Read the rest

Sure enough, he backed out.

https://twitter.com/DearSplenda/status/1495808326113927172… Read the rest

Graham Linehan on Jon Ronson on Michfest:

His documentary about Michfest is, of course, a disgrace: the denigration of second-wave feminists is so facile that it actually includes a reference to them “not shaving their legs”; his barely-disguised cheerleading of third-wave feminism—what a coincidence, the porn-positive feminism that most benefits Jon—is grimly revealing. Jon’s compassion is infinite… if you’re male. If you’re female, your rights are subject to the whims of fashion.

Not shaving their legs? Really? Does Jon Ronson shave his?

And of course, there is the unmistakable attempt, one with which feminists are wearily familiar, to place trans-identified males inside the same moral framework as black people experiencing racism. This relentless propaganda, combined with the ambient soundtrack

… Read the rest

Not a good sign.

Russian state TV's chief war correspondent is now in Donetsk

His live reports are full of claims of an 'imminent Ukrainian invasion', attacks on civilian infrastructure & artillery fire from the Ukr side

Says 70,000 women & children evacuated-> RF

The info war is in full swing pic.twitter.com/Fx8ZlH9zUB

— Sarah Rainsford (@sarahrainsford) February 21, 2022

BBC Live says all signs are that Russia is invading Ukraine.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace says “All the indicators point to increasing numbers and readiness of Russian forces.”

He says the pledge to withdraw Russian troops from Belarus at the end of their joint military drills “was not carried out”.

“The exercise has now been extended until further notice,” he says.

… Read the rest

And the rest of it.… Read the rest

This is excellent. GB News was looking for volunteers on Twitter earlier because someone else had to back out, and Dennis raised his hand and so did Jon Pike.

Full clip here of me on GB news tonight guys https://t.co/p278CSaxJG

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) February 20, 2022

… Read the rest

Help friends harm enemies: Republican ethics in a nutshell.

Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, is backing a controversial proposal to strip $200m in education funding from Democratic counties that defied his executive order last year banning mask mandates in schools.

The Democratic counties did what they thought would help protect students and teachers from a dangerous virus, while the Republican ones took the “don’t tell us what to do” route, which is not always clever in matters of public health. In other words the Dem counties didn’t do anything actually wrong or malicious. It seems very piggy to punish the schools in those counties for that kind of best judgement decision.… Read the rest

Promoting women is sex discrimination, giving scholarships to minorities is majority discrimination, free school lunches are wealth discrimination, yaddayaddayadda.

The Republican senator Ted Cruz complained on Sunday that Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman to the supreme court was an instance of racial discrimination…

No it’s a correction of generations of racial and sex discrimination. I’m sure he understands that point, it’s not very complicated, but one must throw red meat to The Base.

“Democrats today believe in racial discrimination,” Cruz told Fox News Sunday. “They’re they’re committed to it as a political proposition. I think it is wrong to stand up and say, ‘We’re going to discriminate.’”

But it’s perfectly all right to discriminate in favor … Read the rest

Brendan O’Neill, in one of his getting something right moments, points out the flaw in Laurie Penny’s “feminism”:

Penny writes an awful lot about women for someone who doesn’t know what a woman is. Ostensibly this is a feminist tract, about how humanity faces a terrifying choice – it either carries on down the road to fascism or it embraces the corrective of Laurie Penny’s feminism. (Talk about a rock and a hard place!) And yet it’s a strange feminist tome that thinks men can be women, too. Penny gets it out of the way early. ‘In this book, when I talk about “men” and “women”… I am including everyone who locates themselves in those categories’, she says on

… Read the rest

https://twitter.com/moleatthedoor/status/1495436103725289474… Read the rest