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

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 

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,

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

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

When the left is mired up to its nostrils in fantasies sometimes even Boris Johnson gets it right.

Boris Johnson has said he does not “think that biological males should be competing in female sporting events”, amid the fallout from his decision not to ban conversion practices for people questioning their gender.

Well, as we have seen, that all depends on what you’re calling “conversion.” I don’t consider it “conversion” to tell a man he’s not a woman.

Johnson also said that women should have spaces in hospitals, prisons and changing rooms which were “dedicated to women”.

Imagine that. Just imagine thinking a woman in prison shouldn’t have to share a cell with a rapist.

He also insisted it

More on Fawcett. Check out their staff – most of them were hired in the last six months. It doesn’t say how long the CEO has been there, but other than the CEO the staffer who has been there the longest (hired in 2016) is…

…a man.

ANDREW BAZELEY, POLICY, INSIGHT & PUBLIC AFFAIRS MANAGER

Andrew joined Fawcett in 2016. He works across the breadth of issues Fawcett campaigns on, developing research proposals, formulating policy based on that evidence, and advocating for change in a lead role within our public affairs team. He has led on work including our Local Government Commission, in the development of our Equal Pay Bill, and on our Commission on Gender Stereotypes in Early Childhood.

Pathetic. The Fawcett Society responds to EHRC guide for separate and single-sex service providers:

The recently published EHRC guide for separate and single-sex service providers confirms our understanding of the current law. Providers of single-sex services can restrict or modify access for trans people when doing so is necessary to achieve a legitimate aim, and when the action taken is proportionate in balancing impacts on different groups of women.

But (yet again) the issue isn’t “trans people,” it’s men who claim to be trans women.

But much more to the point – “balancing impacts on different groups of women” shouldn’t have anything to do with impacts on men, including men who claim to be trans women. The set … Read the rest

And another thing.

Republican legislators who sponsored the bill emphasized that the punishments outlined were for doctors, “not for the woman”, said the Oklahoma state representative Jim Olsen.

Bollocks. Forcing women to gestate and push out babies they don’t want is extreme torture. It’s beside the point that the bill also punishes doctors, because the whole concept of forced pregnancy is punitive.

Notably, the bill was also unusual for being revived from the 2021 legislative session. During hearings in 2021, Olsen said he felt ending abortion was a moral duty and compared terminating a pregnancy to slavery.

Dead wrong. Forcing women to bear children is slavery – literal slavery. It’s hard labor, it’s not paid, it’s against their … Read the rest

The war on women continues to rage.

Oklahoma lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a bill to make performing an abortion a felony punishable by 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. That is likely to land the bill on the desk of the Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, who has promised to sign all anti-abortion legislation.

And this doesn’t make forced pregnancy the law in Oklahoma, it also catches Texas women in its trap.

More than 781,000 women of reproductive age live in Oklahoma. However, the bill is also expected to have an outsized impact on the nearly 7 million women of reproductive age who live in Texas. Thousands of pregnant Texans have relied on legal abortion in Oklahoma since Texas

Trump has been trying to tell historians what to say about him.

As an academic historian, I never expected to find myself in a videoconference with Donald Trump. But one afternoon last summer—a day after C-SPAN released a poll of historians who ranked him just above Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan, our country’s worst chief executives—he popped up in a Zoom box and told me and some of my colleagues about the 45th presidency from his point of view. He spoke calmly. “We’ve had some great people; we’ve had some people that weren’t so great. That’s understandable,” he told us. “That’s true with, I guess, every administration. But overall, we had tremendous, tremendous success.”

Point missed. He… Read the rest

The current issue of Free Inquiry arrived yesterday. One of the esteemed editors found the perfect illustration for a column I wrote.

But “conversion therapy” is the wrong label. Why does the BBC keep using it?

More than 100 organisations have pulled out of the UK’s first ever global LGBT+ conference over the government’s stance on conversion therapy.

The UK government had promised to ban conversion therapy but last week decided to exclude conversion therapy for transgender people in the ban.

Probably because it’s not conversion therapy. Sexual orientation is not the same as “gender identity.” The two are different. The most noticeable and consequential difference is that sexual orientation entails no surgical or pharmaceutical interventions at all. This discrepancy is why medical professionals need to be very cautious about agreeing with the self-diagnoses of adolescents who say they are trans: … Read the rest

So now let’s read the Equality and Human Rights Commission guide.

Who this guide is for

This guide is for service providers (anyone who provides goods, facilities or services to the public) who are looking to establish and operate a separate or single-sex service.

There was a time when that mostly meant service providers who excluded women from men’s clubs and bars and gyms, which was not only sexist in itself but also an extreme barrier to women working in various professions and businesses where a lot of the networking and jockeying for position took place in…clubs and bars and gyms.

Now it doesn’t mean that any more, now it means service providers who exclude men from women’s toilets… Read the rest

Trans Twitter urges veto on…well, on following the law.

We urge all NHS Equality Teams to ignore this transphobic & hostile guidance from EHRC that is likely to be found unlawful at judicial review & continue to write & follow trans inclusive policies & guidance across your orgs. We need civic leaders to stand up for whats right. https://t.co/ULutWU0JpA

— Trans NHS Staff Network (@TransNHS) April 4, 2022

Likely to be found unlawful on judicial review…according to some people on Twitter.

This is really bad advice. NHS Trusts needs to comply with the law as it is, not the law as mis-stated by campaign groups. Otherwise they risk being taken to court for unlawful discrimination themselves. pic.twitter.com/0tQsA9Agnu

— Sonia Sodha

On pronouns:

If it’s all well-intentioned then why should we not adopt the pronoun game as a universal custom? There are several reasons why I believe we should not: because it undermines self-confidence and resilience by asserting that one’s self-concept is rightly dependent upon external-validation, it endorses and encourages narcissistic behavior, and it creates a world of bizarre and unnecessary confusion for children around the topics of sex and gender. Put simply: it does more harm than good both to those it seeks to aid and everyone else.

Especially everyone else, and there are a lot more of us, and we’re not the ones making bizarre demands to change the language in order to “center” us.

Why are we

The BBC puts it more sharply.

After a contentious approval session where scientists and government officials went through the report line by line, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has now published its guidance on what the world can do to avoid an extremely dangerous future.

First, the bad news – even if all the policies to cut carbon that governments had put in place by the end of 2020 were fully implemented, the world will still warm by 3.2C this century.

This finding has drawn the ire of the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

I find it pretty annoying myself. I won’t be here for the worst of it, but that’s part of the problem, isn’t … Read the rest

There was Oradour-sur-Glane, there was My Lai, there was Srebrenica, there was Amritsar, and now there’s Bucha.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said that Russia’s public image is now one of torture and execution after the retreat of Russian forces in the town of Bucha led to the discovery of the killing of hundreds of civilians.
…

Ukrainian officials said the bodies of 410 civilians have been found in Kyiv-area towns that were recently retaken from Russian forces. Satellite images taken late last week show a 14-metre (45ft) mass grave in Bucha near the Church of St Andrew and Pyervozvannoho All Saints. Maxar, the company that took the pictures, said the first signs of excavation for a mass

As always, the word is that we can do it if we really get serious and hurry up, and the obvious problem is that we’re not going to.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the United Nations, warns that unless countries drastically accelerate efforts over the next few years to slash their emissions from coal, oil and natural gas, the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, will likely be out of reach by the end of this decade.

That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the dangers of global warming — including worsening floods, droughts, wildfires and ecosystem collapse — grow considerably. 

And … Read the rest

Joan Smith on Twitter v Rowling:

One of the biggest lies about the conflict between feminists and trans activists is that ‘the debate is toxic on both sides’. It’s trotted out in just about every article that takes a supposedly neutral position, even though the authors never produce any evidence for this slur on women who’ve never threatened anyone.

OR called anyone the equivalent of “cunt” and the rest of it.

Team Trans on the other hand is not so reasonable.

JK Rowling is a favourite target and now a music video has emerged in which trans campaigner Faye ‘Trust Fund Ozu’ addresses the author with the chilling words ‘hope you fit in a hearse’. The video also features