And speaking of the worship of Peak Bullying, Trump is still flattering his tits-out hero.

Donald Trump chose a rally in Georgia on Saturday night once again to praise Vladimir Putin, calling the Russian president “smart” even as he said the invasion of Ukraine amounted to a “big mistake”.

Putin is “smart” the way any successful crook is “smart.” It’s not a very admirable form of intelligence.

The Republican former president also had warm words for China’s president Xi Jinping and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and referred to such leaders collectively by saying: “The smartest one gets to the top.”

The “smartest” in the sense of the most ruthless, shameless, brutal, determined, conscienceless.

He spoke admiringly of Xi

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There’s conservatism and then there’s whatever this is:

After Donald Trump lost the November 2020 election to Joe Biden, Fox skewed further from news to comment, ending its 7pm nightly broadcast, firing the political editor who had been part of Fox accurately projecting on election night that Trump had lost the crucial state of Arizona and promoting Tucker Carlson, the populist commentator and host who has consistently downplayed the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, by extremist Trump supporters, the New York Times noted.

Carlson and other voices aired by Fox have spent the past four weeks playing down Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, going soft on Putin, and undermining the messages of the invaded country’s

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Another Lia Thomas looms into view.

Top women cyclists who have helped Great Britain to historic triumphs face losing their team places after a trans woman announced she would now compete in female events.

Emily Bridges has continued to race against men for the past year while undergoing hormone therapy, and her successes include a gold medal at the recent University Championships in Nottingham.

However, her testosterone levels are now low enough to meet the criteria set out by British Cycling, the sport’s governing body, for her to compete against women.

So he’ll be guaranteed to win everything in sight! Progress!

The 21-year-old recently spoke candidly about her transition and revealed it was ‘always the plan’ to compete in

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More war crimes:

There have been more than 70 separate attacks on hospitals, ambulances and doctors in Ukraine with the number increasing on a “daily basis”, says the World Health Organization (WHO).

…

Since 24 February, the WHO has reviewed and verified 72 separate attacks on healthcare facilities in Ukraine causing at least 71 deaths and 37 injuries.

Most have damaged hospitals, medical transports and supply stores, but the WHO has also recorded the “probable” abduction or detention of healthcare staff and patients.

“We are concerned that this number is increasing daily,” the WHO’s Ukraine country representative Jarno Habicht told the BBC.

“Health facilities should be safe places for both doctors and nurses, but also patients to turn to

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The BBC has lost its damn mind.

Heavy periods, debilitating pain and infertility – those are some of the causes of endometriosis, a condition that affects one in 10 people of any age in the UK, who are assigned female at birth.

They mean women. Endometriosis affects one in ten women in the UK. Simple, clear, easy to understand. The way they put it not so much.

But what is it really like living with the gynaecological condition?

Two women shared their story for Endometriosis Awareness month.

There you go! Gynaecological; women; you can say it.… Read the rest

A Russian-Canadian academic (he emigrated to Canada from the Soviet Union) writes a public Facebook post about Putin’s absurd invocation of JK Rowling:

Earlier today, Putin railed against the alleged “Russophobia” in the West and, moronically enough, attempted to compare Russia to J.K. Rowling in that context.

He shared JKR’s prompt response. The rop comment on his post? Rebecca Solnit libeling JKR.

What a stunningly ugly and untrue thing to say – especially to a Russian-born critic of Putin at this particular time.

She goes on in the same vein, on and on. Kill the witch blah blah blah kill her some more.

She recommends a piece by Laurie Penny of all people.

More from Solnit:

Leaving aside that this

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There are some very strange ideas about rights and entitlements out there.

Russia has approximately 6,000 nuclear warheads – the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. In an interview on Saturday, Medvedev said Russia’s nuclear doctrine did not require an enemy state to use such weapons first.

It’s a nuclear doctrine, you see. Bullies have a fist doctrine, murderers have a gun doctrine, Russia has a nuclear doctrine.

He said: “We have a special document on nuclear deterrence. This document clearly indicates the grounds on which the Russian Federation is entitled to use nuclear weapons. There are a few of them, let me remind them to you: number one is the situation, when Russia is struck by a

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Here’s a surprise. Protesters in Ukraine did such top quality protesting that they got Russian soldiers to go away.

A mayor in a Ukrainian town occupied by Russian forces has been released from captivity and the soldiers have agreed to leave after a mass protest by residents.

Slavutych, a northern town close to the Chernobyl nuclear site, was taken by Russian forces but stun grenades and overhead fire failed to disperse unarmed protesters on its main square on Saturday.

The crowd demanded the release of mayor Yuri Fomichev, who had been taken prisoner by the Russian troops.

Attempts by Russian troops to intimidate the growing protest failed and on Saturday afternoon Fomichev was let go by his captors.

I find … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The obvious rejoinder.

Maybe the trans people aren’t getting enough recognition after all, so let’s create trans athlete divisions…. Give them what they want; proper divisions with little sexless statuettes for the winners.

But that’s not what they want. Having a separate trans division would deny them their validation as “women” in exactly the same way that “third space” toilet facilities would. Trans activists don’t want a solution that’s “fair” that does not give them the hit of affirmation they crave. They don’t want to put a spotlight on their “transness”, they want to be centered, celebrated, and rewarded for their “womanliness.” The idea behind TWAW and “NO DEBATE” … Read the rest

Sometimes it just takes the breath away. This isn’t some pink-hair young adult, this is a middle-aged man with a book to advertise, and this is how he presents himself to the world.

https://twitter.com/pdkmitchell/status/1507091047301758986

He brags of standing outside a feminist meeting with a bunch of people shouting in order to drown them out and disrupt their meeting. He brags of it.

https://twitter.com/pdkmitchell/status/1507136157389316102

“Good and inspiring” to try to shout down women meeting to discuss women’s needs and rights.

https://twitter.com/pdkmitchell/status/1507450551927197704 https://twitter.com/coccinellanovem/status/1507377345195249668

At what point did you think a middle aged man traveling to shout aggressively outside a meeting hall full of women discussing how to lessen violence against women and children was a good and noble act?

— Shropshire Wendy.

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Megan McCardle writes about Lia Thomas:

I’ve now written two columns about Thomas, and it is striking how many people — almost all of them liberal — have spontaneously erupted when I told them what I was writing about. All made the same complaint: It’s not fair.

What’s striking about that? Of course it’s not fair. The unfairness is laughably (enragingly) obvious. He’s mocking us.

There’s little question that Thomas has retained some of the many biological advantages conferred by male puberty, such as height, heart and lung capacity, and strength. But the obvious rejoinder is that of course biology isn’t fair; it never was, and never can be.

That rejoinder is not obvious at all. It’s flippant … Read the rest

How is it their “turf”?

“Terfs get off our fucking turf”. #WPUKManchester. pic.twitter.com/43GH5WJIIh

— Belstaffie (@Belstaffie) March 25, 2022

#WPUKManchester #Manchester #Misogyny ⁦@AndyBurnhamGM⁩ trans extremists try to silence, intimidate and disrupt women speakers inside the Mechanic’s Institute this evening, by converging on it for the ⁦@Womans_Place_UK⁩ event. Around 200 protesters. One arrest made. pic.twitter.com/ewI7SxwUQe

— Belstaffie (@Belstaffie) March 25, 2022

#WPUKManchester Around 200 trans rights activists, gathered in St Peter’s Sq, Manchester at 7pm, to attempt to silence, intimidate and disrupt a WPUK meeting, at the nearby Mechanic’s Institute. pic.twitter.com/s1sBW4atUm

— Belstaffie (@Belstaffie) March 25, 2022

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Some background from way back on February 21:

Three decades ago, the newly independent country of Ukraine was briefly the third-largest nuclear power in the world.

Thousands of nuclear arms had been left on Ukrainian soil by Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But in the years that followed, Ukraine made the decision to completely denuclearize.

In exchange, the U.S., the U.K. and Russia would guarantee Ukraine’s security in a 1994 agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum.

Oh really. That’s not going all that well.

It is clear that Ukrainians knew they weren’t getting the exactly legally binding, really robust security guarantees they sought.

But they were told at the time that the United States

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Department of really bad analogies department:

JK Rowling has hit back at Vladimir Putin, after the Russian president cited her in a wide-ranging speech that saw him criticise “cancel culture”.

Pause for correction: she hasn’t “hit back”; she has rejected the comparison.

At a televised meeting on Friday, Mr Putin compared recent criticism of the Harry Potter author to that faced by pro-war Russian composers and writers.

“Pro-war” is sloppy too, since the issue isn’t war in general but this specific “war” which is an unprovoked attack by a massive nuclear-armed country on a much smaller one with no nukes.

In the lengthy speech, which was given to the winners of various cultural prizes, President Putin claimed Russian composers

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So the thing is, the wife of a Supreme Court justice tried very hard to overturn the presidential election last year, which is…kind of criminal? Probably impossible to prosecute but not therefore legit? Criminalish?

The messages, which do not directly reference Justice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results — and how receptive and grateful [Mark] Meadows said he was to receive her advice. Among Thomas’s stated goals in the messages was for lawyer Sidney Powell, who promoted incendiary and unsupported claims about the election, to be “the lead and the face”

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Cultural differences.

We are also much more sceptical of religion – neo or traditional.

— Nicole Lampert (@nicolelampert) March 24, 2022

https://twitter.com/Adele_Thames/status/1507144310378086404 https://twitter.com/Adele_Thames/status/1507144883018076173

She says, not taking herself at all seriously, not bragging at all, not boasting about how self-deprecating she is, not accusing other people of what she’s doing herself.

I see this claim a lot, in fact: the claim that people in the UK are massively self-deprecating. It’s a self-defeating claim, because it’s self-flattering. You can’t convince us how self-deprecating you are by bragging about how self-deprecating you are.… Read the rest

It seems Clarence Thomas’s wife plotted with Mark Meadows to help Trump steal the election. That’s interesting.

Jane Mayer in the New Yorker in January:

Many Americans first became aware of Ginni Thomas’s activism on January 6, 2021. That morning, before the Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C., turned into an assault on the Capitol resulting in the deaths of at least five people, she cheered on the supporters of President Donald Trump who had gathered to overturn Biden’s election. In a Facebook post that went viral, she linked to a news item about the protest, writing, “love maga people!!!!” Shortly afterward, she posted about Ronald Reagan’s famous “A Time for Choosing” speech. Her next status

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There was a Woman’s Place UK meeting in Manchester tonight. Apparently the usual happened.

https://twitter.com/boodleoops/status/1507110750590017537

Of course there were men with megaphones outside. Can’t let women talk unopposed.

Imagine this was a trans meeting in Manchester tonight.

Do you think for a moment the reaction would be symmetrical or barely recognisable to what we've seen tonight?

The indulgence offered to angry sexless bourgeoise mantra chanting misfits is quite something.

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) March 24, 2022

Women gathering to discuss our rights are being subject to a large, aggressive protest. In 2022. Please follow #WPUKManchester and share so that people can see what women have to put up with when trying to meet.

— Woman’s Place UK (@Womans_Place_UK) March

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Yglesias is really making me cross, I must say.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1507029260657168389

Come on. This is not primarily (or secondarily and you could go through quite a lot more numbers) an issue of linguistic change. The word is not some relatively unimportant vocabulary item, it’s the word that names the female half of the set of human beings, the half that is the source of all human beings. That’s what matters about it. The fact that “language changes over time” is not central to this controversy and he must know that perfectly well.

Mar nails it.

https://twitter.com/mar2vickers/status/1507054062122020873… Read the rest

Yet another man telling us yet again that we have to accept the “new” meaning of the word that names us. Language changes, you fools! Live with it!

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1507005563644829696 https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1507007063154515972

Funny how he’s not talking about people with XY chromosomes. Funny how people like him always know which people to lecture and bully.… Read the rest