From Reporters Without Borders:

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is appalled by the suspended prison sentences passed yesterday on two Nigerien journalists who published an international report about drug trafficking and corruption in Niger. These totally unjustified sentences send a shocking signal about the state of justice and the fight against corruption in this country, RSF says.

In a terrible start to the year for journalists in Niger, L’Événement news website editor Moussa Aksar was given a two-month suspended jail sentence and freelance reporter Samira Sabou got a one-month suspended jail sentence for publishing a report by the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC) in May.

Describing Niger as a “nerve centre” of regional drug trafficking, the GI-TOC

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What petty childish performative bullshit.

A secondary school specialising in performing arts has quietly cancelled Harry Potter author JK Rowling – replacing her as a house name over her ‘comments and viewpoints surrounding trans people’.

The Boswells School in Chelmsford, Essex, had honoured the writer for one of its in-school groups, which had also been labelled with the quality of ‘self-discipline’.

But it emerged today she had been replaced over the summer with Olympic hero Dame Kelly Holmes.

The school had announced plans to review Rowling’s name in July after ‘requests from students and staff’. 

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The school’s issues with Rowling, 56, were laid bare in a newsletter seen by MailOnline, which featured an image of the house logo

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La lutte continue.

Letter 8. Losing the will to live. https://t.co/btZff8QPxm

— Andy (@lecanardnoir) January 4, 2022

So I read the other guy’s 6 and 7 so that I’d know what Andy was replying to. I became very tired when I got to this bit:

In my first letter, I gave a definition of gender that highlights that it is a complex construction involving a wide range of inputs and outputs, and that we are still actively involved in the process of understanding how those factors interact.

No it isn’t complex, except in the sense that it’s become fashionable to misunderstand it and try to make a personality out of it.

Andy’s response to that part:

I am not going

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Yet another guy cheerily giving away women’s rights.

https://twitter.com/roderickgraham/status/1477752118404595718

He’d rather destroy women’s sports than “erase” trans people (by which he means not allow men to compete against women). Easy for him, it’s not his ability to compete fairly in a sport that’s being waved away.

https://twitter.com/radicalhag/status/1477989506011869185

He would rather erase women. So many of them would. It’s astounding.

Jess DeWahls sees it too.

https://twitter.com/JessDeWahls/status/1478136391565520897… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Connections found.

“The idea that history stands still is nonsense because you keep finding new things.”

It’s not just a matter of things being “found” or “discovered.” It’s that new information is being disclosed or officially acknowledged, instead of being hidden, or swept under the rug. It completes the story, telling it more fully and honestly.

On this side of the Atlantic, the official acknowledgement of the foundations of Canada and the United States in genocide, and the disposession of the Original inhabitants, along with the importation of kidnapped, enslaved Africans, is a work in progress.* It’s not that this was ever really secret (certainly not to those on the … Read the rest

We keep seeing them, men breezily giving away women’s rights. There’s an endless supply of such men.

A blanket ban is insane. Young trans girls are indistinguishable from their non-trans friends.

Feels like this country is *uniquely in the world* sliding backwards on trans rights.https://t.co/qSyAn8JvPy

— Tom Harwood (@tomhfh) January 3, 2022

Yes, how dare girls’ schools continue to be girls’ schools. Never mind the fact that girls flourish in girls’ schools – add some boys to the mix anyway, because Tom Harwood is fine with it.

No, actually the “question at the heart of this debate” is, why do YOU (essentially just a rich person with opinions) merit being listened to as though you’re an expert here? https://t.co/f6UKe9gcTj

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Why is Devin Nunes walking? To take up an awesome opportunity to run a new Media Thingy invented by Donald Trump! (Actually because redistricting has made it hard for him to get re-elected.) Who is better at inventing awesome new media thingies than Donald Trump??? He’s invented about six of them since he lost the election, and they’re all so successful that they make Twitter and Facebook look like the local coffee shop’s noticeboard.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) officially resigned from Congress on Monday to become the CEO of ex-President Donald Trump’s new media venture, Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG).

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The California Republican’s plans for resignation were revealed in early December. Trump claimed in a statement at the

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Devin Nunes has resigned.

NBC News: Devin Nunes has officially resigned from Congress. @NBCNews

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) January 3, 2022

Devin Nunes is no longer in Congress. Marjorie Taylor Greene is no longer on Twitter… 2022 is off to a good start.

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) January 3, 2022

Devin Nunes resignation letter is read on the floor of the House today, taking effect at 11:59 PM. Good riddance. pic.twitter.com/cAN5oY6cbe

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 3, 2022

Buh-bye.… Read the rest

Graham Douglas in a comment told us about a statue that has been moved from a prominent place in front of the National Trust property Dunham Massey Hall.

The Dunham Massey Hall sundial is a lead sculpture depicting a kneeling Black man holding a sundial on his head. It was created during the early 18th century, and until 2020 stood outside Dunham Massey Hall, a stately home in Cheshire, England.

Its subject matter attracted criticism and in 2020 the National Trust removed it amid the global wave of statue removals connected with the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. It is currently held in storage.

The sundial sculpture is a black, polychromed cast-lead statue. It depicts a

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Apparently learning more about history is excessively “woke.”

The head of the National Trust has said she received anonymous death threats during a “culture war” row over the organisation’s perceived “wokeness”.

Oh no, what did they do? Rename themselves the Critical Race Theory Trust?

The row was sparked by NT efforts to learn more about the history of its properties, including a report published last year that found connections between 93 of its historic places and colonialism and slavery.

Oh. They reported on the fact that the money that built those historic places came from somewhere.

What was the thinking before that? That it’s all just a miracle? Somehow a few men designated “aristocrats” were rewarded with prodigy houses and … Read the rest

Whew it’s been a weather here. A week ago today, early in the morning, it started snowing as if being blasted from a fire hose, and the temperatures went down way below freezing and stayed there until today.

So now there is slush everywhere, but even so walking is easier than it’s been for a week, and tomorrow it will be more so. I just walked up and down the block 8 times because the sidewalk is naked from one end to the other and that’s still a rarity. Before that I walked to the library – it had been closed for the whole week.

Your Chicago and Minneapolis don’t close down when it snows but then it snows a … Read the rest

Harry Miller v College of Policing might as well not have happened.

.@SurreyPolice consider this a public order offence and wish to arrest the person who posted it.

Please retweet if you disagree this is a public order offence and that the police should have better things to do. pic.twitter.com/HusqNdoRRI

— WeAreFairCop (@WeAreFairCop) January 2, 2022

2022 will therefore be the year of injunctions and damages, over and over again until lessons are finally learned.

— WeAreFairCop (@WeAreFairCop) January 2, 2022

Or how does it fall within section 5? How is any of this ‘threatening or abusive’? pic.twitter.com/Sdh4e4Psfi

— WeAreFairCop (@WeAreFairCop) January 2, 2022

https://twitter.com/MartinNeill3/status/1477685940818780171 … Read the rest

Finally – a NO!

A group of the UK’s leading girls’ schools will not accept transgender pupils because they are worried it will ‘jeopardise’ their status as single-sex institutions. 

Stupid place to put scare quotes. Yes, jeopardise; what’s wrong with that word?

The Girls’ Day School Trust, which represents 23 private schools and two academies, updated its gender identity policy guidance document last month and shared it with its members. 

In a new section on admissions, the GDST said its schools do not accept applications from pupils  who are legally biologically male, even if they identify as women [girls].

They said that having a policy on ‘gender identity’ rather than the sex recorded on a pupil’s birth certificate would ‘jeopardise

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Marjorie Taylor Greene joins Trump is being permanently booted off Twitter.

Twitter on Sunday permanently suspended the personal account of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia, after the company said she had violated its Covid-19 misinformation policies.

Twitter suspended Ms. Greene’s account after she tweeted on Saturday, falsely, about “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths.” She included a misleading chart that pulled information from a government database of unverified raw data called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, a decades-old system that relies on self-reported cases from patients and health care providers.

Twitter said that Ms. Greene had a fifth “strike,” which meant that her account will not be restored. The company had 

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Sonia Sodha says something you’d think would be too obvious to have to say:

The police need to be politically impartial – they must not police people differently because of their political opinions. Yet there are numerous examples of police forces actively taking political sides in the sex and gender debate. Paul Giannasi, the national policing adviser for hate crime, has praised Lancashire police for expressing disappointment at lawful expressions of gender critical belief, congratulating them for their “initiative and empathy” in doing so.

Empathy for whom? For men who say they are women. Definitely not for women.

The police officer who unlawfully warned off [Harry] Miller told him, Miller said, that a foetus could have a female brain but

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Just handing away our rights as if they were his to hand away.

There's also women in American prisons right now how have been sexually assaulted by lesbian prisoners. Do you want them removed from women's prisons as well?

— @etvpod.bsky.social (@ETVPod) January 1, 2022

No, I'm proving you're willing to accept a nonzero amount of risk by housing lesbians. Then it's a separate question if housing trans women is more like housing lesbians or housing cis men. I haven't seen any evidence to prove it's like the latter, just one really weak study.

— @etvpod.bsky.social (@ETVPod) January 1, 2022

Oh just stop right there. That’s cheating. It’s not “a question” whether housing trans women is more like housing lesbians … Read the rest

Andy Lewis aka Le canard noir is doing a letters-debate thing with Embrace the void aka Aaron Rabinowitz. The latter defines some terms at the outset:

The other important term here is moral panic, which I’ve discussed in a few places but just briefly refers to a substantial overreaction to a small or nonexistent problem.

Mm. It’s a small or nonexistent problem – the fact that we (women) are being told we have to redefine ourselves in a way that entails including men as women on demand. If a man tells us he’s a woman we have to agree, or at least comply; if we refuse, punishment is swift. To us that is not a small problem.

Often the

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Girls can’t “identify” their way out of having their genitals sliced off.

The death of a young woman in Sierra Leone, almost immediately after undergoing female genital mutilation, has sparked outrage and revived calls to end the practice.

The body of 21-year-old Maseray Sei was found on 20 December at Nyandeni village in Bonthe district, southern Sierra Leone, a day after the FGM took place. Sei’s family said that after the procedure the mother of two boys complained of a migraine and was in pain, with complications from FGM thought to be the cause, according to activists working on the case.

Maybe pointless mutilation of genitals isn’t such a good idea after all.

Sierra Leone has one of the

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Dress your people in lacquer and rubber:

The sexology department at a Norwegian university headed by a trans-identified male and his wife prompted backlash after requiring students to participate in a fetish club as part of their research.

Zoologists can do research on animals without dressing up as animals. I don’t see why sexologists can’t do the same.

Tonje Kristin Jensen, a student at the University of Agder, told the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation that she decided to forego a study trip in Oslo after receiving a letter providing a required dress code that included fetish gear on the theme of “lacquer and rubber.” The memo encouraged students to attend in erotic clothes, such as lace and thigh-high stockings.

Erotic … Read the rest

A letter to the Glinner update from Matt Osborne:

Mr. Linehan,

The following comment from an Alabama Democratic Party insider was just passed along to me:

“How are we going to talk to voters with a straight face after setting a quota for non-binary party officials?”

I have been sounding the alarm all this time, and now the pigeons are coming home to roost. This midterm election year is going to be awful for Democrats. I was just discussing the poor polling on all this gobbledygook with my local-political friends and said “every time another man cheats women out of their sports, Democrats lose ten House seats.” One of them responded by conveying that comment, which is less than

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