Libya goes full Afghanistan.

Libya’s interior minister has announced the reintroduction of the morality police to the streets to enforce what he called “society’s traditions” and restrict women’s freedom of movement.

On Wednesday, Emad al-Tarabulsi said the patrols would resume next month. They would target people with “strange” haircuts, ensure women wear “modest” clothing, and prevent gender mixing in public spaces. He also suggested that women would be barred from travelling within the country without a male guardian, adding that those “seeking personal freedom should go to Europe”.

That, or be male.

Since 2011, Libya has seen a decline in religious freedoms in the predominately Muslim country.

The circulation of non-Islamic religious materials, missionary activity and speech considered “offensive

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Drag them and burn them he says.

As Timothy Snyder put it, they are clearly (from memory) preparing the ground for worse things to come. I don’t know to what degree it’s a conscious strategy (as opposed to instinctual, trial and error etc.), but anyway it’s a prime example of the weaponization of cognitive dissonance: Signal your illiberal and authoritarian agenda in advance while making sure there is just enough plausible deniability to give you an alibi (”it’s just trolling”, ”not to be taken literally” etc.). Get your followers into the habit of going along with, excusing or explaining away, even actively applauding increasingly dehumanizing and violent rhetoric, unambiguous, shameless lies, blatant … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany Room.

Another neighbourhood vignette. Trans bullshit makes me cranky. Maybe at this point I’m spending too much time looking for it, but its omnipresence makes it hard to avoid. Today’s encounter with it took place in a local store selling handicrafts. Right at the door was a little Pride Progress flag (complete with the Intersex yellowtiangle with purple circle). Beside it was a happy rainbow sticker assuring those in need of such reassurance that You Are Safe Here. Of course this wasn’t telling everyone entering the store that the building they were entering was up to code and therefore unlikely to burst into flame or collapse onto us during … Read the rest

Trump Attorney General Hopeful Vows to Drag Bodies Through the Street

Mike Davis, a right-wing activist considered a leading candidate for Trump’s attorney general, on Wednesday threatened to (legally) “drag their dead political bodies through the streets” and burn them, referring to enemies of Trump and the right.

He did say that.

Davis, a former clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch who calls himself “Trump’s viceroy,” is not likely to show any restraint in exercising retribution on behalf of the president. He’s already threatened special counsel Jack Smith, who oversaw the investigation and prosecution of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election as well as his mishandling of classified documents, to “lawyer up.”

The fact

It seems the Yay Nazis wing is celebrating. The New Republic reports:

The immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidential election win is already a bad omen for women and minorities across the nation, who within less than 48 hours have found themselves the subjects of hate campaigns designed to belittle and marginalize them.

“Your body, my choice. Forever,” posted white supremacist, Hitler fan, and far-right political pundit Nick Fuentes hours before the race had even been called in Trump’s favor.

…

A text campaign—and obvious hate crime—issued a threat to students of color across the nation, claiming the recipients had been “selected” as “house slaves” and were due to appear at plantations.

Just kids blowing off steam.… Read the rest

And we wonder why Dems are unpopular.

This @CNN clip centers on a fierce dispute over whether calling transgender girls “boys who play in girls’ sports” is a slur. The man who says it isn’t one says that most people are uncomfortable with this and this helped cost Harris this election.
pic.twitter.com/Fo1smbwTgK

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) November 9, 2024

Check out the self-righteous beardy white guy shouting down the black guy who had the unmitigated temerity to say the words “boys playing in girls’ sports.”

He’s why Trump won.

Ok not all of why Trump won, but a big chunk of it.… Read the rest

Via Kathleen Stock, a seminar at Sussex in 2021.

I find it so fascinating, that substitution of the image for the reality. It’s not a brute physical fact that children are children, no no no no, how crude and philistine would that be? No no, it’s an image, conjured up by evil cruel weird “transphobic activists.” It’s not a brute physical fact that mutilating genitals is mutilating genitals, no no, it’s a paranoid fantasy in the contemporary landscape. Everything is an image and a fantasy, nothing is physical or real – except of course for the obvious unmistakable fact that the trans child is the trans child.… Read the rest

This should cheer us up – Susan B. Glasser at the New Yorker on Trump’s revenge.

Electing Donald J. Trump once could be dismissed as a fluke, an aberration, a terrible mistake—a consequential one, to be sure, yet still fundamentally an error. But America has now twice elected him as its President. It is a disastrous revelation about what the United States really is, as opposed to the country that so many hoped that it could be. His victory was a worst-case scenario—that a convicted felon, a chronic liar who mismanaged a deadly once-in-a-century pandemic, who tried to overturn the last election and unleashed a violent mob on the nation’s Capitol, who calls America “a garbage can for the

An interesting development:

UPDATE: A source with knowledge in the matter has told me that the ACLU is considering sacking its star transgender attorney, Chase Strangio, from leading oral arguments on Dec 4 in U.S. vs. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court case involving Tennessee’s ban on pediatric sex “change” Rx.…

— Leor Sapir (@LeorSapir) November 7, 2024

UPDATE: A source with knowledge in the matter has told me that the ACLU is considering sacking its star transgender attorney, Chase Strangio, from leading oral arguments on Dec 4 in U.S. vs. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court case involving Tennessee’s ban on pediatric sex “change” Rx. According to my source, Strangio is “Not dealing well with the stress, not being sufficiently respectful” of LGBT

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Historians will.

Did you stop for a minute to really think about what exactly “trans” IS? There’s no question that you love your child. Isn’t that all the more reason to look long and hard at what’s going on with your child, no matter how frightening it may seem to look directly at it?

I’ll tell you what trans is NOT: it is not some innate state of being. “Being trans” is not like being gay, which is inborn. “Transness” is not something anyone is born with. Your child was not born “trans” and your child is not fated to “be trans” for the rest of their days. Transness is an idea in … Read the rest

Watch the clip.

Mike Davis, a leading candidate for the Trump administration's AG: “We're going to deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing – anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents. We're gonna put kids in cages. It's gonna be glorious."
(2023)pic.twitter.com/YpjjmL2K4V

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) November 8, 2024

… Read the rest

The chief anti-Holocaust-denialism scholar, Deborah Lipstadt:

Horrified by the attacks tonight in Amsterdam, which are terribly reminiscent of a classic pogrom. I am also deeply disturbed by how long the reported attacks lasted and call on the government to conduct a thorough investigation into security force intervention and on how these…

— Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt (@StateSEAS) November 8, 2024

Horrified by the attacks tonight in Amsterdam, which are terribly reminiscent of a classic pogrom. I am also deeply disturbed by how long the reported attacks lasted and call on the government to conduct a thorough investigation into security force intervention and on how these despicable attacks transpired. In terrible historical irony, this is happening two days before the grim anniversary

Ah yes, “Zionist hooligans.” That explains everything.

“Maccabi Tel Aviv Hooligans” – that’s just lovely.… Read the rest

Yes, the one consolation for the victory of the convicted felon is that he’s not a TransAlly and won’t be appointing any men who pretend to be women to cabinet posts. No, that’s not because he respects women.

In other words, what she said.

In case I haven’t been clear in the numerous articles I have written in which I slate and heavily criticise what passes for the modern left these days, including Biden and Harris. I understand, as far as I am able, whyTrump was elected, and the absolute shit show surrounding the…

— Julie Bindel (@bindelj) November 8, 2024

All of what she said:

In case I haven’t been clear in the numerous articles I have written in

Antisemitic riots in Amsterdam:

Israeli commercial planes on Friday were bringing home citizens injured in Amsterdam after bursts of violence tied to a soccer game between a Dutch and an Israeli team that Israeli and Dutch officials described as antisemitic attacks.

…

While the exact sequence of events remained unclear, the violence appeared to be the product of two combustible forces in Europe: the unrest that often accompanies gatherings of hard-core soccer fans and tensions over the yearlong Israeli military offensive in Gaza.

In other words men lose control.

Videos circulating on social media and a video distributed by The Associated Press provide a glimpse of the tensions in the hours leading up to the violence. In the A.P.

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Historians will.

@Bevin

If you and your child were to be honest about what is going on with the trans issue, you would be more able to resolve it in a way that protects him, or her in the long run. The transgender issue is an artifact of toxic masculinity. Those children who experience the sexism and bullying of not conforming to the gender expectations of their sex are now being shepherded into a belief that they have a gender identity that is different from their sex, and that the gender identity is what takes primacy in defining whether they are male or female; and that is a dangerous social lie that … Read the rest

Maybe, just maybe, this was never a good idea in the first place.

Trans men sue NHS over ‘half-built’ genitalia

Sorry, mate, just can’t get the parts.

Human rights lawyers are representing patients who have been left with “indeterminate genitalia” and “psychological distress” after their surgery processes were unexpectedly halted.

NHS England had commissioned St Peter’s Andrology Centre, a private clinic in north London, to carry out the surgeries but did not renew the contract upon its expiry in March 2020.

Good old Saint Peter, patron saint of rebuilt peters.

Seeking further information, I learn that andrology is a real thing. Creating a penis out of thigh skin on the other hand, not so much. Whatever you create that way

Department of silly titles department.

Trump’s triumph is a disaster for Starmer and the self-regarding, virtue-signalling elites

Well, yes, but it’s not quite that simple. Just for one thing it’s also a festival for the rich, destructive, profit at all costs elites.

Preening virtue-signaling thought-policing lefties can be annoying, especially when they forget that women are not The Enemy, but that doesn’t make the blunt misogyny and racism and generalized contempt of Trump more acceptable. The choice is not between gender police and Trump; there’s a huge amount of territory between those two silly poles.

That territory is where most people live.… Read the rest

The International Boxing Association speaks up.

The IBA sent a letter to the International Olympic Committee in June last year, warning of the safety risks that women could face at the Paris Games against a fighter who had already failed sex tests. But the IOC took no action, instead allowing Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, a second boxer whose results suggested the same difference in sexual development, to sweep to Olympic titles without losing a single round. Three months on, as the IOC pours scorn on fresh reporting in France about “unverified documents whose origin cannot be confirmed”, the IBA is mounting a staunch defence of the accuracy of its testing procedures.

“It was a chromosome test, to

Oh goody goody, another first.

State Sen[ator] Sarah McBride will be Delaware’s next representative in Congress, becoming the first transgender person elected to federal office in the history of the United States.

But not, by quite a long way, the first man elected to federal office in the history of the United States.

That’s part of the fun of trans for men, you know – getting to playact being oppressed and ignored and shoved aside All This Time. When you pause to remember they’re men the game crumbles into nothing.

She will assume the congressional seat vacated by U.S. Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, who will replace retiring U.S. Sen. Tom Carper.

Man replaces woman. Big news.… Read the rest