Originally a comment by latsot on The most extreme elements.

A compromise is supposed to be a mutual acceptance of terms. A deal. It’s expected that each party give something up to achieve a result beneficial to everyone. The phrase a “compromise on the rights of women” implies that it’s only women – as usual – who are expected to give anything up and what they’re expected to give up is – as usual – their rights.

This is not a compromise as the word is generally understood. Sullivan uses it to make disagreement seem unreasonable and himself the sole arbiter of reason.

That much is obvious. What’s not, apparently, is that negotiation isn’t really about making compromises, it’s … Read the rest

This kind of crap.

https://twitter.com/MagsVisaggs/status/1380198966348877825 https://twitter.com/MagsVisaggs/status/1380199252379496451

No you’re not, because I for one did say it and you didn’t and you can’t, because you don’t know where I am and because it’s hardly worth it to travel from wherever you are and because there’s no such thing as “period diarrhea” and because if there were you wouldn’t be keeping it in a tub now would you.

Anyway. This. This is why the whole idea is so fucked up. The belief that women can’t function in the world because [gasp] they have periods is one of the pretexts for subordinating and confining us for however many years it’s been. To see fetishizing fantasizing men claiming they’re menstruating and that as … Read the rest

It takes my breath away sometimes to see with what relaxed confidence some men will tell women to compromise on our rights. Andrew Sullivan is one such man.

If we were going to construct a test-case for how dysfunctional our politics have become, it would be hard to beat the transgender issue. It profoundly affects a relatively minuscule number of people in the grand scheme of things, and yet galvanizes countless more for culture war purposes. It has become a litmus test for social justice campaigners, who regard anyone proposing even the slightest qualifications on the question as indistinguishable from a Klan member. It has seized the attention of some of the most extreme elements among radical feminists, who

… Read the rest

This is very bad news: Amazon succeeded in blocking the union.

Workers at the Bessemer, Alabama warehouse voted 1,798 to 738 against the effort, labour officials said.

That represented a majority of votes cast in the contest, which was seen as a key test for Amazon after global criticism of its treatment of workers during the pandemic.

The union said it would challenge the results.

It accused Amazon of interfering with the right of employees to vote in a “free and fair election”, including by lying to staff about the implications of the vote in mandatory staff meetings and pushing the postal service to install a mailbox on company grounds in an effort to monitor the vote.

“Amazon has

… Read the rest

“Rachel” McKinnon aka Veronica Ivy is working his final weeks at the College of Charleston and still finding time to abuse a student on Twitter. It’s almost as if he’s just not a very nice man.

https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380316558912815113 https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380317893372620800 https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380479516993335307

Selina Soule was of course not suing to ban trans women from sport, she was suing to keep males from competing in women’s sport.

But also, this is a man in his late 30s, a professor, holding a first year student up to ridicule on Twitter, and lying about her in the process.

https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380480258424631302 https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380480761711710208

I guess Rhys McKinnon wants bullying a teenage girl on Twitter to be his legacy at 39. Yikes.

https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1380481705866362883

Yes definitely the fact that he never … Read the rest

Mm. Progressive.

https://twitter.com/Slatzism/status/1380295311399264259

More on “Jessica Marie” Hann from March 2019:

Desert Hot Springs, California. Jason Michael Hann was convicted of senselessly murdering his infant daughter and son, and abandoning their bodies in storage units. At the time of his arrest, he was found to be subjecting a third infant, his son, to life-threatening harm. Now on death row, the 45-year-old serial baby killer says he identifies as a woman, and is demanding that the state of California approve him for gender-affirming surgery to supplement the bras, makeup and hair-styling tools he is permitted to use.

In 1999, Mr Hann was living in Vermont with Krissy Lynn Werntz, the mother of his children, when he beat their infant son,

… Read the rest

Man approves of man being nominated for women’s prize.

https://twitter.com/GarthGreenwell/status/1379783066302971907

Easy for him. He’s a man, so he doesn’t get overlooked and forgotten and tucked away on the pink fluffy shelf the way women do.

https://twitter.com/GarthGreenwell/status/1379783419715059714

He’s apologizing to himself in case any of the ugliness on Twitter has been directed at him. How sweet.

https://twitter.com/nanalanfann/status/1380076206809178114

Oh yes, that’s so funny, women and little girls are so funny for being afraid of male strangers getting all kinky and ironic in their toilets and pageants.… Read the rest

Yeah, god damn it, open up the cruise industry again, because how could that possibly be at all risky in the midst of a pandemic?

The state of Florida is suing the Biden administration to reopen the cruise industry “immediately” and allow cruises to “resume safely,” Florida’s governor and attorney general announced Thursday.

“Safely” how? A cruise ship is a small place where thousands of people are packed together like tuna in a can.

“We don’t believe the federal government has the right to mothball a major industry for over a year based on very little evidence and very little data. And I think we have a good chance for success,” Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a news

… Read the rest

The Babylon Bee:

LITTLE ROCK, AR—In a huge blow to trans-species rights, Arkansas has passed a controversial law banning the dismemberment and surgical altering of children if they want to be a different creature. 

But trans mermaids are mermaids!

“I’ll never forget the day my daughter Belle was splashing in the tub and said, ‘Look at me, Mommy! I’m a mermaid!'” said local progressive mother and part-time librarian Zindy Derple. “I knew that day she was different. A mythical fish-creature trapped in a human girl’s body.”

Belle’s dismemberment surgery has now been canceled due to Arkansas’s new law. 

“Now, we can’t even get her the compassionate leg-removal medical care needed to turn her into her true mermaid self,” she

… Read the rest

Greg Sargent at the Post notes the determination of the Republicans to enforce evil on all of its foot soldiers via the example of Georgia governor Brian Kemp.

Kemp’s travails are detailed in a great new piece in the New York Times. It examines Kemp’s frantic efforts to atone for the heresy of refusing to help then-President Donald Trump overturn his Georgia loss, and then defending the loss as a legitimate outcome.

That is, the heresy of refusing to help Donald Trump break a bunch of laws in order to steal the election.

The central revelation is that Kemp sees his advocacy for Georgia’s new voting law as a way to win back GOP voters still fuming over his

… Read the rest

The Republican “we’re gonna TELL on you” ploy is getting more attention.

The National Republican Congressional Committee debuted a bright-yellow prechecked recurring-donation box on its donation page with a startling ultimatum.

The message from House Republicans’ campaign arm — which caught the eye of many reporters on Wednesday — told people that it needed to know it hadn’t “lost you to the Radical Left” and that if they opted out of making their donation a recurring one and “UNCHECK this box, we will have to tell Trump you’re a DEFECTOR & sided with the Dems.”

It’s interesting how stupid that message is, and how cheerful the Republicans who thought it up must be about telling their own people “We … Read the rest

The insult of nominating a man to win a women’s writing prize is compounded by the fact that the book is badly written as well as stomach-turningly sexist. (I haven’t read the whole book, but I have read snippets, and writing that bad is not confined to snippets. The snippets are as it were diagnostic. Someone who writes that badly writes that badly all the time.)

"Standing for decency." Lol. pic.twitter.com/kr606laHtY

— International Lesbian Solidarity ⚢ (@theomegalesbian) April 8, 2021

It just couldn’t get much worse. It’s a prize for women so the people in charge nominate a man who calls himself a woman, for a book in which he writes that “feminization” is all about being the object of … Read the rest

Some people think much too well of themselves.

Former reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner is talking with political consultants as she actively explores a run for governor of California, three sources with direct knowledge of her deliberations tell Axios.

Based on what? Being a self-obsessed nitwit? What possible qualifications could that boring vain narcissistic twerp have for being governor of a state that’s larger than many countries? Not to mention the fact that he killed a woman by crashing into her car when she was stopped at a red light. Who would want a governor who killed someone by driving badly?… Read the rest

Sian Cain, scolder of women who don’t agree that men are women if they say they are, tweets.

Hey wonderful @secondshelfbks – how many copies of Detransition, Baby have you sold in the last 24 hours?

— Sian Cain (@siancain) April 7, 2021

She also retweets.

A statement about eligibility for the Women's Prize for Fiction.

Our full terms and conditions of entry can be viewed on our website: https://t.co/nAkInbbiUZ pic.twitter.com/gEsAEuszUF

— Women's Prize (@WomensPrize) April 7, 2021

I don’t know what to tell them. It’s nice that (according to them) the Women’s Prize has always aimed to honour, celebrate and champion women’s voices, but the reality remains that they’re not doing that by making men eligible for the prize. … Read the rest

Sian Cain at the Guardian writes:

The Women’s prize for fiction has issued a strongly worded statement saying that it “deplores any attempts to malign or bully” authors nominated for the prize, after trans novelist Torrey Peters was targeted in an open letter.

In other words the Women’s prize for fiction has issued a statement maligning and bullying women who say the Women’s prize for fiction should be for women as opposed to men who claim to be women. So I guess the Women’s prize for fiction isn’t for women any more.

The US writer, who is nominated for the £30,000 award for her debut novel Detransition, Baby, was the subject of a letter published online on Tuesday

… Read the rest

In Georgia news:

A district attorney in Atlanta said Wednesday that she will not pursue charges against a Georgia state lawmaker who was arrested during a protest of the state’s sweeping new election law.

Probably because she didn’t commit a crime.

“After reviewing all of the evidence, I have decided to close this matter,” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said in an emailed statement. “It will not be presented to a grand jury for consideration of indictment, and it is now closed.”

Rep. Park Cannon, a Democrat from Atlanta, was arrested March 25 after she knocked on the door to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s office while he was on live television speaking about the voting bill he had

… Read the rest

Hey Siri,

Define grace.

pic.twitter.com/cTmuKD8AqQ

— Dr. Jonathan N. Stea (@jonathanstea) April 7, 2021

… Read the rest

James Kirchick on the new and not improved ACLU:

“My successor, and the board of directors that have supported him, have basically tried to transform the organization from a politically neutral, nonpartisan civil liberties organization into a progressive liberal organization,” [former Executive Director Ira] Glasser says about Anthony Romero, an ex-Ford Foundation executive who continues to serve as the ACLU’s executive director. According to former ACLU national board member Wendy Kaminer in her 2009 book Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity, and the ACLU, Romero and his enablers routinely engaged in the sort of undemocratic and unaccountable behavior practiced by the individuals and institutions the ACLU usually took to court, like withholding information (concerning a breach of ACLU members’ privacy,

… Read the rest

It seems the Republican National Committee thought Trump’s sneaky theft of money from supporters is such a brilliant idea that they’ll do it even more so.

UPDATE: The @NRCC has an even worse alternate prechecked recurring donation box that says they will "tell Trump you are a DEFECTOR" if unchecked. h/t @iankoski cc @ShaneGoldmacher https://t.co/TH8sURaZ9P https://t.co/et4wN88OiW pic.twitter.com/FhDphhmNkY

— Tim Miller (@Timodc) April 7, 2021

I checked Snopes and they don’t have it yet, though they do have the Trump one and rate it true.… Read the rest

The reporting is always so incomplete, not to say distorted.

Arkansas bans transgender youth treatment

It’s not “treatment” though. It’s not medicine to cure a disease. It is, at the very least, disputed whether or not it’s a good idea to give adolescents who say they are the other sex surgeries and/or puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones. None of that is straightforwardly “treatment.” Given the fact that some people who have gone through one or more of those interventions now regret it, it’s all the more dubious to call it “treatment.” Being female or male isn’t an illness, and doesn’t in itself require treatment. Responsible journalism should be cautious about adopting terminology that assumes there is an illness or condition … Read the rest