All entries by this author

“This week we did horrific harm”

Jul 17th, 2021 8:21 am | By
“This week we did horrific harm”

There was a follow-up tweet from the ABA that I missed because they locked their account; it contains yet more frantic self-flagellating histrionics.

A serious, violent incident; inexcusable; terrible incident; pain we caused; apologies are not enough; harm we caused.

It’s as if they have a literal gun to their literal heads.

Meanwhile, in the Advocacy section of the ABA website, we can see:

The American

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The wages of anti-vaxxing

Jul 16th, 2021 5:42 pm | By

Some of the people Fox News is killing:

The hospital is now busier than at any previous point during the pandemic. In just five weeks, it took in as many COVID-19 patients as it did over five months last year. Ten minutes away, another big hospital, Cox Medical Center South, has been inundated just as quickly. “We only get beds available when someone dies, which happens several times a day,” Terrence Coulter, the critical-care medical director at CoxHealth, told me.

Last week, Katie Towns, the acting director of the Springfield–Greene County Health Department, was concerned that the county’s daily cases were topping 250. On Wednesday, the daily count hit 405. This dramatic surge is the work of the super-contagious

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“Ways to make periods more inclusive”

Jul 16th, 2021 3:21 pm | By

Now it’s the Vagina Museum doing it. Yes really – the Vagina Museum.

But women talking about things that concern women (and women only) don’t need to be “more inclusive.” It is just women who menstruate – men don’t menstruate.

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Rather than a legitimate feeling

Jul 16th, 2021 11:23 am | By

One of the comments allowed to remain on the American Booksellers Association’s Facebook post yesterday captures the eccentric nature of the ideology:

The book is a ploy for people to see gender dysphoria as a trend rather than a legitimate feeling. It’s ideology is one where being transgender is a “fad”. Someone’s gender identity is not a debate. It’s not something to question or say isn’t true based or crap science or psychology. The simple answer to the author’s “mysterious” question as to why gender dysphoria is more widely acknowledged is because society is finally opening up to discuss and talk about it. Not because it didn’t ever exist before. Society has purposefully been heteronormative and forced people with gender

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Withering

Jul 16th, 2021 6:53 am | By

It’s a fierce competition for who can shout the loudest.

The American Booksellers Association is facing withering criticism from booksellers after walking back its promotion of an anti-trans title to member bookstores. Among the promotional items included in the ABA July “white box” mailing sent to 750 bookstores, the organization included a copy of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, as well as a sell sheet.

So Publishers Weekly poisons the well in the first sentence (and the title) by calling the book “anti-trans.” What does “anti-trans” mean? It implies, and I think is generally taken to mean, hostile to trans people, but usually the subject is the truth claims about what “trans” means … Read the rest



Off the fence

Jul 16th, 2021 5:41 am | By

David Aaronovitch reviews Helen Joyce’s Trans:

I didn’t look too closely when in 2015 a Conservative administration proposed changing the law on gender recognition. A few trans people want more easily to get official confirmation for the new gender they have become? Well, I thought, that’s probably OK. No skin off any part of me.

Then the issue appeared to morph into a different kind of conflict. It had clearly somewhere along the line become impermissible for those who thought that there was something ineluctable about biological sex to say so. It wasn’t whether they were correct or mistaken on the subject that was in question, but their right even to express their view.

That had definitely happened by … Read the rest



Fired like a dog

Jul 16th, 2021 4:58 am | By

Trump and “like a dog” – Philip Rucker in the Post in 2018:

In President Trump’s singular lexicon, there is no more vicious put-down than likening an adversary to a dog.

“Choked like a dog.”

“Fired like a dog.”

“Sweat like a dog.”

Then there is what Trump said Tuesday of Omarosa Manigault Newman, his former reality television protege and White House staffer who is now scorned and telling all in her new book, “Unhinged,” and accompanying media tour.

“When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out,” Trump tweeted. “Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”

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What dastardly offense?

Jul 15th, 2021 6:23 pm | By

The Wall Street Journal:

The American Booksellers Association apologized Wednesday for a “terrible” and “serious, violent incident.” What dastardly offense did it commit? The profound trauma occurred this month when the trade group dedicated to selling books sent out a paperback copy of a book some of its members don’t like.

So its members have all liked every single book the ABA has ever sent out? This shocking violence of sending one that some didn’t like is a brand new event in the world?

No, it’s not that, it’s that Abigail Shrier’s book is different. It’s violent enough to say that some girls who say they are trans are just caught up in a fad.

Ms. Shrier’s book

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You can’t comment

Jul 15th, 2021 6:05 pm | By
You can’t comment

And they’ve also deleted dissenting comments from the Facebook post, and blocked some people from commenting – like me, for instance.

What a shower of class traitors and scabs and informers. What a complete shit-show.… Read the rest



Celebrating and supporting indie book stores

Jul 15th, 2021 5:53 pm | By
Celebrating and supporting indie book stores

Pathetic and shameful.… Read the rest



Oops

Jul 15th, 2021 1:00 pm | By

Well it’s another Streisand effect – the ABA’s idiotic groveling apology has resulted in Shrier’s book trending on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/chadfelixg/status/1415711631267532802

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And the absolute crazy people

Jul 15th, 2021 12:33 pm | By

First, CNN reported:

The top US military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley, was so shaken that then-President Donald Trump and his allies might attempt a coup or take other dangerous or illegal measures after the November election that Milley and other top officials informally planned for different ways to stop Trump, according to excerpts [from] an upcoming book obtained by CNN.

The book, from Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, describes how Milley and the other Joint Chiefs discussed a plan to resign, one by one, rather than carry out orders from Trump that they considered to be illegal, dangerous or ill-advised.

Milley viewed Trump as “the classic authoritarian leader

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Irrelevant to our investigation

Jul 15th, 2021 11:52 am | By

I hate to cite the Daily Wire but they took the trouble to ask the Toronto police about that “woman” whose photograph makes it so obvious that he’s a man.

In a follow-up email, The Daily Wire asked the department to confirm Ruby’s biological sex and to “please indicate if the suspect was booked in a male or female facility.”

Toronto Police Service’s Meaghan Gray replied (emphasis added):

Your question, and the answer, are irrelevant to our investigation. Our focus is on the sexual assault of a child and identifying any additional victims. The best way to do that is to share information with the public that would assist them with recognizing the person involved, such as a name and

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Lying cowards

Jul 15th, 2021 11:24 am | By
Lying cowards

The American Booksellers Association also has that stupid crawling lying apology on its Facebook page, but this one is signed.

Again, from the section of the ABA website that celebrates and promotes Banned Books Week:

Banned Books Week was founded in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. Banned Books Week brings together the entire book community — librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, students, and readers of all types — in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas.

Unless they’re Abigail Shrier’s ideas. That’s entirely different. Then the ideas become “violent.”… Read the rest



Censorship Divides Us

Jul 15th, 2021 10:38 am | By

The American Booksellers Association has a website.

On that website it has a section for…Banned Books Week.

I’m not making it up.

The most recent item is April 13:

Lovely.

But, so…why are they now screaming that sending Abigail Shrier’s book out to booksellers is “violent” and in need of prompt and searching atonement?

On April 13, the Banned Books Week Coalition announced that Jason Reynolds has been named the inaugural Honorary Chair for Banned Books Week 2021. The New York Times bestselling author will headline the annual celebration of the right to read, which takes place September 26–October 2, 2021, and features the theme: Books Unite Us, Censorship Divides Us.

A couple of months away. … Read the rest



Violence in a box of books

Jul 15th, 2021 10:20 am | By

What has happened to the grownups? This is the second time in as many days I’ve asked that.

https://twitter.com/ABAbook/status/1415399389615595520

A “violent” incident – that’s teenager talk, it’s the worst kind of idiot-Twitter talk, it’s frenzied catastrophizing tantrum talk.

https://twitter.com/ABAbook/status/1415399393897984001

Executions? Torture? Banishment?

https://twitter.com/FeralQuokka/status/1415707500490465280 … Read the rest



We did indeed learn

Jul 15th, 2021 6:08 am | By

Women not wheeshting.

https://twitter.com/SVPhillimore/status/1415635116420894724

There are lots of these.… Read the rest



What women learned

Jul 15th, 2021 6:00 am | By
What women learned

Sometimes it turns out to be a mistake to tell women to shut up about women and their rights.

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The principles of listening and solidarity

Jul 15th, 2021 5:34 am | By

It’s about the conflict over “trans rights”:

Siân Berry is to quit as leader of the Greens, citing conflict within the party over transgender rights and claiming it had been a “failure of leadership” on her part that the party was sending “mixed messages”.

What are transgender rights though? That’s the problem, isn’t it – they turn out to be a very peculiar form of “rights,” that are not really rights at all.

“There is now an inconsistency between the sincere promise to fight for trans rights and inclusion in my work and the message sent by the party’s choice of frontbench representatives,” she said.

Again, that’s a trick claim. Normally “inclusion” means just not invidious exclusion for bad, … Read the rest



Mass murder for entertainment

Jul 15th, 2021 5:07 am | By

This is what I keep wondering – how is it ok for a tv personality to keep killing people by using his tv celebrity to tell people not to get vaccinated?

https://twitter.com/OccupyDemocrats/status/1415444618712272898… Read the rest