Somebody seems to have Marxism confused with theocracy. They’re not quite the same thing.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn continues her running feud with Taylor Swift, warning her that if we have a “socialistic govt,” the state would have to “approve her music,” and won’t “allow women to dress, or sing, to be on stage, or entertain.” pic.twitter.com/HGXziiai8K

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 8, 2021

… Read the rest

The game’s afoot.

Steerpike tells us:

It’s not just the boardroom where such clashes are being played out. Mr S hears word that the editorial floors of the Guardian and its Sunday sister the Observer have become riven with tensions over the perennial problem of trans rights. WhatsApp groups are ablaze with talk that Observer commentator Sonia Sodha could become the next feminist hounded out of the group, following Suzanne Moore’s purging in November.

Sodha has incurred the displeasure of the Guardian’s vocal trans-rights faction for daring to suggest that women have a right to free speech and should not be threatened for having opinions. She now faces public attacks on Twitter from Guardian contributors, attacks that go

Originally a comment by Sastra on Gendered language at the abortion clinic.

James Randi used to do an experiment where college students who had previously given their birth dates were each presented with a paper written by a “master astrologer” describing what the stars said about them, specifically. After they finished their personalized readings, they were each asked to rank how accurate they were on a 10 point (?) scale. There were lots of 8s and 9s, and even some 10s. On the whole, they were all impressed, and gave the astrologer high marks, too. Then they were asked to pass the papers to the student in the next desk.

It was the same reading, of course, with the … Read the rest

What next? Bus drives are Nazis if they don’t let you throw bottles at people on the bus? Servers in restaurants are Nazis if they don’t let you push over all the tables? Bouncers are Nazis if they eject you from the bar for throwing a punch? Dog walkers are Nazis if they don’t let you kick their dogs?

Fox News pushing boundaries again:

Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren on Thursday joined a growing number of right-wing pundits and politicians comparing covid-19 restrictions to Nazism.

To Nazism. Because of what? Are there concentration camps? Is there forced labor? Are there extermination camps? I’m not seeing the Nazism. I’m not seeing the Fascism and I’m sure as hell not seeing … Read the rest

Time to grow up now, people.

The headline:

Why Emma Corrin is using a chest binder

Oh I bet I know the answer to that one – because, like many others, she’s found a new way to be special and attention-worthy.

Who is she? An actor. She played narcissistic PrinCess DiAna in The Crown. Typecasting, it seems. So a different woman, poshly named Charlie Gowans-Eglinton, instructs us on how meaningful all this is.

Your response to the above may be largely generational. In the middle of the millennial age bracket at 33, I didn’t know about non-binary pronouns at school or even at university…But it’s a very small adjustment for me, personally, to make, isn’t it? Just swapping one word

Another damn fool tries to erase the existence and needs of women, and thinks she’s progressive for doing it. I wish these people would hurry up and become adults.

I got pregnant four years ago, when I was 26, and had an abortion in my first trimester. At the time, I wasn’t in a position financially or emotionally to be a parent. I was unemployed, and I knew that choosing to have a child would make it very hard to get a job in the near future. I wasn’t in a living situation where I had room for a baby.

I didn’t feel ashamed about having an abortion. It was an easy decision for me. But as a 

Pink News exclaims

Non-binary people are valid!

In other words…there is no descriptor for non-binary, you just are it.

So…what does the word mean then?

And why are we supposed to care?… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Idolatry.

So, once again: Muslims are people, and as such they can be the targets of bigotry and racism. Islam itself is a set of abstract, philosophical ideas about theology, metaphysics, ethics etc. to which concepts like bigotry and racism don’t apply. It’s perfectly possible to be critical* of the ideas and practices of Islam (not to mention the political ideology of Islamism) for reasons that have nothing to do with what people look like, where they’re from, or who their ancestors were. It’s even possible to oppose Islamists and white racists at the same time.

Whatever’s legitimate about the term “Islamophobia” can be expressed better – because more precisely – … Read the rest

Ari Berman on voting rights in Texas:

Texas law makes it monumentally difficult to register voters…

And voting in Texas could soon get even harder. On Thursday, the GOP-controlled legislature is beginning a special legislative session that will revive a sweeping voter suppression bill that was blocked at the 11th hour in May when Texas House Democrats staged a dramatic walkout before a midnight deadline, denying Republicans the quorum needed to pass it. So Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session to pass new voting restrictions, along with far-right priorities like banning critical race theory and preventing trans-gender athletes from competing in Texas sports. 

He’s wrong on that last one, but anyway.

The voting bill, known as SB7, 

The hotness was most likely because of hotness.

The searing heat that scorched western Canada and the US at the end of June was “virtually impossible” without climate change, say scientists.

In their study, the team of researchers says that the deadly heatwave was a one-in-a-1,000-year event. But we can expect extreme events such as this to become more common as the world heats up due to climate change.

If humans hadn’t influenced the climate to the extent that they have, the event would have been 150 times less likely. Scientists worry that global heating, largely as a result of burning fossil fuels, is now driving up temperatures faster than models predict.

That is worrying. If it gets too … Read the rest

But why is this political? Why is it right v left? Why is it Republicans v Democrats?

Fox News warns that anyone under age 30 should not get vaccine, attack the left and Fauci for being pro vaccine. https://t.co/3BgksRz4XT pic.twitter.com/7fSh2jwDec

— Angelo Carusone (@GoAngelo) July 8, 2021

It’s not political, it’s technical. The two shouldn’t have anything to do with each other. Either the vaccine protects against the virus or it doesn’t. General vaccination either slows the pandemic or it doesn’t. The vaccine is either safe or not. Those are not political questions. Nobody wants to get the virus, so why is anyone making the issue political?

Is it just because “fuck you, that’s why”? Because it’s so urgent to … Read the rest

Revisiting the quest for a new blasphemy law:

Just hours after Kim Leadbeater took her seat in Parliament, following a campaign dogged by questions about a Batley school teacher forced to go into hiding for showing children a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, [Labour MP Naz] Shah delivered an eyebrow-raising intervention likening such depictions to the vandalism of Winston Churchill’s statue.

This call from a frontbench spokesperson to treat cartoons of Mohammed as equivalent to actual public vandalism has caused something of a belated backlash, amid fears it would mean the restoration of blasphemy laws. Such restrictions were abolished in England, incidentally, by the last Labour government in 2008.  Shah told the Commons:

As a Muslim, for me and millions of Muslims across this country and

Disgraced loser Donald Trump held a “press conference” today to tell an indifferent world that he’s suing Social Media for not letting him use its platforms to incite a civil war.

The funniest part is the photo, titled Let’s Pretend This Is Still the White House.

He’s at his New Jersey golf club.… Read the rest

Hah!

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Playing a skeptical maverick.

As I have said many times, I cut all ties to Movement Skepticism™ specifically because of the misogyny issue, but now I don’t even think the movement did very well on the science front. For example skeptics tended to let climate change denialists (some of whom were even considered “thought leaders” of the movement) off the hook far too easily, and enter false balance territory whenever the issue came up, while congratulating themselves on how clever they were for not believing in homeopathy or Bigfoot.

The Movement also includes some of the most staggering examples of the Dunning Kruger Effect ever seen. Even the smartest, best educated, most … Read the rest

Isaac Schorr at National Review:

Tracey Lambrechs is not quieting down.

Lambrechs — a female weightlifter from New Zealand who took bronze in the 2014 Commonwealth Games, silver at the 2015 Pacific Games, and competed in the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro — has retired from the sport. But that retirement appears to have lent her her voice back after several years of being cajoled into silence.

Those several years are the years when “Laurel” Hubbard was breaking records.

In 2017, Lambrechs was gearing up to compete in the 2018 Commonwealth Games when she was informed that if she wanted to participate, she would need do so in a different category than she was accustomed to.

“I

David Gorski asks in 2006 why not just castrate them?

Ever since I found myself critically examining the claim that autism and autistic spectrum disorders are caused by mercury found in the preservative(thimerosal) used until recently in childhood vaccines, I thought that I’d heard of every dubious or quack autism therapy there is out there. Indeed, it is from that concept (that “autism is a misdiagnosis for mercury poisoning,”, which is not supported by epidemiological or preclinical evidence) that flows all sorts of dubious therapies to “remove” the mercury. Foremost among these questionable therapies is chelation therapy, using a chelating agent like EDTA or DMSA to bind to and remove this supposed mercury excess. This therapy is touted

Interesting discovery.

The book looks at how teenage girls are being prescribed the drug Lupron in never seen before numbers to stop their developing puberty. These girls are reporting dysphoria about their emerging sex and sexuality and want to 'transition' to be 'boys'.

17/x

— Andy (@lecanardnoir) July 7, 2021

This cased a stink at the blog as it was seen as 'transphobic'. The trans activist movement acts as if children have a *right* to Lupron and doctors have a *duty* to prescribe it. Any deviation from this "affirmation' is 'transphobic'. This is not how SBM works.

19/x

— Andy (@lecanardnoir) July 7, 2021

The next was by an "expert" who had just graduated ihn family medicine a few days

It’s not just “viewpoint.” At all.

Eric Kaufmann at National Review thinks willingness to fuck a Trump fan is an index of political open-mindedness. Come on. The vast unexplored foulness of Trump goes way beyond the political, and anybody who can’t see that is, to put it delicately, not desirable.

When a sample of nearly 1,500 female Ivy League students was asked whether they would date a Trump supporter, only 6 percent said yes (after excluding the small minority of the sample who support him [huh?]). So finds a survey of 20,000 university students that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) conducted in 2020. While people are free to discriminate however they wish in dating, this attitude

I didn’t know until today that Bret Weinstein is an anti-vaxxer. When worlds collide, yeah? He’s one of those Intellectual Dark Web people, which surely ought to be enough to keep anyone busy, but no, he finds the time to tell people not to get vaccinated against Covid too.

Bret Weinstein is, simply, a right-wing media grifter in the vein of conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro and Canadian professor of psychology Dr. Jordan Peterson. Part of the “intellectual dark web,” (a term his brother Eric coined), Weinstein has risen in prominence over the last year as other members of the IDW have lost relevance.

Weinstein made his reactionary right wing guru bones after he left his evolutionary biologist