Trump got to put on his party suit and give a speech again!

A long long speech which started 50 minutes late because he couldn’t be bothered to show up on time.

Trump suggests he lied to foreign countries by withholding foreign aid unless certain conditions were met, and then still refusing to provide the aid even after those conditions were met pic.twitter.com/PyHzK1SgO2

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 28, 2021

Trump, without a shred of irony, claims Biden is the most corrupt president in history (Trump owned and profited from a private business while in office, and benefitted from lavish Secret Service expenses at his properties) pic.twitter.com/rm0UNxME4M

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 28, 2021

these threats sound especially impotent now

… Read the rest

Ructions!

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1366079077208252417

Oh no! Splitters! Where did it begin? This maybe?

Swap “woke” with “fascist” and you’ll find the exact same rhetoric that Antifa has used to describe people like me as “crypto-fascist.”

This Us vs Them mentality is toxic and extremist. Cut it out @ConceptualJames https://t.co/NkSpZBh8d2

— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) February 28, 2021

I knew what I was talking about a year ago when Critical Theory was "too obscure" for you and Quillette too. Now you're saying it. Looking forward to you catching up.

— James Lindsay, full varsity (@ConceptualJames) February 28, 2021

Sad sad sad. Next you’ll see Mike Pence falling out with Donald Trump and then where will we be?

Or maybe this is where it started?… Read the rest

That explains it.

Leading gay, lesbian and bisexual rights charity Stonewall has recognised CQC’s commitment to equality in the workplace by placing it in the top 100 UK employers in the Stonewall Equality Workplace index for the first time.

They forgot the T.

That was back in 2015. They’re not forgetting it any more. Not allowed to, mate.

The top 100 list is based on the results of Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index 2015, the eleventh published by the charity. The index is based on a range of key indicators which include a confidential questionnaire of lesbian, gay and bisexual staff, with over 9,700 participants. This consistently revealed that employees from organisations ranked in Stonewall’s Top 100 exhibited higher levels

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It’s on Facebook, too. Not faring well.

Many sharp comments.

I would find it rather creepy/threatening and definitely intrusive if I was being cared for by a health professional who was wearing badges, written in a faux childish script, announcing ‘I am straight’ and ‘I like women’.

As a doctor myself, I would be concerned that some patients might take it as a license to be inappropriate as well. Plus, given how little time I have as it is to see patients – regrettably – I just don’t have the time to get into chats about ‘music’ and ‘cats’ and I wouldn’t want to set up expectations that I couldn’t fulfil in the moment.

These badges are unprofessional and

… Read the rest

And speaking of changing everything for the sake of a handful of narcissists…

https://twitter.com/CareQualityComm/status/1365313914632892418

In a medical setting? People getting vaccinated or treated for Covid are supposed to want all that in their faces? Are you joking?… Read the rest

Philosophy academic at Georgetown:

https://twitter.com/OlufemiOTaiwo/status/1366031704482344963

That’s a puzzlement I’ve always had about the trans issue – the whole business of reversing everything we know about sex, dimorphism, who is which, feminism, oppression, language, and more, because a tiny fraction of the populace has emotional reactions.

But that’s not what this is.

https://twitter.com/OlufemiOTaiwo/status/1366032802412716038

What??? Women who can’t pretend that men are women are an example of the impulse to organize everyone’s entire world around the emotional reactions we have? We’re an example of that while the people who order us to do so are not?

Bonkers.… Read the rest

How can we stop this troublesome woman?

https://twitter.com/binarythis/status/1364420302684397568

Might be worth people contacting the uni about this if concerned. Can't see where you can direct central complaints but might be worth tagging @unimelb or contacting the Dean of Arts @FrenchProfessor. Must come a point where "academic freedom" doesn't trump hate speech (surely!)?

— Hannah McCann (@binarythis) February 24, 2021

A TikTok from someone who took the “Feminism” course last year https://t.co/lD1MxrBRlt

— Hannah McCann (@binarythis) February 27, 2021

More bullying, and more, and more, and more! There can never be enough!

https://twitter.com/VernMachil/status/1364621559391006725 https://twitter.com/AndyPerfors/status/1364456545463922690

So much hilarity.… Read the rest

Another bad thing undone:

The Biden administration’s Bureau of Land Management on Friday rescinded a grazing permit that was granted to Eastern Oregon ranchers who were previously convicted of arson on public lands.

It reverses the decision by former President Donald Trump’s Interior secretary, David Bernhardt. He had granted the permit to Dwight and Steven Hammond on Trump’s final day in office. The permit gave the Hammonds the right to graze livestock on public land for 10 years.

…

In its notice, the BLM wrote that it had remanded the decision for additional consideration after finding flaws in how the previous administration had made its decision to issue the permit. The government failed to immediately alert the public,

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Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on What do we lose?

On a related note, one of the take-home messages common to authors who have studied the rise of authoritarian populism (Snyder, Mounk, Applebaum, Temelkuran, Levtisky/Ziblatt etc.) that I think applies to the Gender Wars as well is to not concede the other side’s language with its implicit framing of the issue (the “ordinary”/”real” people who vote for the populist vs. the “elite” who don’t etc.). This is why I cringe whenever gender critical people start talking in terms of “cis” vs. “trans” women etc. As I have previously written, “cis woman” is not another word for “biological female”. Indeed, referring to biological females in Genderspeak is no more possible … Read the rest

A Waterstone’s in a former Victorian wool exchange in Bradford:… Read the rest

The Sydney Morning Herald:

Almost 100 academics have demanded the University of Melbourne take “swift and decisive action” in response to a website created by one of its lecturers that has been labelled “transphobic” and potentially in breach of the university’s own guidelines on research integrity and inclusion.

And how are the almost 100 academics defining “transphobic”? With the precision and care expected of academics? Or with the wild abandon of Twitter “activists”?

On Tuesday, Holly Lawford-Smith, an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Melbourne, launched www.noconflicttheysaid.org in response to legislation in Australia and elsewhere designed to be inclusive to transgender people but which, she says, “replaces sex with gender identity”.

The site calls for women assigned

… Read the rest

One little word.

The [UK] government has agreed to change its bill allowing ministers to take maternity leave, so that it uses the term “mother” rather than “person”.

The Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Bill would ensure up to six months’ leave on full pay.

But the House of Lords rejected the use of the word “person” in its text.

The government initially argued this was in line with “drafting convention” but has changed its view, saying use of “mother” is legally “acceptable”.

I strongly doubt that it’s any kind of “convention” to use “person” in single-sex legislation. I think the goal when writing legislation is to be as precise and clear as possible, so if a law affects … Read the rest

The problem isn’t boys on girls’ teams, the problem is bad coaches!

The February 26, 2021 passage of the Equality Act in the US House of Representatives piqued conservatives into a moral panic.

The bill, which would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, had a terrifying potential for Republicans: the presence of trans girls in high school sports.

No, not the presence of trans girls in high school sports, the presence of boys in girls’ sports. And it’s not just Republicans or just conservatives who think this will be unfair to girls.

All this language of the need to “protect,” the need to root out other children from “bathrooms” and “locker rooms,” is hard to square with

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Men who identify as women can invade women’s sports, but maybe not those contests where people score women on how fuckable they look in bathing suits. For that kind of thing the customer wants an actual woman, by golly.

Beauty queen Anita Noelle Green competed in the Miss Universe pageant, was the first transgender contestant for Miss Montana USA and title holder for Miss Elite Earth Oregon 2019. Only one pageant has excluded her on the basis that she’s not a “natural born female” — Miss United States of America. A federal judge OK’d that policy on Thursday.

It’s a consumer issue. If you buy a steak at the grocery store you don’t want to unwrap it at home … Read the rest

This is so maddening. Go ahead, guys, say you’re trans and presto you can compete against women and be guaranteed to win.

The Biden administration has withdrawn government support for a federal lawsuit in Connecticut that seeks to ban transgender athletes from participating in girls’ high school sports.

Notice what that doesn’t say – that the suit seeks to ban boys from competing in girls’ sports. That would make the reasons way too obvious, whereas if you say “transgender athletes” instead of “boys” it sounds cruel and vaguely homophobic.

Connecticut allows high school athletes to compete in sports according to their gender identity. The lawsuit was filed a year ago by several cisgender runners who argue they have been

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Oh Senator.

I started working by bussing tables at the Star Family Restaurant for $1/hour & slowly moved up to cook – the big leagues for a kid like me– to earn $6/hour. Businesses in small towns survive on narrow margins. Mandating a $15 minimum wage would put many of them out of business. pic.twitter.com/izQDOGRAH1

— Senator John Thune (@SenJohnThune) February 24, 2021

Yes but that wasn’t last week or last year or ten years ago.

pic.twitter.com/vNNEEGfa2V

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) February 25, 2021

H/t Roj Blake… Read the rest

More on Cruz –

“Orlando is awesome. It’s not as nice as Cancun, but it’s nice,” Cruz began, referring to the scandal he sparked when he left storm-ravaged Texas for Cancun with his family last week.

A child died in his bed in storm-ravaged Texas, but heeheehahahoho let’s make jokes about it anyway.

Here are some other highlights from Cruz’s speech:

Mask-wearing is virtue-signaling: “We’re gonna wear masks for the next 300 years,” Cruz said. “And by the way, not just one mask — two, three, four — you can’t have too many masks! How much virtue do you wanna signal?”

…

There were no “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations in Houston last year because of the Second Amendment: “In Houston

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No it isn’t.

Most of the people who give birth are women. But not all. What do I lose by creating room in the language that I use so it can take into account the experience of trans people? This is such a silly argument!

— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) February 26, 2021

No, all the people who give birth are women, no matter how they “identify.” Pretending otherwise is not “making room” but deleting, denying, concealing. What you – and, much more important, what all women – lose by doing that is the ability to talk coherently about the issues that affect women. That’s a very big thing to lose.… Read the rest

It’s asking too much, though.

Democratic plans to include a gradual raise to $15 in Joe Biden’s $1.9tn coronavirus stimulus bill were effectively ended on Thursday when the Senate parliamentarian ruled it should not be part of the package.

…

Biden campaigned on a pledge to increase the minimum wage to $15. Low-wage workers and unions have campaigned for a rise since 2012, and its inclusion in the coronavirus stimulus bill had been seen as a major victory.

While the proposal faced universal opposition by Republican senators and skepticism from some Democrats, Senator Bernie Sanders and others were confident that it could be pushed through with a simple majority in the Senate, where the Democrats hold a slim

… Read the rest

I hate this about the US. Hate it. It’s contemptible and awful.

In Europe, many people scoff at the US as a country of low-wage McJobs with paltry benefits – often no paid sick days, no paid vacation and no health insurance. In Denmark, a McDonald’s hamburger flipper averages $22 an hour (with six weeks’ paid vacation), while in the US, fast-food jobs pay half that on average.

Plus no health insurance.

You might wonder: how can the United States, the world’s wealthiest nation, be a low-wage economy? Of the 37 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the unofficial club of rich and near-rich nations, the US has the third-highest percentage of low-wage workers, with nearly

… Read the rest