All entries by this author

The bizarre arrogance

May 28th, 2021 4:09 pm | By

Oh so this is who Christian Jessen is.

https://twitter.com/TwisterFilm/status/1398414921969418240 https://twitter.com/TwisterFilm/status/1398414927421968389

Maybe he never had any critical thinking to begin with.… Read the rest



A lethal “school”

May 28th, 2021 3:22 pm | By

Via Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany 6 – The Toronto Star reports:

KAMLOOPS, B.C. – The remains of 215 children have been found buried on the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.

Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwépemc First Nation said in a news release Thursday that the remains were confirmed last weekend with the help of a ground-penetrating radar specialist.

Casimir called the discovery an “unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.”

She said it’s believed the deaths are undocumented, although a local museum archivist is working with the Royal British Columbia Museum to see if any records of the deaths can be found.

Read the rest


Room for Gaetz and Greene

May 28th, 2021 12:23 pm | By

The existential threat:

On Friday Republicans in the Senate torpedoed an effort to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the deadly insurrection by Donald Trump’s supporters at the US Capitol on 6 January, deploying the procedural move known as the filibuster to stop it even being debated.

The filibuster is bad and stupid and needs to go away.

Tellingly Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who previously condemned Trump’s role in the riot, reportedly asked senators to nix the commission as a “personal favour”. It was a sign that the rot now goes deeper than a cult of personality into the foundations of the Grand Old Party (GOP).

A personal favor ffs. This isn’t his living room we’re talking … Read the rest



To discuss everything

May 28th, 2021 10:56 am | By

It’s called “Woman’s Hour” for a reason.

Ah yes the old space to discuss everything approach. We used to understand that woman’s meant woman’s, and that for women meant for women. Now instead we “understand” that woman’s means everyone’s, and for women means for everyone.

https://twitter.com/helensaxby11/status/1398279153149960196 Read the rest


Big hugs

May 28th, 2021 10:02 am | By

Once in every billion tweets or so, a man will go so much too far that it bites him in the ass.

Northern Ireland First Minister Arlene Foster has been awarded £125,000 in damages after a defamatory tweet by TV presenter Dr Christian Jessen. Dr Jessen tweeted an unfounded claim that the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader had been having an extra-marital affair on 23 December 2019. The post remained online until Dr Jessen deleted it on 7 January 2020.

A judge at the High Court in Belfast said it was an “outrageous libel” which was “grossly defamatory”.

He ordered Dr Jessen, who is best known for presenting Channel Four programme Embarrassing Bodies, to pay damages of £125,000

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It’s everywhere

May 27th, 2021 5:12 pm | By

Like corporate greenwashing only trans-color.

Oh look, a box of 98% sugar “cereal” that’s pushed on kids via cute animals and endless tv ads – but this one is different, because it’s about…um…telling kids to be trans inclusive.

They even put out a press release.

BATTLE CREEK, Mich., May 20, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Limited-edition Together With Pride cereal hits shelves across the country today, marking the latest collaboration between Kellogg Company and GLAAD. LGBTQ+ icons and friends of GLAAD will start their day with the new cereal to celebrate that no matter who you are or who

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Always asking questions

May 27th, 2021 4:18 pm | By

Lovely words maybe, but she certainly doesn’t live up to them.

She’s not always asking questions about the world around her, and she’s very hostile to women who asks questions about the world around us that she finds politically unacceptable, aka terfy.… Read the rest



Forced ritual

May 27th, 2021 12:59 pm | By

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave – very very much free, top free, most free of any anywhere.

With just a week to go before the legislative session ends in Texas, a host of bills are making their way to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk.

One of the pieces of legislation still under consideration would require sports teams to play the national anthem at games.

So there! You have to stand up for this anthem if you go to a sports game, and the teams have to play this one song if they do a sports game. Have to, I tell you, it’s mandatory and required and a legal obligation. That’s FREEDOM. You there, … Read the rest



That way she would remember

May 27th, 2021 12:05 pm | By

Not just Ireland.

When Ann Keen gave birth, the midwives refused to give her anything for the pain. That way, they told her, she would remember it and learn not to be so wicked again. To be treated like an animal in labour, denied the most basic compassion and respect, was simply part of the punishment she had supposedly earned for getting pregnant out of wedlock aged 17. The hospital discharged her without any follow-up care, as if the birth had never happened. But the most grievous part of the story is that she also went home without her baby.

For Keen is one of a still unknown number of unmarried British women coerced into handing over their

Read the rest


Guest post: A few basic principles

May 27th, 2021 10:13 am | By

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Not merely the product of individual bias in reply to my request for more background.

People like DiAngelo and Kendi are not aberrations or perversions of CRT. They’re extensions of a framework that traces right back to Derrick Bell at CRT’s beginning. I’ll try to sketch some of the essentials. Theorists really do only have a few basic principles and rhetorical moves. Once you familiarize yourself with them, it’s like a perversely easy game.

I suppose the first thing to note would be that CRT’s philosophical lineage is critical theory. I mean, it’s in the name, but it’s very easy to read it as the critical in “critical thinking” rather than in … Read the rest



A pair of unsparing judges

May 27th, 2021 9:45 am | By

Cashing in.

Were White Fragility to be adapted as reality TV, the result might look something like this: A collection of affluent white women, equipped with varying degrees of vanity and self-delusion, gather at a well-appointed dinner table. There, they face down a pair of unsparing judges prepared to see right through them. Who’s racist? Time to find out. White wine flows; white women admit shameful secrets. They get squirmy; they get angry; they turn on each other. If one of them starts to cry, she has to leave. She will find tissues in the designated crying room.

The Real Housewives of White Fragility?

The Bravo version of Robin DiAngelo, in other words, might look a bit like Race2Dinner

Read the rest


Office life

May 27th, 2021 8:44 am | By

It’s ok because women are Karens.

A former City bank worker took upskirt images of his female colleagues and covertly filmed them as they walked around the office, a court heard today.

Charles Sleilati, 53, made more than 300 videos of women he worked with at the leading bank, and also amassed around 1,000 images of random women in restaurants and on public transport.

Westminster magistrates court heard Sleilati was reported by whistleblowers within his Bishopsgate office, after concerns about his behaviour.

“The defendant was seen by other members of staff in an open-plan office taking pictures, filming up women’s skirts, and down their tops”, said prosecutor Komal Varsani.

He probably identifies as a porn producer. You have to … Read the rest



The rats are scrabbling

May 27th, 2021 8:26 am | By

“Marion Millar’s” [not her real name, I gather] appointment with the Scottish Stasi was supposed to be in progress now but they have (cough cough) “postponed” it. I suspect that’s a cowardly way of saying they’re trying to figure out how to cancel the whole thing, and stalling while they try harder. This has the benefit (from their point of view) of prolonging their torment of Marion. From our point of view it has the benefit of underlining what chickenshit sadists they are.

https://twitter.com/millar_marion/status/1397599450911105024 https://twitter.com/millar_marion/status/1397878857693282306

What a shower.… Read the rest



A practice of interrogating

May 26th, 2021 4:57 pm | By

Janel George at the American Bar Association on Critical Race Theory:

CRT is not a diversity and inclusion “training” but a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society that emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship. [ Kimberlé ] Crenshaw—who coined the term “CRT”—notes that CRT is not a noun, but a verb. It cannot be confined to a static and narrow definition but is considered to be an evolving and malleable practice. It critiques how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers. CRT also recognizes that race intersects with other identities, including sexuality, gender

Read the rest


Oh no, not Aztec chants

May 26th, 2021 4:19 pm | By

Why conservatives are so freaked out about Critical Race Theory, or what they say is Critical Race Theory.

Critical race theory is an academic concept, a form of analysis developed in the 1970s and ’80s by legal scholars including Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw. It suggests that our nation’s history of race and racism is embedded in law and public policy, still plays a role in shaping outcomes for Black Americans and other people of color, and should be taken into account when these issues are discussed.

Is any of that especially wack or even surprising?

According to Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and perhaps the foremost popularizer of critical race theory alarmism on

Read the rest


The life-sustaining basics

May 26th, 2021 12:13 pm | By

That was the goal, after all.

Low-income immigrants in the US who struggled to afford basic needs during the coronavirus pandemic avoided seeking government benefits and other assistance because of immigration-related concerns, according to a new report by the Urban Institute.

Of course they did, and that’s exactly what Trump and his goons wanted them to do. Cunning plan succeeded.

Immigrants, and especially immigrant women, have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic-induced recession, enduring higher unemployment rates than workers born in the United States, the Migration Policy Institute reports.

While the economy sputtered, more than a quarter of adults in low-income immigrant families said they or their partner lost a job, the Urban Institute found. Roughly half said

Read the rest


Used as a proxy

May 26th, 2021 11:39 am | By

The British Journal of Medicine.

Yes, the British Journal of Medicine.

MEDICINE.

Read the rest



Unfit for the job

May 26th, 2021 10:53 am | By

Interesting.… Read the rest



Not merely the product of individual bias

May 26th, 2021 10:25 am | By

If it has the word “critical” in it, it must be dangerous, is that the idea?

Across the United States, state legislatures are showing a newfound interest in — and aversion to — critical race theory, or CRT, an academic movement that systematically considers how even seemingly neutral laws, regulations and social norms can have different impacts on particular racial and ethnic groups. It examines how legislatures at times target racial minorities for adverse treatment — such as recent voter suppression laws in Arizona, Georgia and Iowa — and, at other times, are simply indifferent to how new laws will impact those outside the majority.

And this should be stamped out because…why, exactly?

CRT originated in U.S. law

Read the rest


Respect the lesbians who date men

May 25th, 2021 4:47 pm | By

Oh yay, more gentle reminders! I love gentle reminders!!

https://twitter.com/TheFaerth/status/1396909342905888770 https://twitter.com/TheFaerth/status/1396909344839532547

…………………………………….Wut?

That’s not a reminder, it’s wholly new information, and it’s word salad.

https://twitter.com/TheFaerth/status/1396909347351908353 https://twitter.com/TheFaerth/status/1396909348413079556

It goes on and on like that.

It’s stupid, it’s boring, it’s incoherent. (And how do you “fall in any kind of umbrella”?)

Meanwhile, glaciers are melting and sea levels are rising and forests are vanishing while people spin out the doctrines of this trivial meaningless new religion.… Read the rest