All entries by this author
Oct 11th, 2020 4:00 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Save Women’s Sports posted an item yesterday:
The Save Women’s Sports flag was raised this morning over Nashua City Hall, where it will be flying through Friday! Thank you to Beth Scaer for your dedication to our movement! Ask your city if they offer this option and we can send a flag your way!
But it got taken down today. A Nashua group page patted itself on the back for silencing women.
Yesterday morning, a flag was raised over Nashua City Hall in support of a transphobic organization, with the expectation that it would continue to fly until Friday. As word spread through the community, the response was clear – this isn’t what Nashua stands for. Many folks
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2 comments
Oct 11th, 2020 12:58 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
James Barry on Ireland and women and the new woke erasure of women:
Enough now, Irish Twitter libfems. (Irish rant coming up). JUST because you made some noise for Repeal, and gained a few followers, does NOT make you the gatekeeper for “Irish feminism.” You’re NOT the person who forevermore gets to say “this is what Irish women are, or want.”
It wasn’t just the young and woke who caused Repeal to happen.
Ireland was awful for a young woman in the 50s & 60s & 70s & 80s- and even 90s. ALL the women who lived through those terrible times, had a voice in the Repeal the 8th Referendum. The “repeal” doesn’t belong to any one group.
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Oct 11th, 2020 12:18 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
“Misleading” is a polite way of putting it.
Twitter on Sunday added a warning label to a tweet from President Donald Trump, who tested positive for the coronavirus and said he is no longer contagious.
Trump tweeted on Sunday that he received a “total and complete sign off from White House Doctors yesterday.”
“That means I can’t get it (immune), and can’t give it,” the president added. “Very nice to know!!!”
So he’s admitting that he didn’t “know” that before and thus knew he was being reckless with other people’s lives. Surprise surprise.
The tweet contains “misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19,” the Twitter label says. It remains accessible because “Twitter has determined that it may be
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Oct 11th, 2020 8:24 am |
By Ophelia Benson
How can they do that?
I don’t understand how they have the authority to do that. Fauci is not an employee of Trump’s, and anyway employers don’t generally have the power to control what employees do in their own time, do they? I don’t understand what this “blocked” means.
Axios elaborates:
The White House refused to allow Anthony Fauci or any of the medical experts on the coronavirus task force to appear on ABC’s “This Week,” host Jon Karl said Sunday.
But why is it a matter of … Read the rest
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6 comments
Oct 11th, 2020 7:33 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Good catch.
How the BBC words it:
Speaking to BBC Sport in August, Grace McKenzie, a trans woman who plays for Golden Gate Women’s rugby club in San Francisco, said she was worried “that other sporting federations will look at World Rugby and begin to second-guess the existing science that supports trans women’s inclusion in sport, and begin to make policies based out of a place of fear instead of a place of logic and reason”.
“I want to be able to participate fully with
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Oct 10th, 2020 4:55 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Like shards of glass stuck in your brain.
I have just read the Croatian writer Daša Drndić’s extraordinary novel-cum-documentary, ‘Trieste’, which is about the destruction of the Italian Jews. A number of Jewish families gave their children to the Catholic Church for safe-keeping. After the defeat of Naziism & the Fascists, the Catholic Church refused to return the children to their families. Monsignor Angelo Roncall, papal nuncio to France and future Pope John XXIII was required to ensure that the Church retained supervision and guardianship over Jewish children who were baptised. Jewish children who had been baptised were on no account to be handed over to Jewish agencies with responsibility for the … Read the rest
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8 comments
Oct 10th, 2020 4:43 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Hoo-boy.
In several phone calls last weekend from the presidential suite at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Mr. Trump shared an idea he was considering: When he left the hospital, he wanted to appear frail at first when people saw him, according to people with knowledge of the conversations. But underneath his button-down dress shirt, he would wear a Superman T-shirt, which he would reveal as a symbol of strength when he ripped open the top layer.
Very adult, very sensible, very even keel, very normal … Read the rest
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8 comments
Oct 10th, 2020 4:01 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Cancel everything. Better safe than sorry. Broadway World tells us:
Richmond Triangle Players has released the following statement announcing the cancellation of its production of “The Second Coming of Joan of Arc”, original scheduled to run in-person and streaming through October 10, 2020.
“After weeks of rehearsals and steady preparation to open our production of The Second Coming of Joan of Arc, we discovered a great number of views and opinions expressed by and endorsed on the playwright’s personal Facebook page that, after intense investigation and research, we believe to be transphobic.”
So it takes “intense investigation and research” to decide that the playwright’s opinions are transphobic? And even then it’s only their belief? And for that they … Read the rest
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9 comments
Oct 10th, 2020 11:12 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Originally a comment by iknklast on Shame and fear of damnation.
It has taken decades of therapy and hard work to overcome the intense feelings of shame and fear of damnation that she said marked her childhood.
This. So much this. I have been out of Christianity for over 40 years, and I still deal with this nearly every day. It is like shards of glass stuck in your brain. No matter how much you know on an intellectual level that these are fallacious beliefs, that you are not a bad person, you still respond to certain things in the way you have been trained to respond. I have been trying to root out those shards of glass in … Read the rest
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10 comments
Oct 10th, 2020 11:02 am |
By Ophelia Benson
This again:
https://twitter.com/Docstockk/status/1314822391680380928
From the article:
More than 500 students and alumni at Oxford have come together to sign an open letter condemning “two professors with a history of transphobia”.
The letter expresses disappointment and distress over the controversial appointment of professors Selina Todd and Senia Paseta to lead a new programme on Women’s Equality and Inequality at the Oxford Martin School. Accusing the Martin School of ‘tacitly sanction(ing)’ the views of Professor Todd and Professor Paseta, the signatories raises concerns about a “hostile and exclusionary environment”.
Blah blah blah blah. This is the new “left” now: the chief enemy is women.
You already know this, but: they are not phobic. Saying that men are not women … Read the rest
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4 comments
Oct 10th, 2020 10:11 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The BBC leans heavily on one side of the scale again.
LGBT rights campaigners have criticised World Rugby’s decision to prevent transgender women from competing at the highest levels of the women’s game.
Some have, and others have praised it.
LGBT charity Stonewall says it is “deeply disappointed” with the decision.
“The proposals were based on hypothetical data modelling that has little relevance to the questions of fairness and safety in rugby that the policy review sought to address,” said Stonewall chief executive Nancy Kelley.
Don’t be schewpid. Men are bigger and stronger than women, so letting them play on women’s teams is not fair as well as not safe. Parents don’t call for evidence before telling Joe age 14 … Read the rest
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10 comments
Oct 10th, 2020 9:47 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Thus we are reminded why intense religious cults are not benign.
Rebekah Powers was 11 when members of her faith group, the People of Praise, gathered around as she sat on a chair and laid their hands on her to pray. Powers’ sister had shown a gift for speaking in tongues, a defining trait of the followers of the small charismatic Christian community, and Rebekah was expected to do the same.
She couldn’t do it.
“I couldn’t get it, and I stayed there an hour and a half before they gave up and finally said, ‘You just have blockage. You need to just work on your sin and be more open,” she said.
There. That’s why. She was … Read the rest
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4 comments
Oct 10th, 2020 9:16 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump will be far away from the crowd.
The White House communications director, Alyssa Farah, says that today’s address from Donald Trump will be short and to the point. Although, as many of you will have noticed, brevity is not exactly the president’s strong point.
Neither is getting to the or making a point. There is no point, there’s only a surging mephitic sea of exclamations.
“The President’s at a great distance, he’s gonna be up on the balcony and very briefly address the supporters there,” Farah told reporters at the White House on Saturday.
But “the supporters” will be in a crowd. See the problem there?
If reports that 2,000 people have been invited to watch the president’s
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Oct 9th, 2020 4:03 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Lindsey Graham refuses to get a COVID test before he debates Jaime Harrison. Now why would he do that? Because he has it or suspects he has it?
A debate between incumbent Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and his Democratic challenger, Jamie Harrison, scheduled for Friday night was cancelled after Harrison demanded both candidates be tested for Covid-19 before the debate and Graham refused, leading the organizers to replace it with separate televised interviews.
Why refuse? Remember when people couldn’t get a test? Why would anyone refuse?
Last week, Graham said he tested negative for the coronavirus after President Donald Trump announced his Covid-19 diagnosis. Three senators, two of whom are on the Judiciary Committee, which Graham chairs, have tested positive
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Oct 9th, 2020 3:48 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Aw Don wanted to go out and play again but it seems that being hospitalized with the covid just a few days ago means you can’t do that immediately.
President Donald Trump will remain at the White House this weekend, people familiar with the matter said, after he said he wanted to hold rallies in Florida and Pennsylvania despite questions over the stage of his recovery from Covid-19.
Covid shmovid; he wants to play.
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Trump “will be clear to go” on Saturday, when “he wants to talk to the American people.” There are medical tests underway to ensure he doesn’t transmit the virus when he returns to the campaign trail, she
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Oct 9th, 2020 12:09 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump blathered at Rush Limbaugh for a few hours just now, because obviously he has nothing more important to do.
Towards the end of the radio broadcast, Limbaugh remarked that the president’s stamina was proof he had recovered from the coronavirus.
“The president’s status with COVID-19 is pretty solid,” Limbaugh declared, adding: “Not once during the hour and 42 minutes has the president been stumped, has he not known what he’s wanted to say.”
Oh please. Trump always knows what he wants to say, which is it doesn’t matter what, because the point is to prevent others from talking. We’ve watched him do it a million times in those “press briefings” – the way he holds out his pudgy little … Read the rest
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