All entries by this author

He’s warming up

Aug 13th, 2020 12:36 pm | By

Trump is cheering himself up by talking sexist shit about women.

In an interview with Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo, Trump referred to Harris as “sort of a mad woman”, criticizing her questioning of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his heated confirmation hearing in September 2018. “She was the angriest of the group and they were all angry,” he said of the Democrats.

Earlier this morning, Trump tweeted that the media has given Harris a “free pass”, saying there was “nobody meaner or more condescending” to Biden during the primaries.

Trump’s tirade on Fox Business also including US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, saying that she “is not even a smart person” and that she “goes out and yaps”. Trump also

Read the rest


List-making

Aug 13th, 2020 12:23 pm | By

About that “Whiteness” chart again…

One thing to note is that it was compiled by Judith Katz in 1990, and it’s copyrighted by a “consulting group.”

JudithH.Katz © 1990. The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The thing that’s so bizarre and stupid about it is that it’s not about “whiteness” at all, it’s just about a grab bag of tastes, habits, practices, beliefs, ideas, ideologies, fashions and the like, few if any of which are genuinely specific and exclusive to white people. It mixes up class, hierarchy, status, consumerism, and some just plain randomness.

For instance –

Rugged Individualism

Self-reliance

Individual is primary unit

Independence and autonomy highly valued and rewarded

Individuals assumed to be in

Read the rest


The what voices?

Aug 13th, 2020 11:18 am | By

Read the rest



In plain sight

Aug 13th, 2020 11:04 am | By

Trump and co are openly moving to steal the election. This is a violation of several laws.

The head of the Iowa Postal Workers Union alleged Tuesday that mail sorting machines are “being removed” from Post Offices in her state due to new policies imposed by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major GOP donor to President Donald Trump whose operational changes have resulted in dramatic mail slowdowns across the nation.

Mail sorting machines are being removed. What will that do? Sabotage voting by mail, of course.

Asked by NPR‘s Noel King whether she has felt the impact of DeJoy’s changes, Iowa Postal Workers Union President Kimberly Karol—a 30-year Postal Service veteran—answered in the affirmative, saying “mail is beginning

Read the rest


Proudly support

Aug 13th, 2020 10:42 am | By

Stonewall wants us to know that oh yes it definitely does support the swift and easy prescription of puberty blockers.

https://twitter.com/stonewalluk/status/1293834612536496129

Sterility and arrested brain development, rock on!… Read the rest



Voting rights not their thing

Aug 13th, 2020 9:20 am | By

Trump is telling us right out in the open that he’s carefully kneecapping our ability to vote by mail, i.e. rigging the election so that he can keep destroying everything while piling up more money for himself.

Speaking with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network on Thursday morning, Trump appeared to confirm that he opposes Democrats’ proposed funding for mail-in balloting and the U.S. Postal Service in order to make it more difficult to expand voting by mail.

“Now they need that money in order to make the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” he said. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in

Read the rest


One of his trademark fits of pique

Aug 13th, 2020 8:40 am | By

So of course we get this:

Thanks What a Maroon for alerting us to that.

“So what?!” says Tucker Carlson in fake fox anger.

Margaret Sullivan in the Post:

Not only did Carlson mispronounce it, but when a guest went out of his way to politely correct him, Carlson had one of his trademark fits of pique.

The exchange went like this:

“Tucker, can I just say one thing?” said Richard Goodstein, an adviser to Democratic campaigns.

Carlson: “Of course.”

Goodstein: “Because this will serve you and your fellow hosts on Fox. Her name is pronounced

Read the rest


Coded language

Aug 12th, 2020 5:45 pm | By

Of course Trump is calling Kamala Harris the N word.

President Trump has called magazines, pharmaceutical advertisements and questions “nasty.” He has called rumors, numbers and one unnamed TV columnist who gave “The Apprentice” a bad review “nasty.” He has called men “nasty,” and he has called women “nasty.”

So of course he wasted no time in using it on a woman who is more intelligent and impressive than he is.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, the president described Harris’s questioning of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing as “extraordinarily nasty” — “nasty to a level that was just a horrible thing.” He also said she was “the meanest” and “the most horrible” in pressing Kavanaugh.

Read the rest


Steak and potatoes; “bland is best”

Aug 12th, 2020 4:54 pm | By

Jonathan Chait wrote a thing in New York magazine last month, about anti-racism training and some eccentric ideas some such trainers (or entrepreneurs) have embraced. In Googling for more I saw that National Review and Don Junior were also interested, so keep that in mind – but even National Review and Don Junior aren’t wrong about everything. (Nearly everything, in Junior’s case, but not quite everything.)

The star of anti-racism training is Robin DiAngelo of White Fragility fame. What Chait focuses on is the whiteness studies part.

The African-American History Museum has a page on whiteness, which summarizes the ideas that the racism trainers have brought into relatively wide circulation. The museum’s page summarizes what it calls “white culture”

Read the rest


$36 million, or maybe $157 million

Aug 12th, 2020 11:09 am | By

Meanwhile we mustn’t lose sight of the filthy corruption of “senior adviser” Ivanka Trump. (Her brothers are just as filthy but they don’t have pretend jobs in the White House, they don’t insert themselves into conversations among heads of state at international meetings, they don’t take Daddy’s place at the table at international meetings, they don’t have pretend jobs in the White House.)

Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, earned at least $36 million in income outside their White House roles in 2019, according to financial disclosure forms released on Friday. 

The income, first reported by The Washington Post, is from the businesses, properties, and other assets owned by the couple.

“Conflicts of interest?” [giggle, simper] … Read the rest



New medical advice: let’em all die

Aug 12th, 2020 10:14 am | By

Donnie Disaster has added a quack to his pandemic team. Donnie D introduced him yesterday at the “press briefing.”

The man Trump was pointing to was Dr. Scott Atlas, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who frequently appears on Fox News and has advised Republicans in the past. And crucially, unlike the government’s medical experts who have advised Trump until now, has adopted a public stance on the virus much closer to Trump’s — including decrying the idea that schools cannot reopen this fall as “hysteria” and pushing for the resumption of college sports.

Just what we need – even more murderous denialism about the pandemic.

“He’s working with us and will be working with us on the

Read the rest


Delete delete

Aug 12th, 2020 9:55 am | By

Mermaids? Mermaids who? I think you must have the wrong number.

https://twitter.com/suzanne_moore/status/1293508438903918592

Maybe the same reason the BBC did.

https://twitter.com/suzanne_moore/status/1293569715428884482

Along with the non-stop bullying of women.… Read the rest



Seeking support

Aug 12th, 2020 9:46 am | By

Oh have they now.

The BBC has quietly dropped four LGBT+ charities from an information page for transgender people seeking support.

The LGBT Foundation, Mermaids, The Gender Trust, and The Gender Identity Research and Education Society (GIRES) are all registered British charities that provide vital support and advice for trans, non-binary and gender-questioning people.

“Support” in the form of eager encouragement of delusional thinking.

As recently as June 29, they were all listed on a page on the BBC website called “Information and Support: Gender Identity”.

Pages such as this are often linked to under BBC articles or videos covering topics people may need further support or information about, including gender identity, sexual or mental health, and addiction

Read the rest


Actually, be extremely careful

Aug 12th, 2020 8:55 am | By

From The Australian:

Australia’s psychiatrists have been urged to be very cautious about giving official backing to gender clinic treatments for under-18s after an international scandal over false claims of mental health benefits for transgender surgery.

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists should be “extremely careful” before endorsing so-called “gender affirming” hormonal treatment and surgery for minors, according to Philip Morris, president of the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists whose members look after patients in the private and public sector.

In other words don’t cut crucial bits off people or give them dangerous hormones, or both, unless you’re very sure it will be beneficial. (Shorter: first, do no harm.) You’d think that would be self-evident, but … Read the rest



No YOU’RE the empty signifiers

Aug 11th, 2020 4:54 pm | By

The Kamala Harris news has given me a second wind so I’ll go back to TERF wars an intro for a bit.

The next theme, after the “cis women and white fragility” bullshit, is “what do they mean it’s an ideology??”

The language of ‘gender ideology’ originates in anti-feminist and anti-trans discourses among right-wing Christians, with the Catholic Church acting as a major nucleating agent (Careaga-Pérez, 2016Kuhar & Paternotte, 2017). In the last decade the concept has been increasingly adopted by far-right organisations and politicians in numerous American, European and African states. They position gender egalitarianism, sexual liberation and LGBTQ+ rights as an attack on traditional values by ‘global elites’, as represented by multinational corporations and

Read the rest


Ketamine Don

Aug 11th, 2020 3:54 pm | By

Trump can barely get the words out.

He also says Harris was “very disrespectful” to Biden. Trump says that. Trump is the rudest person on the planet, and he says that. Also…

Read the rest



Hot ticket

Aug 11th, 2020 3:19 pm | By

Good news I think, Biden’s choice. He’s such a lousy choice himself, he needs an exciting companion on the ticket. I know people have qualms about some of Harris’s work as a prosecutor, but I think she’ll rock it anyway.

Once a rival for the top job, the California senator of Indian-Jamaican heritage had long been considered the front-runner for the number two slot.

The former California attorney general has been urging police reform amid nationwide anti-racism protests.

Mr Biden had faced mounting calls to pick a black woman as his running mate in recent months as the nation was convulsed by social unrest over racial injustice and police brutality against African Americans, a key voting bloc to

Read the rest


Parentheses do all the work

Aug 11th, 2020 11:57 am | By

Now that I’ve calmed down a little I’ll tackle another chunk of Terfwarsanintro.

By positioning (cis, white) ‘females’ as a category uniquely vulnerable to the threat of ‘male’ violence (and especially ‘biological’ male sexual violence), trans-exclusionary arguments around toilet access – including those advanced by self-proclaimed feminist groups – lend support to the gendered and misogynistic discourses that have long positioned (white) women as the ‘weaker sex’ needing protection (by men, from men).

These discourses have racist undertones, as the implicit whiteness of the women who are the subject of protection means that racialised and especially Black women and non-binary people are more likely to be considered dangerously masculine (Patel, 2017).

It would be funny if it … Read the rest



Just rent a woman for a few months

Aug 11th, 2020 11:11 am | By

David Kaufman in the NY Times a couple of weeks ago:

Still in its infancy, this movement envisions a future when the ability to create a family is no longer determined by one’s wealth, sexuality, gender or biology.

By “create a family” he doesn’t mean adoption or step-parenthood, he means gestation. But of course the ability to gestate is determined by biology and by sex (not gender). It’s not something men can do. One can “envision a future” in which that’s not the case all one likes, but as of now that’s how it is. People burble about “uterus transplants” but it’s not that simple, to put it mildly.

“This is about society extending equality to its final and

Read the rest


Fighting dirty

Aug 11th, 2020 10:18 am | By

Reading the intro part 2.

 Organisations resisting self-determination discursively position it as ‘dangerous’, arguing that it enables ‘men’ (a category frequently presumed to encompass trans women and non-binary people assigned male at birth) unfettered access to women-only spaces. Trans people and allies often describe proponents of this approach as ‘TERFs’ because they tend to support trans women’s/girls’ exclusion from spaces such as women’s toilets, changing rooms, rape crisis centres, shelters and feminist groups.

That’s because trans women and girls are not literally women and girls, they are men and boys who have adopted the label “trans.” The label is just a label. It’s just a word. It’s not magic. I could say I’m a trans house or giraffe or … Read the rest