A play in three acts. WITS is Women In Technology & Science.

Act one:

WITS Reads – Invisible Women by @CCriadoPerez our virtual book clubs meets July 28th. #WomenInSTEM More below ⬇️ https://t.co/Pzj9Pb8ZqU

— Gendelity – for workplace inclusion (@gendelity) July 20, 2020

Good choice. Caroline Criado-Perez is brilliant, as any fule kno.

Act two scene one:

https://twitter.com/Repealist_/status/1285496641991180288 https://twitter.com/Repealist_/status/1285497212810792960

In other words, don’t read this book that you chose, read some other book that someone else will choose from this list of names provided by me.

Act two scene two:

Thank you so much, we were not aware of this at all and based our choice on the @stemminist book club, we really appreciate you informing us and will look

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Veterans challenge illegal orders:

The Black Lives Matter protest in Portland looked to be winding down last Saturday night when US marine corps veteran Duston Obermeyer noticed a phalanx of federal officers emerge from the federal courthouse.

They shot teargas at the crowd and pushed a protester to the ground with such force that, Obermeyer said, she slid 6ft across the pavement.

He’d gone there to see what was happening, but at that point he decided to participate.

In a Pokémon hat and Superman T-shirt, and with a cotton mask protecting his face, the 6ft 4in, 275lb man walked up to the officers and asked whether they understood their oath to defend the constitution.

Defending the constitution is not … Read the rest

Good luck watching this unmoved.

The chant is: our streets.

Another huge crowd tonight in Portland, including a new "wall" on the front lines: a Wall of Vets.

Here's a look at the line of military veterans getting set up here in front of the federal courthouse. Behind them, the Wall of Moms and the Wall of Dads are arriving. pic.twitter.com/gGnXHjI3k2

— Mike Baker (@ByMikeBaker) July 25, 2020

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It appears that the Feds committed a war crime in Portland.

Federal authorities have been accused of violating the Geneva Convention after apparently destroying medical equipment during protests in Portland.

Reporter Sergio Olmos shared a video on Twitter Tuesday night showing medical supplies and protective gear covered in an orange liquid.

“It appears that federal officers, during dispersal, pepper sprayed the medical supplies in the tents,” Olmos wrote.

And The Enemy is…protesters. Not soldiers for the Nazis but protesters.

It appears that federal officers, during dispersal, pepper sprayed the medical supplies in the tents pic.twitter.com/Y9HGqzcepB

— Sergio Olmos (@MrOlmos) July 22, 2020

An article in the 1998 International Criminal Court Statute says “[i]ntentionally directing attacks against … hospitals and

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Mary Trump was on Fresh Air yesterday.

GROSS: Donald Trump was sent to military school, the New York Military Academy. And this was against his protests. Why was he sent there, and who do you have that information from? Who told you why he was sent there?

TRUMP: My grandmother told me stories. And, you know, I think it was a combination of things. He was a student at a school in Forest Hills that my grandfather was a trustee for. He was on the board of trustees. And Donald’s behavior, as he grew up, became increasingly belligerent and uncontrollable. So I think that was causing some problems. I think my grandfather probably found it, if not embarrassing then

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What is contrition, what is apology, what do we mean when we use those words?

Did Ted Yoho apologize and/or “offer contrition” to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for calling her a fucking bitch?

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s outrage over a Republican lawmaker’s verbal assault broadened into an extraordinary moment on the House floor on Thursday as she and other Democrats assailed a sexist culture of “accepting violence and violent language against women” whose adherents include Donald Trump.

A day after rejecting an offer of contrition from Republican congressman Ted Yoho for his language during this week’s Capitol steps confrontation, Ocasio-Cortez and more than a dozen colleagues cast the incident as all-too-common behavior by men, including the president and other Republicans.

An offer of … Read the rest

Our new friend Zack just keeps on giving. Thanks to the vagaries of Twitter I didn’t see this one yesterday, despite clicking on all the view threads and replies I did see.

That is, a cisgender woman can believe their biology is part of what makes them, personally, a woman — so long as they do not assert that this is the only way one can be defined as a woman.

— Zack Beauchamp (@zackbeauchamp) July 23, 2020

It’s breathtaking, isn’t it. We impudent women “can,” according to this man, “believe” (stupid credulous creatures that we are) that our biology is “part of” what makes us women – only “part of,” mind you, we’re not allowed to “believe” it’s … Read the rest

Right???

What is a man? Why aren’t radio shows asking this & inviting only women to tell us? Why aren’t we talking about expanding male boundaries or questioning why men aren’t kinder men? The male rights movement aka trans lobby has everyone dissecting women while men remain untouched.

— Sonia Poulton (@SoniaPoulton) July 23, 2020

Funny how that works.

It's odd how women for you two are all 'cis women' or 'trans women' but men are just men

— ripx4nutmeg (@ripx4nutmeg) July 23, 2020

Notice Beauchamp’s “come on, man” – no pause to ask what is a man, no worries about whether men think having a male body makes men “more legitimately” men – just the bare word itself, taken … Read the rest

Media historian Aniko Bodroghkozy explains why the march on Selma got so much national attention.

On March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers beat and gassed John Lewis and hundreds of marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

…

Most Americans didn’t see the footage on the 6:30 nightly news. Instead, they saw it later Sunday night, which, like today, drew the biggest audiences of the week. That evening, ABC was premiering the first TV airing of “Judgment at Nuremberg.” An estimated 48 million people tuned in to watch the Academy Award-winning film, which dealt with the moral culpability of those who had participated in the Holocaust.

…

News programs never got those kinds of ratings.

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This Zack Beauchamp guy – he’s a senior correspondent at Vox. He wrote a long piece on the Harper’s letter and cancel culture and all that. In that context he talked about The Trans Question – aka won’t someone please think of the trans ladies.

Kate Manne and Jason Stanley, philosophers at Cornell and Yale, respectively, put the point nicely in an essay on the free speech debate in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Kate Manne and Jason Stanley are both very hostile to feminist women who say that women are women and men are not.

“When oppressed people speak out — and up, toward those in power — their right to speak may be granted, yet their

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Ummm…

Donald Trump, the president of the United States, has insisted that a cognitive test he took recently was “difficult”, using the example of a question in which the patient is asked to remember and repeat five words.

“Person, woman, man, camera, TV,” Trump explained, saying that listing the words in order was worth “extra points”, and that he found the task easy.

He said it to a man-person standing in front of him, facing a camera for a tv shoot. I don’t know if there was a woman within view – he may have come up with that one all by himself. “Man” and “person” are pretty broad hints though.

“They said nobody gets it in order, it’s

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New development! Michael Cohen ordered released from prison.

A judge ordered the release from prison of President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer on Thursday, saying he believes the government retaliated against him for planning to release a book about Trump before November’s election.

Michael Cohen’s First Amendment rights were violated when he was ordered back to prison on July 9 after probation authorities said he refused to sign a form banning him from publishing the book or communicating publicly in other manners, U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said during a telephone conference.

The judge ordered him released by tomorrow afternoon.

“How can I take any other inference than that it’s retaliatory?” Hellerstein asked prosecutors, who insisted in court papers

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Dude explains that it’s bigotry for women to think that women are people with female bodies.

I actually don't think that's the key question. I think the question is whether they think that makes them *more legitimately female* in some sense than trans women. That, I think, is bigotry.

— Zack Beauchamp (@zackbeauchamp) July 23, 2020

What a good thing it’s up to Zack Beauchamp to decide. We women are too stupid and too bigoted to decide or understand what women are.… Read the rest

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has responded to Yoho’s “I won’t apologize” yesterday.

“And I want to be clear that representative Yoho’s comments were not deeply hurtful or piercing to me,” she added. “Because I have worked a working-class job. I have waited tables and I have ridden the subway. I have walked the streets in New York City. And this kind of language is not new. I have encountered words uttered by Mr. Yoho and men uttering the same words as Mr. Yoho while I was being harassed in restaurants. I have tossed men out of bars that have used language like Mr. Yoho’s.”

In other words he talked to her the way drunk assholes in bars have talked to her. Not … Read the rest

It’s official.

Canada’s federal court has ruled that an asylum agreement the country has with the US is invalid because America violates the human rights of refugees.

The Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), in place since 2004, requires refugee claimants to request protection in the first safe country they reach.

But on Wednesday, a judge declared the deal unconstitutional due to the chance that the US will imprison the migrants.

In other words refugees who tried to go from the US to Canada were being turned back at the border on the grounds that they were already in that “first safe country.” Lawyers for refugees pointed out that what they were already in was not safe.

Nedira Jemal Mustefa,

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Behold the violent anarchists!

A new ad for President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign used an image of pro-democracy protests in Ukraine from 2014 to show what it called “chaos & violence” in the US.

The ad, published on Tuesday, includes a photo of the president listening to police leaders next to another photo appearing to show a group of protesters attacking a police officer on the ground.

“Public safety vs chaos & violence,” the text underneath the photos says.

LOL

a new Trump ad warning of chaos & violence depicts a cop being attacked by protesters…

…only it's a pic from Kyiv in 2014, when Yanukovich's thugs fought to quash a democratic uprising.https://t.co/VfJujT50Lm pic.twitter.com/QBrlwauo6s

— Jesse Lehrich (@JesseLehrich) July

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From Pliny:

Click to embiggen.… Read the rest

Trump’s ambassador to the UK is also being investigated for saying sexist and racist shit. What a surprise.

Diplomats told investigators that Johnson made remarks — often casually bandied about — that they found deeply offensive and demoralizing, sources said.

In 2018, ahead of an event for Black History Month — commonly marked at US embassies around the world — Johnson appeared agitated and asked if the audience would be “a whole bunch of Black people,” according to one source.

Three sources said Johnson questioned why the Black community would want a separate month to celebrate Black history and argued that Black fathers didn’t remain with their families and that was the “real challenge.” One source said an official

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Biden thinks Trump is the first racist president.

Dude.

“We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed, they’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has,” Trump’s Democratic challenger said, the Washington Post reports.

No he’s not.

The “peculiar institution” loomed large over the first few decades of American presidential history. Not only did enslaved laborers help build the White House all of the earliest presidents (except for John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams) owned enslaved people. George Washington kept some 300 bondsmen at his Mount Vernon plantation. Thomas Jefferson—despite once calling slavery an “assemblage of horrors”—owned at least 175 enslaved workers at one time. James Madison, James Monroe and Andrew

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Jane Clare Jones nailing things down:

This argument is not, therefore, an appeal for empathy with the damage done to us by male power and projection, by the immemorial and immovable demand that we efface ourselves before the needs of more important others. We know our pain doesn’t count in your economy, that it only registers on your balance books as a sly deceptive weapon or a vicious wilful harm to the interests of the only kind of people given credit. That you’re so certain of the justness of your accounting, you never seem to notice, that this one obvious fact, gives the lie to the ‘validity’ of your catechism. If you really thought that they were women, their

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