All entries by this author

Guest post: Sadly not unusual

May 15th, 2024 11:29 am | By

Originally a comment by Freeinder on The rights of mariners.

Sadly, this is not unusual. Even if the crew are issued shore passes, they may still be blocked from stepping ashore. Many ports in the USA are private property, and therefore declare crewmembers trespassers if they leave the ship. Many ports, globally, do not allow crew changes anymore, as they ban non-company vehicles from entering. This was common before 9/11, but afterwards it became virtually impossible in too many ports (here’s looking at you, Oakland, New York, Norfolk). Seattle, LA and San Francisco used to allow crew swaps, but then a mariner has just 24 (or in some cases 12) hours to leave US territory, on pain of arrest. … Read the rest



Like, just no

May 15th, 2024 11:24 am | By

It’s like, like.

Serious students of language have a hard time knowing what to do with this all-too-familiar use of like. They call it “filler,” and it’s hard not to regard it as something bordering on the sublinguistic, an almost intolerable torturing of the magnificent instrument bequeathed to us by Shakespeare and his successors. For those of us who teach and spend a lot of our time talking to young people, the endless supply of self-interrupting likes that litter their speech and impede the flow of their thoughts can be very hard to take.

I’ve been noticing that lately – the way the filler-like has expanded to the point that it excludes other words almost entirely. How do … Read the rest



The rights of mariners

May 15th, 2024 9:38 am | By

Horrors – I didn’t realize the crew of the ship that destroyed the Key Bridge in Baltimore are stuck on the damn ship.

As a controlled explosion rocked the Dali on Monday, nearly two dozen sailors remained on board, below deck in the massive ship’s hull. The simultaneous blasts sent pieces of Baltimore’s once iconic Francis Scott Key Bridge into the dark waters of Maryland’s Patapsco River, seven weeks after its collapse left six people on the bridge dead and the Dali marooned.

Authorities – and the crew – hope that the demolition will mark the beginning of the end of a long process that has left the 21 men on board trapped and cut off from the world,

Read the rest


Fire her or else

May 15th, 2024 9:06 am | By

Return to Gardencourt…not an obscure Henry James sequel but a new window into just how brazen the Stonewall bullying is.

https://twitter.com/SexNotGI/status/1789644257919160415

“I trust that you will do what is right.” Aka “Nice little place you got here, would be a shame if something happened to it.”

Pdf of the full letter.… Read the rest



Transgender golf cart

May 15th, 2024 8:05 am | By

The usual incomplete evasive dishonest manipulative reporting:

Transgender golfer Hailey Davidson narrowly misses out on qualifying for the U.S. Women’s Open

He’s not a “transgender golfer” – he’s a transgender man, aka a man who claims to be a woman. “Golfer” is not a gender.

This careful evasiveness seems to be universal in mainstream journalism, which is maddening. It’s not the job of news outlets to protect men who are working 24/7 to destroy the rights of women.

The caption under the photo at the top of the story is even more evasive:

Hailey Davidson, a winner earlier this year on the NXXT Tour, missed qualifying for the U.S. Women’s Open by one spot.

Nothing even hints that he’s … Read the rest



They’ll be seeking an explanation

May 14th, 2024 5:23 pm | By

The new homophobia in action:

Read the rest



Just going with what a lot of other people have said

May 14th, 2024 10:31 am | By

I’m just catching up on the news about a teacher who was abruptly fired, apparently for teaching critical thinking. It seems the school also seized his personal laptop and is keeping it, which…how is that legal? It’s either that or he was writing a book on a school computer and not backing it up on a computer of his own, which…why tf would he do that?

Read the rest


Calling themselves election investigators

May 14th, 2024 9:44 am | By

The NY Times reported several weeks ago that Republicans are hard at work purging voters.

A network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald J. Trump is quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states, an all-but-unnoticed effort that could have an impact in a close or contentious election.

Calling themselves election investigators, the activists have pressed local officials in Michigan, Nevada and Georgia to drop voters from the rolls en masse. They have at times targeted Democratic areas, relying on new data programs and novel legal theories to justify their push.

The groups have made mass voter challenges a top priority this election year, spurred on by a former Trump lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and True

Read the rest


Lessons in womaning

May 14th, 2024 4:53 am | By

We are learning to Be Kinder.

Read the rest



Careful about paper trails

May 14th, 2024 4:44 am | By

An interesting detail from Michael Cohen’s testimony yesterday:

He reported directly to Mr Trump, on “whatever concerned him, whatever he wanted”, Cohen said, calling his ex-boss a micromanager. “Everything required Mr Trump’s sign-off,” he said.

At the same time, Mr Trump was careful about paper trails, Cohen said. The Trump Organization founder never had an email address, telling Cohen that “emails are like written papers”.

“There are too many people who have gone down as a direct result of having emails that prosecutors can use in a case,” Cohen said Mr Trump once told him.

Gone down, eh? As in, been exposed as criminals? If Trump did say that it tells us he knows he’s a crook and takes … Read the rest



Meet Amos n Andy

May 14th, 2024 3:40 am | By

Many many people, especially women, are asking why the BBC keeps promoting drag and why it doesn’t equally promote blackface. It’s a fair question.

Read the rest



Guest post: You even get a whistle

May 13th, 2024 4:53 pm | By
Guest post: You even get a whistle

Originally a comment by Arty Morty on True Selves.

His “true self” being the woman he is not. His fake true self, his pretend true self, his fantasy true self. Back in the before times a true self meant something along the lines of a self not repressed and stifled by convention. It didn’t mean childish fantasy. Adults didn’t prance around saying their true selves were birds or race cars or space travelers or Nobel laureates or ponies. Fantasy and delusion are now what’s real, so I guess truth and sanity are fake.

How are we supposed to even try to show compassion for people who may or may not have debilitating dysphoria when so many of the most … Read the rest



Argumentum ad dizzy bitch

May 13th, 2024 4:38 pm | By

That’s embarrassing. She’s a lawyer and a journalist and that’s her reading comprehension level?

Probably not, most of the time. Probably it’s an excess of anger that caused her to miss the point so thoroughly. Let that be a lesson to us all: when in a rage, slow down and read carefully before you rush to denounce. Otherwise you’re gonna look like a damn fool in front of all those sages and wits on social meeja.

Read the rest



En plein Paris, devant la police

May 13th, 2024 10:31 am | By

“A terf, a bullet, social justice”

The cop who escorts Moutot seems to be laughing.… Read the rest



The real man

May 13th, 2024 10:20 am | By

An amusing bit in a Bloomberg piece by Timothy O’Brien:

Cohen, a lawyer, didn’t work for Trump because he was a deft attorney, a skillful accountant or a brilliant money manager. He worked for him because he knew just enough about the law, accounting and greed to help Trump engineer end runs and cover-ups. “I know where the skeletons are buried because I was the one who buried them,” Cohen wrote in Disloyal, a memoir of his Trump years. “I wasn’t just a witness to the President’s rise — I was an active and eager participant.”

“Apart from his wife and children, I knew Trump better than anyone else did,” Cohen wrote. “In some ways, I knew him

Read the rest


He laughs

May 13th, 2024 9:40 am | By

Ridiculous man thinks it’s personal.

Dude. It’s not about you the person. It’s about this ridiculous destructive ideology, and the myriad ways it harms women (and children, and lesbians and gay men, and confused people). We don’t want you to live your worst life, we just don’t want you demolishing our rights.… Read the rest



True selves

May 13th, 2024 9:09 am | By

The FA did a puff piece on “Lucy” Clark in February 2019.

February is LGBT History Month and Wembley Stadium hosted the Just A Ball Game #StrongerTogether conference on Tuesday 5 February. One of the guest speakers was Lucy Clark, who became English football’s first transgender referee at the start of the 2018-19 season. Here, she tells her story and how the campaign has gone so far…

Notice how they avoid spelling it out, as the media and organizations so regularly do. Just “transgender,” not trans which gender.

The game has always been my outlet throughout life. As a child, a teenager and an adult, my life always revolved around football, whether I was a player, a manager or

Read the rest


Out of obscurity

May 13th, 2024 8:44 am | By

Oh what do you know, it turns out that “Lucy” Clark, who is being hailed as the first “trans football referee,” is not some random fella who just happened to be the star of this story, he’s a Celebrity Personality with multiple masks.

https://twitter.com/JammersMinde/status/1790009638152204597

They do? They are?

Why yes.

The Victoria Derbyshire chat was March 2019. This guy didn’t just fall off the turnip truck yesterday.

Read the rest


All the way off

May 13th, 2024 3:45 am | By

Yet another guy tries to tell JKR how to bee nither to the nithe men thtealing all our thtuff.

She’s not playing. None of us are playing.

Read the rest


Guest post: Today prisons are very, very motivated to avoid rape

May 12th, 2024 6:17 pm | By

Originally a comment by Peter N on Backstabbers.

For the record, I’ve been pen-pals with half a dozen federal inmates going back something like 15 years, and I volunteered in a state prison for ten years. I’ve also been active in a local prisoner support group for three years. In all of that, I’ve never heard any first-hand report of rape in prisons. I don’t question that things were very bad in the past, and may remain so in some locations, but it seems to me that today prisons are very, very motivated to avoid rape. Indeed as a volunteer I had to take an anti-rape class mandated by federal law, and re-qualify every year.

What I have heard … Read the rest