Jonathan Freedland on Labour and antisemitism.

For most progressive-minded, remain-leaning folk, is it even a dilemma? I’m not sure. To them the logic must seem simple and straightforward: they want to eject a cruel and useless government and stop Brexit, and that means denying Boris Johnson a majority and replacing him with Jeremy Corbyn, who will end austerity and hold a second referendum. Job done.

But it’s not that simple for him, much as he would like it to be.

The thought of it prompts in me, and the overwhelming majority of the community I grew up in, a fear that we have not known before.

I’m referring to Britain’s Jews who, for the first time in their history,

Some dastardly fiend stabbed the Alabama Trump Baby balloon.

A towering Baby Trump protest balloon was knifed and deflated by someone unhappy with its appearance during Donald Trump’s Saturday trip to Alabama, organisers said.

The incident occurred during the president’s visit to watch a University of Alabama football game. The balloon, which is more than 6.1 metres (20 feet) tall, was set up in a nearby park.

Jim Girvan, the organiser of a group that “adopts” out Baby Trump balloons for protests, said a man charged the balloon with a knife and cut a 2.4-metre (8-foot) gash in the back. Girvan said the unidentified man was taken into custody.

Good! Throw the book at him!

Robert Kennedy,

How difficult can it be?

It took a marathon school board meeting. It followed months of divisive debate, including two student walkouts. It came after the student newspaper opted for change for similar reasons.

“It” is another high school dropping its longtime “Redskins” mascot, with this one in Idaho proving a particularly contentious exercise.

Hm. Maybe we could shorten these exercises with a new plan: all teams named “Redskins” will alternate between that and “Whiteskins” every week until people get the point.

As reported by the Washington Post, Teton High School (Driggs, Idaho), which sits just outside Yellowstone Park and the Wyoming border, announced Tuesday evening it would retire its “Redskins” mascot at an undetermined date in the near future.

Lara Adams-Miller shared some anti-suffrage images yesterday. It’s always unnerving to see how very venomous they were.

“Shut up, terf” and “punch a terf” rhetoric is nearly indistinguishable from anti-suffrage rhetoric.

Those go way beyond just shut up – they urge torture.

Suffer, bitch!

More:

A man’s foot on her breasts, a hundred-twelve*-pound concrete block on her abdomen and crotch, while she is choked and drowned by a great vat of soup. Clear enough?

*correction… Read the rest

Originally an item for the Miscellany Room from Screechy Monkey. 

So, Slate has a really, really shitty sex advice column called How To Do It. It presents a real dilemma for me: from Slate’s point of view, a click is a click, so they can’t tell that I sometimes read it just for the train wreck value as opposed to actually thinking the authors give good advice.

(Why is it shitty? Well, aside from the issue I’m about to complain about, I’m reminded of something Dan Savage once said when asked if he had any advice for young people who want to be sex advice columnists. After noting that he wasn’t interesting in encouraging competition, he said the one mistake … Read the rest

An authoritarian state boss abusing his power who isn’t Trump:

A British Indian author and journalist has been stripped of his Indian citizenship after he wrote an article criticising the regime of the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi.

Aatish Taseer, who was born in the UK but raised in India and spent a further decade living there from the age of 25, was stripped of his overseas citizenship of India (OCI) status on Thursday.

Taseer, who has written multiple books on India, described the government’s move as “highly suspicious and systematic”. He added: “They are making an example of me and sending a warning message to other journalists.”

Wouldn’t Trump love to do that.

The decision followed the

To the surprise of no one we learn that Mick Mulvaney too is implicated in the Ukraine extortion.

Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney approved a White House meeting for the Ukrainian president – if Ukraine announced investigations tied to Joe Biden, a political rival of Donald Trump, according to testimony unveiled on Friday by the congressional committees pursuing an impeachment inquiry.

Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, “blurted out” that Mulvaney had approved the meeting if the Ukrainians announced an investigation of Burisma, a gas company that formerly employed Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s son, said Fiona Hill, a national security council member who was deposed by the committees last month.

Hill’s account was corroborated

And speaking of special rules for women – a conversation among some feminists on Twitter brought up the familiar issue of Why is it always women who have to wear the torture shoes or tight lacing or tiny dress in freezing cold?

Jennifer Lawrence has criticized “sexist” media coverage of her fashion choices in a new Facebook post.

The Oscar-winning actor, currently on a press tour for thriller Red Sparrow, responded to comments suggesting that the sleeveless Versace outfit worn during a photocall in London implied that she was being mistreated alongside her coat-wearing male co-stars.

“Wow. I don’t really know where to get started on this ‘Jennifer Lawrence wearing a revealing dress in the cold’ controversy,” she wrote.

cazz pointed out this Harvard Business Review article.

Susan Fiske and her colleagues have shown that people seem to universally use two dimensions to judge others: competence and warmth. We decided to test for both of those in addition to confidence. As a proxy for the likelihood of being promoted, we also tested for influence, on the theory that people who are seen as influential are more likely to be promoted to leadership roles.

We conducted a study analyzing the judgments that colleagues made regarding the competence and warmth of 236 engineers working in project teams at a multinational software development company. As part of their performance evaluation, the engineers were evaluated online by their supervisor, peers, and collaborators

Well, I guess women at work don’t need to see.

Wearing glasses at work has become an emotive topic in Japan following reports that some firms have told female employees to remove them.

Several local news outlets said some companies had “banned” eyewear for female employees for various reasons.

Among them, some retail chains reportedly said glasses-wearing shop assistants gave a “cold impression”.

If they’re women. Only if they’re women.

I’m going to make a wild guess that it’s not actually a “cold” impression the chains are worrying about, but something more like a “clever” impression. Glasses remind us of reading – so obviously that’s a total turnoff and a waste when it’s a woman. Nobody wants to see … Read the rest

God, it’s almost funny. You know those fundraising ads that political candidates run? Saying donate to my campaign and get a chance to have a beer with the candidate? I’ve seen a lot of them from Warren. Trump must think they’re a cool idea, because he has lots of them too…but in his case it’s a fraud, because nobody ever wins. He cheats even at that. How hard would it be to meet with a fan? Not very, but he doesn’t do it, he just takes their money.

A heavily-promoted contest to win breakfast with President Trump in New York City on September 26 was a fraud. The purported winner of the contest, Joanna Kamis, did not have

Giuliani is running the State Department, apparently.

A State Department official told lawmakers that Rudy Giuliani’s attacks were part of a “campaign of lies” against the former Ukraine ambassador, according to a transcript released Thursday.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent testified that President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer’s actions contributed to his decision not to speak out internally about Giuliani in the run up to the July phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian President. Kent, who oversees US policy on Ukraine, told lawmakers that he did not the speak to anyone at State to express his concerns about Giuliani because he had previously been told to “keep my head down” after Giuliani attacked him by name.

Kent … Read the rest

Via Louise Moody on Twitter: a woman writes to the Liberal Democrats:

I am gender critical – that means that whilst I believe transgender people should not face and discrimination or abuse for their transgender status, I do not believe people can change biological sex.

The reply is not very inclooosiv.

By the sounds of your email it appears that your values are not aligned with ours so we are probably not the right the party for you.

That’s not telling her she can’t join, which parties probably can’t do at the membership level, but it sure as hell is giving her reason not to. “If you don’t believe that people can change their biological sex your values … Read the rest

Oh no, an academic – at Goldsmiths no less! – pretended to be non-binary. Pretended! Would you believe it?!

A university academic has sparked outrage after claiming to be transgender and asking students to call her ‘Mx Tippy Rampage’ before admitting it was a satirical character for a book.

Dawn Mellor, who was ‘the preferred tutor for transgender and non-binary students’ at Goldsmiths University in south-east London, inhabited the ‘toxic and unpleasant’ character online for several years.

Mellor, who demanded the use of gender neutral pronouns, has now been blasted by the LGBTQ+ community for ‘treating transgender lives as a… performance piece.’

A performance piece – how could nonbinary identity possibly be seen as a performance piece?!

An

Age won’t save you, political office won’t save you, time at Auschwitz won’t save you.

An 89-year-old Holocaust survivor in Italy has been assigned police guards for protection after receiving hundreds of threats on social media.

Liliana Segre, who was sent to the notorious Auschwitz death camp at 13, has been subjected to a barrage of anti-Semitic messages in recent days.

Auschwitz was a work camp as well as a death camp. She necessarily must have been sent to the work camp, because if she hadn’t she wouldn’t be alive now. There was no waiting period: it was straight from the train to the Zyklon B room. Anne and Margot Frank were also in the work camp, where they … Read the rest

The Star Vancouver reported that protesters showed up outside Meghan Murphy’s talk on Saturday despite the last minute announcement of the location.

Some protesters carried signs proclaiming that “Trans rights are human rights” and “Trans women are women.”

The event was originally scheduled to take place at Simon Fraser University, but was moved after the senior director of campus security said there was a high safety concern.

The talk included Meghan Murphy, a freelance writer who opposes trans rights, saying they threaten the rights of cisgender women.

Oh but that’s wrong – she doesn’t “oppose trans rights” – not the ones that comport with everyone else’s rights. She opposes special, new, invented “rights” like the “right” to be affirmed and … Read the rest