Business Insider reports that Saudi Arabia uses a tracking number on the packaging of phones to track down women who leave the country.

Women who flee Saudi Arabia expect to be chased.

They expect their friends to be interviewed, their social media to be scoured, their passports to be frozen.

They mostly do not expect Saudi government agents to hunt down the old box for their iPhone.

But why do they expect to be chased, though? I realize Saudi Arabia doesn’t allow women to travel without a male “guardian” but I don’t see why it feels the need to continue that beyond its own borders.

The fact that such techniques are being employed shows how seriously Saudi Arabia takes 

What is he, six?

….call the FBI about these calls and meetings? How ridiculous! I would never be trusted again. With that being said, my full answer is rarely played by the Fake News Media. They purposely leave out the part that matters.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2019

“You leave stuff on the floor too! You leave the chairs on the floor, and the table, and the rug – you should get all your stuff off the floor too! Waaaaaaaah!”

Yes, Don, we know you talk to foreign governments. (By the way the royals are not that. You can talk to all the Romanovs you like.) The issue wasn’t talking tout court, and we’re not so … Read the rest

Hmm.

.@JoeBiden in Ottumwa, Iowa: "I promise you if I'm elected president, you're going to see the single most important thing that changes America — we're going to cure cancer."

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) June 11, 2019

He can’t “promise” that. It’s an absurd thing to say. He could promise to increase funding to cancer research, but he can’t promise that if he’s elected we’ll “cure” cancer. Cancer isn’t One Thing, so “it” can’t be cured, boom, game over. Survival rates can be improved but I don’t think anyone who knows anything about it talks about curing cancer full stop.

The doofus act was ok for a sidekick. It’s not ok for this. Promising to cure cancer is worthy … Read the rest

Guest post by Josh Slocum

Guaranteed method to attract abusers:

1. Lower your boundaries—and make a big deal out of talking about lowering your boundaries.

2. Characterize lowering your boundaries as “being inclusive.” This signals to predators that you are already brainwashed. They now know that you believe discernment and boundaries are bad things, things that oppress other people.

They can see that you derive your sense of being a good person from your self sacrifice. They like this, because it means that you will work hard to give up things that rightly belong to you, and that you won’t reserve any space for yourself.

They realize they can make you work faster and harder at giving up your own … Read the rest

What was that we were saying yesterday about the ever-escalating demands to obey the ever-inflating rules, and how impossible it is to obey them all when they’re constantly in motion, and how that trap is indeed a trap and no we can never escape the new demands? The trap caught Chelsea Cain:

Mockingbird writer Chelsea Cain has deleted her Twitter account after facing mounting backlash and accusations of transphobia due to a creative choice present in the latest issue of her comic book series Man-Eaters.

Cain’s self-described “feminist” series Man-Eaters, published by Image Comics with art by Elise McCall, follows the exploits of a twelve-year old girl named Maude as she navigates a world wherein a mutation causes

Yes, that’s a good look, Joe Biden sticking his finger in a woman’s face and telling her what’s what.

https://twitter.com/thelocalmaniac8/status/1138575498437681153

If you play it you can see that he’s wagging his finger up and down, right in her face, while leaning over her. This is what I keep talking about – when men do that shit it’s intimidating, and they need to stop doing it.

A clarifying point: this was absolutely and undeniably an intimidation tactic. He leaned forward, raised his voice, tried to grab my arm with his free hand. For a hot sec I thought he was going to hit me. Don’t make excuses for his actions in my comments anymore pls & thank https://t.co/OyXFJqIEAY

—

Biden’s red-hot New Idea is to run as The Guy Who Can Work With Republicans. People who know anything about Republicans think he’s doolally.

Joe Biden insists that congressional Republicans will work with him once he’s elected president but no one, let alone [especially] those who worked with Biden in the last administration, actually believes him.

The former vice president’s latest promise of a forthcoming wave of bipartisan cooperation came on Monday night, when he told a crowd of fundraisers in Washington D.C. that he believed that when Donald Trump left office, GOP lawmakers would see the error of their ways.  “[T]hese folks know better,” he explained. “They know this isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing.”

Uh huh, and … Read the rest

Trump and Gang are ratcheting up the “we have absolute power” move.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday moved to block Congress’ access to documents about how a citizenship question was added to the 2020 census.

Trump claimed executive privilege over subpoenaed documents at the urging of the Justice Department, as the House Oversight and Reform Committee was beginning proceedings Wednesday morning to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with the panel’s subpoenas, which the committee issued in April.

…

The committee launched an investigation earlier this year into the origins of the citizenship question, with Democrats claiming that it was added to the census in order to

Oh I misunderstood what Trump said about Kim’s murder of his brother – it wasn’t that he would do the same thing in Kim’s position, it was that he wouldn’t let the CIA spy on North Korea.

Soooooo that’s horrifying. Here we are, wishing Trump had merely endorsed a murder.

David Graham at the Atlantic cleared it up for me.

Two accounts, a new book by the Washington Post reporter Anna Fifield and a Wall Street Journal story, report that Kim’s brother Kim Jong Nam was a CIA informant. Kim Jong Nam was killed in a shocking chemical-weapons attack in the Kuala Lumpur airport in February 2017. Trump was asked about the revelation as he left the White

One bit of better news though – the Trump admin is failing to kneecap climate change-related regulations.

The Trump Administration is losing on climate in the courts. More than two and a half years into the Trump Administration, no climate change-related regulatory rollback brought before the courts has yet survived legal challenge. Nevertheless, climate change is one arena where the administration’s rollbacks have been both visible and real. In total, the Sabin Center’s U.S. Climate Deregulation Tracker identifies a total of 94 actions taken by the executive branch in 2017 and 2018 to undermine and reverse climate protections.

But despite the Trump Administration setting a high-water mark for climate change deregulation, a new Sabin Center working paper, 

I saw a reference somewhere yesterday (I wish I could remember where) to an analogy between trans identity and adoptive parents. I kept thinking about it off and on all day, finding it less convincing the more I thought about it. So I searched for it and found a piece by a philosopher, one Sophie Grace Chappell. Is Chappell trans?, I wondered as I read. I had to look hard to find out, but I did look hard, because…that name? Sophie Grace? Remember the also self-named cartoonist Sophie Labelle? Self-flatter much?

Anyway I did find out: yes, Chappell is trans.

Sophie Grace Chappell is professor of philosophy at the Open University, Milton Keynes, England. Under her previous

How can we do more? More more more? The situation is desperate; we must do more.

The profession being discussed is philosophy (i.e. the university job).

After reading several accounts by transgender colleagues reporting very negative experiences in the profession–accounts that a number of other trans colleagues wrote on social media cohere with their own experiences–Helen and I commissioned the following guest post on ways to support our trans peers better. We hope the post will lead to constructive, supportive dialogue on this important issue – as we believe that our profession should be a welcoming and supportive place for all of its members, particularly those who have been marginalized and who experience the profession as less welcoming that it

Liam Madigan informs us that Karen Ingala Smith is not a feminist, on the grounds that her list of murdered women is a list of murdered women. She “purposely” doesn’t include men on her list of murdered women, therefore she is not a feminist in the view of Liam Madigan, Labour Students National Women’s Officer.

https://twitter.com/NOLSWO/status/1138172193395892225

Also Liam.

https://twitter.com/NOLSWO/status/1138064028943732736

I don’t think Liam would recognize a fact if it bit him on the ass (as we vulgarly say over here – swap in “arse” if you prefer).… Read the rest

Oh goody, a town hall. A Two Spirit, Dyke, Queer & Trans Community Town Hall, Hosted by Coalition Against Trans Antagonism and Vancouver Dyke March.

Vancouver Dyke March is the one that doesn’t like lesbians. It has a video about trans inclusion.

I feel like the word “dyke” is so inclusive of so many different idenninies.

That’s at 22 seconds in and I’m not watching any more because that’s plenty stupid enough. The word “dyke” is inclusive of lesbian identities; why does it have to be inclusive of “so many” other ones? Why can’t it just name what it names? Why do words have to be inclusive at all? The more inclusive they are the less they … Read the rest

Laurie Penny makes a reasonable suggestion.

Let’s start by acknowledging that women are not things. Before we talk, like we have to, about what the attacks on abortion access mean for this anxious, awful political era, let’s establish as a ground rule that women are not vessels, or incubators, or an undifferentiated natural resource. Women are human beings whose human rights matter.

And one item that looks a good deal like a human right is the power to decide what happens to your body, within the realm of possibility. You can’t decide you will never get ill, but you can decide to do something about getting ill. Medical technology being what it is, women now can decide they will … Read the rest