Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on What’s that smell coming from the basement?

…the sad reality is our climate is changing faster than our infrastructure can respond…

We all know what happens to organisms whose ability to adapt fails to keep up with the pace of its changing environment. Humans are numerous and resourceful enough to be around for a long time (even if it is ultimately in only small numbers, in widely spaced patches). Civilization is another story. Its dependence on the combination of cheap, reliable energy, and immediate access to material resources on a planetary scale makes it vulnerable to disruptions of either. The unacknowledged and unprotected foundation of all of this economic activity is a healthy, thriving biosphere, which is needed to keep the soft, squishy humans who think they’re in charge alive.

A healthy biosphere means leaving leaving large swathes of Earth “undeveloped” so it can go on doing what it’s doing, unhindered. Civilization doesn’t do well with “undeveloped,” as it regards such “unused” spaces in much the same way an artist or writer might look at a blank canvas, or empty page, believing its plans for use can only ever be an improvement on what is already there. There’s always that urge to fill in this supposed emptiness, to “improve” the “wasteland, ” and the inability to know when to leave well enough alone. We’ve developed powerful tools and technologies, and claimed exclusive, unlimited ownership of the entire planet before we’ve even learned about everything that constitutes it and how it all works together. We’re clever, but not smart. We aren’t living up to Linnaeus’s wildly optimistic species epithet of “wise,” and have made insufficient progress towards his injunction to know ourself. We’re a bunch of hyperactive, barefoot, psychotic apes with nuclear weapons, throwing our weight around in a house of glass.

The normal operation of civilization, which is now geared to a recklessly dangerous degree towards maximized, short-term returns for only a few, is destroying this biogeochemical foundation. Civilization is autolytic; it is consuming itself, and there’s more concern about who will extract the most out of the world before the whole Ponzi scheme collapses (this is called “winning”), instead of the fact that that this collapse is hastened by continued pursuit of business as usual itself. It’s a game of musical chairs being played by chainsmokers on board the Hindenburg, where the last one left with a chair congratulates himself on his entreprenurial accumen and asbestos underwear, even as the chair he’s on ignites beneath him.

Now to see if I can tolerate reading all of Grace Lavery’s Address to the Genderariat.

The emergence of a liberal ideology of trans rights over the last two decades has precipitated a crisis in higher education. The purpose of my lecture today will be to sketch the contours of that crisis as I see them, and to propose a couple of possible ways forward.

The trouble is though, it’s not a liberal ideology. Very much the opposite. It’s dictatorial and punitive, not liberal. It rests on bullshit claims and personal fantasies, which are not good foundations for a liberal ideology.

…there is in this room some number—perhaps a sizable number—of people who are perturbed by the growing conflict between certain members of the LGBT community and certain feminist activists and organizations. I hope to offer an account of that conflict that differs from the mainstream account, with which everyone in this room is familiar: that by insisting on the axiom that “trans women are women,” LGBT activists have engendered a set of conflicts between the rights of women and trans rights. In fact, no such conflicts exist, and the widespread attempt to diagnose them, however well-intentioned, has had the effect of weakening the women’s movement throughout the UK.

[Bronx cheer] Of course such conflicts exist. His presence is a conflict; his giving this talk is a conflict. He is displacing us. That is a conflict.

I do not believe that most of those responsible for this schism are feminists—many are simply reactionary trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos and Graham Linehan; some others are opportunistic centrist journalists like Helen Joyce and Jesse Singal; and still others are conservative ideologues like Toby Young and Rob Liddle.

Graham is nothing like Yiannopoulos. Helen is not “opportunistic” (and by the way what about the opportunism of “Grace” Lavery himself?).

However he admits there are some feminists who don’t bend the knee to him.

My argument today is not complex, and it is more or less encapsulated in the title of the lecture. Over the last decade, trans civil rights claims (particularly those of trans women, and especially those of trans women who love women) have become the scapegoat for an increasingly pervasive anxiety: that young people, or social media, or young people on social media, are incapable of rational thought, and their modes of reasoning need to be radically suppressed for the good of their blameless victims, which are sometimes figured as “women,” sometimes as “the university,” sometimes as “children,” and sometimes as “lesbians.” In order to defend this facially rather improbable account of the world, the gender critical movement must maintain a constant state of battle-readiness: always ready to swarm some graduate student on Twitter, to circulate some collection of memes that prove that trans teenagers are more likely to detransition than is widely believed, or to smear anyone who contradicts any of their positions as a rapist, a pedophile, an apologist for rapists or pedophiles, a misogynist, a wife-beater, a homophobe, or all of the above.

What a flippant way to describe the conflict – as well as inaccurate. What a male-centric way to ignore women’s concerns about our rights and change the subject to some mythic fretting about the social media habits of young people.

…the GC movement is not merely a threat to academic freedom, it is the greatest threat in a generation: not only have GC academics created a system whereby one teaches one’s students best when one teaches them at gunpoint, not only have they done so to the great delight of conservative politicians who despise the cultures of learning that have been sustained by the higher education sector, but they have done so while persuading liberal media outlets like the BBC and the Guardian that the students really do need to be put down for the good of the country. 

Ok that’s enough of “Grace” Lavery.

The second point-hiss in the Open Democracy hit piece on Kathleen Stock is a complicated but trivial story about Nathan Oseroff accusing Stock of “publicly advocating bigotry and intolerance” and Brian Leiter saying Oseroff should be fired from his job as an editor at the American Philosophical Association blog, which eventually he was.

Leiter defended his actions, telling openDemocracy that Oseroff-Spicer “repeatedly abused his position at the APA blog”.

The events led both Oseroff-Spicer and his partner, a trans man, to conclude “philosophy just was not the right place for either of us”.

Or to put it another way, he and his partner weren’t the right people for philosophy.

Next up:

Christa Peterson, currently a final-year philosophy PhD student at the University of Southern California, has become an expert on the impact of ‘gender critical’ thought in academia, having clashed with ‘gender critical’ philosophers since the movement came to prominence.

Well, she’s become an “expert” in bullying people who don’t grovel to the ideology.

In 2021, she was invited by a group of postgraduate students at the University of Sussex to present her research on anti-trans thought in philosophy, scheduled at the same time as Stock was meant to give a talk.

Cute. Of course Peterson jumped at the chance to bully Stock more than she already was, which was a lot.

She agreed, but then received concerned emails from the organisers. “My sense is that the students were getting pressure from the administration to cancel it,” she said. “They were sent the university’s conduct guidelines and were told they were responsible for everything I said, and that it could not be an ‘anti-Kathleen’ talk.”

Peterson broadened the scope of her talk to cover anti-trans thought in academia more generally. “I changed the subject of the talk in response to these concerns – which is a clear-cut academic freedom problem,” she said. “I was very worried about getting them in trouble.”

Except it’s not an academic freedom problem because it wasn’t an academic event – it was just Peterson talking to some students at their invitation. (I think it must have been organized as an online “presentation of her research”; I doubt the students ponied up the cash to bring her to Brighton and then send her back again.)

Stock told openDemocracy that Peterson’s talk was “certainly not a standard academic event in any sense” and added: “I am told it took place without any interference from management, so I am not sure I understand what she is now complaining of.”

The revised talk, given in the summer of 2021, went ahead without issue, but weeks after resigning from Sussex, Stock told The Times that she “went off sick with a breakdown” because of it. She told openDemocracy: “The timing by the organisers was intentionally hostile to me, as was the nature of the invitation as a whole.”

All because she doesn’t agree that men can be women.

In November 2022, an academic article in the journal Impact referred to Peterson’s invitation to present her research at Sussex as part of a campaign of “bullying” directed at Stock. The authors, Alice Sullivan and Judith Suissa, both influential ‘gender critical’ thinkers, omitted Peterson’s name and credentials, calling her simply “a Twitter-troll primarily known for her obsessive interest in Stock”. Sullivan had previously called her a “loony grad student” on Twitter.

Peterson says she complained to Impact about this portrayal of her in January of this year and was told she would receive a quick response, but has still not heard back. Impact has yet to respond to requests for comment from openDemocracy.

But the article didn’t name her. Peterson on the other hand has named Stock in public.

The dismissal of her work by senior academics has left Peterson concerned about her career opportunities. “I’m going on the job market this year and these people keep saying my academic work is bullying and harassment,” she said. “I will not apply to jobs in the UK. I think most departments would have at least one person who would have a real problem with me being hired, because they think I’ve been bullying Kathleen Stock for years.”

I absolutely think no one should hire Peterson for an academic job. I think she would be extraordinarily bad at it.

Peterson is not the only researcher into ‘gender critical’ academics who has felt pressured by a British university to soften their academic work on the subject.

Open Democracy really should look into the pressure on gender critical academics before it worries about pressure in the opposite direction.

Grace Lavery, a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, gave a talk in 2022 at University College London (UCL) about what she called “the mortal threat to academic freedom in the United Kingdom that has been mounted in recent years… by an alliance composed of the gender critical movement and the managerial class of administrators that govern the UK [higher education] sector.”

…

When the editors of Think Pieces, an in-house journal at UCL, asked Lavery to produce a written version of her talk, she was happy to oblige – but started to become concerned when, months after she submitted an article, it had not appeared. Lavery understood editors feared they could face legal action for running the piece as was, something UCL appeared to confirm when we asked about the article, telling openDemocracy that it “must carefully take other factors into account when publishing articles including the risk of legal action against the institution”.

Lavery instead published the article on her blog in June. “It was the first time I’d ever heard of university administration actually intervening in the normal course of publication of work,” she said.

I bet he was thrilled. (We’ll have to read the article. Later.)

Another academic who says her career has been affected by her support for trans rights is Newcastle University sociology professor Alison Phipps, who was head of gender studies at Sussex University when Stock was teaching there. Phipps has been a vocal trans ally for the past decade, which she says has meant “some academics working on violence against women give me a wide berth, as do some third sector organisations”.

Ok so why doesn’t that give her pause? Why doesn’t it worry her that academics working on violence against women give her a wide berth? Why doesn’t it cause her to think again about her work?

According to Phipps, ‘gender critical’ women in her field “tend to set the mainstream agenda, with very few people willing to risk their own careers by challenging them openly”.

What??????

It. is. the. other. way. around.

Oh please.

Open Democracy does the big Reverse:

Cancel culture? Trans-inclusive writers say they face abuse and censorship

They face abuse and censorship? You mean they engage in abuse and censorship.

Students and academics say they are bullied and threatened with legal action for opposing ‘gender critical’ views

And Open Democracy pretends to believe them.

Sussex English undergraduate Katie Tobin was among the first to experience such a backlash when she wrote an article in late 2018 for the Sussex branch of The Tab, a student newspaper conglomerate with a presence on dozens of UK campuses.

Tobin’s piece concerned an email Stock had sent the entire Sussex philosophy cohort defending her views on trans rights. In her article, Tobin said Stock’s email had “created a hostile and unwelcoming atmosphere” for trans students, and that her comments about trans issues had been “extremely detrimental” to their welfare.

In other words Tobin wrote an article bashing Stock…and Open Democracy is pretending Tobin is the one being bullied.

When the article was published, Stock responded on Twitter: “This is not OK @TheTab. I will be seeking legal advice.” In a tweet that Stock ‘liked’, a supporter of hers wrote: “Tobin is clearly a homophobe and misogynist”, and called the article “slander”.

At that point, Tobin said, she started getting a “flood” of “horrible messages”, including death threats. She filed a complaint with the university about Stock instigating a pile-on against her.

Tobin trashes Stock, Stock pushes back, Tobin pretends Stock is the baddy here, Open Democracy pretends the same. It’s remarkably brazen. Do they think we just won’t notice the part about Tobin’s article accusing Stock of creating a hostile atmosphere?

Sussex concluded that Stock was not responsible for the abuse Tobin had received, and that she had not been unprofessional or engaged in bullying. Tobin was, however, given £250 as compensation by the university.

After she put a target on Stock.

The university’s response to Tobin appeared to set a precedent, In October 2021, when students put up posters reading “IT’S NOT A DEBATE. IT’S NOT FEMINISM. IT’S NOT PHILOSOPHY. IT’S JUST TRANSPHOBIA AND IT’S NOT ON. FIRE KATHLEEN STOCK”, an art history lecturer at Sussex tweeted that “security rushed to remove them at 8am”.

And???? Do universities normally allow posters attacking individual professors by name?

There’s more. Then there’s Christa Peterson. Then there’s Grace Lavery. Then there’s Alison Phipps. This may take some time.

Not the future any more.

All drainage systems have their limitations and New York City’s is 1.75 inches of rainfall per hour. Unfortunately for many New Yorkers, the storm that deluged the region on Friday dropped more than two inches between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. — and then kept on coming.

The limit on the capacity of the city’s network of drains, pipes and water-treatment plants is the main reason New Yorkers across all five boroughs suffered through flooding. And this probably will not be the city’s last bout with heavy flooding as it plays catch-up with the pace of climate change, experts said.

“This changing weather pattern is the result of climate change, and the sad reality is our climate is changing faster than our infrastructure can respond,” said Rohit Aggarwala, commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection.

And we still refuse to do anything about it, so expect more floods and droughts and lethal heatwaves.

The rush-hour downpour on Friday overwhelmed the 7,400 miles of pipes that carry storm water and sewage under the city’s hard surfaces to treatment plants or into the nearest rivers and bays. The runoff backed up into the streets, causing flooding that swamped cars and seeped into basements and subway stations in Brooklyn and Queens.

Note the sewage part. This is sewage that’s seeping into basements.

About 60 percent of New York City has a drainage system that combines storm runoff with sewage in the same pipes. When the flow through those pipes is more than double what the sewage treatment plants were designed to handle, the excess — a mix of rain and untreated sewage — goes straight into local waterways like the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, the East River or Jamaica Bay.

But as the sewer system backs up, some of that untreated wastewater winds up in the basements of homes and businesses around the city.

So that’s always nice.

Maybe we should all take up residence on cruise ships?

I feel like Stanley on The Office [US version] saying “Have you lost your damn mind?”

“Has someone said something that made you feel bad? Tell the police.”

It literally says that. It literally says that.

I can’t find another source for this clip so here’s this one.

It’s hard to hear what she says at the beginning. She says adults nationwide have been “calling out the student’s gender.” That, she says, “has nothing to do with the choices that student made relative to the assault. That student made an incredibly awful choice, and will have consequences that are ‘metted’ out, commensurate with that assault. However, this other piece, which is because the student has a particular gender identity, therefore -” emphatic shake of the head – “there is no connection, and that is the hate that we are dealing with right now.”

Now how the hell does she know there is no connection? How could she know that?

Is it likely that there is a connection? Why yes, I think it is (but I’m not so sure of it that I would go public saying emphatically “there is a connection”). I think trans ideology and “activism” teach believers and “activists” that trans people are The Most Victimized, and by a wide margin, and that they are uniquely vulnerable, or vunnerable as they say in the UK, and that because they are Most Victimized and uniquely vulnerable, they get to do whatever they want all the time. Which doesn’t sound much like being victimized, let alone most victimized, but there you go.

They just are, that’s all. Why are you so stupid? If I say they are, then they are. There’s nothing more to it.

Klyne-Simpson says she understands some people can feel uncomfortable at first if they have never met a transgender person before.

“But all it takes is education. Once you understand trans women are women, trans men are men, non-binary people are who they say they are, it’s as simple as that,” she said. “If you still feel uncomfortable after that, that’s on you, it’s not on me. I am who I am, it’s as simple as that. I just look different. That’s all.”

It’s so simple. You just say. Why are you so stupid that you don’t understand it? People are who they say they are. That’s how the world runs and how it has run for billions of years.

Kelli Paddon, B.C.’s parliamentary secretary for gender equity says situations like this highlight that it is important to continue working to advance transgender people’s rights.

“Trans people deserve to feel safe, welcome and affirmed for who they are. Trans women are women – period,”

See? She gets it. (Is a she, right? Men don’t spell their names with an i do they?) She says it, so it’s true. Period.

How dare anyone doubt or question something someone has said? It’s worse than murder.

More on the school corridor assault on a girl (that I meant to add to the post about it but ran out of time, sorry) in a suburb of Portland (Oregon):

School officials in Tigard-Tualatin, a suburb southwest of Portland, say the incident is now under criminal investigation. The attacker was arrested and is facing assault charges, said Jennifer Massey, the public information officer for the Tualatin Police Department; the case was referred to the Washington County Juvenile Department. The district would not comment on the specific disciplinary actions it had taken against the attacker.

Oregon Live goes off on what I consider a tangent, about a trend of brawls in schools and how schools are trying to cope. Then of course it goes off on that other tangent.

Video of the incident made its way around the Tigard-Tualatin community, and then to conservative commentators, who seized upon the appearance and clothing of the perpetrator and concluded without confirmation that they were transgender. 

There you go, that’s the important thing – Divine Gender. If “they” is transgender, probably “they” should get restitution from that girl “they” slammed to the floor and yanked around by the hair and punched repeatedly. It must be all her fault, not “their” violent sneak attack.

That assumption prompted an onslaught of furious, often profane calls to the district and to the school from people around the country, as those who encountered the incident online assumed wrongly that the perpetrator had been differently disciplined due to their supposed gender identity.

Do let’s stop talking about the violent attack on the girl and talk about the poor fragile perpetrator instead.

Tatchell telling women what we’re allowed to do and say and think, yet again.

Two men telling women we have to pretend men can be women.

Cars identify as a vulnerable community!

Rishi Sunak is to prioritise the interests of millions of car owners with a series of measures that will provoke environmentalists and curb the power of local councils.

In a package expected to be announced at the Tory conference on Monday, the prime minister will set out his “plan for motorists” that will limit the number of 20mph speed restrictions and favour drivers over bus passengers.

Yeah, go after those spoiled selfish privileged bus passengers who bully and victimize poor huddled drivers of cars.

The “plan for motorists” is expected to include moves to limit English councils’ powers to place 20mph speed limits on main roads, and to restrict the number of hours a day that car traffic is banned from bus lanes.

It is also understood to include curbs on local authorities’ ability to impose fines – and thus raise revenue – from traffic infractions caught by automatic number plate recognition cameras, and on the use of such cameras in box junctions.

Why? Well, because drivers are People Like Us and bus riders are Those Other People, who don’t matter. Zoom zoom.

The proposals follow Sunak’s pledge in July to crack down on what he called “anti-motorist policies” after the unexpected Conservative win in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip byelection, which was aided by concerns about the expansion of London’s ultra-low emission zone.

It’s the new oppression. Brutal people, with their brutal legs and feet that allow them to walk all over the place and get in the way of the motorist, are taking away the human right to go as fast as possible in a large metal object that emits carbon dioxide.

At the time, Downing Street said Sunak had no plans to restrict the use of 20mph speed limits, which evidence shows can significantly reduce the numbers of road deaths and injuries.

Oh how cares about reducing road deaths and injuries? Drive that large metal object as fast as you can!

The transport charity Sustrans said the “plan for motorists”, if introduced, would mean Sunak was yet again failing those people who did not drive or own a car.

Psshhh. People who don’t own cars are the enemy.

This clip was doing the rounds yesterday. (Warning: it’s horrible.)

A transgender student of the male flavor, that is. Quite a strong male student by the looks of it.

Pliny on Wolf:

Yesterday it was the cancellation letter, today it’s the defense of the cancellation letter. The American Anthropological Association issues A Statement…one which we could probably all write for them.

The AAA and CASCA boards reached a decision to remove the session “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” from the AAA/CASCA 2023 conference program. This decision was based on extensive consultation and was reached in the spirit of respect for our values, in order to ensure the safety and dignity of all of our members, as well as the scientific integrity of the program.

What’s “in the spirit of respect for our values”? What does it add to “via respect for our values”?

The first ethical principle in AAA’s Principles of Professional Responsibility is to “Do no harm.” 

They’re failing. They’re doing harm – lots of it.

The session was rejected because it relied on assumptions that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline, framed in ways that do harm to vulnerable members of our community.

Nonsense. That’s like saying it does harm to a child to say it’s fine to pretend to fly but not fine to jump off the roof. It’s not harm to say that fantasies are fantasies. (There are times when it’s pointlessly cruel, but the circumstances of those times are very limited.)

It commits one of the cardinal sins of scholarship—it assumes the truth of the proposition that it sets out to prove, namely, that sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline.

“Simplistically binary” – that’s a good one. It’s so much more complex and sophisticated to say that people are a little bit of every sex [or gender] you can think of.

Forensic anthropologists talk about using bones for “sex estimation,” not “sex identification,” a process that is probabilistic rather than clearly determinative, and that is easily influenced by cognitive bias on the part of the researcher.

But that’s bones. It’s not every form of sex identification there is, it’s specifically bones. It could be that bones are not as unmistakably sexed as other body parts.

There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification.

I’m seeing biologists rolling their eyes and saying “Yeah there is: gametes.”

There is some hope…

Donald Trump’s real estate empire could collapse “like falling dominoes”, experts believe, following a New York judge’s ruling that the former president’s business fortune was built on rampant fraud and blatant lies.

According to Michael Cohen, his former attorney and fixer, Trump is already effectively “out of business” in New York after Judge Arthur Engoron on Tuesday rescinded the licenses of the Trump Organization and other companies owned by Trump and his adult sons, Eric and Don Jr.

“Those companies will end up being liquidated … the judge has already determined that the fraud existed,” Cohen told CNN, hailing Engoron’s pretrial ruling in a civil case brought by Letitia James, the New York attorney general.

On Wednesday morning, in a confrontational post on his Truth Social website that branded the judge a “political hack”, Trump said Engoron “must be stopped”.

Trump on the other hand is an everything hack, an omni-hack. Everything he touches turns to hackery.

In his post on Wednesday, Trump decried the judge’s $18m valuation of Mar-a-Lago, claiming it was worth “100 times more than he values it”.

Attaboy. Continue as you began: inflate everything.

William Black, a white-collar criminologist, corporate fraud investigator and distinguished scholar in residence for financial regulation at the University of Minnesota law school, said: “In finance, once the dominoes start falling, it becomes basically impossible to save it.

“These properties are even more damaged goods today because of the success in demonstrating they are massively overvalued. The most likely thing, if you get an honest agent or receiver, they’re going to sell the properties at a loss. And when you’ve got a whole bunch of properties, with the first one you just desperately need to get some action and that gets discounted the most.”

Black, who helped expose congressional wrongdoing in the Lincoln Savings and Loans scandal of the 1980s, in which the financier Charles Keating inflated his company’s worth to bilk taxpayers for billions, called Engoron’s ruling “devastating”. He believes Trump insiders and employees would have incentive to come forward with more information if he loses his wealth and influence.

“What we experienced in the Savings and Loan debacle, we would put in an honest manager and employees would start coming to that person over time and say, ‘You know, you really ought to look at this,’” Black said.

“Trump is monumentally, stupidly greedy in that he isn’t actually paying for a number of key lieutenants in terms of their legal needs, and they’re facing financial collapse of their own, [such as] the Rudy Giulianis of this world. But a lot of folks can sink Trump.

“Having this ability to control all these assets, even if they’re massively overvalued, meant hope springs eternal among the Trump folks that he can use that money and influence to help them, but if Trump instead ends up bereft of control over the overwhelming bulk of his assets, and has lots of liabilities, sugar daddy goes away.”

Thoughts and prayers, people, thoughts and prayers.

Yes it’s so “fascist” to know that men are not women.

Wolf and Fox together again:

Since mid-February, [Naomi Wolf] appeared at least seven times on Fox to discuss her views on the pandemic: twice apiece on Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Revolution with Steve Hilton, and three times on Fox News Primetime, the most recent of which came Monday night. Wolf cited the notorious anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during that interview to argue that Dr. Anthony Fauci, Bill and Melinda Gates, the state of Israel, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were engaged in some sort of nebulous but sinister vaccine conspiracy.

In order to [your best guess here].

It is irresponsible for a news outlet to give Wolf that sort of credulous attention. Her social media channels are littered with absurd claims about the virus and its vaccines. Between her first and second Fox appearances alone, she tweeted that a new technology allowed the delivery of “vaccines w nanoparticles that let you travel back in time”; that the Moderna vaccine is a “software platform” that allows “uploads”; and that due to face masks, children now lack “the human reflex that they when you smile at them they smile back” and have “dark circles under [their] eyes from low oxygen.” 

On Sunday night, Wolf cited purported reports of women who “bleed oddly [from] being AROUND vaccinated women,” pointing her followers to a Facebook group which at one point had been titled “All Vaccines are Fake.”

Vaccinated women emit menstruomadness particles! It’s a proven fact!

Via NightCrow, a collection of some of the stupidest arglebargle in a very crowded field: from the YWCA in June 2021:

Trans or Cis, Women Are Stronger Together

Men or Women, Women Are Stronger Together

Bosses or Workers, Workers Are Stronger Together

Rich or Poor, The Poor Are Stronger Together

Be stronger together by no longer being together.

YWCA has always been at the forefront of the women’s rights movement, empowering women since our inception over 160 years ago. For this reason, we remain committed to centering the experiences of BIPOC communities, LGBTQIA+ folks, survivors of gender-based violence, people with disabilities, and immigrant, low income, and unhoused people in our work to eliminate racism and empower women.

“For this reason,” they say, “we remain committed to changing the subject.”

“For this reason, we acknowledge going forward that women don’t matter enough so we’ve added everyone else.”

Moving forward, we will continue to work to ensure that our platform centers ALL voices.

Women are stronger together so we’ll separate them by adding EVERYONE.

Also, if you center ALL voices you’re not centering any voices. You can’t center everyone, because there is no center without a periphery.

It’s dimwitted in the extreme to begin by patting the YWCA on the back for having always been at the forefront of the women’s rights movement and then immediately throw that overboard by adding everyone else. Just like no center without a non-center, no fight for women’s rights if it’s a fight for everyone’s rights. Everyone should have rights, and fighting for universal rights is good, but it’s not fighting for specifically women’s rights. Feminism is for women.

Especially the voices of Black women, trans women, and other women of color who are often diminished in the conversations about our collective truth. 

Trans women are men.

During pride month and year-round, it is critical for us to be allies to our trans sisters, taking on the responsibility of using our privilege and platform to promote education, camaraderie, and to rebuild trust across the spectrum of womanhood and sisterhood. Our collective liberation demands cooperation. Together, with common goals of gender equity and collective liberation, we can transition from general awareness to actions for mutual empowerment.

No, it isn’t. It isn’t critical at all. Men who claim to be trans have more allies than they know what to do with, and a marked hostility toward non-supine women. Women get to focus on women.

Accept that every woman has the right to define her own womanhood.

Sure, if you mean women. No, if you mean men. Men don’t get to “define” their own “womanhood” because they’re not women. It’s not a “right” for men to force the world to pretend they’re women.

All women experience life in different but overlapping ways. Our collective struggle has the potential to unify our mission and bolster our calls to action because they are one in the same. Our voices are amplified as we stand together against a common enemy: misogyny, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia.

No.

Trans women, especially trans women of color, often experience a dangerous cocktail of misogyny, sexism, and homophobia, which puts them at high risk of harm but also arms them with a unique intersectional experience. This experience allows them to understand the myriad ways that all marginalized are affected by persecution, providing them with unique insight into how our movements can be inclusive to all people and centers them as pioneers at the forefront of civil rights, gay liberation, and women’s movements. By embracing trans women and listening to their experiences, our collective work can change the world!

Look around you. How’s that going?

Uplift trans voices and center trans women, especially trans women of color, in women’s movements.

Not enough to include them, we have to center them. We have to sit in an obedient circle around the men in dresses telling us how things are and what we have to do.

Have you lost your damn minds?

Keeping women safe is not important. Surely everyone knows this by now?

When they say “gender-based” they mean cool gender, exciting gender, new gender, gender for folks. They don’t mean boring old vanilla women.

Still, the invitation did look as though they meant the old humdrum kind.

“Every Gender-based violence survivor!” it says. You’d think they could squeeze women into that “every” somehow. (Why is “gender” capitalized? Is it officially a religion now? Muslims, Christians, Genders?)

On a different note – apparently Trump is done.

Donald Trump is no longer in business. 

Worse, the self-proclaimed multibillionaire may soon be personally bankrupt as a result, stripped of just about everything because for years he engaged in calculated bank fraud and insurance fraud by inflating the value of his properties, a judge ruled Tuesday.

His gaudy Trump Tower apartment, his golf courses, his Boeing 757 jet and even Mar-a-Lago could all be disposed of by a court-appointed monitor, leaving Trump with not much more than his pensions as a one term president and a television performer.

It’s because of all those business licenses being cancelled.

Five Trump lawyers were each fined $7,500 for making “frivolous” arguments. 

A judge calling a lawyer’s argument “frivolous” is the equivalent of saying it is no better than nonsense from a drunk in a bar, as I teach my Syracuse University College of Law students. 

Those lawyers may well find it wise to hire their own lawyers as Judge Engoron’s findings could form the basis of disbarment proceedings, something already underway against Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, the former federal prosecutor, and John Eastman, a former dean of the Chapman University School of Law in Orange, Calif.

Without frivolous arguments, what does Trump have? Not a damn thing.

A non-jury trial before Judge Engoron next week will determine how much Trump will be fined for his years of bank fraud and insurance fraud. 

Barring a highly unlikely reversal by an appeals court, Trump’s business assets eventually will be liquidated since he cannot operate them without a business license. Retired Judge Barbara Jones was appointed to monitor the assets, an arrangement not unlike the court-supervised liquidation of a bankrupt company or the assets of a drug lord.

Creditors, any fines due the state because of the fraud, and taxes will be paid first from sales of Trump properties.

The various properties are likely to be sold at fire sale prices and certainly not for top dollar when liquidation begins, probably after all appeals are exhausted. 

Among these properties is the portion of Trump Tower that Trump still owns and leases to businesses as office and retail space; his own triplex apartment there; his golf courses; and Mar-a-Lago, the Florida mansion he bought in a corrupt mortgage deal decades ago. He also has deals to license his name on buildings and businesses, which similarly he can no longer operate and whose profits he must give up.

I look forward to watching it happen.