Women=fascist scum. Not just terfs, but women in general, women as such. We’re all fascist scum.

I’ve seldom read anything more wounding. A Guardian autobiographical tale of a UK teenager who longed to go west:

I applied to US colleges I had heard of in films. I studied SAT books and got a good enough score to attempt the admissions process. Things started to happen. I bunked off sixth form to attend interviews. In films these are huge moments of plot development…

The campus was eerily pristine; if there was a leaf on the ground it would be swept up almost immediately. No wonder, because the campus was literally a film set. This was where Buffy the Vampire Slayer went to college and Elle Woods checked into Harvard in Legally Blonde. Hip-hop dancers had dance-offs in car parks and the marching band practised on the athletics field.

Sounds hellish, doesn’t it. It sort of was, but she sort of missed it. But the wounding bit is…

Coming home, I refused to sleep in my teenage bedroom. I was afraid that I would wake up and feel as if the past few years had been a dream. I missed my friends, professors and the sunny California disposition, but I felt incredibly relieved to be back among irreverent and witty Britons.

Hey! Hey now! We can do irreverent! We can do witty! We can even do cloudy dispositions.

Paul Murphy is TD for Dublin South West. TD=Teachta Dála, a member of Dáil Éireann, the lower house of the Oireachtas (the Irish Parliament). 

He did this today.

A legislator put a target on a reporter’s child on social media.

Whoopsie, the Pope let the mask slip.

The Vatican sought to defend Pope Francis on Tuesday after he sparked fury in Ukraine by praising Russia’s imperial rulers — a history President Vladimir Putin has invoked to justify his ongoing war.

The Kremlin delighted in the controversy, which stemmed from comments the pontiff made to a group of young Russian Catholics urging them to see themselves as the heirs of a “great” empire.

No no no, Mister Pontiff, that’s the part you’re not supposed to say out loud. You’re not supposed to admit it’s about power and domination. Big big no-no.

“Don’t forget your heritage. You are the descendants of great Russia: the great Russia of saints, rulers, the great Russia of Peter I, Catherine II, that empire — educated, great culture and great humanity,” he told them in St. Petersburg by live video Friday.

“Never give up on this heritage. You are descendants of the great Mother Russia, step forward with it. And thank you — thank you for your way of being, for your way of being Russian.”

The great Mother Russia that wants to clasp Ukraine to her bosom even if she has to slaughter every last Ukrainian to do it.

The pope was strongly criticized by Ukrainian leaders, who said he was repeating Russian nationalist talking points that are used to justify the Kremlin’s war. Russian President Vladimir Putin has compared himself to the expansionist Peter the Great and spoken of Ukraine being part of a historic, greater Russia.

“It is precisely with such imperialist propaganda, the ‘spiritual ties’ and the ‘need’ to save ‘great Mother Russia’ that the Kremlin justifies the killing of thousands of Ukrainians and the destruction of Ukrainian cities and villages,” Oleg Nikolenko, spokesperson for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, said on Facebook.

Which means it all fits. The papacy has always been an empire – it’s no accident its home base is Rome, you know.

Francis’ latest intervention was warmly received in the Kremlin.

“It is admirable that the pontiff knows Russian history,” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said in his daily press briefing Tuesday.

“It is deep and the legacy is very old, not restricted to Peter I. The entire society and schools work hard to hand over this to young people. The pontiff going along with this effort is really good and makes us glad,” he said.

Yup yup yup, good stuff. You can’t have too much imperial pride.

H/t Richard Glosson

Still doing it, is he? Guy who likes to tweet enhanced photos of his 58-year-old male self, calling women frumps and old relics? Guy who has been around for 58 years and still hasn’t caught on that playground-bullying isn’t a good look on an adult?

Pakistan Willoughby says:

The entirety of the Helen Joyce ‘Gender Critical’ movement meeting in a Manchester museum for old relics today. Wow. Around 1,000 cis women outside, standing WITH the trans community, opposing GC bigotry and hate. Terf now stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Frump.

With photo of actual women rather than the pretend kind.

H/t Rob for the link after Willz tried to hide.

Hmmm.

Beatification for Polish family murdered for sheltering Jews

A beatification Mass service has been held in Poland for a Catholic family murdered by Nazis for hiding Jews during World War Two. Poland’s president and more than 30,000 pilgrims attended the outdoor service, led by Pope Francis’ envoy. This was the first time an entire family has been beatified, a great honour and a step towards sainthood.

They were executed in 1944 with the Jews they sheltered in south-eastern Poland, after they were betrayed.

That’s all very nice but the BBC fails to murmur so much as a word about the Catholic church’s relationship to Nazism and Anti-Semitism. The Catholic church was not a beacon of resistance to Nazism in 1944. The Catholic church is a reactionary institution with a deep affinity for fascists – the real kind, not the pretend kind. I don’t think I much like its laundering itself now via ceremonies for people who did resist back then when it was dangerous.

In late 1942, motivated by their Christian values, farmers Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma and their six young children – Stanislawa, Barbara, Maria, Wladyslaw, Franciszek and Antoni – hid eight Jews in their farmhouse in the village of Markowa.

How tf does the BBC know what they were motivated by? And which “Christian values” do they mean? Masses of Christians were on team-fascism back then. It was a “Christian value” to want to get rid of all those annoying godless lefties.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Most don’t have a grounding.

So I can only guess that being incomprehensible is the point – it’s supposed to be inaccessible to the plebs.

Keeping things in house, acting as interpreters, gatekeepers and guides gives merchants of obscurantinism control over the narrative. Would Judith Butler be as influential if she wrote simply and understandably? She takes adantage of the all-too-common belief that things that are complex are difficult to understand, and there “must be something to it” if it’s coming from a professor.

But there’s a difference between specialized vocabulary (which can involve a lot of technical jargon), and obfuscatory bullshit. The core of genderism is that “gender identity” is essential, trumps material reality, and carries the “authentic” self, and that sex is constructed, subordinate, and can be overcome, or changed. None of this is true, and this core untruth must be defended at all cost. We’ve here seen how honest, clear language is death to both gender ideology and trans activism. Media reports are straight out lies, calling men women, ascribing male crimes to women, characterizing statements of fact “transphobic” without quoting the actual statement made. And so on. This media deception is the public face of the academic games used to give whatever intellectual credibility genderism has in academia; both sides would be crippled by plain language.

It’s interesting that sports organizations seem to be waking up to the realities of the physical bodies their rules and regulations judge and qualify. The nuts and bolts of muscle bone and breath are stubbornly unmoved by appeals to “inclusion” that conceal cheating. (Would that medecine would become as heedful of the demands of human bodies entrusted to its care) It’s also interesting that reportage of sports’ awaking from woke is couched in terms of “bans” against trans athletes, and not as the recognition of the unfairness of letting males compete against women. Honest reporting would demolish the “arguments” for ‘inclusion” by showing that they were simply demands to be allowed to continue cheating. Their inevitably side falls in the light of clear language, whether it is on the sports field, the news room, the political convention, or academia.

Originally a comment by Coel on Most don’t have a grounding.

One reason science papers are inaccessible is the language of science requires a vocabulary most people don’t have. [iknklast]

Agreed, and to add to this, it is not just a matter of using different words (as if they were using every-day concepts, but talking in German rather than English). Rather, each of these jargon words represents a concept that is not present in everyday life.

Thus someone could be familiar with the car-mechanic’s word “carburettor”, but still not understand how a carburettor combines with other components into an engine. Imagine explaining that term to an intelligent and educated person from the 14th century.

There are physicists writing books purportedly for lay people, but as someone who has taken physics and read a lot of physics, I can tell you I wouldn’t give most of the books to anyone outside the sciences to read and expect they’d understand it.

Yes, agreed again. The problem here is that modern physics has progressed so far beyond everyday life, that it’s not just unfamiliar concepts. It’s that each of those concepts builds on a layer of other concepts that are also unfamiliar, and each of those concepts then builds on a further layer, and there are 4 or 5 layers of concepts between cutting-edge theoretical physics and everyday life.

Now, each of steps can be explained, but even if a lay person can follow the explanation of each step, being able to follow multiple layers of unfamiliar concepts is something that human brains basically cannot do (without vast amounts of work assimilating each step until it is familiar), even for intelligent people.

So take something like “the Higgs Boson was predicted as being necessary to complete the standard-model of particle physics, by then expaining why the other particles have mass”, and then ask how the Higgs gives mass to the other particles.

You can attempt to answer that with an imaginative analogy (which is a highly worthwhile thing to do), or, to do anything approaching a proper job, would take a whole book. Sean Carroll did indeed write a whole book that attempts to explain this. But, as you say, unless the reader is both interested in science and fairly capable of following physics-y concepts, they are going to struggle to assimilate it. Again, the problem is that the novel concepts come in layers upon layers.

And that means that — unfortunately — research papers in physics are never going to be accessible to anyone who doesn’t have a strong background in physics.

This seems like a very insane thing to do to young children:

Kids in a primary school have been told to refer to their gender-neutral teacher as “they” in the classroom. The Third Class pupils returned to school last week to be informed their new teacher wants to be referred to by first name only, or the pronoun “they”.

The children from the Dublin Educate Together school – aged 8 and 9 – were told this on their first day back, according to parents. They have since been corrected by the teacher for saying “she” and taught to say “they” instead.

Look, these are children. They’re still learning the language. It’s idiotic to teach them a wrong version of the language they’re still learning.

Also: the point of schools is to teach the children. It’s not to give fuzzy-feels to the teachers or administrators or kitchen staff. It’s triply not to give fuzzy-feels to one narcissistic teacher who wants to force the children to think way too hard about how to refer to that narcissistic teacher.

One guardian said: “The schoolkids shouldn’t be corrected for using ‘she’ or ‘he.’ These children are eight years old and it is confusing for them.

It’s confusing and more to the point it’s wrong. We do say “she” and “he” in English, and it’s an error to refer to a known person as “they.” It’s normal idiom to refer to an unknown person [whose sex/gender is unknown] as “they” but it’s not normal idiom at all to refer to a woman or man in the room with you as “they.” It’s novel political coercive idiom to do that, and it’s terrible pedagogy to do it.

Psychologist and campaigner Stella O’Malley believes the teacher is putting their needs ahead of the welfare of children. 

That’s not even a belief, it’s just a fact. You could think it’s an awesome progressive thing for the teacher to do it, but you can’t honestly say it’s not what’s happening.

However People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy said it is “positive” the school is supporting the teacher. Murphy – who told this year how he is raising his new baby Juniper as gender-neutral – said: “It’s basic decency, respect and politeness to refer to people as they want to be referred to.”

Within reason, yes. Without reason, no. Teachers can tell students to call them by their last name or first name or perhaps a friendly classroom nickname, but beyond that, no. It’s not “basic decency” for teachers to tell students to call them Joan of Arc or Mary Mother of Jesus or Donald Trump or Donald Duck. There are limits on what teachers should be demanding of students, especially when the demand is purely personal and nothing to do with the education of the students.

More from the Manchester event:

That hefty guy in the black top and blue skirt near the right margin is the one who told her to “get off our streets.” He flapped his hand at her in a “shoo” gesture. Very bossy, very entitled, very rude, very male.

The People’s History Museum stood up for the people known as “women”!

Then some anti-feminist goons tried to rain on the parade but they failed.

Hmmm. I doubt that.

Donald Trump was “really, really upset” when he learned that his former White House adviser Peter Navarro had been convicted of contempt of Congress, according to the ex-president’s close ally Rudy Giuliani.

“This one really got to me,” Giuliani – the former New York City mayor and Trump attorney – said Friday on the far-right media outlet Newsmax. “I was with former president Trump when we found out about it [on Thursday], and I’ve got to tell you, he was really, really upset about it.”

No he wasn’t. He was pissed off. Not the same thing.

Trump doesn’t get “upset.” Ever. He doesn’t feel sorrow or (emotional) pain or grief, much less sympathy or pain for others. Ever. He never gets anything but angry. You know this, Giuliani knows it, everyone knows it. He doesn’t mind anything that’s not a narcissistic wound to him. He could watch a bear eat Ivanka in front of him and all he would feel is mild regret that he wouldn’t be able to leer at her any more.

What did Navarro do? Oh, a little light treason, that’s all.

A House committee investigating the attack suspected Navarro had more information about any connection between claims of voter fraud that Trump allies had pushed and the assault on the Capitol. But Navarro did not surrender any emails, reports or notes, and he refused to testify.

On Thursday, he was found guilty of two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress, both punishable by up to a year behind bars. Navarro’s sentencing has tentatively been scheduled for 12 January.

Gangster behavior in short.

Is it progressive to tell people to kill themselves?

I would have thought no.

AND ANOTHER THING.

Because I missed it the first time around.

“Most don’t have a grounding in feminist theory” – so she’s saying if you’re not an academic with a grounding in feminist theory, you’re…suspect, shall we say. Not quite good enough. Inferior. Not up to Sally Hines’s standards.

So she’s saying feminism is for academics. Like her. She’s saying it’s an academic subject, with an academic theory, and if you want to argue and dispute claims and ideologies as a feminist, you’d better have that academic grounding.

So she’s saying a political movement, a struggle against oppression and baked-in contempt, is not for most people.

Imagine saying that about striking workers. Or climate activists. Or refugees. Or anti-racism activists. Imagine saying it about any other political activism. She wouldn’t, would she. She’d call it elitist, wouldn’t she.

But somehow feminism is for people like her, especially her. It’s not for the rabble who simply are women and don’t want to be treated as second-rate.

Sally Does SCIENCE!!

Sally Hines is still hating on feminists while claiming to be a feminist.

She starts by reminiscing about her involvement in feminism in her teens and twenties.

A man who wanted to be a feminist ally could usefully run the crèche, wash the pots, write the Xmas cards . But quietly and without expecting praise. Useful possibly. Needed never. Given the megaphone, impossible.

— Sally Hines (@sally_hines) September 8, 2023

But now, she goes on to say, all they have to do is say “I’m a woman” and they’re given the microphone to call feminist women misogynist names…hahaha just kidding. Of course she goes on to say the opposite of that.

She has a PhD in DARVO.

Oh not Kew ffs. Kew is one of the best things on the planet (albeit far too expensive now).

Oh do stop. Write an opera about queer idenninies if you like but leave Kew out of it. Kew is a botanical garden, not a museum of queer idenninies.

The 2/2 has disappeared so I’ll finish the sentence for them – “Although we’re aware that some people view the word as a homophobic insult we really don’t care, because we’re trendier than that. Sucks to be you, sorry.”

And all for what? How many “queer” people feel excluded from Kew anyway?

Have you ever looked into the eyes of a tree? I mean really looked?

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Nothing added to nothing is nothing.

He’s fooled himself into thinking a few superficial trappings can fool a survival mechanism (telling a conspecific’s sex) that’s hundreds of millions of years old. We are wired to clock someone’s sex from scores and scores of yards away, even in dim light where all we can make out is a sillhouette and a gait. No doubt many of the other people he thinks he’s fooling are just being nice and humouring him, or hoping to avoid an angry, aggressive “IT’S MA’AM!” response. Even if his makeup was, according to his hair stylist, “on point and flawless,” it might only mean he’d applied it comparatively well, not that it was succeeding in erasing his maleness. Is the stylist going to risk pissing off the guy sitting right there in the chair? Easier and safer to flatter and lie. Stephonknee Wolscht didn’t fool anyone into believing he was a five year old girl; anyone who “accepted” him as such was just playing along, but doing him no favours.

I wonder if this guy’s failure to pass will spur him on to more radical, surgical interventions to “feminize” his facial bone structure and his body shape? For most men, it would take this kind of cheating to “pass,” and even then, the surgical interventions, like the superficial wardrobe, make-up, and comportment gambits, tend to exaggerated and stereotypical.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on But are you?

It’s so creepy because it’s so paranoid. Signalling that there’s a kind of diffuse, spectral force of terror out there. The world is just so, so full of evil people! But I’m not one of them! I’m safe!

The real force of terror is the idea itself — the paranoia that at any moment you could be marked as One of Them instead of One of Us, the Good People. So you must be vigilant and demonstrate your commitment to Us, against Them.

It’s the Crucible. The poster might as well say:

I am not a witch.

If you are

in any way

afraid

of being harmed by a witch

or you suspect

that someone’s a witch

let me know.

I’ll prove I’m not a witch

by joining in the witch hunt.

Ron DeSantis is doing his best to nullify the Voting Rights Act.

In mid-August, lawyers representing Florida Republicans made a startling admission. The state’s new congressional map, drawn by governor Ron DeSantis, made it harder for Black voters in north Florida to elect the candidate of their choosing. On Sunday, a judge in Florida ruled the map was unlawful.

From 2016 until last year, Florida’s fifth congressional district had stretched more than 150 miles across the northern part of the state, from Jacksonville to just west of Tallahassee. It was a portion of the state once home to the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings. In 2022, it was represented by Al Lawson, a Black Democrat, and 46% of eligible voters were Black.

That year, DeSantis went out of his way to chop the district up into four majority-white ones, all of which elected a Republican last fall.

…

It was the kind of concession that politicians, wary of doing anything that could be perceived as motivated by racial animus, rarely make. And it was particularly striking in Florida, where a provision in the state’s constitution specifically outlaws diminishing the influence of Black voters in that way. Voters overwhelmingly approved that provision as part of a set of anti-gerrymandering reforms, called the fair districts amendment, in 2010.

Welp 2010 was another world. This is now, and racist gerrymandering is the hot new trend.

So it was no surprise that circuit judge J Lee Marsh struck down the map. “Under the stipulated facts [in the lawsuit], plaintiffs have shown that the enacted plan results in the diminishment of Black voters’ ability to elect their candidate of choice in violation of the Florida constitution,” he wrote in his ruling.

…

DeSantis is already appealing the ruling and the case is likely to be decided by the Florida supreme court, where he has appointed five of the seven justices. And the governor has his sights set on an even bigger goal – getting rid of the protection in the state constitution altogether. It’s an aggressive legal gambit that’s part of a broader conservative push in the courts to limit considerations of race in redistricting, even when it’s being used to protect voters of color.

“Even”? The word you want is “especially.”

While the Florida case is unique because it involves a state-based constitutional provision, it could have broader implications if it reaches the US supreme court, said Mark Gaber, the senior director of redistricting at the Campaign Legal Center, a non-profit group. The court could be forced to decide whether “the history of past discrimination makes it constitutional to prohibit the diminishment, the retrogression, of minority voting strength”, Gaber said. Its decision could affect a handful of other states that have implemented their own standards barring retrogression.

We must pretend that slavery and racism never happened starting NOW.