This Johnny fella who turns out to be not an especially dim-witted undergraduate but a post-doc is a real piece of work. Flippant, ignorant, and malicious, while full of self-righteous hatred of women who don’t submit.

See also: “I’d only read about Christianity when the book is written by a Christian”; “I’d only read about Scientology when the book is written by a Scientologist”; “I’d only read about Nazism when the book is written by a Nazi”; “I’d only read a book about Trump when the book is written by a fan of Trump.”

What if the law said humans can fly? Would he jump?

The story there turned out to be that a few protesters were sitting in front of the entrance blocking people from going in, and grabbing the legs or ankles of women brazen enough to persist in going inside anyway.

I suspect this last one will get him in trouble. Hope so.

People told him to share that “abusive, threatening” email but he said he didn’t want to make “Shereen” look bad.

Just in case there haven’t been enough insults yet today…

Sigh.

Sorry, lezzers, you have to let men in. Sux 2 b u.

The insults just keep rolling in.

Cancel that book.

Academics at the University of Edinburgh have accused their own union of attempting to stifle debate after it called for the launch of a book on sex and gender to be scrapped.

Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader features essays from figures such as the philosopher Kathleen Stock and is edited by Selina Todd and Alice Sullivan, a professor of sociology at University College London (UCL) who gave evidence to the Scottish Parliament last year on the Scottish Government’s gender reforms.

Selina Todd is a professor of history at Oxford. Don’t ask me why that was omitted.

The University and College Union (UCU) Edinburgh branch committee has written to the university’s principal, Sir Peter Mathieson, saying it has “concerns about the launch of a transphobic book on campus”.

UCU Edinburgh has previously been criticised for preventing free speech after it supported demonstrations on two occasions that stopped the screening of the film Adult Human Female on the university campus.

The union argues that the book launch continues with the strategy “that trans people’s existence – like any ideology or theory – can be ‘debunked’” and that essays in the book reduce “trans people to an abstract anomaly or sinister cabal”.

The union argues what? How can a statement of fact be a “strategy”?

In their letter to management, the UCU Edinburgh branch committee said: “The book being launched at the event continues with this strategy by using this false framing that trans people’s identity represents an ‘ideology’ and/or ‘lobby’ and that anyone supportive of trans people’s rights is a ‘gender-identity theorist’ or part of the ‘gender identity lobby’.”

It’s not a “strategy”; it’s reality. It’s not a “strategy” to say that men are not and cannot be women; it’s not a “strategy” to point out that insisting that men can be women is based on an ideology that claims people can be the sex they are not.

The UCU urged the university’s management to show “its support for its trans staff and students” and to demonstrate a recognition that trans people are “not an ideology to be debunked” but a “vulnerable minority” under the Equality Act 2010 and the university’s policies.  

But what makes them a “vulnerable minority”? What makes them different from everyone else in a way that makes them a “vulnerable minority”? What makes enormous square-jawed men in lipstick “a vulnerable minority”? It’s a belief system that does that: a set of beliefs about the magic of an internal sense of being the sex that is the opposite of the body’s sex. This set of beliefs was unknown until the last ten or twenty years or so.

They added: “It is also time that you recognised – again in alignment with human rights organisations such as the United Nations – that ‘free speech’ must be balanced with responsibilities and restrictions relating to harm caused by certain types of speech, such as those that advocate and disseminate misinformation and smears against the validity of disempowered minorities.

What does “smears against the validity of disempowered minorities” mean? What is the “validity” of a “minority”? What does it have to do with rights or social justice?

It means, of course, pretending that it’s true that if a man says he’s a woman, he is in fact a woman – he is “valid” as a woman. It’s an idea straight out of clown college.

Has to be parody doesn’t it?

Guy is there to protest the event, guy tells interviewer he doesn’t know what it’s about, doesn’t know what the book says, doesn’t know what the protest is about, but by god he’s there anyway because [insert miracle here]

The CBC is being a little bit bashful in its wording here…

Dead “as a result of the conflict”? Meaning what, dead of a broken heart?

But, I’m grateful to them in a way, because that silly periphrasis introduced me to this guy:

What was that we were saying the other day (or maybe I was the one saying it) about how rape is basically legal in the UK? (Not that it’s much better in the US.) Tiny fraction reported; tiny fraction of those prosecuted; tiny fraction of those convicted.

Now we can add tiny fraction of those punished. It must be down to a thousandth of a rapist per annum by now.

Scottish man who R*ped a 13 year old girl smiles as he leaves court as his conviction is DROPPED due to liberal laws enacted by the Scottish government. The 22 year old man repeatedly r*ped the 13 year old girl when he was aged 17 and was originally sentenced to do ‘unpaid work’ for his crimes. In April this year, he was spared jail by Judge Lord Lake at the High Court in Glasgow and given just 270 hours of unpaid work for his punishment. He has now had his conviction overturned because he is under the age of 25. Under new court guidance in Scotland, criminals under the age of 25 are treated more leniently because of their alleged brain immaturity.

So! Young men of Scotland! Get out there and help yourselves until your 25th birthday. Enjoy!

The Outside article with the subhead “Banning trans women from competitive cycling is an insult to all women” is written by…wait for it…a man who claims to be a woman. Well he would say that wouldn’t he – anything to fool or cheat or bully women into obedience.

My career as an athlete is a little complicated, though. As a trans woman, bike racing has always felt like a lose-lose proposition for me. If I do well, I risk getting called a cheater, or even worse, becoming a Fox News headline.

That’s because you are a cheater, bro.

Even before transitioning in 2020, seeing the hate directed at trans women athletes made me feel like competitive sports was a dead end for me.

Put that aside for a moment. Imagine how women feel.

I decided to risk life and limb in the high-risk sport of freeride mountain biking, where instead of competing against each other, we test our skills riding the biggest and hardest things we can find.

And having a male body remains a massive advantage.

On July 8, I finally lined up for my first race, the Sturdy Dirty, an all-women’s enduro hosted annually in North Bend, Washington. I went because the event organizers and a number of pro cyclists encouraged me to compete. Lining up for that race was the scariest thing I’ve done on a bike. I was venturing into the very place I swore to avoid for my own mental health and safety.

Diddums. Now think about how women feel.

They never do though, do they. They can’t. If they did, they would be forced to notice – if only internally and in silence – the unfairness of it.

Dishonest and stupid in one.

First of all nobody proposes “banning trans women from cycling.” The issue is that trans women have zero right to compete against women, because it’s unfair to the women.

Second, the insult is not to trans women, it’s to women. Letting men who call themselves women compete against women is a profound and multifaceted insult to women.

What a nightmare girls must live in.

“Most people aren’t able to do this job for more than two years.” It was a strange comment for an introductory training session, but it wasn’t an average first day of a new job. I was 27, living in Herne Hill and learning how to be an online sex and relationships advisor for young people on a salary of around £24,000 a year. “There’s no shame in quitting,” my trainer reassured me. “This type of work really takes its toll on a person.”

Because there’s so much of it? Because of all the research? Because too sedentary?

I realised there was one issue coming up over and over that shouldn’t be considered normal, but extremely concerning.

Is it normal to have sex you don’t want to have?

My boyfriend is pressurising me to have anal sex.

Sex with my boyfriend really hurts but he doesn’t seem to mind.

I woke up to find my boyfriend having sex with me.

I said no but he had sex with me anyway.

Almost every shift, it would happen again. A young girl writing in, describing what was quite clearly a rape, but not fully understanding that’s what had happened to her — almost always with a boy she was in a relationship with.

Every day, young girls would describe being pressured, coerced, manipulated, and downright forced to have painful sex, degrading sex, violent sex, and sex like their boyfriends had seen in porn. This charity wasn’t a rape crisis charity, but it was becoming one. I wasn’t a rape crisis worker, but I was becoming one. Quite quickly, I started to dread my shifts. After I’d clocked out, I didn’t feel fulfilled for my altruistic contribution to the world, but a deep rage at what was happening to young girls.

And what young boys are becoming.

How sick is it that a whole generation (and maybe all future generations until climate change shuts everything down) has been taught that good sex for men=torture of the woman, and that good sex for men is the only relevant issue? Good sex for women? Pff. No torture of women? HEY that would ruin men’s fun!

The impact of pornography appeared to infiltrate every shift. It happened in overt ways, like girls worried about the safety of being choked, or being expected to have anal sex, and then there were boys writing in, getting increasingly addicted to porn, unable to be turned on by a ‘real’ girl, and worried about their penis size or how long they can last. But there was a worrying covert impact too. A mass miseducation about what sexual consent really meant, sold to a generation raised on free, explicit, violent porn where up to 90% of the content shows physical aggression or violence, and women were the targets of this violence 97% of the time. Women in porn are almost always depicted as responding to this violence with pleasure or neutrality, meaning a generation of teens are internalising assumptions and expectations about the ‘sex’ expectation of young girls.

Torture isn’t sexy, pain isn’t sexy, sadism isn’t sexy, violence isn’t sexy.

Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), on atrocities and the moral high ground and international humanitarian law:

Hamas’s appalling attack on Israeli civilians has been widely described as the country’s “9/11 moment”. It is an appropriate description of such wanton cruelty. But the analogy carries a cautionary note as well.

The US government lost the world’s sympathy, and the moral high ground, when its response to 9/11 degenerated into a highly abusive war in Iraq, systematic torture, and endless detention without trial in Guantánamo. The Israeli government should be careful not to replicate this path to opprobrium. Indeed, such an abusive response may be exactly what Hamas wanted to provoke.

Hamas also thinks it’s on Team Allah, which naturally means that whatever it does is ok. George Bush thinks he’s on Team Baby Jesus, so there you go. Thinking you’re on Team God, aka theocracy, is practically a guarantee that human rights are entirely off the table, as is ordinary compassion.

Yes, Palestinians were understandably frustrated as Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government kept expanding the illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, boxing in the people of Gaza with a punitive blockade, and imposing a discriminatory and oppressive rule on millions of Palestinians under occupation that has been widely described as apartheid. To make matters worse, one Arab government after another has been normalizing relations with Israel after at most token concessions to the Palestinians that did nothing to change their persecution. Still, none of that justifies resort to war crimes, as Hamas has done.

Especially when the war crimes are punishing people who are not Netanyahu and his far-right government.

It is a basic premise of international humanitarian law that war crimes by one side do not justify war crimes by the other. Of necessity, given the passions, charges and counter-charges of most wars, the duty to comply with the rules designed to spare civilians as much as possible the hazards of war is absolute, not contingent on the behavior of opponents.

But Hamas doesn’t care and neither does Netanyahu.

The Israeli government already seems to be flouting those rules. The declared siege of Gaza, blocking food, water, and electricity, violates the duty to allow humanitarian aid to civilians in need, as the people of Gaza certainly are as they suffer massive Israeli bombardment. In the first day of those airstrikes, the Israeli military targeted four large apartment towers. In the past, Israel has purported to justify such attacks because of an ostensible Hamas office somewhere in the complex, but the civilian cost of rendering hundreds of Palestinians homeless is wholly disproportionate.

One attack hit a market, reportedly killing dozens. The UN says two hospitals have been hit.

Though apparently less frequently than in the past, the Israeli military has at times been issuing warnings to Palestinian civilians, which it is required to do whenever feasible, but that does not provide carte blanche to attack. In the 2006 war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the Israeli military issued similar warnings and then attacked anyone who remained as if they were all Hezbollah fighters, even though many civilians were unable or unwilling to flee. In Gaza, the Israeli military is reportedly flattening neighborhoods after such warnings – attacks that not only endanger any civilians who remain but also seem more designed to punish the civilian population than to target Hamas fighters who impose their will on the people of Gaza by force.

Well it’s like this: it’s easier to bomb the civilian population than it is to find Hamas and bomb them.

There is also something cruel and otherworldly about the Israeli government’s warning to the people of Gaza to flee. Where? From one densely populated Gaza neighborhood to another as they are pummeled in turn? To Egypt, which has helped Israel reinforce the blockade and has shown no inclination to welcome the 2.2 million residents of the territory? After the warning, the Israeli military bombed the crossing to Egypt. And if people escaped Gaza, would Israel ever let them return, or would this be another one-way flight as in 1948?

There seems to be no escape for anyone.

Harvard students don’t actually know everything.

A letter from Harvard University student groups blaming Israel for violence in the region has drawn a backlash from prominent alumni and US lawmakers.

The letter, authored by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee, stated that students “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”.

Glad they’re not dogmatically absolutist about it.

“The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years,” the letter added.

And what was going on 75 years ago? 76 years ago? 77, 78, 79? That might have given Jews the idea that they needed a Jewish nation?

I overlooked this news last week:

Donald Trump has dropped his $500 million lawsuit against Michael Cohen, his former lawyer and fixer who is now a key witness in a criminal case against him, Cohen and a Trump spokesperson said Thursday night. But the former president did not waive his right to sue again.

Trump had accused Cohen of “spreading falsehoods” “with malicious intent” and causing “vast reputational harm” for talking publicly about hush-money payments made to women during Trump’s 2016 campaign that are at the heart of criminal charges he faces in New York. Trump has also accused Cohen of breaking a confidentiality agreement that he signed as a condition of his employment.

In other words Trump has accused Cohen of causing “vast reputational harm” by belatedly telling the truth about Trump. The truth will do that when you’re a crook and a liar.

“Given that President Trump is required to sit for deposition in a civil matter on Columbus Day, when he is scheduled to be in the Great State of New Hampshire, and while the President is fighting against the meritless claims that have been lodged against him in New York, Washington D.C., Florida, and Georgia, as well as continuing his winning campaign … President Trump has decided to temporarily pause his meritorious claims against Michael Cohen,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Obviously dictated by Trump. That stupid “great state of” – he always does that. He’s so corny.

H/t Screechy Monkey

Trump doesn’t have enough legal action going on so he’s suing, suing I tell you.

Donald J. Trump has claimed in a lawsuit in a London court that Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, inflicted “personal and reputational damage and distress” on him by leaking a dossier detailing unsavory, unproven accounts of links between him and Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign.

…

In a court filing last month, Mr. Trump’s lawyers said he was “compelled to explain to his family, friends, and colleagues that the embarrassing allegations about his private life were untrue. This was extremely distressing” for him, the filing said, asserting that Mr. Steele had presented the claims in a “sensationalist manner” that was “calculated to cause tremendous embarrassment” to Mr. Trump. He is asking for unspecified compensation.

That’s just silly. Trump is incapable of embarrassment. He’s too conceited to be capable of embarrassment.

Mr. Trump’s foray into the British courts comes as he is facing a raft of criminal and civil charges in the United States, on accusations ranging from election interference to inflating the value of his real estate assets — all of which he has denied. He has experienced a string of legal setbacks in courtrooms from Manhattan to South Florida.

But in London, Mr. Trump is the plaintiff, and legal experts said his lawyers were trying to seize an advantage from Britain’s comparatively tight controls on personal data. Winning a claim that his data had been compromised, these lawyers said, would be easier than winning a claim of defamation.

“It avoids the obvious hurdles of a U.K. defamation claim,” said Jay Joshi, a media lawyer with the London firm Taylor Hampton. These include the statute of limitations for defamation, normally a year, and the fact that the dossier was published in the United States, not Britain. “Trump is clearly seeking some form of vindication,” Mr. Joshi said.

So the guff about being embarrassed is superfluous as well as not even slightly credible.

A month ago, on September 11, the president of Penn State explained about free speech and the First Amendment, while carefully also wringing her hands about how hurtful some speech can be – “not only offensive but deeply hurtful” she emphasized, without explaining the difference.

Today, it seems, Penn State canceled a talk by Riley Gaines, on account of how…um…er…

Phoning it in much?

Is it, as the South East Technological University (SETU) claims, “unlawful” to refuse to address someone by their preferred name or use their chosen pronouns? It isn’t and it shouldn’t be. But it is bad manners – and deliberate discourtesy is not a trivial matter.

I don’t understand why anyone has a problem calling people by the names they prefer. I’ve been doing it almost all my life.

If Fintan O’Toole really doesn’t understand then he hasn’t been paying attention. Easy for him, isn’t it. Women, on the other hand, have compelling reasons to be wary of men who order us to call them “Nellie” while taking over our spaces and even our feminism.

It started when I was four. I entered the junior infants’ class in the Marist convent school in Crumlin. I discovered that I had to call nuns Sister even though they were not my sisters. I learned that the head nun had to be addressed as Mother, even though I had a mother and it wasn’t her.

Uh…yes, and that’s quite creepy, and not something to hold up as a shining example of “what could possibly be wrong with this???” Convent schools are not self-evidently a good thing, and ordering small children to use religious terminology when addressing the teachers is also not self-evidently a good thing. I, for one, think it’s a bad thing.

When I was a kid, I accepted these rituals of nomenclature out of a sense of religious duty.

Exactly, and religious duty is not something that should be imposed on everyone (or for that matter anyone). People have a right to refuse religion. That’s a much stronger and more necessary right than the “right” for a man to be called Betsy.

There’s an obvious imbalance of power between teachers and their students. That places a particular onus on the teacher not to abuse that power and on the school or university to make sure that the student is treated with respect.

So Colette Colfer, the lecturer at SETU who has objected to the university’s gender inclusion policy, is right to question the university’s implication that “staff and students at higher education institutions [are] required, by law, to use a person’s preferred pronouns”. But I think she’s wrong to go further and claim that requiring staff to use a person’s preferred mode of address “could result in discrimination against those who do not subscribe to gender identity theory”.

It really couldn’t. If I call the SETU chaplain Father because that’s what common courtesy requires, I am not subscribing to the teachings and beliefs of the Catholic church.

Yes you are. That’s the problem. That’s why they do it. Most professions don’t do that. Very few academics are pompous enough to demand the “Doctor” label on all occasions, and the same goes for judges and medical doctors. Computer scientists don’t even have a title to refrain from demanding. If the church can make everyone think it’s a polite obligation to call them Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, then that’s a big head start on getting us to grovel in other ways. We’re free to think we comply just to be polite, but the reality is it’s way more than mere politeness.

Same with calling men Betsy.

A good thing for a change.

Outside Sydney Opera House:

Australian police said on Tuesday they were investigating a pro-Palestinian protest outside Sydney Opera House, after footage emerged of a small group appearing to chant anti-Semitic slogans at the demonstration.

…

Unverified footage shared by the Australian Jewish Association and featured on Sky News appeared to show a small group outside the Opera House lighting flares and chanting “gas the Jews”.

…

Protest organiser Palestine Action Group Sydney defended its right to protest “apartheid” in Israel but said a small number of “vile antisemitic attendees” had no place in their movement.

There was an interesting (and heated) discussion about Israel and apartheid on Start the Week yesterday.

Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on Just dissolve that sucker.

I suspect that the reasons that they formed a ‘church’ were tax avoidance and lack of oversight; the latter enabled them to avoid prosecution for years, despite numerous complaints, injuries and deaths.

Because of the abuse of autistic children, there were a lot of campaigns from autistic advocates over the years; but the wheels of justice were clamped until governments finally made it illegal to administer the specific ingredients to children.

The ‘church’ had got away with it by handing out the ingredients and then giving unrecorded spoken instructions to the ‘congregation’ which, when followed, turned the MMS into a powerful industrial bleach.

Parents enthusiastically shared photos in online groups of the intestinal lining passed by the poor abused children, claiming that they were ‘parasites’ and were ‘causing’ the autism. Children were forced, often daily, to drink MMS solution, bathe in it, and have MMS enemas. The parents were told by the ‘church’ that the more the children objected, the higher the dose was needed; until, immensely sick and exhausted, the children gave up. The monstrous adults then saw that as a sign that the treatment was working, and maintained the dosage.

How do we cure autism? We don’t. How do we integrate autistic people into society? By teaching us the social skills developed by the non-autistic majority because they’re easy for non-autistic children to pick up, and giving us logical reasons for following them (even if the ‘logic’ is just “Other people prefer us to behave this way, and your life will be easier if you do so too”).

It’s interesting that one way to poison people for $$$ is to tell them you’re a church. God and poison in one easy visit, hurrah!

A Florida man and three sons who used a business masquerading as a church to sell more than $1 million of a deadly bleach solution that they claimed was a “miracle” cure for Covid-19 and other diseases were each sentenced on Friday to several years in prison, federal prosecutors in Miami said.

Mark Grenon, 66, of Bradenton, Fla., and one of his sons, Joseph Grenon, 36, were sentenced to five years in prison for conspiring to defraud the government, while the two other sons, Jonathan Grenon, 37, and Jordan Grenon, 29, were sentenced to 12 years and seven months in prison for defrauding the government and contempt of court, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida said in a news release.

“The Grenons poisoned thousands of people with their bogus miracle cure, which was nothing more than industrial bleach,” Michael Homer, an assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case, said in a statement. “They targeted vulnerable people who were suffering from life-threatening illnesses and who were desperate for a cure.”

Prosecutors said that the Food and Drug Administration had received reports of people requiring hospitalizations, developing life-threatening conditions and dying after drinking the product.

Drinking bleach. It’s hard to believe. Bleach dissolves stuff.

The sentencing capped a three-year-long case in which the Grenons were accused of selling the treatment, named “Miracle Mineral Solution,” online under the guise of a church called Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, which Mark Grenon had co-founded. The product, they claimed, could cure Covid-19, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, H.I.V.-AIDS, and leukemia among other serious diseases, prosecutors said.

How about fentanyl addiction? Any good with that?