Aha! Appearances are never deceiving! Actors who play characters are the characters they play! You are what you say you are!
Yes indeed and Helen Mirren is Elizabeth Windsor, Gillian Anderson is Margaret Thatcher, Tom Hanks is Ben Bradlee, Robert Redford is Bob Woodward, Helena Bonham Carter was on the Titanic when it broke apart and sank.
Also, by the way, we can see the color difference between Willoughby’s heavily made-up face and his chest. Oops.
Why do we have to have Steve Bannon running things?
On Wednesday morning, two Republicans who hours earlier had toppled Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House made a well-worn trek to a 19th-century brick townhouse a few blocks away from the Capitol and entered the cluttered sanctuary of Stephen K. Bannon’s recording studio.
Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida, the instigator of the rebellion, and Nancy Mace of South Carolina, one of seven other Republican defectors, huddled with Mr. Bannon for a morning meeting ahead of a joint appearance on his “War Room” podcast.
Steve Bannon ffs. Why don’t the Republicans just go scour all the psych wards for their gurus, it would be cheaper.
From this cavelike studio not far from where Congress meets, Mr. Bannon, the former Trump adviser, has been stoking the chaos now gripping the Republican Party, capitalizing on the spectacle to build his own following and using his popular podcast to prop up and egg on the G.O.P. rebels.
Why do they let him? Why do they seek him out?
Mr. Bannon represents a clear through line from the grievance-driven MAGA base to Congress. And his role in the meltdown that played out this week in the House helps explain why the Republican Party appears to be eating its own. He is a vital part of a feedback loop of red-meat media hits and social media posts, online fund-raising and unfettered preaching to an often angry and fervently right-wing base that rewards disruptions and detests institutions.
Anarchists, in short.
Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado said she was grateful to him for recently offering her a slot on his show to talk about the southern border, rather than to rehash her embarrassing evening at “Beetlejuice.”
“Steve is an actual trusted source, he understands that my one personal night out does not impact the work that I’ve been doing for four years,” she said. “Steve understands the base and what the base wants. I don’t go on there for the donor aspect, but I’m grateful when folks do chip in.”
Ah yes, that’s the important thing – ignore what a piece of trash Boebert is, and pretend she’s a real legislator and adult.
Mr. Bannon, an unrepentant agent of chaos, admits he was spoiling for a government shutdown.
“You create a firestorm now that totally changes things,” he said. “People right now think government is a benefit. I’m going to show government spending as cootie-infested.”
Good good good. Let’s just revert to a war of all against all.
Good grief. The journalist asks the minister if refusing to use luxury pronouns is unlawful discrimination, and the minister refuses to answer that question, saying it’s an individual case and it’s for the court to decide. The journalist keeps repeating that that’s not what he’s asking, he’s not asking about the individual case, he’s asking what the law is. Minister persists in changing the subject. Dude. What is the law? Does the law make it a crime to use ordinary pronouns?
Also maddening: the minister keeps calling it “basic courtesy” to remember everyone’s specialty pronouns. Nonsense. It’s not basic at all. Basic courtesy would be not expecting anyone to remember any information about oneself, because people have other things to do.
Wo, dude, that’s a mirror you’re looking at.
Donald Trump called his former chief of staff John Kelly a “lowlife with a very small brain and a very big mouth” after the former marine general confirmed reports about the ex-president’s derogatory attitude to members of the US armed forces.
Trump is a lowlife.
Trump is extremely stupid.
Trump never shuts up and never says anything that’s not stupid.
In posts to his Truth Social platform, days after Kelly spoke to CNN, Trump said his former aide was “by far the dumbest of my military people … incapable of doing a good job” as chief of staff or, before that, homeland security secretary.
There’s that stupid. He hired Kelly for those jobs.
Exciting.
Last month shattered the record for the hottest September on record by such a wide margin that climate scientists say it was almost beyond belief.
The September milestone, reported in new data released late Wednesday by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, added to an alarming stretch of record-breaking global temperatures. During June, July and August, the planet had its hottest summer on record “by a large margin.”
September’s temperatures have climate scientists even more stunned.
“This month was, in my professional opinion as a climate scientist — absolutely gobsmackingly bananas,” Zeke Hausfather, the climate research lead for the financial services company Stripe, wrote Tuesday on X.
Frog. Pot. You know the rest.
An October heat wave is baking Western Europe, with temperatures soaring well above 90 F in parts of France and Spain. And in the Southern Hemisphere, unseasonably warm temperatures have been recorded across South America and Australia, all coming on the heels of multiple bouts of extreme heat in previous months, during what should have been the winter season in that part of the world.
We meant well.
Lots of people know lots of things “in their heart of hearts.” That’s the problem.
How does that work?
But there’s no such thing as “our pronouns”. Pronouns don’t belong to the person referred to; they’re not property. Talking about “our pronouns” is the opposite of “inclusion” (the I in DEI), because it excludes the vast majority of people. It insults them, it alienates them, it pisses them off. Is that a good thing to do in a healthcare setting? Make people more stressed than they already are?
The ostentatious “inclusion” of narcissistic people who claim to be trans is the exclusion of everyone else.
Trump won himself a gag order the other day.
The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial issued a gag order Tuesday barring Trump from making comments about court staff after the former president posted a social media attack on the judge’s principal law clerk that included her photo.
“This morning one of the defendants posted to his social media account a disparaging, untrue and personally identifying post about a member of my staff,” said Justice Arthur Engoron, addressing Trump as he sat in the courtroom, about 15 feet from the clerk, Allison Greenfield.
“Personal attacks on members of my court staff are unacceptable, inappropriate and I will not tolerate them in any circumstances,” Engoron continued.
The judge said he had warned Trump Monday “off the record” about making such comments, but that Trump had ignored him. After Trump posted the material online Tuesday, Engoron ordered him to delete the post — and it quickly disappeared from Trump’s social media site, Truth Social.
Trump is such scum.
Earlier Tuesday, Trump posted a message alleging Greenfield “is running this case against me.” The message was pulled from an account on X with fewer than 200 followers. Trump then linked to an Instagram account for Greenfield’s campaign for a judgeship in Manhattan civil court.
“How disgraceful! This case should be dismissed immediately!!” Trump added. He also posted a photo of her alongside Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and referred to her as “Schumer’s girlfriend.”
Several minutes later, Trump’s campaign sent out his social media post in an email blast.
Scum. Garbage. Trash. A talentless conceited greedy noisy bully.
Engoron’s decision lands at the precise moment a federal judge in Washington, D.C. is weighing prosecutors’ request for a more severe gag order on Trump, whom they’ve accused of repeatedly harassing and intimidating witnesses, tainting the D.C. jury pool and fueling threats against prosecutors and the court in one of the four criminal cases he is facing.
U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan has scheduled an Oct. 16 hearing to consider the matter. Trump, despite being put on notice that prosecutors were seeking a gag order, posted a string of social media attacks on key witnesses in the Washington, D.C.-based federal case against him brought by special counsel Jack Smith. His most pointed attacks came against former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who is expected to be a witness against him in both of his federal criminal cases.
Trump’s verbal assaults on judges, prosecutors and court personnel have already resulted in consequences in another one of his criminal cases, the New York state indictment brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. The judge overseeing that case, Justice Juan Merchan, issued a protective order preventing Trump from receiving the names or other identifying information of personnel in Bragg’s office, other than prosecutors and law enforcement members, until the start of jury selection.
In requesting the protective order, prosecutors argued in a court filing that Trump “has a longstanding and perhaps singular history of attacking witnesses, investigators, prosecutors, trial jurors, grand jurors, judges, and others involved in legal proceedings against him, putting those individuals and their families at considerable safety risk.”
That’s who he is, and half the country loves him. It’s sick-making.
Oh no oh no, says Philip Ball: government is messing with science!
The science secretary, Michelle Donelan, told the Conservative party conference this week that the Tories are “depoliticising science”. Or as a Conservative party announcement later put it, in case you didn’t get the culture-war reference, they are “kicking woke ideology out of science”, thereby “safeguarding scientific research from the denial of biology and the steady creep of political correctness”.
I wish we could skip the stale “political correctness” bit along with the stale “woke” bit, but denial of biology is not something to laugh off as if it were imaginary.
What exactly does Donelan think science needs protecting from? What is this woke threat? At the conference, she expanded on that. “Scientists are told by university bureaucrats that they cannot ask legitimate research questions about biological sex,” she claimed, adding that Keir Starmer thinks the “legitimate concerns of the scientific community” on these issues of sex and gender “don’t matter”. She said she will launch a review of the use of gender and sex questions in scientific research, apparently to be led by Alice Sullivan, a professor of sociology at University College London, which will be used to formulate guidance.
Such a review should not be necessary, but we don’t live in that world.
You would need to have been hiding under a rock not to appreciate that questions of sex and gender have become controversial, bordering on incendiary, in some areas of academia. As a recent exchange by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and professor of humanities Jacqueline Rose in the New Statesman revealed, academics are often talking at cross-purposes: Dawkins defended the binary nature of human sexes from an evolutionary angle, Rose the socially constructed aspects of gender identity.
That’s just a bit of obfuscation. The issue is scientists – and we know there are some – who insist that trans women are literally women in every sense. Adherents of trans ideology consider it blasphemy to distinguish between “the socially constructed aspects of gender identity” and the physical ones. “Trans women are women” is the slogan. No exceptions allowed, not even for biologists.
But one doesn’t need to take a strong stand about rights or wrongs in these debates to recognise that they are difficult and subtle – and to acknowledge it is proper that they be rigorously discussed.
They’re not all that difficult and subtle. Dressing up as Darth Vader isn’t all that difficult and subtle, and neither is dressing up as a woman.
More to the point, why is the government getting involved in the first place? What chills Baum is the idea of “politicians telling scientists about the nature of biology”. Some scientists can’t help thinking of previous instances where governments imposed their views on the subject: the spurious “race science” of the Nazis and the anti-Darwinian denialism of Stalin’s regime.
Yes but this time the role of Stalin and the Nazis is being played not by governments but by narcissists on social media. This time it would be the government stepping in to shove the ideologues out of the science. (That is, if the government does it right. That is a big if.)
Willoughby bullying women as usual.
Note: He hasn’t given birth himself, because he couldn’t, because he’s a man. Barren yerself boyo.
Gee I wonder why.
What’s stopping them? The fact that they won’t win, of course. The whole point of invading women’s sports was the guaranteed win. William Thomas was a middle of the pack swimmer; Lia Thomas won first prize. It really is that simple.
Why we can’t have nice climate:
On Friday, Dr Gianluca Grimalda, an environmental campaigner who refuses to fly on principle, was told by his employer, Germany’s Kiel Institute for World Economy, that if he was not at his desk on Monday he would no longer have a job to return to.
Trouble is he’s 14 thousand miles away.
Instead this week he was still waiting in Buka Town, Bougainville, to embark on a cargo ship to begin his journey back to Europe, after six months studying the impact of climate change and globalisation on communities in Papua New Guinea.
Grimalda said he intends to make the 22,000km (14,000-mile) return trip to Europe entirely without flying, instead travelling on cargo ships, ferries, trains and coaches – a journey he estimates will take two months, but that will, he estimates, save 3.6 tonnes of carbon emissions.
It seems pointless, of course, because the planes will fly anyway, but that’s why we can’t seem to do what needs to be done. What’s the use when everybody else keeps right on taking cruises and hopping on planes and driving 100 miles every day? So nobody does anything and on goes the rush into the abyss.
Papua New Guinea, of which Bougainville is a part, is one of the countries most vulnerable to the impacts of the warming climate. In a long Twitter thread detailing his encounters, Grimalda details his meetings with islanders who have been forced to move entire villages inland to avoid rising tides, or who were desperately planting mangroves to hold back the waters.
Yes but that’s far away. We can ignore what’s far away.
Oxford vice-chancellor gives her annual speech, which includes thoughts on the free kind.
Free speech has been centre stage this year. I have been clear about our role in the university sector to protect free speech: it is core to how we teach subjects and expose students to different views; and it also goes hand in hand with our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion. I have publicly acknowledged that this means some legal free speech will be hard for some individuals to hear. However, I am also disturbed by what I witness as an amplification of discourteous, intolerant and hateful rhetoric on social media platforms under the guise of free speech. I was deeply saddened to learn of the abusive and threatening language and behaviours that our trans community suffered this year. We should have done more to support them; rest assured lessons were learned. In this University, I expect more and we will continue to strive to create a culture of tolerance and respectful disagreement on key issues of the day. That is how we learn together and evolve.
Hm. She’s deeply saddened about abusive and threatening language and behaviours she claims their “trans community” suffered, but apparently not even shallowly saddened about the equivalent directed at women or feminists or “terfs.” The “trans community” gets a shout-out but the women’s community gets nothing. Why is that?
According to a survey of students and the public last year, conducted by King’s College London Policy Institute, while there is strong agreement that free speech is protected in universities, only 20% of those surveyed agree that universities should allow for all ideas and opinions to be expressed when it means that people feel threatened. This highlights one of the tasks we have: making sure that free speech happens within the bounds of civility, intellectual rigour and the law. So I’m grateful that colleagues from a few colleges, led by David Isaac, have created a toolkit in consultation with students with top tips for how to navigate free speech.
Well it’s clear that one way to “navigate” free speech is to be careful to say nothing the “trans community” dislikes. There is of course no such obligation when it comes to the female “community.” Badger and threaten and libel women all you like.
Oh golly gee now who could have seen that coming?
Men Overran a Job Fair for Women in Tech
IT WAS MEANT to be a week for women in tech—but this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration was swamped by men who gate-crashed the event in search of lucrative tech jobs.
The annual conference and career fair aimed at women and non-binary tech workers, which takes its name from a pioneering computer scientist, took place last week in Orlando, Florida.
Wait. Why women and non-binary? Why not just women? Include women who call themselves non-binary and there you go, the conference is still for women. But if you say women and non-binary you’re going to get men who call themselves non-binary…which, of course, they did, along with men who weren’t even that subtle.
The event bills itself as the largest gathering of women in tech worldwide and has sought to unite women in the tech industry for nearly 30 years…
This year, droves of men showed up with résumés in hand. AnitaB.org, the nonprofit that runs the conference, said there was “an increase in participation of self-identifying males” at this year’s event. The nonprofit says it believes allyship from men is important and noted it cannot ban men from attending due to federal nondiscrimination protections in the US.
Invading a conference for women isn’t “allyship.” Those bros were there to hoover up all the jobs.
Cullen White, AnitaB.org’s chief impact officer, said in a video posted to X, formerly Twitter, that some registrants had lied about their gender identity when signing up, and men were now taking up space and time with recruiters that should go to women. “All of those are limited resources to which you have no right,” White said.
That just makes it more fun.
Avni Barman, the founder of female-talent focused media platform Gen She, says she immediately noticed “tons” more men and a more chaotic scene this time compared to previous years.
Barman was at the conference to host a meetup. During and after the conference, she heard from a number of women who were sad and frustrated after. “This is a conference for women and non-binary people,” Barman says.
Nelly Azar, a student at The Ohio State University studying computer science and engineering, attended the conference and saw long lines of people waiting to speak to employers. That was entirely different from 2022, they say, when they attended and saw few men.
Sigh. Why is Nelly Azar called “they”? Why have a conference for women and pretend some of the women are not women but “non-binary”? No wonder it gets swamped by men.
Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Desk job.
It does put us Democrats in a quandary the way that the party has embraced gender ideology. I see on Twitter how many Democrats plan to vote Republican even though they’ve always been Democrats; over gender and the roles that men like Richard Levine and the guy here in Minnesota who said that detransitioners should be dismissed because they are very low in number, Leigh Finke. But in the meantime:
1. The Republicans voted to oust their leader in the House because he refused to let the government shutdown, after previously refusing to let the country default on its loans.
2. The Republicans cut heating assistance for those unable to pay for high gas and oil costs in the winter.
3. The Republicans are looking for ways to cut Social Security and Medicare even though they are not funded by the general fund.
4. The Republicans are trying to keep us beholden to carbon-based sources of energy.
5. The Republicans are going to nominate for President a man who is under indictment for several crimes, including interfering with election officials, and has stated that he will initiate a purge of Deep State Operatives in the Executive department (meaning anyone who is not a true-redTrump-loyal conservative.) He is a man who has stated that the punishment for shoplifting should be death, just shot on sight. Never mind the Constitution!
Should I go on?
Yes, many liberals will leave the Democratic party for their stance on gender, but not enough for the Democrats to get the message of why, so they will go on with it. Some of us will try to find allies within the party as gender skeptics to try to turn this leaky ship around because the alternative is far worse.
In all the years I have been an active member and apparatchik on the volunteer side of Democratic politics, I have found many things I don’t like about the party. Now that I own property, I can see why many people get sick of their mortgage escrow being raised every year by Democrats and property taxes. I’ve also seen many people get fed up with the failures of the party to see reason on a particular issue and go to the other party, and we really are stuck with just the two.
So, I see what you are saying on this, but if some women have been trying to get their fellow liberals to see sense and get met with charges of bigotry and hatred rather than be heard, and find an outlet for their issues in a conservative framework whose only issue of agreement is on the issue of how transgender ideology is bad for women, I can hardly blame someone for using Fox News or whatever outlet that will actually put them on the air. And the intransigence of many liberals on the gender issue is going to turn some women conservative, no doubt. But if you place yourself in their shoes, can you fully blame them? The trans capture has fucked things up, royally. But one thing that it demonstrates is that our idea of what’s left and what’s right is based on the fallacy that people can be pinned down to one of two ideologies. Left and right blurred long ago, when you saw people jump from Sanders to Trump in 2016 it was just an example.
So, I don’t think it’s justified to say “they were never principled leftists/progressives/liberals.” Banging your head into a wall can do many things, among those changing one’s perspective.
Broadcaster Michael Crick actually says, starting at 52 seconds in, that one rape in a hospital is probably not too many.
PROFESSOR Stephen Whittle wants to make sure women don’t get to have women-only wards in NHS hospitals.
Weird that Whittle sees it as cruel and “fascistic” to put men in men’s wards but sweet and angelic to put men in women’s wards. Last I heard men were more of a danger to women than women are to men.
Of course they did.
Non-binary male of course, which is TOTALLY VALID.
The head women’s lacrosse coach at Oberlin College in Ohio was removed from her position this week, more than a year and a half after she posted her personal views on social media criticizing the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports.
The news of Kim Russell’s reassignment to a different position in the athletics department follows her release late last month of a mini-documentary explaining her side of the story, through the Independent Women’s Forum, or IWF, a national conservative organization.
The documentary includes audio clips of lacrosse players and university officials, which were recorded by Russell during what she called “disciplinary meetings” following her social media post. An Oberlin spokesperson says the other individuals involved were not aware that recordings were being made.
They wanted to do their bullying in secret.
“I have been taken out of the role of coach, which is what I’ve done for 27 years,” Russell said in an interview with Fox News this week. “I’ve been a PE teacher, a coach and a teacher of programs of wellness, yoga, all sorts of things, kickboxing … and [been] asked to take a role as employee wellness program manager, which would have no contact with students and be creating things—which is paperwork.”
…
Oberlin College said in a statement via email that the decision to reassign Russell to a new role pertains to a “breach of trust rather than any views she has expressed.”
I don’t believe Oberlin’s statement.
Discussions over whether transgender women, those who were assigned male at birth, should be allowed to participate in women’s sports have become a lightning rod for conservative criticism.
Oh fuck off. It’s not just conservatives who think letting males take over female sport is bad and wrong.
The Biden administration is currently rewriting Title IX rules to allow individual athletes to decide which team and/or locker room suits their gender identity.
That makes no sense. If men decide women’s teams and locker rooms best suit their “identities” then those teams and locker rooms will no longer best suit the women who have to use them.
The Oberlin controversy began back in March 2022, when University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas became the first transgender athlete to win an event at a Division I NCAA championship. Russell took to Instagram to weigh in on the news, reposting a headline that facetiously congratulated the silver medalist, Emma Weyant, for being the “the real woman who won” the event.
Facetiously?!! God these people are so stupid it takes the breath away. This is no joke. Emma Weyant should have been the gold medalist, but a man stole it from her. There’s nothing funny about that.
Travers, a sociology professor at Simon Fraser University who uses a single name, said Russell’s belief that transgender athletes “unfairly erase” the hard work of cisgender female athletes is a “myth” used to “provoke” and “propagate” a sense of public “moral panic.”
“For a coach at a college like Oberlin to make such an antitrans and ignorant statement is deeply disturbing,” Travers said. “If someone won the gold medal, you never say that the silver and bronze medalists, or any other competitors, had their hard work unfairly erased by being beaten. It’s particularly transphobic.”
Oh for god’s sake. Of course you don’t, because there was no cheating. If there is cheating, then you do say so. Capeesh?
Also that “uses a single name.” Notice how everyone has to stop and waste a few seconds on having this name explained, so that people will thinking about the guy who uses the single name. Notice the ever-spreading fog of ego, and the absurdity that it’s being mistaken for peak progressive-think.
