The ever-popular “but what do you mean by ‘trans rights’?” question.
For once we get an answer.
Ah, that “right.” Ok so now explain to us how that can be a right without demolishing the right to single sex spaces. Explain how it can be a right for men to force themselves on women in changing rooms and toilets and rape crisis centers and homeless shelters. Explain how “identifying as” the opposite of what a person in fact can be a basis for human rights.
We’ll wait.
About 30,000 households have been ordered to evacuate in Canada’s British Columbia province, where nearly 400 wildfires are raging.
Two huge fires in the Shuswap region merged overnight, destroying blocks of houses and other buildings. To the south, travel to the waterside city of Kelowna has been restricted, and smoke from nearby fires hangs over Lake Okanagan. Fires have charred homes in West Kelowna, a nearby city of 36,000.
…
The province’s emergency management minister said officials “cannot stress strongly enough how critical it is to follow evacuation orders”. Bowinn Ma added: “They are a matter of life and death not only for the people in those properties, but also for the first responders who will often go back to try to implore people to leave.”
…
Canada is having its worst wildfire season on record, with at least 1,000 fires burning across the country, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC). Experts say climate change [aka global warming] increases the risk of the hot, dry weather that is likely to fuel wildfires. Extreme and long-lasting heat draws more and more moisture out of the ground – which can provide fuel for fires that can spread at an incredible speed, particularly if winds are strong.
I’m familiar with that just from Seattle summers: the grass gets visibly (and touchably) dryer and more brittle as the rainless months add up. By September it’s like straw.
Robin Ince promotes LGBT Youth Scotland, is reminded of the allegations of grooming and trafficking, boasts that he views the people reminding him as flat-earthers.
It’s a particularly odd comparison, because it wouldn’t be supernatural or an overturning of a huge chunk of science for LGBT Youth Scotland to have a history of grooming.
It’s also callous and smug.
Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on We can say it; he can’t.
We could say the same about the word “nerd”, which people tell me isn’t an insult anymore. They tell me that it’s cool to be a nerd now. They tell me to look at how nerd subculture is mainstream with comic book superheroes reigning at the box office.
Permit me to doubt. What I see is the cool kids saying, “I’m such a nerd,” in the same way and the same tone as they would say, “I’m such a bitch.” I see basic functionality locked behind menu options with labels like “stats for nerds”, implying that to understand or care about such things is abnormal. I see actual nerds seeking popularity through embracing Genderism, or else being shunned for lacking the social graces to shut off their hyperanalytical minds and go along with it.
The only person who can call me a nerd without being an asshole is me, and I’m an asshole anyway.
And “nerd” isn’t spat with anywhere near the venomous rancor as “terf”. It’s not in the same ballpark. It’s not even the same sport. There aren’t people making bank on shirts about nerds like the ones that say, “Kill TERFs”. Nor are there people telling crowds to attack nerds like the ones getting cheers for saying to punch any terfs they see right “in the fucking face.”
The gall of trying to claim it’s just an acronym with no connotations is simply stupendous.
India Willoughby spits venom at The Telegraph for saying “terf” is a slur. Such a lovely guy.
He says, echoing every racist who wants to say “nigger” because theyyyyyy dooooooooo so whyyyy cannnnnn’t weeeeeee? Thick as a plank and nastier than rancid fish.
Originally a comment by Francis Boyle on The situation evolved rapidly.
Terrible as this is it’s almost the best case scenario. The worst case scenario would be that the planet warms more or less uniformly with the tropics slowly becoming uninhabitable while the industrialised world looks on with much hand-wringing but precious little useful action. This way everyone is on notice that it’s their life or at least their property that is on the line.
Now, I’m not pretending that anyone is voluntarily going to give up their lives of consumption-for-the-sake-of-consumption. The sense of entitlement is too deeply engrained in the wealthy and the wannabee wealthy. But we have an opportunity to make the worst of the destructive behaviours along with opposition to necessary change socially shameful. Unfortunately, it seems that the majority of climate activists are stuck in a mindset that has outlived its usefulness. What’s so shocking about dyeing the Trevi fountain black when the land is being burnt black? We know the problem. Stunts whose only effect are to publicise that there is a problem look, and are, self indulgent. And for that reason they backfire, badly.
I don’t want to do the “young people today” thing. It was people of my generation who created a world where performative narcissism is almost the only sane, or at least effective, strategy.But I suspect a little bit of genuinely subversive thought would go a long way. (I’m looking at you Penny, Maugham and Ince. The house of the self-regarding is getting crowded.) Of course, that requires actually thinking and who has time for that these days?
Originally a comment by Rev David Brindley on More threats.
It’s an easy, and lazy, argument to make that chess is played with the brain, not the genitals or the muscles therefore saying there is a need for a separate women’s category is demeaning to women. It relies on the trope of men’s brains and ladyeez brains and assumes women’s intellect is inferior to men’s.
Susan Polgar – Hall of Famer, the Winner of 4 Women’s World Chess Championships,12 Olympic Medals (5 Gold, 4 Silver, 3 Bronze), and the first woman in history to break the gender barrier in chess would like to disagree.
“Why is there a need for Girl’s or Women’s tournaments?”
This is probably one of the top 5 questions I have most often been asked over the past 15 years, since creating the Susan Polgar Foundation in 2002.
I would like to walk you through some history and then explain to you some challenges girls / women face in chess. But before we start down this journey, I want to make one thing abundantly clear. I have not changed my point of view. I do strongly believe that if given equal opportunities, women are just as capable in chess, and many other STEM fields, as are men. However, I still adamantly believe that there is a serious need for SOME “girls only” or “women only” events.
Polgar then goes on to address the 5 questions, pointing out how hard it is for girls to compete against aggressive males, that women’s achievements are belittled and diminished, how barriers are put in their way at every level.
When she qualified to enter the world championships, she was told she couldn’t enter because she wasn’t a man. Can’t have a girly brain showing up those muscular manly brains, can we?
The article concludes
Within 48 hours after I posted my article about “Why is there a need for Girl’s or Women’s Tournaments?”, between my website and various social media outlets, this article has reached well over 400,000 readers. Many made comments in the comment sections, in private messages, email, and tweets, etc. While the overwhelming majority were very supportive and understanding, some comments were eye openers. Here are just a few of the best ones:
– Why is it a problem if some girls are sexually harassed by male players at tournaments? It will make them stronger to deal with the real world.
– …shielding girls from the realities of the world isn’t the way to improve the conditions. What this does is subconsciously reinforce the notion that they are somehow inferior.
– If the girls didn’t provoke first, there would be no problem at all.
– If you have Girl or Women’s tournaments that exclude men, then shouldn’t you have Men’s tournaments that exclude women?
– Oooh, you’re so pretty. Are you married?
– If girls can’t deal with the reality of chess, maybe they could try something less challenging?
– Get a grip. Girls won’t ever be as good as boys.
– It’s good to have more girls in chess, especially the pretty ones.
– Chess is a men’s sport. You can’t change the fact.
– Girls are surely seeking attention when they go to chess tournaments. What do they expect?
– Why do you always wanna to rock the boat? Why can’t you accept it?
Now, why wouldn’t women want to be in a room with men like these?
It’s never not weird that Giuliani started out as a scourge of mobsters and then turned into one. Maureen Dowd writes:
Giuliani went from cleaning up corruption to ginning up corruption, from crimebuster to criminal defendant in Georgia and unindicted “Co-Conspirator 1” in D.C. Rudy, the prosecutor who made his reputation aggressively pursuing RICO cases, is now Rudolph William Louis Giuliani, a defendant in the Georgia RICO case about the deranged plot to steal the election.
We have seen many cases of mobsters turning state’s evidence for prosecutors. But now we have the rare experience of seeing a prosecutor turn into a mobster.
After all those years spent prosecuting the Five Families in New York, Giuliani surrendered himself to the lamest mob boss there ever was: Don Trump.
We saw the coup attempt play out, but it’s startling to see the Georgia indictment refer to “this criminal organization,” “members of the enterprise,” “corruptly solicited” and “acts of racketeering activity.”
Trump, mentored by mob lawyer Roy Cohn, always loved acting like a mobster, playing the faux tough guy, intimidating his foes, swanning around like John Dillinger, Al Capone and John Gotti. He told Timothy O’Brien, the author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,” that he admired Gotti because the mobster sat through years of trials with a stone face. “In other words, tough,” Trump said.
Which Trump isn’t. He’s many things, but tough isn’t one of them. He’s sadistic, ruthless, self-dealing, callous, all that, but he’s not tough. He’s a big whiny baby.
“Trump both fetishized mobsters and did business with them,” O’Brien told me. “The way he fetishizes mobsters informs this fascination he has about Putin and Kim Jong-un. He loves ‘bad-ass’ guys who roll like they want to roll. He sees himself the same way.”
But he’s not bad-ass, he’s lard-ass.
The passive-aggressive self-flattery is off the charts.
We get it – you want everyone to think you’re very very very very kind, you’re all about kindness, you put kindness first on all occasions, you’re a kind kind kind man. We get it; we get that you think that. We get that you think you’re massively kind and we’re cruel bitches. We get it.
But you’re not. You’re not, for instance, “kind” to women. Being “kind” to men who claim to be women entails being very unkind to women, and that’s what you’re doing.
We get that you think the default for kind people is to heap flattery on men who call themselves women while ignoring all the objections of women. We get that. We also get that you’re wrong, and that you keep flattering yourself in the most blatant embarrassing way.
About 15,000 households have been ordered to evacuate in Canada’s British Columbia, as firefighters battle raging wildfires that have set homes ablaze. Officials said a “significant” number of buildings caught fire in West Kelowna, a city of 36,000 people, and more than 2,400 homes were evacuated. A state of emergency has been declared for the entire province, where hundreds of separate fires are burning.
Meanwhile there are only about a thousand people left in Yellowknife.
In British Columbia, evacuation orders grew from covering 4,000 homes on Friday afternoon to about 15,000 in the space of an hour. Another 20,000 homes are under alert. Premier of the province, David Eby, said that evening that the situation had “evolved rapidly” and officials were braced for “an extremely challenging situation in the days ahead”.
“This year, we’re facing the worst #BCWildfire season ever,” Mr Eby wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Given these fast-moving conditions, we are declaring a provincial state of emergency.”
…
Canada is having its worst wildfire season on record, with at least 1,000 fires burning across the country, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC).
Experts say climate change increases the risk of the hot, dry weather that is likely to fuel wildfires. Extreme and long-lasting heat draws more and more moisture out of the ground – which can provide fuel for fires that can spread at an incredible speed, particularly if winds are strong.
We’re all living on a stovetop with all the burners on.
Blah blah blah women must not be allowed to have anything for themselves blah blah trans blah blah blah.
The International Chess Federation (FIDE) says it is temporarily banning transgender women from competing in its women’s events. The FIDE said individual cases would require “further analysis” and that a decision could take up to two years. The move has been criticised by some players and enthusiasts.
…
Yosha Iglesias, a trans woman professional chess player with the FIDE rank of chess master, said the policy would lead to “unnecessary harm” for trans players and women. “This appalling situation will lead to depression and suicide attempts,” Iglesias said.
See? That’s all he’s got. Men must be allowed to take what belongs to women or they will get depressed and kill themselves. Trans “activism” should be called The Infinite Blackmail Note. Just take a hike, dude. Chess for women is by definition for women, so get lost.
Another shipment of pestilent bullshit:
I am reading it and it is indeed horrifying. The case:
My name is Almut Gadow. For almost 10 years, I taught law at the Open University. I was dismissed for questioning new requirements to indoctrinate students in gender identity theory, in ways which, I felt, distorted equality law and normalised child sexual exploitation.
I am bringing an employment tribunal claim arguing that I was harassed, discriminated against, and unfairly dismissed because I reject gender ideology and believe in academic freedom, and that this breached human rights protections for academic free expression.
…
In 2021/22 the Open University’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion department announced plans to incorporate its political ideologies into ‘all current curriculum’. The law degree on which I taught was redesigned around a ‘core theme’ of ‘liberating the curriculum’, reflecting these ideologies.
Criminal law tutors were told that, to ‘liberate the curriculum’, our classes now had to introduce diverse gender identities and teach students to use offenders’ preferred pronouns. I questioned if incorporating gender identity theory might be an unnecessary distraction or even unwise. I described gender theory as hotly contested, and as recently developed in wealthy Western countries. I pointed out that (not) believing in gender identity is a protected religious or philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010, and said law tutorials are no place to promote one’s beliefs.
I also highlighted some of the implications of describing offenders according to self-identified gender in our work. I said a criminal lawyer’s role is to present facts, that sex is a relevant fact for offences involving perpetrators’ and/or victims’ bodies, and that no offender should be allowed to dictate the language of his case in a way which masks relevant facts. I said an assailant’s language about himself and his offence should not automatically be adopted over his victim’s, and that lawyers and courts sometimes need to describe offenders in terms with which the latter might not agree – calling the innocent-identifying perpetrator ‘guilty’, or the trans-identifying male ‘he’.
When I raised these questions, in an online forum for law tutors to discuss what they teach, management had no answers. Months later, they were cited as reasons for my dismissal. Managers spuriously alleged that my ‘unreasonable questions’ had created an environment which ‘isn’t inclusive, trans-friendly or respectful’, thus violating the transgender staff policy and codes of conduct. In fact, I had broken no lawful rule by probing the academic soundness of what I was expected to teach.
Christing fuck. Imagine the lawyers that are going to emerge from this form of “education.”
But don’t worry, it gets worse.
I further incurred the wrath of the curriculum liberators when I asked them to define their key concepts such as ‘LGBTQ+’. It had become apparent to me that some treated ‘minor attraction’ (i.e. paedophilia) as part of the ‘diverse sexualities and gender identities’ Open University law teaching now seeks to ‘centre’. The criminal law module culminated in an assignment in which students had to discuss a relationship between an adult and a minor. Students would gain marks by describing child and adult as each other’s ‘boyfriends’, but lose marks if they considered whether the adult was grooming the child or committing a sexual offence.
My request for clarification was spuriously described as further misconduct. Curriculum liberators complained that it had made them feel undermined, harassed, bullied and reputationally damaged. In fact, asking colleagues to explain core concepts of their output is just part of everyday academic work, but curriculum liberators were unable to do so here.
I despair. Dangerous idiots are taking over everything.
The BBC’s AntiSocial on “queering” museums.
The debate sparked by reviewing historic collections through a queer or LGBT lens. A “queering the collection” blogpost from the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth was criticised for making what some saw as tenuous links between historic objects from the ship and the experience of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. Supporters of “queering” museums and galleries say it’s needed to redress a traditional approach to history that has often ignored non-heterosexual people or stories. But it’s led to controversy and criticism that some institutions have gone too far by focusing on the LGBT angle at the expense of others or imposing a modern interpretation that wouldn’t have made sense at the time.
Dominique Bouchard, Head of Learning and Interpretation at English Heritage
Mary Harrington, Contributing Editor at UnHerd
Jackie Stacey, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester
Josh Adair, Professor of English at Murray State University
It won’t surprise you to be told that Mary Harrington was especially good.
Interesting.
The * in trans* leads to a clarification at the bottom of the poster: “In this case, trans refers to people who identify as transgender, transsexual, two-spirit, non-binary, genderqueer, or gender diverse.” In other words, anything and everything. Any guy who feels like going right on into the women’s washroom [rest room, toilet, bathroom, WC, etc] is welcome to; all he has to do is say he’s gender diverse. Who’s going to challenge him on that? Who even knows what the fuck it’s supposed to mean? So come on in, bros, fill the place up, make it so bro-friendly that women won’t go near it. Stupid bitches will have to stay home and it serves them right, yeah?
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Empowering the bullies.
I think the block feature is an absolute necessity to prevent harassment.
It’s true that mass-blocking tools were bad: the promotion of block-lists to true believers to get them to isolate themselves from dissenting views was a move straight out of the Scientology playbook. But I don’t think that problem — which appears to have largely abated anyway; I don’t hear about mass block-lists anymore — merits getting rid of the block feature altogether.
Very often we have to be able to block specific accounts from replying to our posts, because they harass us. It’s true that people can create sockpuppet accounts to circumvent blocks, but very often harassers want to reply under their real identities, with their main accounts that have amassed large followings, not under anonymous accounts with few followers.
Not all accounts are equal — some have vastly more reach than others — and we need to be able to block the accounts that have amassed large followings and use them for targeted harassment.
Muting isn’t good enough either. If someone’s following you around the internet and bringing along a gang to shout lies about you every time you speak, it’s not enough that you personally tune them out, because everyone else will see the lies.
Also, blocking harassers is a way to prevent them noticing when you speak. Once blocked, they would have to create a sockpuppet account and seek you out specifically in order to be notified when you tweet. Without that block feature, your speech could just show up in their twitter feed — an open invitation for them to harass you.
I can’t see how getting rid of the block feature will be anything but a disaster for victims of harassment.
Yes, we do want someone who knows how to utter a coherent sentence, whether to us or to Putin or to Zelensky. That’s one reason we don’t want Trump.
Word is he’s gonna snub the debate and have a chat with Tucker Carlson instead.
Musk tells us he is getting rid of the block feature. Auschwitz Museum tells him why that’s a terrible idea.
The whole reply:
Failing to address the antisemitic and Holocaust denial comments that appear under our posts commemorating the victims of Auschwitz would be a disservice to their memory.
We’ve chosen to block users who promote denial and hatred. This decision stems from our deep dedication to our mission. We need a secure space to do this.
Engaging in discussions with people and accounts that seek to abuse the memory of victims of Auschwitz is against the values we believe in. These individuals do not seek discourse; they aim to inflict pain. In this context, blocking is a necessary step to ensure that these harmful voices don’t persist in their repetitive attacks on memory.
In today’s digital age, social media platforms shoulder significant moral responsibility. They should actively counter hate speech and halt its normalization.
A platform that disregards the need to defend the memory of the victims demonstrates a disregard for creating a respectful and empathetic online environment.
Blocking users isn’t a mere action; it’s a practical measure. Often, reporting accounts that spread hostility remains an unanswered call. Blocking provides a way to protect the memory of people who suffered and were murdered in Auschwitz.
And this applies across the board. Muting just hides responses from the original account; blocking prevents the responses from appearing at all. Musk is throwing open the door to abusers and bullies and verbal sadists.
We’re the creationists???
Talking to people who know that men are not women is like talking to creationists.
So we’re the ones engaged in magical thinking? We’re the ones who deny reality? We’re the ones who believe in the power of thought to change physical givens? We’re the ones who value faith and submission and compliance more than truth and evidence?
We’re the ones who believe what we’re told to believe as opposed to what it’s reasonable to believe? We’re the ones who conform? We’re the ones who let The Community tell us what we’re allowed to think?
We’re the ones who put fantasy ahead of reality – who let fantasy contradict reality? We’re the ones who believe in miracles? We’re the ones who think the body is mere dross and the soul is everything? We’re the mind-body dualists?
What a shambles.
Hahahaha nothing to do with being a woman.
Even Republicans are saying Trump is lying.
Former President Donald Trump now says he won’t be holding a news conference next week to unveil what he claims is new “evidence” of fraud in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election — even though no fraud has ever been substantiated — citing the advice of lawyers as he prepares to face trial in two criminal cases that stem from his election lies.
No compelling evidence of the wide-scale fraud Trump alleges has emerged in the two-and-a-half years since the election in Georgia or elsewhere, despite Trump’s baseless claims. Republican officials in the state have long said he lost fairly and three recounts there confirmed President Joe Biden’s win.
“Rather than releasing the Report on the Rigged & Stolen Georgia 2020 Presidential Election on Monday, my lawyers would prefer putting this, I believe, Irrefutable & Overwhelming evidence of Election Fraud & Irregularities in formal Legal Filings as we fight to dismiss this disgraceful Indictment,” Trump wrote on his social media site Thursday in announcing his reversal.
He should get that on a sweatshirt – Irrefutable & Overwhelming.
Trump’s renewed attacks on the integrity of Georgia’s vote this week drew swift criticism from state’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, whom Trump had tried to lobby as part of his efforts to overturn his loss in the battleground state.
“The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen. For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward – under oath – and prove anything in a court of law,” Kemp wrote on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.
Former Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump had tried to pressure to unilaterally overturn the results of the election and who is now challenging Trump for the Republican nomination, echoed that message.
Nobody believes him. His crackpot army doesn’t so much believe him as want to burn everything down.
