Hmm. Irony, or no? Lia Thomas having a little laugh, or Lia Thomas going all Patty Hearst on us? Hard to tell.

At least we know he’s still an entitled abuser of women.

Well he doesn’t say quite exactly that – he says the less true, less fair, less justifiable version. He says there are competing rights, in other words that men do have a right to invade women’s spaces regardless of what women want.

What do you say to women who want to keep women’s spaces she asks, do you understand them she asks. “I do,” he says with energy, “and I think there is um more of a conversation to be had to try and you know to try and calm this, to try and provide reassurance”

Ah yes, that’s the important thing, calm this, provide [empty] reassurance so that these god damn women will shut the fuck up already. It’s not that women have needs and rights, it’s that they just will not shut up, and we need to persuade them to shut up.

Shut down the entire sport why don’t you.

On Friday [last week], Disc Golf Pro Tour announced that it would relocate the Female Professional Open (FPO) division at some of the largest events of the season to other states while canceling other FPO divisions completely in order to avoid more legal troubles as a result of lawsuits from Natalie Ryan, a male disc golfer who identifies as a female and has sued DGPT in California and Minnesota over gender eligibility policies that restrict him from competing.

…

In a press release obtained by The Post Millennial, DGPT said, “These adjustments have been made in order to protect competitive fairness in the FPO division and to limit financial burden in locations where the PDGA Policy on Eligibility for Gender-Based Divisions may become the subject of last-minute litigation harmful to the tour.”

The release mentioned several times that financial liability was a major part of the decision to change the schedule. According to a tour spokesperson, DGPT has already spent more than $100,000 on the legal fights surrounding transgender eligibility. A survey by the association in December showed 67 percent of its members and 80 percent of its female members disagreed with the statement: “Transgender women should be allowed to compete with other women in disc golf and in other sports.”

Whatever. Women have no right to anything, so it doesn’t matter what they agree or disagree with. Bitches.

Ryan filed a discrimination lawsuit protesting the Professional Disc Golf Association Pro Tour’s new rules in February which stated that trans-identifying males seeking to compete in the women’s division must have medically transitioned during Tanner Stage Two of puberty or before turning 12. The new rules also required a low testosterone level, which excluded Ryan from playing.

Male narcissists win, women lose. Tough shit, Karens.

In 2022, Ryan was the first biological man to win the women’s Elite Series event. Earlier this month, a Minnesota judge blocked the Professional Disc Golf Association from enforcing its policy restricting trans-identifying players from participating in women’s events, a policy change went into effect on Jan. 1.

As a result of the judge’s ruling, Ryan was able to compete earlier this month in the Preserve Championship Female Professional Open in Clearwater, Minnesota.

Ryan underwent sex change surgery in 2018 and then began competing in women’s disc golf. Ryan won two Elite Series events in 2022 and earned $19,360 in prize money.

Nearly 20 grand. Worth having. Worth taking away from women.

The part of Beth Rigby’s interview of Iain Anderson that deals with the gross insult of “Lia” Thomas stealing women’s wins is absolutely disgusting. He blathers and huffs and bloviates and completely ignores the obvious, gruesome, painful injustice to the women, the mere tedious boring nobody cares women.

“Do you think that’s fair Iain?”

“So, em, sport by sport, people are looking at this, they absolutely are – we’re about to celebrate, this year, ten years of Rainbow Laces” – big beaming smile. Grassroots sports, he says, he’s ab-so-lutely delighted that more and more “LGBTQ” people are getting involved.

That’s not the question.

He thinks there’s still a problem with the Premier League, and men’s sport.

That’s not the question.

Sporting body by sporting body is looking at this, he says smugly. Oh well that’s fine then – how many years will it take them to see the problem?

Rigby asks him how he would feel if he were number two or number three in that scenario, would he think that’s fair.

“We’re working our way through on this,” he says, “this is how trans folk take part in elite sport”

But it’s a problem, Rigby interrupts him to insist. “Do you think it’s a problem.”

“I think it’s a problem in terms of perception.”

No, you absolute fuck, it’s a problem in reality.

“You can see it’s a problem, no?” Rigby says, gesturing at the image of giant hulking Thomas looming over the two much much much smaller women. “I want everybody to take part in sport,” he replies idiotically.

Rigby pushes the question again and he says “I understand the question you’re asking” – and I’m going to go right on refusing to answer it. “Are we going to say that trans people shouldn’t take part in sport?” he asks indignantly. Yet again, that’s not the question.

It’s fascinating to see how easily men brush off injustice to women.

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Do it to her and her.

Carl Schmitt, that highly intelligent but nasty old Nazi, had some interestingly nasty thoughts on the importance of making a distinction between ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” Though I doubt whether any Tory politicians know much about Schmitt’s thought, one saw (and sees) his playbook in action in the Brexit disaster, both before and after Britain’s leaving the EU, when not only virulent Brexiters with no formal political power but the British government as well deliberately sought to cast the EU as an enemy who sought Britain’s destruction.

Hitler & Goebbels were very good at creating enemies, both within Germany (Jews, Roma, homosexuals) and without it. The more recent collapse of Yugoslavia showed how readily the idea of ‘friend’ versus ‘enemy’ becomes salient – it is not merely tribal, it runs through the whole of humanity. I don’t think one should blame only tribes.

And cynical politicians are happy to use it. Trump, for one; De Santis, for another, Johnson, Erdogan, Orban, and of course Putin, among many. The world these people want is that described in Auden’s ‘In Memory of William Butler Yeats’:

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace

Stares from every human face,

And the seas of pity lie

Locked and frozen in each eye.

Well of course he does. What answer can he give?

Beth Rigby on Sky News talked to Stonewall chair Iain Anderson about the war on feminist women. He tells us it’s Both Sides.

No it isn’t. Not even close. We get abuse, insults, name-calling, venomous misogyny day in day out. Very few of us on team terf try to match them.

From The Guardian:

“A site visit carried out on 12 July 2023 confirmed that whilst the colour of door is currently pale pink and not white as required by the notice, it is a muted colour and is acceptable to under-enforce the requirements of the enforcement notice.

“It is therefore recommended that the case is closed.”

And, down the page:

In a report to councillors recommending that the council take no further action, the city’s chief planning officer, David Givan, warned that Dickson remained on notice.

See it? In the first extract the subjunctive is not used, and in the second it is. It’s especially interesting because it’s the same kind of subjunctive – the kind that follows “recommend that” in the present tense. I’ve seen that called (with disdain) “the American subjunctive” as if it were some crass vulgarity like spitting tobacco juice on the Queen’s favorite Corgi, but honestly, you need the subjunctive for “it is recommended that” [something be done]. Why do you need it? Because “it is recommended that something is done” makes no sense. It’s done, so there’s no need to recommend it, is there.

The solution would be to avoid the subjunctive by just saying “should” or “must” or similar. But “It is therefore recommended that the case is closed” is just inane. If the case is closed why are you recommending closing it?

Convince me I’m wrong.

Takes the breath away.

When in doubt, find some women to torture.

A video showing two women being paraded naked by a mob in the north-eastern state of Manipur, hit by violent ethnic clashes, has sparked outrage in India. The police say they have opened a case of gang rape and arrested a man, adding that others will be held soon.

…

Deadly violence has plunged Manipur, a scenic Indian state bordering Myanmar, into turmoil for more than two months. Clashes between members of the majority Meitei and the Kuki tribal communities have resulted in their complete segregation. At least 130 people have died and 60,000 have been displaced. The two women, who are Kukis, were assaulted by men of the Meitei group.

What are “tribal communities”? What are tribes? What are communities? What is the point of them other than a pretext for violence and torture?

Maybe Willoughby is a secret agent undermining trans ideology from within.

This just in.

Allegedly, on video.

The rest of that section of the paper:

Freeman (2015) argues that contemporary pregnancy, in particular, has become a site of epistemic injustice through processes of medical professionals and technologies assuming power and epistemic authority over pregnancy and pregnant people, often denying or superseding the epistemic privilege, knowledge, and control that a pregnant person has over their own body and embodied pregnancy experience. Similarly, both MacKendrick (2018) and Waggoner (2017) clearly demonstrate how responsibilities for ensuring the health and well-being of embryos, fetuses, children, and families are forms of gendered precautionary labor in which “safety first” approaches result in additional social control over women and their everyday lives, often despite equivocal empirical evidence supporting the benefits of such precautions.

Oooh suddenly women appear. I did not see that coming. Where did the pregnant people go?

In this work, we argue that these forms of gendered precautionary labor and social control are not solely constrained to cisgender women, the context in which they have been explored almost exclusively in the empirical literature to date.

Oh good. Whew. No sooner are they mentioned, the bitches, than we’re told that they’re not the only ones who get pregnant and get told what to do by doctors, god damn it!

The mind reels.

So…it’s bad to make efforts to have a healthy (or “fit”) baby, because doing so may reflect eugenicist and biomedical moralist underpinnings.

What, I wondered, is biomedical moralism? Is it a label in common use? Not according to Google, which has never heard of it. I’m guessing it’s a label for thinking it’s better to have a healthy baby than a sick or weak or underweight one, and that it’s better to have a baby without any disabilities than it is to have a disabled baby. I suppose I get the idea in a sense – that rejoicing at health and absence of disabilities carries with it messages about people who lack health and/or have disabilities. I get that parents maybe shouldn’t lean too hard on the health of their new baby in the presence of people who are not so fortunate, but other than that? Should pregnant women and their nurses and doctors not even do what they can to produce healthy babies? Should they voluntarily and knowingly allow babies to be born with preventable disabilities?

In a pig’s eye, yet that’s what these sociologists are claiming, in language veiled by sociojargon.

Also, “pregnant people.”

NPR on the Women’s World Cup:

The U.S. will be looking to snag their third straight World Cup title — and its fifth overall.

The U.S. women’s national team (USWNT) has held the No. 1 spot in FIFA’s rankings for years, and is the odds-on favorite to win once again. But this year’s tournament is considered fairly wide open, with several teams having a decent shot at the title.

…

This time around, the U.S. squad is, on average, less experienced at the international level than it has been at previous tournaments. Several veterans whose experience had been counted on were left off the roster due to injuries, including Becky Sauerbrunn, Mallory Swanson, Samantha Mewis and Christen Press.

The U.S. is in Group E, and will face Vietnam, the Netherlands and Portugal. The team will play the entire group stage in New Zealand.

It’s a funny thing, but there’s no mention of trans women in the whole piece. NPR is very excited about trans women, and so is Rapinoe, yet there’s not a word about an exciting new player on the team who transitioned last week. There’s not even a celebration of a trans woman on one of the other teams. Puzzling.

Is Arts Council Wales sniffing glue?

Gendered pronouns will be purged from official documentation by the Welsh government’s primary arts body, the Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

The Arts Council of Wales, the taxpayer-funded body responsible for supporting the arts on behalf of the devolved government, is set to purge male and female pronouns like “he/him” and “she/her” from the body’s official documentation, the Telegraph understands.

In place of gendered pronouns, the Arts Council will use gender-neutral pronouns “they/them”.

So no more “gendered” pronouns in the language of the Arts Council at all? Surely that’s insane? (And don’t call me Shirley.)

News of the policy arts comes after the Welsh government this year rolled out an LGBTQ+ Action Plan for Wales, which pledged to ensure public bodies were “sensitive to gendered language”.

Information from the Arts Council of Wales states that the public body is “currently undertaking a general update across our policies amending any specific references to gender (eg she/he/his/her) to ‘they/them’”.

Because nobody is a she or a he any more? Is that the new rule? Why weren’t we told?

Yeah sure kid.

Marx would totally agree.

Headline:

‘We are dying’: Houston workers protest new state law removing water break requirements

House Bill 2127, which takes effect on Sept. 1, will do away with local rules that require water breaks for construction workers. The cities of Austin and Dallas, for example, require 10-minute breaks every four hours. San Antonio officials had been considering a similar ordinance.

Ten minute breaks every four hours are not all that much, especially in blazing heat. (When I worked as a seasonal laborer for the Seattle Parks Department the rule was fifteen minute breaks every two hours – thanks to the union. Annoyingly, some crews liked to combine the breaks into one break first thing in the morning to go to a restaurant for a big breakfast. I think I pointed out once or twice that this meant we got no break from the peak afternoon heat, but got nowhere. Seasonals were the lumpenproletariat.)

This summer has already been a punishing one, with record-high temperatures throughout the state, a reminder that climate change continues to worsen heat in Texas. At the morning news conference, protesters sweat as they wore hard hats and held white crosses in honor of construction workers who have died from the heat. Organizers offered water and Gatorade.

The people who passed the law taking the breaks away work inside in air-conditioned offices and chambers. They’re not going to die of heat stroke on the job. It’s unabashed class privilege and sadism, but the left is too busy sniffing out terfs and DEI-criminals to pay attention.

It turns out that global warming means actual global warming, as in we’re in the frying pan and the burner is on. It means we’re accidentally cooking ourselves along with everything else.

Punishing heat waves gripped three continents on Tuesday, breaking records in cities around the Northern Hemisphere less than two weeks after the Earth recorded what scientists said were likely its hottest days in modern history.

Not just a little upward bump in average temperatures but raging heat waves that kill people by the thousands.

Firefighters in Greece scrambled to put out wildfires, as parched conditions raised the risk of more blazes throughout Europe. Beijing logged another day of 95-degree heat, and people in Hangzhou, another Chinese city, compared the choking conditions to a sauna. From the Middle East to the American Southwest, delivery drivers, airport workers and construction crews labored under blistering skies. Those who could stay indoors did.

For hundreds of millions of people on Tuesday, the heat was hard to escape. In the United States, Phoenix broke a nearly half-century-old record on Tuesday, with the city’s 19th consecutive day of temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 Celsius).

Remember, kids: not everyone can just turn on the air conditioning. Also, turning on the air conditioning contributes to the warming.

Wildfires raged on for yet another week in Canada, having burned a staggering 25 million acres so far this year, an area roughly the size of Kentucky. With more than a month of peak fire season to go, 2023 has already eclipsed Canada’s annual record, from 1989.

Fires also forced evacuations in villages south, west and north of Athens, burning an estimated 7,400 acres of forest in Greece despite aerial water bombardments to bring the blazes under control.

All those forests gone up in smoke can no longer absorb carbon dioxide.

There’s an irony here, or a cascade of ironies that has no visible terminus.

One of the thorniest questions raised by the possibility of another indictment would be how to schedule multiple trials in a way that satisfies the need to give Trump a fair trial but permits the wheels of justice to turn at reasonable speed. 

Oh gosh, doggone it, we can’t even figure out how to fit all these trials into the time we have. Why is that? Well, because the guy is such a prolific committer of crimes. The secret to success as a criminal: do so much of it at such a fast clip that the cops and prosecutors can’t even keep up with you. Result: get elected president, pardon yourself.

The situation could become even more complicated since Trump is still waiting to hear whether he will be charged in an investigation by a district attorney in Georgia over his alleged effort to steal Biden’s election win in the key swing state. On its own, the Georgia case would be a staggering blemish on a presidency. But such is the legal morass facing Trump that it has become something of an afterthought at this point.

That’s his genius – do so much crime so expeditiously that nobody can even keep up.