Originally a comment by Sastra on He’ll rename himself Anne Frank next.

Atheist blogs have long noted the existence of what we’d call “persecution porn” coming from Christian conservatives. Liberal Secularists were feverishly plotting ways to destroy Christianity and choosing the easiest and only viable method: the use of force against Christians. Laws banning Bibles and camps “reeducating” the faithful were always on the verge of being implemented or had become fact in a fictional drama about the near future. Being asked to renounce Jesus by someone holding a gun to your head was a viable possibility: prepare yourself. How will you answer?

General consensus was that there were several factors motivating this lascivious dwelling on people “coming for you.” First, there was fundraising, for obvious reasons. Second, was the thrill of seeing oneself as a crucial player in an important drama. And third was confirmation that your faith was true. Nobody would bother bringing such big guns to Christianity if one — they thought it insignificant and pointless and two — they weren’t on the side of Evil.

I’m not sure about the role of fundraising, but sense of significance and establishing truth — oh yes. Willoughby is intent on both. That may also apply to those with the stubborn inability to see the opposition as they are, as opposed to how they need to be if we assume they know they’re wrong.

Why would anyone think trans ideology is full of hatred of women?

Trump gets a target letter.

The fact that Trump had received yet another target letter from Jack Smith was a relatively close hold in his world. He went public after a media inquiry asking if he had received one, according to a person briefed on the matter.

…

We don’t know what charges Smith is considering bringing against Trump, but commentary from many lawyers — ranging from the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 riot to outsiders writing “model prosecution memos” — have focused in particular on the possibility of the attempted corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding, under Section 1512(c) of Title 18, and conspiracy to defraud the government under Section 371 of Title 18.

…

There have been at least two grand juries investigating Trump’s efforts to remain in power after he lost the 2020 election. One is related to Trump’s fundraising off his false claims of widespread fraud and his claim he needed money to fight it. The other relates to the so-called “fake” electors that his allies sought to have votes tallied for Trump in the electoral college count.

You know – little stuff. Details.

To state the obvious plainly, Trump is facing significant jail time. He has already been indicted twice and is now facing two more, one federal and one in Georgia, also in relation to his efforts to remain in power. When he was indicted in the documents investigation, his advisers were blunt that in their view, he needs to win the election as a defense against possible jail time. That only increases with an indictment related to Jan. 6 at the federal level.

That’s frankly horrifying. Winning an election should not be a fucking get out of jail free card! Quite the reverse. His rampant prolific criminality should disqualify him from so much as running.

The hearing today in Florida could help flesh out more details about when Mr. Trump’s trial on charges of violating the Espionage Act will take place. The government has requested a date in December. Mr. Trump’s lawyers have asked for an indefinite postponement.

This is all so shaming.

Pathetic.

Nope, no misogyny here.

India Willoughby having the fucking gall to frame himself as a Jew and gender skeptics as Nazi exterminators.

This is not Vichy. There are no “collaborators” because there is no Vichy and there are no Nazis. There is no “Nazi poster-girl” and no one, NO ONE AT ALL, is “coming for” Willoughby. He’s not going to be hauled off to Auschwitz to be worked to death or immediately gassed. He’s not going to be one of the six million.

This is where narcissism and obsession with one’s precious IdenTiTee takes a person.

Never mind the lethal temperatures, the important thing is what reporters are saying about them.

Italy is sweltering in abnormally high temperatures, but its media appear to be more interested in how the extreme heat is being reported in the foreign press than delving deeply into the effects in a country deemed to be among the most vulnerable in Europe to the climate crisis.

Over the weekend, several outlets picked up on reports on Italy’s heatwave in leading foreign news websites – including the Guardian, the Times and the BBC. They were particularly fascinated by a headline in the Times calling Rome – where temperatures are forecast to reach highs of 43C on Tuesday – the “Infernal City”, a play on the nickname “Eternal City”. So much so that it was still a talking point come Monday.

At this point it’s impossible not to mention fiddling while Rome burns.

That the climate crisis is not well covered by the Italian media is unsurprising, said Gianni Riotta, the director of the school of journalism at Rome’s Luiss University. “It is lousy and it has been lousy for years,” he said.

Much of this is due to the dominance of the rightwing media, which for decades have been owned or heavily influenced by the late former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Still today, rightwing newspapers such as Il Giornale, Libero and La Verità serve as mouthpieces for Giorgia Meloni’s government, whose strategy on tackling the climate crisis is vague.

Not that other governments are doing much better.

Jennifer Lahl and Kallie Fell, president and executive director respectively of the Center for Bioethics and Culture, write at Reality’s Last Stand:

In recent years, a striking paradigm shift in medical ethics has emerged, driven by progressive political ideologies purporting to champion “Social Justice.” This shift has precipitated a surge in initiatives centered around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The resulting effects have varied considerably; they include the introduction of explicit racial bias in treatment protocols in a quest for “health equity,” and an unsettling disregard for biological sex as an important variable in both medical research and patient care. Instead, the new radical movement favors categorizing individuals based on their self-identified and medically irrelevant “gender identity.”

A bit like issuing all women with jock straps and all men with bras, only much much much more likely to be fatal.

This trend of overlooking biological sex as a critical medical variable stems from an ideological drive to “queer” the natural world. The proponents of this view resist categorization, arguing that such practices are instruments of oppression wielded by the powerful against the less powerful. According to this perspective, medicine must eschew not only biological categorization of patients, but also traditional notions of what is deemed desirable or adverse patient outcomes.

So we’re queering death now? Queering chronic pain, fatigue, weakness, fever? Health is bad and illness is good?

A provocative new paper in the journal Qualitative Research in Health titled “Medical uncertainty and reproduction of the ‘normal’: Decision-making around testosterone therapy in transgender pregnancy” by Pfeffer and colleagues propels us further down the road of medical malpractice.

The authors, a group of transgender sociologists and enthusiasts, and healthcare activists, with not one medical degree among them, argue to dramatically move the goal posts of medical ethics, choosing to completely disregard the health, safety, and well-being of the developing fetus, all in the name of “trans” inclusion. 

Ok brace yourselves.

The authors argue that “gendered” pregnancy care is too focused on helping women have healthy babies, and that it might be okay for transmen to continue taking testosterone during pregnancy despite the known health risks to the fetus and effects on its normal development. The desire for “normal fetal outcomes,” according to the authors, is rooted in a problematic desire “to protect their offspring from becoming anything other than ‘normal’” and “reflect historical and ongoing social practices for creating ‘ideal’ and normative bodies.”

Ok so why was this published? What reckless cynical sniggering fool decided it would be a good idea to put this disgusting death-cultish garbage out there?

Updating to add: Here is the paper. (There’s a link in the article, but have another for convenience.)

One of the authors is Sally Hines. Of course she is.

To be “cis” is to be nothing.

YOU get a pretty colorful flag and YOU get one and YOU get one…but you dreary boring neutral straight people and “cis” people are just blanks.

Also, why the fuck do “asexual” people need a flag? Or for that matter a label? And why are they grouped with trans people and lesbians and the rest?

There’s no such thing as “LGBT+ History.”

Originally a comment by Papito on Iss biggitree an prejjudiss.

This is the way the racket works: Willie can get the nurses and doctors fired if they don’t lie to him, so they lie to him.

Establishing “misgendering” as some sort of unforgivable prejudice means that he can force them to lie by threatening their livelihoods. So of course they lie; they need their jobs.

Martina Navratilova doesn’t have to lie to him, he can’t force her to lie to him with threats to her livelihood, so she doesn’t.

If gender critical belief were protected to the extent that it should be, then no doctor or nurse could be forced to lie to creeps like Willie. Consequently, many of them would stop. Others would still continue to lie because they were concerned about anonymous violence towards them, or social shunning, banks closing their accounts, etc., and those few who truly believe that sex doesn’t exist and people aren’t living organisms at all, but constructs like potato-head toys that you can plug and unplug organs and features from at will, might continue to call Willie a woman.

It’s circular reasoning: TRAs have bullied people into lying to them, and now say having the lies repeated back to them proves the lies are the truth. No, all it proves is the coercive power of TRAs over other people and their beliefs.

It’s like a foreman at a sweat shop saying he’s proven that twelve-hour shifts are fair because all the workers he’s asked say so.

Trump has big plans to make himself (and future presidents, but what are the chances he’s taking that into account?) dictator.

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

In other words he wants to make himself a dictator and he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about what happens after his head explodes.

He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.

He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”

The Heritage Foundation is overseeing the operation.

The agenda being pursued has deep roots in the decades-long effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut what has become known as the administrative state — agencies that enact regulations aimed at keeping the air and water clean and food, drugs and consumer products safe, but that cut into business profits.

Who needs clean air and water or safe food and drugs? What a piffling administrative pansy-ass Murka-hating idea.

“The notion of independent federal agencies or federal employees who don’t answer to the president violates the very foundation of our democratic republic,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, adding that the contributors to Project 2025 are committed to “dismantling this rogue administrative state.”

You know what really violates the very foundation of our democratic republic? Trump anywhere near any kind of government power.

Personal power has always been a driving force for Mr. Trump. He often gestures toward it in a more simplistic manner, such as in 2019, when he declared to a cheering crowd, “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

Yeah that’s a more simplistic manner all right. It sounds like a toddler.

The Willoughby Diaries:

You ok with this Philip Bernie??? You condoning this Philip Bernie???

Philip Bernie is the Head of BBC Sport Content, so I guess Willoughby wants him to banish Martina from BBC sport content, or Twitter, or the planet, or something.

Originally a comment by Athel Cornish-Bowden on Robin might be described as….

Last week I was invited to referee a paper by an editor of a journal that I was associated with (as author, editor of three special issues, member of the Editorial Board) for more than 40 years. The paper was relevant to my expertise, so I said yes. However, when I tried to download the PDF file I was faced with a demand (not optional) to answer a “diversity questionnaire”.

I should have said right away that it was none of Elsevier’s business what I “identify as”, or what sort of person I spend my nights with. Foolishly, however, I answered their silly questionnaire, in which the first question asked if I was a man, a woman, or “other”. The other questions seemed mainly interested in my skin colour.

When I was on the Editorial Board we selected potential reviewers on our perception (sometimes wrong, of course) of their knowledge of the subject, etc., never any nonsense about “diversity”. In retrospect I could have answered “other (giraffe)” for the first question, and “green” for my skin colour, but I didn’t think of that until afterwards. Anyway, I am planning to write to the handling editor revoking my agreement to review the paper, and emphasizing that in the future I won’t agree to review papers if doing so requires me to answer questionnaires that have nothing to do with my competence.

Cartoon biology for cartoon people.

We’re cooking ourselves.

Americans have been treated for second-degree contact burns in Arizona as extreme heat caused pavement temperatures to surpass 71C (160F).

Over 110 million people were under extreme heat advisories in the south west as brutal conditions caused by a heat dome threatened to break records.

…

Hospitals and firefighters in the city have been treating residents who have been burned by scorching pavements.

Sidewalks are indeed nasty things in extreme heat.

Patients have been admitted with temperatures far exceeding the normal range. They have been treated with cold intravenous fluids and been placed in what look like small inflatable kayaks filled with ice.

One burn centre in Phoenix told the Washington Post it had treated 10 patients with contact burns serious enough to require hospitalisation.

H/t Mike Haubrich

Originally a comment by Francis Boyle on Men are not women=the earth is flat.

I learnt a useful term on Twitter(!) today – epistemological caste system. Roughly, the idea is that people like McKinnon see their job as purely the promotion of ideas. Testing or analysis of those ideas is strictly someone else’s job. Whatever passes for truth in their world view is taken on authority and that authority is taken as being fundamentally ethical. How that squares with identifying as a philosopher is anyone’s guess. (I suppose I could read the thesis in question but thankfully that’s not my job and I don’t identify as a masochist.)

@ktron

I certainly don’t know anyone who believes the Earth is flat but I follow several flat-Earth debunkers on Youtube and the first question I ask when I see someone new is “is this person a dupe or a scammer”. Eric Dubay who started the modern flat-Earth movement is undeniably a scammer. He’s a bullshitter in the Frankfurtian sense. He probably has less concern for truth than McKinnon, and like many new age gurus made a lucrative career out of shamelessly telling people exactly what they want to hear. Down one level, most of those who have positions in flat-Earth organisations, I suspect likewise know they are talking nonsense but they like the gig, even if it’s not financially rewarding. It’s really just a fun hobby for them. But here’s the thing. At the bottom there’s an endless parade of obvious dupes. These people simply lack the intellectual capacity to understand reality in any systematic way so they compensate by reflexive personnel incredulity which they glorify as scepticism. They don’t so much believe the Earth is flat as disbelieve anything they haven’t personally experienced or dreamt up. And to them that’s a brave and noble stance. And when you’ve found a virtually effort-free way of being special and virtuous you don’t want to go and ruin it by asking too many questions. While you don’t have to be very smart to believe the gender nonsense, you just have to be a bit less smart to believe the flat-Earth nonsense.

I don’t know if this is real or not, but if it is, it’s…interesting.

The first thing I notice isn’t even about the stupid destructive ideology being shoved at children who are too young to judge it critically. The first thing I notice is the fact that there are multiple clunky mistakes in the very first question. 1. “Robin feels like he etc is” – yuck. Robin feels that he is or Robin feels as if he is. This is school, not the pub. 2. …”like he/she/they is” – yo! If you’re gonna be teaching kids the New Progressive Whatsit, how about not taking it for granted that the “he” comes first? How about mixing it up a little? How about putting the “she” first? It’s so typical – here’s this cutting-edge new ideology, that retains all the old stupid sexist habits feminists have been pointing out for generations. 3. “he/she/they is” – insert eye-roll here.

More broadly – what a pack of stupid questions. That third one – is the answer supposed to be “a woman”? “Cis”? “Straight”? “Cis and straight”?

More broadly still why the hell is anyone being taught this bullshit in school?

Unless of course it’s not real and none of this is being taught in school.

Rowan Moore in The Observer takes the both-sides view of men who urge violence against women:

“If you see a Terf,” said Sarah Jane Baker, a speaker at last weekend’s Trans Pride in London, “punch them in the fucking face.”…As a number of pro-trans organisations and individuals have since said, this is an incitement to violence against women, both unacceptable and no help to trans people. It enables the rightwing press, as they duly did, to portray what was a celebratory and positive event as an act of hate.

Ah yes, that’s the important thing: calling for violence against women is bad for trans people, especially the male ones. Do lets be sure to rush at high speed past the violence against women part, because that’s old news and kind of boring, just as women are kind of boring.

The police, in a dangerous over-reaction, under pressure from the home secretary, Suella Braverman, have now arrested Baker.

Why is it an over-reaction? Why is it dangerous? Why is that more important and interesting and worth mentioning in The Observer than the danger to women from Baker?

Seditionists identify as not-seditionists. Who are you to deny their identity?

A growing number of Capitol rioters have gone back on their guilty pleas and apologies – including one of the most recognisable faces from 6 January.

The pretend-shaman guy.

A judge called his apology “the most remarkable I’ve heard in 34 years” and sentenced him to 41 months in prison – considerably less than the maximum allowed. Now more than a year-and-a-half later, Angeli is out of jail early, and his remorse is gone. “Regrets only weigh down the mind,” he told the BBC. “They’re like sandbags on a hot air balloon.”

Some minds need weighing down. People who do bad destructive dangerous things need to be weighed down so that they can learn to stop doing bad destructive dangerous things. The classic example of course is Trump himself, who never regrets anything. He’s a terrible human being, in large part because he never lets his mind be weighed down with thinking about the terrible things he says and does.

In addition to walking back regrets, a number of rioters have tried to capitalise on their involvement in the riots in a number of ways.

Derrick Evans, a former member of the West Virginia state legislature, resigned his post after being arrested. He pleaded guilty, apologised in court, and served three months in prison. Now he is running for a seat in the US House of Representatives, and he refers to himself and other defendants as “political prisoners”.

The term is commonly used across a broad section of the right and far-right of American politics to cast rioters as heroic and patriotic.

And their glorious cause is…Donald Trump.

Rhys McKinnon aka “Veronica Ivy” is back. He…hasn’t changed. For some reason MSNBC sees fit to publish his opinion that he has every right to compete against women in cycling races.

The International Olympic Committee and international sport federations have been grappling with inclusion policies for at least 20 years. 

What does he mean by “inclusion policies”? Allowing men like him to steal prizes and medals from women.

Are trans women really women? If you think they are, then there’s no real debate here.

If you think they aren’t, then there’s likely nothing I can say that will change your mind. It’s a little like arguing with a flat-Earther: If someone is convinced that the Earth is flat, then they will likely find any reason, no matter how irrational, to hold on to that belief, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. 

Who is the flat-Earther here? The people who don’t buy the new ideology that says men can turn themselves into women? Or the ones who say they can they can they CAN?

Trans women are women. Trans women are female. Our sport’s governing body (cycling’s Union Cycliste Internationale, the one that banned Armstrong for life) says I’m female. My U.S. and Canadian identification documents say I’m female, including my birth certificate. My medical records all list me as female. So officials in sports, government and medicine all consider me, a trans woman, to be female. The people who disagree are just wrong.

Officials in sports, government and medicine have been coaxed and/or bullied into embracing a lie. Their embrace doesn’t make the lie true. The people who say the lie is a lie are not wrong.

Martina Navratilova effectively called me a cheater for being a trans woman and following all the UCI rules — and passing all my drugs tests — en route to my Masters Track Cycling World Championships.

Diddums. Now think about how all the women you cheated felt. (Mind you, he already has, of course. He likes it. He loves doing that to women.)

Bizarrely, MSNBC captions McKinnon’s op-ed with

Dr. Veronica Ivy (previously Rachel McKinnon) is an associate professor of philosophy at the College of Charleston in Charleston, S.C. She is currently writing a book on trans and intersex women athletes’ rights.

But the College of Charleston got rid of him – denied him tenure, upon which he quit – two years ago.