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.

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.