Kathleen Stock asks:

Have you heard about the latest injustice in women’s sport? No, I don’t mean the disparity in pay or prize monies in comparison to men’s professional teams, or the relative lack of access to high-quality facilities.

Hell no, who cares about that? No, the burning injustice is keeping men out of women’s cycling.

Such is the tear-jerking tale presented to us by the cyclist and trans woman — that is, biologically male — Emily Bridges in this month’s edition of Vogue, objecting to British Cycling’s recent move to make the elite female category actually do what it says on the tin. Alongside a photogenic selection of newsreaders, entrepreneurs and nepo-baby models, Bridges is the only sporting figure featured as a member of “The Vogue 25” power list of the “women defining and redefining Britain in 2023”. And there’s an accompanying opinion piece in which Bridges argues that trans women should be admitted into women’s cycling in order to “diversify” an elite sport. Doing so, we are told, would also help “challenge” other inequalities, such as those involving “power, class, money and capital”. The athlete is pictured wearing a Ralph Lauren sweater (£300), satin trousers (£229) and a titanium watch by luxury brand Audemars Piguet (price available on request).

Plus, he’s a man. He’s a man woofing about challenging inequalities, like for instance by letting him do women’s cycling so that he’ll be sure to win. (He doesn’t actually want lots of men to do women’s cycling. You may be able to work out why if you think hard.)

[I]t seems some kinds of perceived unfairness are harder for this young cyclist to tolerate than others. Racing against people whose genetics mean they have little hope of catching you at full pelt? Fine. Politely asking people with penises to compete against other people with penises? Completely unacceptable, apparently. The piece closes with a rousing commitment to fight British Cycling’s decision “in the courts and the streets”.

Allons enfants eh?!

Contrary to what Vogue apparently thinks, allowing males to compete in women’s sport doesn’t “diversify” it, just as letting cheetahs run in men’s sprint races wouldn’t diversify male sport. As a political value, diversity is not an end in itself, and has no particular value for its own sake. 

But it’s a buzzword. Without our buzzwords we are lost. It goes with “community” and “inclusion.” We must be a diverse incloosive communidee.

Vogue doesn’t care, though. The fact that its power list contains Bridges but no female athletes — none of Britain’s brilliant running, footballing, cricketing, tennis-playing or hockey-playing heroines — shows just how seriously it takes women’s sport, which is not at all. Professional sport is where a woman gets obsessive, fierce, sweaty and shouty and loses herself in pursuit of winning — caring not one bit if her hair gets out of place, her clothes torn, or if she gets a ball or an elbow in the face. If every woman behaved like that, where would high-end women’s magazines be?

In a clinch with Luis Rubiales, no doubt.

The Taliban continues to find new places to tell women to stay out of.

The Taliban government have banned women from visiting the Band-e-Amir national park in Bamiyan province.

Afghanistan’s acting minister of virtue and vice, Mohammad Khaled Hanafi, said women had not been observing hijab inside the park.

And therefore they will be fucking every man inside the park and nobody will know who anybody’s baby is ever again and the world will fall to pieces. Put the women in a smaller box!

Band-e-Amir is a significant tourist attraction, becoming Afghanistan’s first national park in 2009.

And now it’s not a national park any more, because half the population is told to stay out.

The Taliban have a history of implementing bans on women doing certain activities on what it insists is a temporary basis, including preventing them from attending schools in December 2022.

The ban on visiting the Band-E-Amir national park is the latest in a long list of activities that women have been prevented from doing since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021.

Most recently, the Taliban ordered hair and beauty salons in Afghanistan to shut and in mid-July stopped women from sitting the national university entrance exams.

If they can’t put women into smaller and smaller boxes what is the point of them at all? They need a purpose in life.

The Palmer Report is reassuring:

Republicans love nothing more than inventing doomsday narratives about how they’ve supposedly already won, and the media loves nothing more than hyping those empty doomsday narratives for ratings. Usually these kinds of silly narratives fall apart of their own accord, as everyone is able to see in hindsight that the particular “magic wand” in question never existed. But one doomsday narrative that just won’t go away is the notion that Georgia Republicans are going to be able to remove Fani Willis from power and thus magically save Donald Trump. In the hope of putting this one to bed once and for all, let’s review why this isn’t really going to be a story, so we can move on from it.

Months ago a series of headlines popped up claiming that Georgia Republicans had given themselves the ability to remove District Attorneys from office. But that’s not what actually happened. Georgia Republicans could have written this legislation any way they wanted. But they made a point of not giving themselves the ability to remove District Attorneys, and instead granted that power to an independent review board starting in October.

If Georgia Republicans were actually looking to remove Fani Willis, they’d have granted themselves the ability to remove her. And they’d have given themselves that ability immediately, so they could have gotten rid of her before she brought indictments. Instead they gave that power to someone else, on a delay. It seemed obvious right then and there that they weren’t trying to get rid of Willis, they were just trying to create the appearance that they were trying to get rid of Willis. Why? It’s an easy opportunity to fire up Trump’s base and fundraise off it.

It’s the exact same reason Jim Jordan just announced House hearings into Fani Willis. There isn’t anything that Jordan can do to hurt Willis or help Trump, but he’s sure going to make it look like he’s trying to hurt Willis and help Trump. These things are always about appearances. Specifically it’s about baiting the media (on the left and right) into running stories which falsely imply that Republicans do indeed have these kinds of magical powers.

Oh. Well if that’s true…I’ll stop tearing my hair out.

Palmer goes on to say there’s no sign Georgia Republicans are that keen, nor is there reason to think they would succeed, nor is there reason to think the attempt would survive the inevitable court challenges.

That’s the most maddening aspect of all these magic wand ideas. Not only are they generally based on an idea that isn’t a real thing to begin with, it’s also laid out as having the ability to magically succeed without any consequence, or pushback, or legal challenge. It’s one side waving a magic wand and the other side saying “Oops, we’re doomed” and falling through a trap door.

Hahahaha ok good to know, I’ve been feeling all oops we’re doomed and falling through a trap door this afternoon.

Meanwhile back in the real world, Fani Willis clearly isn’t worried about being magically removed from power. If she were, she would have brought her indictments a long time ago. She had a grand jury window back in May, which she reportedly passed up when some of the fake electors agreed to immunity deals which made her case against Trump stronger. If she thought she were up against some kind of magical ticking clock, she’d have brought her case as soon as she could, in the hope of getting it to trial more quickly.

Remind me to be more suspicious of news media hype.

They may be able to sabotage the whole thing.

[Trump’s] Republican allies are rallying to his defense—seeking not only to run political interference for him, but also remove Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from office, potentially undermining the prosecution entirely.

…

In a Facebook post earlier this week, State Senator Clint Dixon accused the DA of prosecuting the ex-president to become “some sort of leftist celebrity,” and said he would call on a newly-formed committee of political appointees to “take action” against her. That commission, approved by Republican Governor Brian Kemp in May, was ostensibly created to make it easier to oust progressive, reform-minded DAs. “I am not gonna stand idly by as rogue or incompetent prosecutors refuse to uphold the law,” the governor said ahead of the law’s signing. In this case, of course, Dixon and the Republicans are seeking to use the law to target Willis not for any reform efforts, but explicitly because she brought charges against Trump and his allies. In his Facebook post, Dixon acknowledged the “reality” of the Trump indictment in Georgia “is one of the reasons we passed a law.”

“There’s a one-hundred percent chance that’s going to happen,” as Clark Cunningham, a professor of law at Georgia State University, told Rachel Maddow on MSNBC Thursday night.

So that’s just great.

Unlike in the federal cases brought by Jack Smith, a conviction in Georgia would not be subject to presidential or gubernatorial pardon—and the RICO charges in the state mean he’d almost certainly face jail time if found guilty. To hobble that prosecution would be an extraordinary and outrageous move. But these are desperate times for Trump—and it has his allies, in Georgia and beyond, reaching for desperate measures. “We’re not going to keep putting up with this,” Sarah Palin said on Newsmax Thursday night, seemingly calling for “civil war” after Trump’s surrender. “We do need to rise up and take our country back.”

We get open mobocracy or we get civil war. Fun times.

Janice Turner on women as spare parts factories:

Throughout the exultant coverage of Britain’s first womb transplant, I waited for news about the donor. We met the shiny-eyed, triumphant surgeons who’d worked a Sunday in their special double operating theatre. We learnt about the recipient, born without a uterus, now having periods and waiting to start IVF. But of her sister who had donated her womb there was just a cursory, “she’s recovering well”.

The gravity of her sacrifice was wafted aside, although this was a radical hysterectomy, removing not just the uterus and cervix but the “cuff” (upper part) of the vagina. Given the complex transplant process it took many more hours, with greater surgical risk than a conventional hysterectomy, an operation that can throw women into menopause, cause blood clots and nerve damage, make sexual climax weaker, even unachievable. A tenth of womb donors suffer complications and need further surgery.

It’s not something a sister should let a sister do. It’s not something a friend should let a friend do; it’s not even something a stranger should let a stranger do. It’s too much. It’s way too much.

There are already concerns about women being coerced to donate. In the UK case, the 42-year-old donor sister had borne two children and completed her family. Many of us would give a life-saving kidney to a sibling. But now there’s a new yardstick of sisterly love. If you have no further use for your womb, why hoard it? Women in conservative cultures could also face strong parental pressure.

And life-saving is a whole different thing from chance of gestation-saving.

The surrogacy industry has also laid the way by erasing women as human beings with rights, needs and feelings from the whole reproductive process. Celebrity couples pose with a new baby while the woman who carried and gave birth to it is invisible, a “gestational carrier”, never a mother.

Maybe we should focus on just manufacturing people, and leave women out of the equation altogether.

Yo, guys, your contempt for women is showing.

The Spanish football federation has threatened to sue Jenni Hermoso, the player at the centre of a row over its president’s conduct, for lying and defamation.

Lots of luck with that seeing as how he planted that unwanted kiss on her in full view of a global audience.

It has also threatened to sue the 79 women’s football players who signed a letter in which they refused to play for their country as long as Luis Rubiales remained in his post.

In a statement, the federation said it would take the “necessary legal action” and told the players that “playing for the national team is an obligation on any member of the federation called upon to do so”.

Bros before hoes yeah?

“At no time did I consent to the kiss,” Hermoso said in a statement. “I won’t tolerate having my word doubted, much less have people inventing things that I didn’t say.”

Shortly after the incident, the federation issued a statement in which Hermoso purportedly said the kiss was consensual and that she and Rubiales enjoyed a close relationship.

First assault her, then lie about her in an official statement. Good look, boys.

In a written statement, Hermoso said: “I don’t want to interfere in the legal process but I feel obliged to report that the words used by Sr Luis Rubiales to explain what happened are categorically untrue and are part of the manipulative culture that he himself has created. I have not been respected.”

The federation reproduced a series of still photographs of the incident that it claimed showed that Hermoso lifted Rubiales off his feet and was not only willing but an instigator of the kiss.

In fact, she tried to rape him, right? No, make that she did rape him. And she got him pregnant, and then walked away. Yeah? What’s the Spanish for “Karen”?

In an interview with El País, Miquel Iceta, the sports and culture minister, said: “I regret that for Spain, a country admired around the world as a champion of rights and freedoms, this episode has taken us back to an image of machista Spain in which women’s rights are not respected. It’s a backward step.”

Iceta added that as the federation had stood by Rubiales, the government would now take the necessary measures to remove him from his post.

Yolanda Díaz, Spain’s acting vice-president, said: “Señor Rubiales doesn’t understand what he’s done. He’s not up to the job. He should resign and save us the embarrassment. The days of impunity for macho behaviour are over.”

Give him the boot.

The Telegraph has a whole slew of articles on Trump’s mugshot and other aspects of his arrest. I get the sense they don’t admire him all that much.

Trump ‘loses two stone and gains an inch in height’

Donald Trump has grown an inch and lost more than two stone according to the measurements recorded during his booking at a Georgia jail.

It is unclear how his details were recorded by Fulton County Jail on Thursday, but it is thought Mr Trump may have given his own measurements.

The former president’s details were recorded as 6ft 3in (190.5cm) and 215lbs (97.5kg), which is considered by doctors as “overweight” but no longer obese.

The details suggest he is more than 24.2lbs lighter than in April, when he was booked in Manhattan for a separate case over “hush money” payments.

His measurements then, at 6ft 2in and 240lbs, would push him over the threshold for obesity, with a body mass index of 30.81.

Do we think he’s lost 24 pounds recently? No we do not.

Mr Trump’s White House doctors tried to help him lose weight during his tenure as president, by hiding cauliflower in mashed potato dishes and recommending that exercise machines [be] installed in the building.

Well you can install exercise machines in every room of the building but you’re not gonna get Lazy Boy to use them.

Donald Trump becomes first ex-US president to have mugshot taken

The 45th president is pictured striking a hostile pose, with his eyebrows contracted, lips pursed and a menacing scowl on his face.

And Trump and his goons plan to use it.

Mr Trump has seen a surge in polls in the wake of his four indictments and believes he can effectively market the mugshot to mobilise his supporters, who believe the charges are politically-motivated.

“This mugshot will forever go down in history as a symbol of America’s defiance of tyranny,” said a Trump campaign fundraising email.

Well yes, but not in the sense the trumpies mean it.

There are a number of people who genuinely believe that they are trapped in the wrong body, and they want to be recognized as the gender that their mind and soul have always told them that they are.

People can genuinely believe lots of things that aren’t true, and even things that are obviously absurd. Religions are good at coming up with whole elaborate systems of untrue things for people to believe. Trans ideology is very like religion in this sense.

The entertainment industry is also quite good at coming up with untrue stories for our entertainment and even enlightenment. The Wizard of Oz is not true, but it’s a good story. Big is not true, but it’s a good story.

We are our bodies. We may dislike aspects of them, we may dislike everything about them, but they are still ours and not anyone else’s.

No. No, he really doesn’t. Even in their terms he really doesn’t. I mean come on – an unconvincing dyed combover? A dyed blond combover on a man in his seventies? “Looking hard” would be a grizzled crewcut, not brassy strands fluffed and pasted over a naked scalp. And the fake tan. And the dumb perpetual blue suit red tie white shirt. And the fact that he looks like a spoiled child who just broke his favorite air-rifle.

He’s petulant, whiny, demanding, greedy, self-involved. It’s true that he has no morals or scruples or empathy, but that by itself doesn’t make him what Fox fool means by “hard.”

So if you’re indicted as the boss of a crime gang the thing to do is milk it for publicity and $$$.

Mr Trump posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, for the first time since January 2021 to share the address of his website and the mugshot with an all-capital letters caption: “Election interference. Never surrender!”

Within hours, his campaign website was selling mugshot-branded mugs, t-shirts and drink coolers.

John Bolton, who served as national security advisor under Mr Trump, said the image was likely carefully staged. “I think it’s intended to be a sign of intimidation against the prosecutors and the judges,” he told CNN. “He could’ve smiled. He could’ve looked benign,” Mr Bolton added. “Instead he looks like a thug.”

A sign of intimidation??? Oh surely not.

Some right-wing commentators have been drawing analogies with Nelson Mandela and Dr Martin Luther King Jr, who had mugshots taken, including in an iconic 1963 shot from Birmingham Jail.

“They did the same thing to Martin Luther King Jr,” tweeted comedian and Trump supporter Terrence K Williams. “They go after the good guys and especially the ones who fight for freedom and expose evilness and corruption. I stand with President Trump and this mugshot makes me want to vote for him even more.”

Sigh.

Trump is back on Musk’s toy.

Election interference, he screams. The election interference is coming from inside the house. That phone call to Raffensperger for instance? Stark staring election interference. Telling a secretary of state to “find” the exact number of votes needed to give Trump the Georgia electoral votes instead of Biden – that, sir, is election interference.

Pink News posted that tweet (aka “post”) twice, eight hours ago and one hour ago. Always do your libeling twice, just to be thorough.

Let’s read the article.

The caption under the photo at the top:

A bomb threat, which followed Riley Gaines spreading outrage over a California library’s handling of hate speech, saw the branch and nearby elementary school forced to evacuate.

Lots of things “follow” lots of other things. Correlation does not equal causation.

Subhead:

Anti-trans harassment pedalled on social media by former US college swimmer Riley Gaines has been linked with a bomb threat at a California library. 

They mean “peddled” not “pedalled.” But more to the point, they’re lying about the “anti-trans harassment.” Disputing an ideology is not harassment.

On Monday (21 August), Mary L. Stephens library in Davis, a city about 14 miles from Sacramento, received an anonymous bomb threat in a phone call that included anti-LGBTQ+ speech. The building and a nearby elementary school were evacuated. 

Of course we don’t know what “anti-LGBTQ+ speech” means here. The label serves the usual purpose of insinuating that lesbians and gays were subjected to hostility, when the issue is probably trans ideology. Pink News is routinely and resolutely dishonest this way in its “reporting.”

The threat came a day after the Yolo county chapter of Moms for Liberty hosted a meeting during which trans inclusion in sport was criticised.

That’s a lie. Inclusion of men in women’s sport is the issue, not “trans inclusion” in general.

During the event, library staff were forced to repeatedly warn speakers that misgendering athletes broke the library’s code of conduct.

Forced how? Cattle prods?

After continuing to misgender trans athletes, a staff member asked them to leave. 

Whoops! Dangling participle. Silly staff member, continuing to misgender trans athletes and then asking them to leave.

Jumping ahead:

Gaines has actively campaigned against trans participation in women’s sports after she tied with trans swimmer Lia Thomas for fifth place in the women’s 200m freestyle final at the 2022 National Collegiate Athletics Association swimming and diving championships. 

Same old same old lie. The issue is not “trans participation in women’s sports,” it’s men’s invasion of women’s sports.

Punch line:

PinkNews has contacted Mary L. Stephens library and Riley Gaines for comment. 

Riley says Pink News has not said a word to her via any medium.

Pink News wants Riley Gaines to sue them. Success!

Pink News wants it to be the new normal that knowing men are not women=”anti-trans harassment”.

Mugshot has landed, repeat, mugshot has landed.

He’s such an idiot. Clearly the idea is Mister Defiant. You can’t get me, you’re all a bunch of communists, I’ll have your guts for garters, I AM A TOUGH GUY. But he just looks stupid and infantile. A disdainful smirk would have been much more effective, but he’s too stupid to think of it.

Of course, I say stupid, but he may win in the end all the same. This tells us, depressingly, that there are a lot more people who are both stupid and mean than we realized.

I skowll achoo. Im tuff. I will kill yooo.

Self-righteous much?

Replies turned off of course. Quote-tweets highly critical. One I was surprised to see –

I would have expected him to be with the cool kids.

Because trans ideology is a secular religion. Heretics must be hunted down and punished.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Out of place but possible.

I’m skeptical that a male could carry a fetus to term at all. Ectopic pregnancies in women are still in women. Male and female hormone systems, and even the basic composition of their blood, are fundamentally different to each other. I know very little about the biology of pregnancy, but I don’t have to know much to know that hormones, bloodstream, metabolism, even antibodies… pretty much every system of the female body plays some kind of role throughout gestation. I just can’t see an embryo, even one inside a uterus, plopped into a male body somehow coming out remotely okay, because I’m highly skeptical that male bodies have evolved to have these same kinds of complex reactions to a fetus showing up inside them. It’s just nuts.

This stuff jumps readily to mind, because I’ve been reading a lot about the biology of homosexuality, which is a good example of the sensitive nature of the interaction between mother and embryo/fetus. Same-sex preference in humans is caused in part by subtle shifts in hormone exposure in the early stages of gestation, which can be influenced by antibodies present in women. (E.g., the famous “birth order effect”, in which each subsequent male fetus pregnancy is more likely to become a homosexual in adulthood, because of subtle changes in the immune system of the mother.) It’s all a very elaborate and finely calibrated physical process, and the whole of a woman takes part in the creation of a child inside her. The idea that we should just assume men can probably do this, too, based on nothing but their desire to be able to, is even more bonkers than allowing men in women’s sports.

There really is no bottom to the craziness of gender identity ideology.

Headin’ down South to the land of the pine

to get arrested for a PERFECT PHONE CALL.

Stollen:

Stolen:

Hahaha this was bound to happen.

Etc.

Creeping fascism continues its creep.

I don’t mean metaphorically or hyperbolically. This is how it’s done – this perversion of courts and legislative bodies.

House Republicans took aim on Thursday at the Georgia prosecutor bringing a sweeping felony racketeering case against former President Donald J. Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, moving to investigate the woman pursuing the case just hours before Mr. Trump was to be booked at an Atlanta jail.

Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced he was opening an inquiry into Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney, questioning whether she had collaborated with Biden administration officials and targeting any federal funding her office receives.

Trump is the guy who tried to muscle the Georgia Secretary of State into “giving” him the votes to move Georgia’s electors to his side, and here’s a member of the federal legislature pretending it’s the other guy who’s dirty.

In a letter to Ms. Willis sent on Thursday, Mr. Jordan accused her of carrying out a politically motivated prosecution.

The phone call. The phone call to Brad Raffensperger. Willis didn’t do that, Trump did. It’s a Mafia-style move and there’s no way Jim Jordan doesn’t know that.

“I make decisions in this office based on the facts and the law,” she said. “The law is completely nonpartisan. That’s how decisions are made in every case.” She added that her office had brought 11 other racketeering cases before filing charges against Mr. Trump: “We followed the same process. We look at the facts. We look at the law, and we bring charges.”

Sure but when it’s Trump you’re supposed to let him off, because that’s the integrityous thing to do.