Woman cyclist driven out of the sport by men taking over.

Still in Melbourne:

Updating to add the Facebook version:

NAZIS CRASH WOMEN’S RALLY IN MELBOURNE – questions raised re police behaviour

Yesterday a “Let Women Speak” rally was held in Melbourne featuring visiting British women’s advocate Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (also known as Posie Parker) as well as local women. This movement is concerned that biological men are undermining the integrity of women’s sport and spaces such as bathrooms.

AJA unreservedly condemns the Nazis who invaded the rally. These ugly thugs likely saw an opportunity to hijack the event for their own publicity.

There was some very odd policing. While the Victorian police held back the trans activists who arrived to disrupt the rally, they did not do the same to the Nazis. Rather they seemed to facilitate their entry to where the women’s rally was taking place on parliament steps. WATCH the video and form your own view.

This disruption caused the women’s rally to disperse early. Many are saying the police should have stopped the Nazis.

The Nazis were condemned by the women’s rally organisers – one contacted AJA in distress explaining what had happened. The “Let Women Speak” organisers had nothing to do with the Nazis.

It is shameful that some politicians and media are now trying to smear this women’s movement with the false accusation of involvement with Nazis.

“Katy” Montgomerie is doing his usual sneer lie taunt routine.

It’s not a woman and he’s not being grabbed by the throat. It’s a man who stole the mic to prevent women from speaking at the Let Women Speak rally. Montgomerie just keeps repeating the lie over and over and over.

The man is a man, and he wasn’t invited and he grabbed the mic so another man stopped him. This is a man forcibly silencing women, not a woman subject to violence. Montgomerie gets off on this Repeat the Lie routine.

It’s not violence against women, it’s prevention of male violence against women. He’s not a woman but trans, he’s a man.

He’s a man. He apparently shoved a woman away and grabbed the mic from her. That’s what justifies forcibly stopping him.

Updating to add

Another update: I’ve found video of the moment via Stone the Crone:

Not all that liberal.

An outspoken Victorian Liberal MP is set to be expelled from the party over her involvement in an anti-transgender rally attended by neo-Nazis.

Moira Deeming spoke at the “Let Women Speak” event held by British anti-trans activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull outside Victorian parliament on Saturday.

The wording is, as always, misleading. The label “anti-trans” implies (as it’s intended to, of course) that the Let Women Speak event was in opposition to trans people when it’s the ideology we reject. This obfuscation makes it sound maybe possibly almost reasonable to kick someone out of the Liberal party for attending.

A group of neo-Nazis joined the anti-trans demonstrators and repeatedly performed the Nazi salute, sparking violent clashes as police kept counter protesters at bay.

The neo-Nazis didn’t so much “join” as “invade.” There’s a photo of one cop high-fiving one of the neo-Nazis. There’s no such photo of a gender-critical woman high-fiving a neo-Nazi.

Opposition leader John Pesutto said he met Ms Deeming on Sunday afternoon and discussed her involvement in organising, promoting and participating in a rally that had speakers and others publicly linked with far right-wing extremist groups, including neo-Nazi activists.

What does “publicly linked with” mean? Anything more than “trans activists say they’re all neo-Nazis!!”? KJK’s rallies are open to everyone, but they’re not neo-Nazi rallies.

“This is not an issue about free speech but a member of the parliamentary party associating with people whose views are abhorrent to my values, the values of the Liberal Party and the wider community,” Mr Pesutto said in a statement.

What values?

“The Liberal Party I joined and which I am now honoured to lead must strive to represent all Victorians.”

Except women.

“Regardless of religious faith, race, sexual preference and identity, Victorians everywhere should know that the Liberal Party is inclusive and can be a voice for them.”

Unless they’re women, especially feminist women.

Like so many people, this stupid man doesn’t grasp that you can’t be “inclusive” and banish all feminist women who defend women’s rights and spaces. You can’t be “inclusive” of men who steal women’s rights and identities and of women.

Mr Pesutto labelled the scenes of black-clad white supremacists marching along Spring Street an “abomination” and “affront” to values all Victorians should hold dear.

But their presence is not Moira Deeming’s fault.

And now Pesutto is punishing her for the fact that the police let the masked men invade the rally. It’s disgusting.

Wyoming makes abortion medication illegal:

The Wyoming bill, which was passed by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature earlier this month, makes it illegal to “prescribe, dispense, distribute, sell or use any drug for the purpose of procuring or performing an abortion”.

Women must not be allowed to plan their own lives. Women must be public property.

Wyoming American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) advocacy director Antonio Serrano criticised the bill, saying “a person’s health, not politics, should guide important medical decisions – including the decision to have an abortion”.

Nice of him to weaken his own criticism by saying “a person’s health” instead of a woman’s. Nice of him to delete women from the abortion issue as if it were not an attack on women specifically and exclusively. Nice of him to be more concerned about the four or five trans men who might be annoyed if he said “woman” than he is about millions of women.

Maybe maybe just maybe trans ideology isn’t quite the red-hot vote-winner that its fans were thinking.

Labour must fix its stance on transgender issues to win the next election, Sir Keir Starmer has been told.

Senior figures within the party believe there is a need to clarify its policies on the issue and bring them closer in line with where the public is.

They’re alarmed by Nicola Sturgeon’s crashing and burning.

Figures within Labour believe their policies must not fall into a similar trap whereby “in trying to do good for a very small minority group, you inadvertently offend an awful lot of women who feel their place in society is being eliminated. You have to balance the needs of different groups”.

Stop right there. It’s not a matter of “offending.” It’s not a matter of women “feeling” you’re trashing our rights. It’s reality. It’s a matter of the blazingly obvious fact that enabling men to displace women violates women’s rights. Just shut up with this subjective deniable “offend-feel” shit. We’re not talking about our feeeeeelings, we’re talking about our rights.

Labour MPs are concerned that the party needs to “come up with an answer” to the trans question that “secures women’s rights”.

Labour MPs also need to get it through their heads that women are not some tiny minority it’s ok to trample for the sake of men who claim to be women.

Trump did a thing in 2018…

President Donald Trump signed the biggest rollback of bank regulations since the global financial crisis into law Thursday.

The measure designed to ease rules on all but the largest banks passed both chambers of Congress with bipartisan support. Backers say the legislation will lift burdens unnecessarily put on small and medium-sized lenders by the Dodd-Frank financial reform act and boost economic growth.

Opponents, however, have argued the changes could open taxpayers to more liability if the financial system collapses or increase the chances of discrimination in mortgage lending.

Cough Silicon cough Valley cough Bank cough

The measure eases restrictions on all but the largest banks. It raises the threshold to $250 billion from $50 billion under which banks are deemed too important to the financial system to fail. Those institutions also would not have to undergo stress tests or submit so-called living wills, both safety valves designed to plan for financial disaster.

Silicon Valley what now?

Poor Trump, no one tells him anything, he has to get his information from the news media like any other shlub.

Donald Trump says he expects to be arrested on Tuesday and has urged his supporters to launch mass protests.

However his lawyer said there had been no communication from law enforcement and the former president’s post was based on media reports.

And gossip, don’t forget gossip.

The district attorney’s office has not yet commented. Mr Trump’s lawyer, Susan Necheles, said her team had not heard anything from law enforcement officials.

“Since this is a political prosecution, the district attorney’s office has engaged in a practice of leaking everything to the press, rather than communicating with President Trump’s attorneys as would be done in a normal case,” she said.

That’s so sad when he’s such a norm-following respectful punctilious guy himself.

The Republican Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, has hit out at the investigation, calling it “an outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA [district attorney]”.

There it is again, that stupid UK media trick of translating discourse into physical violence. Kevin McCarthy didn’t “hit out at” anything; he said words. Metaphor is all very well but this brand of metaphor is highly manipulative, and journalists should not be using it.

Very enlightening piece by Jonathan Haidt about the rise in depression among girls and how catastrophizing is involved.

In May 2014, Greg Lukianoff invited me to lunch to talk about something he was seeing on college campuses that disturbed him. Greg is the president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), and he has worked tirelessly since 2001 to defend the free speech rights of college students. That almost always meant pushing back against administrators who didn’t want students to cause trouble, and who justified their suppression of speech with appeals to the emotional “safety” of students—appeals that the students themselves didn’t buy. But in late 2013, Greg began to encounter new cases in which students were pushing to ban speakers, punish people for ordinary speech, or implement policies that would chill free speech. These students arrived on campus in the fall of 2013 already accepting the idea that books, words, and ideas could hurt them. Why did so many students in 2013 believe this, when there was little sign of such beliefs in 2011?

Greg is prone to depression, and after hospitalization for a serious episode in 2007, he learned CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression. 

What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from.

Ahhhhhh. That’s very interesting, and would explain a lot.

Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT. 

Do catastrophize. Do use your emotions as a guide to reality.

They wrote an essay about it.

After our essay came out, things on campus got much worse. The fall of 2015 marked the beginning of a period of protests and high-profile conflicts on campus that led many or most universities to implement policies that embedded this new way of thinking into campus culture with administrative expansions such as “bias response teams” to investigate reports of “microaggressions.” Surveys began to show that most students and professors felt that they had to self-censor. The phrase “walking on eggshells” became common. Trust in higher ed plummeted, along with the joy of intellectual discovery and sense of goodwill that had marked university life throughout my career. 

2015 eh? The summer of 2015 is when all those loonies at Freethought Blogs got to work catastrophizing about me. I was supposed to walk on eggshells, but I told them to fuck off instead.

Greg and I decided to expand our original essay into a book in which we delved into the many causes of the sudden change in campus culture. Our book focused on three “great untruths” that seemed to be widely believed by the students who were trying to shut down speech and prosecute dissent:

1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
2. Always trust your feelings.
3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people. 

All those people screaming at “terfs” – that’s where their heads are. No wonder it’s all such a clusterfuck.

There’s more. I’ll get to it later, because there’s a lot to think about. I like to take small bites.

Well it’s none of my business but the Guardian saw fit to publish an article about it so I guess that makes it everyone’s business.

Jon Snow ‘at complete ease’ with becoming a father again in his 70s

The broadcaster, 75, and his wife, the academic Precious Lunga, 48, welcomed a baby boy via a surrogate in March 2021 after struggling with “medical setbacks and miscarriages”.

“Via a surrogate”=a different woman did the work of gestation and pushing out.

Snow elaborated:

“I haven’t found age relevant to my relationship with my son or grandsons. Is being a grandad different to being a dad? Not really. In the end, it’s all love, isn’t it?”

Yes but that’s not the issue. The issue is that the kid will have less time with his father than most children do. The issue is that there’s a bigger than usual risk that the kid will lose his father in childhood. Maybe not an altogether kind thing to do?

Pink News sees a fistfight where there isn’t one:

Oxfam hits back at critics of trans-inclusive guidance who claim its ‘erasing mums and dads’

No it doesn’t “hit back,” because nobody “hit” in the first place. Saying words is not hitting. Oxfam responded or reacted or issued a statement; it didn’t “hit.” Nobody “hit” Oxfam.

Also, why “mums and dads” instead of mothers and fathers? Why not treat the readers like adults?

The 92-page toolkit offers advice on how to engage with different groups of people which Oxfam staff and volunteers might come into contact with, including people with a disability, sex workers and the LGBTQ+ community.  

But not women, of course. Women don’t matter. Women aren’t worth mentioning. Women are Karens.

An updated version of the guide, which went live on Monday (13 March), immediately courted controversy for allegedly ‘erasing mothers and fathers’ by encouraging the use of gender neutral terms in certain situations.  

There it is – mothers and fathers. So why the cloying “mums and dads” in the headline? To manipulate, of course.

Under the ‘LGBTQIA+ Rights and Inclusion’ section of the document, the charity stated people use the phrases “parent” or “parenthood” when unsure of the gender of a particular caregiver but equally respect people who want to be called ‘mother’ or ‘father’.

The guidance stated: “In patriarchal culture, social norms around gender result in designated roles for parents that reflect expectations of that gender.”

Well it’s not a social norm that it’s the mother who gestates and pushes out the baby, or that it’s the mother who breastfeeds the baby. It’s not a social norm that the father doesn’t do any of those things.

“Some transgender and non-binary people may identify with these roles. However, some may prefer to use other names to designate parenthood. 

“The important principle here is to be inclusive in the broader sense by describing people as ‘parents’, but if individual parents have a preference for a role name, to respect their choice.” 

Is it really? Does that come up a lot in Oxfam’s work?

I doubt it, myself.

Trump’s lawyer says he’ll surrender if he’s indicted. Very big of him I’m sure. The lawyer didn’t mention that he would also incite his worshipers to riot.

Former President Donald Trump will surrender to face criminal charges if indicted by a Manhattan grand jury, his lawyer said Friday evening.

…

Trump is under investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office for his company recording as legal expenses a reimbursement to his former personal attorney Michael Cohen for $130,000 he gave porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to keep her quiet about an alleged sexual tryst with Trump.

Trump is living at his Florida club these days.

Under Florida law, the state’s governor is responsible for making sure a person in the state is arrested and delivered to another state if that person is indicted on a felony charge.

The governor in question is Ron DeSantis, a rival and an object of trumpy insults. Fun stuff.

Speaking of Trump about to be arrested, he also failed to report a quarter of a million dollars worth of prezzies from foreign governments.

Donald Trump’s White House failed to report more than 100 gifts from foreign nations worth more than a quarter-million dollars, according to a US government report, and several of those gifts – including a lifesize painting of Trump given by the president of El Salvador and golf clubs from the prime minister of Japan – are still unaccounted for.

The revelations came as part of a report on Friday from Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. The report details numerous unreported items, among them 16 gifts from Saudi Arabia worth more than $45,000 in all, including a dagger valued at up to $24,000, and 17 presents from India that include expensive cufflinks, a vase and a $4,600 model of the Taj Mahal.

Funnily enough, there are rules about this.

The Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act requires that gifts above $480 given to the president, vice-president and their families by foreign officials must be reported to the state department.

For very fucking obvious reasons. If they’re not reported, they become bribes.

The top Democrat on the committee, congressman Jamie Raskin, said the findings indicate “a brazen disregard for the rule of law and its systematic mishandling of large gifts”.

Which amounts to taking bribes.

The report is the result of a year-long investigation into Trump’s failure to disclose foreign gifts while in office, according to the Washington Post, and runs 15 pages long.

“Today’s preliminary findings suggest again the Trump administration’s brazen disregard for the rule of law and its systematic mishandling of large gifts from foreign governments, including many lavish personalized gifts that vastly exceed the statutory limit in value but were never reported – some that are still missing today,” said Raskin in a statement.

He’s a greedy corrupt criminal. Maybe it was a mistake to make him president.

Trump is expecting to be arrested next Tuesday and is inciting violence in response.

“TAKE OUR NATION BACK” is pure January 6.

Not how to teach science:

They deleted it.

Too bad she has faith that men can be women.

BBC insults women some more.

The BBC has rejected viewer complaints about the trans rapist Isla Bryson being referred to as a woman on a Scottish news programme. The corporation’s executive complaints unit (ECU) launched an investigation after concerns were raised about how Bryson was described in coverage of his conviction for raping two women.

…

A presenter said: “A woman has been found guilty of raping two women prior to changing her gender. 31-year-old Isla Bryson carried out the attacks in Clydebank and Glasgow in 2016 and 2019 while known as a man called Adam Graham. Bryson now identifies as a woman and is in the process of starting gender reassignment.”

Rubbing our noses in it. They didn’t have to say “A woman has” at the very start of the piece. They chose to. Rubbing our noses in it.

The viewers took issue with the fact the rapist was referred to as a woman, and female pronouns used, when Bryson did not have a gender recognition certificate. The BBC refused to uphold the complaints but said the wording used in the programme was “not ideal”.

I don’t give a flying fuck whether he has a “certificate” or not; he’s a rapist; he’s not a woman. I wouldn’t be fine with that insulting lede if he had had a “certificate” at the time.

The ruling said: “The ECU considered whether the programme met BBC standards of accuracy. The ECU agreed the opening line was not ideal (subsequent bulletins referred to ‘a trans woman’). However, it did not agree audiences had been misled on a material point. Anyone watching the programme would have been in no doubt as to the gender identity of Bryson at the point at which the crimes were committed.

But people don’t always “watch the programme” in the sense of staring fixedly at the screen while doing nothing else. People also listen to it while doing other things, with or without glances at the screen. It’s not a test. It shouldn’t be a matter of “Viewers knew if they were paying proper attention” as if the BBC were teaching first grade arithmetic.

“Notwithstanding the tension between the requirement to report accurately while using appropriately inclusive language, it was a matter of fact that Bryson was convicted as a woman.”

Azza. The court unfortunately went along with his insulting dodge, but it shouldn’t have, and neither should the BBC. The language was not “appropriately” “inclusive” – it’s not in any way “appropriately inclusive” to call a violent rapist a woman. Try being appropriately inclusive of women for a change.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey at Miscellany Room.

The point of laws like this TN one is to intimidate people and chill expression, and this very thread demonstrates how.

Oh, the law doesn’t specifically say that all drag performances are illegal, only ones that appeal to a prurient interest! And who could be against performances of a prurient interest where CHILDREN might see it? (Won’t somebody think of the children?)

Except what makes something an “appeal to a prurient interest”? Yes, it’s a phrase used in obscenity law, so it has some legal meaning, but obscenity has other requirements that limit its applicability, and even with those it’s still a bit of a dangerously fuzzy concept.

And here in this very thread we have J.A. expressing the view that drag performances are de facto appeals to prurient interest.

Imagine trying to advise a client on what they can and can’t do in TN. Can you perform a stage version of Mrs. Doubtfire? Well, the Robin Williams version didn’t seem terribly sexy, so probably? But maybe not. Maybe it depends on the size of the fake breasts. But hey, you probably wouldn’t be convicted. I mean, you might be arrested and lose your job and not be able to pay rent or mortgage while you await your trial, and end up owing huge amounts of attorneys fees, but you’ll probably be acquitted, right? Sound like a risk you’d like to run?

It’s the same with some of the laws being passed in Florida. Oh, gosh, the law doesn’t say you can’t have books about Rosa Parks in schools! I mean, a teacher wouldn’t be convicted for having such a book in their classroom library. Well, almost certainly not. They probably wouldn’t even be charged. I mean, what are the chances of some conservative parent making a stink, and some crusading and/or politically ambitious D.A. deciding to press charges? That would never happen in the great state of Florida! Well, ok, it might. But probably not! That sounds like something worth risking your career, financial security, and freedom for!

The Federalist Society is grappling with the always-grappled-with conundrum of democracy versus rights (or democracy versus law, democracy versus principles, democracy versus charters). Democracy is more fair and just than dictatorship or monarchy, but then what about democracies that persecute minorities? What do you do when the majority is all for violating human rights?

This year’s gathering was even more important than most. As the first student symposium since the Supreme Court handed conservatives a historic package of victories on gun rights, religious freedom, environmental deregulation, and, of course, abortion, the weekend offered a window into the shifting priorities and preoccupations of the youngest and most elite members of the conservative legal movement, at a time when the future of the movement as a whole is quietly unsettled. 

The first major clue about those preoccupations came from the symposium’s theme, which the organizers had designated as “Law and Democracy.” As the programming unfolded over the next day and a half, it became alarmingly clear that, even among the buttoned-up young members of the Federalist Society — an organization not known for its political transgressiveness — the relationship between those two principles is far from settled. 

Is it ever settled? Can it ever be settled? It seems to me the tension is built in. Majorities don’t always respect human rights. Democracies can neglect or persecute their own minorities. They can and do and have.

To those who have followed the Federalist Society closely since its triumphs at the Supreme Court last year, the symposium’s focus on law and democracy may hardly seem incidental. Since its founding in 1982, the Federalist Society has championed “judicial restraint,” the notion that judges should limit their roles to interpreting the law as written, leaving the actual business of lawmaking to democratically elected legislatures. 

Which is a sensible principle on its face, but at the same time, democratically elected legislatures can be very eager to make law that violates some people’s rights. It’s always a tug of war.

That approach made sense for conservatives when they still saw the federal judiciary as a liberal force dragging the country to the left. But now that conservatives have secured a solid majority on the Supreme Court — and voters in several red states have soundly rejected hard-line positions on abortion — a spirited debate is underway within the Federalist Society about the wisdom of deferring to democratic majorities as a matter of principle.

Or to put it another way, deference to democratic majorities is good when it goes our way but not quite so good when it doesn’t. Who knew?

“From our very beginning, there has been an aspect of judicial restraint, and there has been an aspect that it’s judges’ jobs to interpret the Constitution, that whatever it says, that’s what they should do — and those two can sometimes be in tension,” said Eugene Meyer, the president and CEO of the Federalist Society, as we spoke in a back hallway of the conference center. 

What I’m saying.

Headline:

Woman jailed for four-and-a-half years for threats to murder her mother

Except, not a woman.

A woman who threatened to torture, rape and murder her mother, was today jailed for five and a half years with the final 12 months suspended.

Except NOT A WOMAN. Not a woman, not even close. A man. A violent abusive violent man.

Judge O’Donnell noted the defendant, who was born male but identifies as a woman “is unrepentant” about wanting to kill her mother.

His mother.

Unfortunately the women in that prison will now have to deal with him.

Famous they/them artiste Sam Smith wore a thing at an awards do last month.

I’m chagrined that I missed it.

Sam Smith’s inflatable latex suit was the talk of the red carpet at this year’s Brit Awards. Its designer is also a latex farmer in India, who reveals it was inspired by his dog.

An inflatable latex suit! Of course it was the talk of the carpet! (Wait what? What is the talk of the carpet? That don’t make no sense.) Plus it was inspired by a dog!

Aesthetically it’s just [chef’s kiss] –

And the back view!