At least there’s no palaver about who’s a woman and who’s a man when we’re talking about the Tate brothers.

Two women who say they were raped and strangled by the controversial social media influencer Andrew Tate have spoken to the BBC about their experiences. Another woman has alleged, for the first time, she was raped by Mr Tate’s younger brother, Tristan – also an influencer with millions of followers.

The Tate brothers, aged 37 and 36, currently face charges in Romania of human trafficking and forming an organised group to sexually exploit women. Andrew Tate is also charged with rape. If found guilty, the two men could be jailed for more than 10 years. They strongly deny the charges against them.

Oh, strongly – that makes a big difference.

Andrew Tate is currently under house arrest in Romania. In addition to the charges he already faces, prosecutors are considering new allegations against him, including having sex with a minor and trafficking underage persons. Both brothers are also being investigated for trafficking 34 more women.

Now, in a new BBC Panorama programme, two British women not involved with the Romanian case against the Tate brothers, have given detailed first-hand accounts of alleged rape and sexual violence by Andrew Tate. The allegations date back at least 10 years, to when Mr Tate was living in Luton.

Look, it’s their lifestyle, ok?

In 2014, Anna told Bedfordshire Police about the alleged attack. Two other women made similar allegations, and the investigation was taken over by Hertfordshire Police.

In 2019, a file was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service, but it was decided there was not enough evidence to bring charges.

As usual. Rape is seldom reported; when it is reported it’s seldom sent to the CPS; when it is sent to the CPS it’s seldom prosecuted; when it is prosecuted it’s seldom convicted. Four filters; the end product is tiny. Rape is all but legal.

In the second half of the last decade, Andrew Tate began his rise to online fame. The self-proclaimed misogynist’s videos on YouTube and TikTok, and posts on Twitter, gained him millions of followers and a worldwide profile.

He preached a message aimed at boys and young men that women should be dominated. In one video, he said women were “intrinsically lazy” and added: “There’s no way you can be rooted in reality and not be sexist.”

Meh. It’s just women. The real victims here are the trans women.

The BBC manages to say it at last:

Rape crisis centre failed to protect women-only spaces

But don’t get too excited, there’s still plenty of confusion and obfuscation and avoidance.

Rape survivors are no longer being referred to a support service in Edinburgh after a review found it failed to protect women-only spaces. The reviewer’s report said that Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre had not put survivors first or adhered to national service standards.

The report also stated that the CEO of the centre – a transwomen [sic] – failed to behave professionally and did not understand the limits of her authority.

We’re still stuck in the same mud of confusion. The CEO of the centre is a man, and he abused his authority. I don’t think the two reporters on this story – Mary McCool and Lorna Gordon – actually know that Wadhwa didn’t understand the limits of his authority, I think they just wanted to give him as much cover as they could get away with. The whole story reeks of avoidance and distraction. Not least, how could Wadwha not have understood when there were furious women yelling about it for months?

Rape Crisis Scotland said it was “extremely concerned” that the centre had not provided dedicated women-only spaces for 16 months, and as a result had paused new referrals to it.

The national charity, which sets standards for member centres, commissioned the investigation after an employment tribunal found the Edinburgh facility had unfairly dismissed a councillor with gender critical views.

That is, the Edinburgh facility run by a man had unfairly fired a councillor who knows that men are not women and cannot magically become women.

The review concluded that Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre had experienced a number of difficulties…

This included a strategy “which did not put survivors first” and a failure to protect women-only spaces.

There. At least the BBC finally admits that much.

The review also pointed out that the chief executive officer who was appointed in 2021 – Mridul Wadhwa – “did not understand the limits on her role’s authority, when to refer decisions to trustees and failed to set professional standards of behaviour”.

HIS role’s authority. His. He’s a man. The whole point is that he’s a man. He’s not courteous to us; why is the BBC being so “courteous” to him that most readers will continue to be misled into thinking he’s a woman?

In its recommendations, the review said the Edinburgh centre should take advice from Rape Crisis Scotland on the definition of “woman” and publicise this within the service. Women only spaces and times “must be protected and clearly publicised”, it said.

And by “women” it means women. Not men who pretend to be women, not including men who pretend to be women, but just women, actual women.

It said: “The needs of survivors should be listened to and respected when they come to any Rape Crisis Centre. It is important that survivors can make informed choices about the services they access at Rape Crisis Centres, and we recognise that for some survivors this includes the choice of a single sex service.”

For some survivors? Seriously? Do the people who wrote the review seriously think it’s only some women who don’t want to deal with men at a rape crisis center?

There’s still a long way to go.

Will Ferrell has regrets.

Will also said he’s “sure” he probably regrets “a fair amount” of his comedy choices. Namely, his impersonation of former United States Attorney General Janet Reno, which the interviewer said “hits a false note now.”

If you’re unfamiliar, Will would dress up as a woman and impersonate Reno as part of a regular SNL skit called “Janet Reno’s Dance Party.” 

Looking back, Will said: “That’s something I wouldn’t choose to do now.”

Why? Oh not because it’s insulting to women. Hahahahahahahahaha god no of course not. Insulting women doesn’t matter. No, because it’s insulting to trans women, of course.

“I had met trans people, but I didn’t have anyone personally in my life,” he said. “So this was all new territory for me, which is why I think this film is so exciting for us to kind of put out there in the world.”

“It’s a chance [for] all of us in the cis community to be able to ask questions and also just to listen and be there as a friend to discuss this journey,” he continued, echoed by Harper, who said the documentary “tells the story of a cis friend of a trans person who has to transition himself.”

It’s about a guy and a guy who pretends to be a woman. What could be more exciting to put out there in the world? Not a movie about a woman or two women, certainly. Yawwwwwwwwn.

Ah well he didn’t kill them so that’s nice, right? Look on the bright side.

It has been revealed that, while the police have already identified and detained 50 of the men whose images appeared on Dominique Pelicot’s hard drive, another 30 suspects – as yet unnamed and untraced – remain at large.

“So, we know 30 out of 80 still haven’t been caught. There are tensions here because people don’t know if they can trust their neighbours. You ask yourself – is he one of the 30? What is your neighbour getting up to behind closed doors?” said Isabelle Liversain in a voice sharp with frustration.

But Mazan’s 74-year-old mayor, Louis Bonnet, sought to play down those tensions, arguing that most of the alleged rapists came from other villages and seeking to frame the Pelicots as outsiders who hadn’t lived there long.

…

In his interview with us, Bonnet talked about the case itself, and in doing so veered towards the sort of attitudes that have already sparked fury in France as well as deep admiration for Gisèle Pelicot’s courage in confronting them.

“People here say ‘no one was killed’. It would have been much worse if [Pelicot] had killed his wife. But that didn’t happen in this case,” Bonnet said.

So sweet of him not to. Mind you, if he’d killed her he wouldn’t have been able to have more random men come to his house and rape her, so there’s that.

In all its dummitude

Notice at about 20 seconds when he says “They’re eating the cats” Harris simply bursts out laughing, which enrages Trump such that he amps up the scowl and the snarl and the ragey shouting, which makes Harris laugh even harder for a second or two.

Then the news guy breaks in to say we talked to the city manager and he said there have been no specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant communniny and Trump squawks “Wull I’ve seen people on television!” He actually does actually say that.

It’s as if someone discovered a way to inflate a toddler to the size of a very large man and that toddler somehow got nominated for president.

“The people on television say ‘my dog was taken and used for food’ so maybe he said that and maybe that’s a good thing to say for a city manager but The People On Television say their dog was eaten by…the people that went there.” He said that. With his own mouth. He has the brain of a five-year-old in a huge angry body.

Dahlia Lithwick has a nice summing-up:

The contrast was underscored by perhaps the most arresting moment of the debate. In the closing statements, Harris offered up a philosophy of leadership for Americans trying to get a handle on who she is for the first time: “I started my career as a prosecutor. I was a DA. I was an attorney general. A United States senator. And now vice president. I’ve only had one client. The people. And I’ll tell you, as a prosecutor I never asked a victim or a witness, ‘Are you a Republican or a Democrat?’ The only thing I ever asked them: ‘Are you OK?’ ”

Donald Trump doesn’t care if you are OK, because he only cares that he is OK. He is not capable of imagining a world outside his own weird, smoky, pet-munching interior hellscape. He never could. On Tuesday, Harris told millions of American women who have been serially insulted by Samuel Alito and their state legislators, and then not even deemed worthy of being addressed with a “you” statement in Trump’s staged answer, that they were seen and that their experiences count for something. Harris looked at the camera and said simply that it is not enough to be handed off to a different Big Daddy when your needs and demands and basic human rights are exigent and life-altering. And that moment won the debate.

It’s true. Nothing outside Donald Trump is real to Donald Trump.

Now for the most literal form of misogyny:

I have been following Siro’s story for 30 years, ever since I went to interview her and four other rural midwives in India’s Bihar state in 1996.

They had been identified by a non-governmental organisation as being behind the murder of baby girls in the district of Katihar where, under pressure from the newborns’ parents, they were killing them by feeding them chemicals or simply wringing their necks.

Hakiya Devi, the eldest of the midwives I interviewed, told me at the time she had killed 12 or 13 babies. Another midwife, Dharmi Devi, admitted to killing more – at least 15-20.

It is impossible to ascertain the exact number of babies they may have killed, given the way the data was gathered.

But they featured in a report published in 1995 by an NGO, based on interviews with them and 30 other midwives. If the report’s estimates are accurate, more than 1,000 baby girls were being murdered every year in one district, by just 35 midwives. According to the report, Bihar at the time had more than half a million midwives. And infanticide was not limited to Bihar.

Girls. Murdered because they’re girls.

Reports of infanticide are now relatively rare, but sex-selective abortion remains common, despite being illegal since 1994.

If one listens to the traditional folk songs sung during childbirth, known as Sohar, in parts of north India, joy is reserved for the birth of a male child. Even in 2024, it is an effort to get local singers to change the lyrics so that the song celebrates the birth of a girl.

While we were filming our documentary, two baby girls were discovered abandoned in Katihar – one in bushes, another at the roadside, just a few hours old. One later died. The other was put up for adoption.

They don’t get the chance to identify as not girls.

But our trans siblings don’t get special treatment, no no no no no, quite the contrary, they’re tormented and tortured and deprived at every turn.

Oh I get it. It’s a break for everyone else. “Thank you baby Jesus, we get a month free of them interrupting us to talk about their gender every five minutes.”

Trump translates the fact that he had a lot of his “facts” checked into a claim that he was persecuted.

Former President Donald Trump laid into ABC News on Wednesday morning after his rocky debate performance, stating the network should have its broadcast license revoked.

“They ought to take away their license for the way they did that,” Trump said of the news organization.

ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis fact-checked Trump throughout Tuesday night’s presidential debate, quickly correcting the record for millions watching at home after the Republican pushed falsehoods on abortion, migrants and the 2020 election.

That’s…it’s…they…it’s not fair to correct the record, he should be free to claim anything he wants, this is a contest, not a news report.

“It was a rigged deal as I assumed it would be because when you looked the fact they were correcting everything and not correcting with her,” Trump said Wednesday.

To sum up, Trump lies every time he opens his mouth and Harris does not, therefore, Harris is cheating and the news moderators are helping her do it. It’s flawless Trumpian logic and it could work.

You will say you believe in the mandatory mythology or you will be out.

The Green Party of England and Wales has suspended its health spokesperson on the eve its largest-ever conference for calling reports of rising LGBT+ hate crimes “mischievous”.

At a general election hustings in June, Pallavi Devulapalli said she had “yet to meet anyone” who denied a person’s right to “dress” and “be addressed as they please”. Ms Devulapalli told the BBC “there is no trans-hate in society in general”.

The BBC then snidely cites a statistic about an “increase in reported hate crimes” – without explaining how it knows the increase isn’t due to a fashion for seeing putative hate crimes against Our Trans Siblings everywhere.

The Greens suspended Ms Devulapalli two days before the party’s conference got under way in Manchester on Friday. The party has not given any explanation. A spokesperson said it “does not comment on individual disciplinary cases”. But the BBC has obtained party documents showing Ms Devulapalli was placed on an emergency suspension pending a code of conduct investigation.

It’s interesting that the Greens apparently have no qualms about kicking out a member with a noticeably non-Anglo-Saxon name. It’s interesting that the Greens apparently see Our Trans Siblings as more important and/or deserving of protection than boring old persons of color.

Speaking to the BBC, Ms Devulapalli claimed her comments reflected her thoughts that hate crime against LGBT+ people was “being politicised” and “most people weren’t aware of the issue”.

There it is again, another snide nudge to view her as the Greens view her. She didn’t say her comments reflected her thoughts, she “claimed” they did. The BBC is so ridiculous.

Cade Hatton, co-chair of the LGBTQIA+ Greens group, said Ms Devulapalli’s comments at the hustings were “just the most recent thing in a long list of things that have made people uncomfortable”. Mr Hatton said he believed Ms Devulapalli was trying to have a debate about trans rights but had “not gone about it in the right way”. He added that Ms Devulapalli’s suspension was an example of the Green Party’s disciplinary system “working a little more efficiently”.

The party’s rights and responsibilities policy states “trans men are men, trans women are women, and that non-binary identities exist and are valid”.

Then the party’s policy is full of shit, because trans women are by definition not women, ditto trans men, and non-binawee idennninneez are childish bullshit. Gwow up, Gweens.

I’ve been re-reading The Turn of the Screw, and I’m reminded of why I so dislike Henry James’s Late Style. I’ll give you a sample of why.

It was a pity that, somehow, to settle this once for all, I had equally to re-enumerate the signs of subtlety that, in the afternoon, by the lake had made a miracle of my show of self-possession. It was a pity to be obliged to reinvestigate the certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it had come to me as a revelation that the inconceivable communion I then surprised was a matter, for either party, of habit. It was a pity that I should have had to quaver out again the reasons for my not having, in my delusion, so much as questioned that the little girl saw our visitant even as I actually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she wanted, by just so much as she did thus see, to make me suppose she didn’t, and at the same time, without showing anything, arrive at a guess as to whether I myself did!

This is supposed to be not an impersonal narrative voice, not Henry James, not a novelist, but a governess.

A few (long) sentences later:

Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in this review, I should have missed the two or three dim elements of comfort that still remained to me. I should not for instance have been able to asseverate to my friend that I was certain—which was so much to the good—that I at least had not betrayed myself. I should not have been prompted, by stress of need, by desperation of mind—I scarce know what to call it—to invoke such further aid to intelligence as might spring from pushing my colleague fairly to the wall. She had told me, bit by bit, under pressure, a great deal; but a small shifty spot on the wrong side of it all still sometimes brushed my brow like the wing of a bat; and I remember how on this occasion—for the sleeping house and the concentration alike of our danger and our watch seemed to help—I felt the importance of giving the last jerk to the curtain. “I don’t believe anything so horrible,” I recollect saying; “no, let us put it definitely, my dear, that I don’t. But if I did, you know, there’s a thing I should require now, just without sparing you the least bit more—oh, not a scrap, come!—to get out of you. What was it you had in mind when, in our distress, before Miles came back, over the letter from his school, you said, under my insistence, that you didn’t pretend for him that he had not literally ever been ‘bad’? He has not literally ‘ever,’ in these weeks that I myself have lived with him and so closely watched him; he has been an imperturbable little prodigy of delightful, lovable goodness. Therefore you might perfectly have made the claim for him if you had not, as it happened, seen an exception to take. What was your exception, and to what passage in your personal observation of him did you refer?”

Said no one to anyone ever.

It makes me feel like Kingsley Amis writing to Philip Larkin – “No she didn’t, no he didn’t, no they didn’t.”

Jawad Iqbal in the Times last week:

Is the prominent Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran a suitable choice to chair the highly influential Commons health and social care committee? She belongs to a party that has responded with deafening silence to the landmark Cass review, which recommended sweeping changes to the way the NHS treats under-18s who are unsure about their gender identity.

Moran is also on record as believing that “trans women are women” and said she was “disgusted” when Kemi Badenoch, who has pushed for single-sex spaces, was made women and equalities minister under the previous Conservative government. Would campaigners for same-sex healthcare to help safeguard women and girls feel confident that she can be open-minded and fair?

Liberal Voice for Women, the party’s gender-critical group which campaigns for women’s rights, has also voiced concern. It described the Lib Dems’ position on transgender healthcare — in 2015 the party called for the use of experimental puberty blockers in children with gender distress — as “woefully and dangerously outdated”.

Aka sheer quackery.

Hadley Freeman is skeptical:

“There are many forms of the human body. I see someone in their soul and as a person. I do not really care whether they have a male body.”

Well, she says that, but is it true? What if a male body is following her persistently? What if a male body follows her into an otherwise empty restroom [aka toilet] and stands in front of the cubicle she’s in, so close that she can see his feet? What if he goes into the next door cubicle and she watches his feet as first one disappears and then the other and she looks up to see him staring at her over the partition? [That’s a real thing; it’s happened to me.] What if a male body starts hassling her in the street, and gets closer and closer until he’s pressed up against her, shouting into her face while he grips her arms?

And so on. Fuck off with that not caring lie. Of course she cares, in certain circumstances. That’s why she has no right to laugh off the caring of other women for the sake of men cosplaying women.

I’d say she’s definitely not the right person to chair the Commons health and social care committee.

The Taliban says listen listen listen what we’re doing is fine because it’s Islamic law.

In the three years since the Taliban takeover, it’s become clear that even if edicts aren’t strictly imposed, people start self-regulating out of fear. Women continue to be visible in small numbers on the streets of cities like Kabul, but nearly all of them now are covered from head to toe in loose black clothes or dark blue burqas, and most of them cover their faces with only their eyes visible, the impact of a decree announced last year.

“Every moment you feel like you’re in a prison. Even breathing has become difficult here,” said Nausheen, an activist. Until last year, whenever new restrictions were announced, she was among small groups of women who marched on the streets of Kabul and other cities, demanding their rights.

The protests were violently cracked down on by the Taliban’s forces on multiple occasions, until they stopped altogether.

Nausheen was detained last year. “The Taliban dragged me into a vehicle saying ‘Why are you acting against us? This is an Islamic system.’ They took me to a dark, frightening place and held me there, using terrible language against me. They also beat me,” she says, breaking down into tears.

Ok fine, it’s an Islamic system. That’s because Islam despises women. It’s famous for it. The other monotheisms aren’t feminist religions, but Islam wins the award for Worst Of All.

Islam gets that men think about sex all the time, but where it goes wrong is in deciding the way to manage that is to turn women into black blobs that can’t talk and are seldom allowed outside.

Taliban government deputy spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat, who didn’t want to be pictured with a woman or sit directly opposite me, justified the new edict, which came accompanied with copious footnotes – references to religious texts.

“The law approved by the supreme leader is in accordance with Islamic Sharia law. Any religious scholar can check its references,” he says.

Yeah whatever; we don’t care. Islamic Sharia law is horrible woman-hating garbage. Women are not receptacles for the penis, they are fully human people just as men are, only not as sex-obsessed. Sharia sees the world entirely through male eyes, and that’s why it’s so warped.

Shireen is part of a network of Afghan women running secret schools quietly rebelling against the restrictions. Already operating under a great deal of risk, often having to move the location of the school for safety, the new law has compounded her fears.

The danger of discovery is so great, she cannot speak to us at home, instead choosing a discreet location.

“Every morning I wake up asking God to make the day pass safely. When the new law came, I explained all its rules to my students and told them things would be more difficult. But I am so tired of all this, sometimes I just want to scream,” she says. “They don’t see women as human beings, just as tools whose only place is inside the home.”

Tools and penis receptacles.

I asked Hamdullah Fitrat about the Taliban government’s responsibility towards women and girls in their country who are being driven into depression and suicidal thoughts because they’re banned from education.

“Our sisters’ education is an important issue. We’re trying to resolve this issue which is the demand of a lot of our sisters,” the spokesman said.

No they’re not. They’re still taking rights away from their “sisters”; they are not restoring any.

The Respectable Meeja continue to pretend Trump is normal.

Journalist Parker Molloy recently detailed the media’s extensive efforts to “rationalize Trump’s incoherent statements,” tracing back to his catastrophic covid response. The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote back in June about the media’s “bias toward coherence” when covering Trump. But the question still remains why the press insists on covering Trump like a normal politician.

Legacy media bristles at the accusation that they treat Trump more generously than past presidential candidates, both Democrat and Republican. New York Times publisher AG Sulzberger claimed in a recent self-serving Post op-ed that Democrats want his paper to “cast aside neutrality and directly oppose [Trump’s] reelection.“ But that’s a strawman argument. The problem isn’t that the Times is “neutral.” The problem is that the Times in particular artificially balances the scales with coverage that makes it seem as if Kamala Harris is running against a normal Republican candidate, a wacky, off-color Mitt Romney.

Because, it seems, if they reported on him without artificial “balance” it would come across as unbalanced aggression. It’s such a fine trap, from Trump’s point of view. He’s exaggeratedly awful, incompetent, stupid, abusive, mendacious, corrupt, sadistic – so if you point that out you look “biased” and he looks like the victim. The worse he is the less the media can afford to say how bad he is.

A common defense of the media’s Trump coverage is that it’s almost impossible to detail every awful thing he says and does. But there’s a consistent narrative through line with Trump: He’s a criminal who’d use the power of the presidency to seek revenge on his enemies. That’s not complicated, and his every action supports this thesis. The mainstream media simply chooses to ignore the obvious.

It’s not complicated, and it’s true, but if they say it they’ll get yelled at.

Officer Diddums on the job:

The police are recording too many hate crime incidents and getting involved in disputes that include “hurt feelings”, the police watchdog has warned in a new report.

Selectively though. Always selectively. The hurt feelings of men who call themselves women matter; the hurt feelings of women do not.

The report was commissioned in September last year by Suella Braverman, when she was home secretary, after she said officers were pandering to politically correct causes, such as taking the knee.

And such as pretending that men who claim to be women are in fact women.

She ordered a new code of conduct, which came into effect in June, that introduced a higher threshold for the recording of NCHIs. Under the code, NCHIs would be recorded only if the incident was “clearly motivated by intentional hostility” and where there was a “real risk of escalation causing significant harm or a criminal offence”.

Despite the new guidance, the number of NCHIs recorded by the police has risen. Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is planning to reverse the changes and restore requirements for police officers to record NCHIs in an attempt to crack down on the significant rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia since the October 7 attacks on Israel.

But not hatred of women. Never ever hatred of women.

The report found that some forces could not even distinguish between non-crime hate incidents and hate crimes. It said: “They record and attend more of these incidents than they need to.”

The report also found that police forces were allowing officers to wear rainbow lanyards, saying that in some cases it caused negative comments and perceptions among members of the public. However, it acknowledged it helped recruitment in areas with high numbers of LGBT people.

There are no “LGBT” people. That’s a meaningless category.

Meanwhile rape goes unprosecuted.

Tom Nichols on that guy:

Here is part of what he posted early Saturday evening over at his personal rantatorium, Truth Social:

CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again.

How do you watch the Sanctity of something? How do you watch the Sanctity of an election? Especially one that is in the future?

(I will just note that I refuse to believe that Trump really coughed up a word like skulduggery on his own. Spelling it incorrectly does point to him, but the likelihood that someone else is writing these posts is a reminder that Trump is surrounded by people who have no objections to his plans and will willingly carry them out.)

I think Trump writes them but maybe he asks one of the surrounding people what’s a good word for dirty tricks.

But the very first question at the debate should reflect a basic paradox in this election: How can any meeting between Trump and Harris be a “debate” if Trump has already made clear that he rejects the foundations of the American system of government?

Debates are based on good faith and shared assumptions about democracy. Trump bellows at us, over and over, that he couldn’t give a damn about any of that. He’s running because he wants to stay out of prison, get revenge on his enemies, exercise untrammeled power, and gain access to even more money. Are we really expecting a give-and-take about, say, child care (a subject on which Trump was spectacularly incoherent a few days ago) between a candidate who will govern as a traditional president and a would-be junta leader who intends to jail his opponents—including, possibly, the woman standing next to him and the reporters grilling him?

No, of course we’re not. The man is both evil and profoundly stupid.

How’s the reporting on all this? Not great.

I can’t give you a lot of headlines about all of these mad comments because, for the most part, they don’t exist. (Reuters summed up the raving on Saturday as “Trump Revs Up Small-Town Base in Wisconsin,” which is true, in the way that a 1967 headline saying Mao Encourages Chinese Intellectuals to Aid With Agricultural Efforts would be true but perhaps incomplete.) The New York Times had nothing about Trump’s weekend comments on its front page today. This morning’s Washington Post homepage simply said: “Harris Hunkers Down for ‘Debate Camp,’ Trump Opts for ‘Policy Sessions’ as Showdown Looms.” This headline is no doubt an accurate account of what’s happening in the campaigns, but “Trump says he will inevitably win and prosecute his opponents for fraud anyway” is probably more important than whether he is being briefed yet again on policies he doesn’t care about or understand.

This is the system being a system. If the Times and the Post did report on all his ravings they would be accused of libbrul bias, so they primly ignore most of them.

Several writers at The Atlantic, including our editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, have raised the issue of the “bias toward coherence” that prevents many journalists—and millions of Americans—from saying out loud that the Republican nominee for the presidency of the United States is emotionally unstable and a menace to the Constitution.

Ah, right, that’s what I was getting at. It’s almost funny, in a horrible way. Trump is so off the charts stupid and evil that reporting on him truthfully looks abnormal. Head he wins tails we lose.

This is not going to change in the next two months. But if Trump’s comments this weekend are not the first questions at the debate—if his threat to democracy is not the only question—then there is no point in debates at all.

I don’t think there is much point in The Debates anyway, really. They’re just a Thing, the way football is a Thing.

What is a woman?

Anneliese Dodds, the Minister for Women and Equalities, has said in response to a written question asking whether the government plans to amend the legal definition of what a woman is:

“We are proud of the Equality Act and the rights and protections it affords women. The Government does not plan to amend legal definitions in the act.” 

Hundreds of women are coming to Parliament on Wednesday on a mission to change her mind as part of the Stand up for single-sex services campaign.

If “women” no longer means “women” then how can women have rights specific to women?

They are going to tell her, and other MPs, how the Equality Act is failing to protect women, and how men who claim to be women are gaining access to women’s spaces, services and sports. 

…

This is being allowed to happen because of confusion about the interaction between the Gender Recognition Act and the Equality Act. It could be fixed with a one-line amendment, introduced through secondary legislation, using a power provided for by the last Labour government for exactly this purpose. 

…

If Anneliese Dodds is proud of the political heritage of the feminists who came before her, she should listen to the women and men who are coming to Parliament on Wednesday. They will tell her that the law is not working. If she wants to live up to the legacy of the brave women who fought for women’s rights, she needs to listen and to act.

Will she?

Oh how sad, people in Canada have to pay for some of their Magic Gender Care.

A new gender-affirming care provision under the federal government’s employee health plan — a change touted as a major win for transgender plan members — has turned into an ongoing struggle for some trans workers who say they’re rethinking future surgeries because they’re already running into walls getting claims reimbursed. 

I have to wonder why the government pays for mutilations in the first place.

Gender-affirming care encompasses a number of treatments, including mental health counselling, hormone replacement therapy, genital surgery, breast augmentation, pectoral implants and even something as basic as a haircut.

Genital surgery, they say cheerfully, when what they mean is amputation/mutilation.

Plan members can have up to 80 per cent of each treatment covered, to a lifetime maximum of $75,000, for procedures performed in Canada but not covered by provincial or territorial health plans. It’s meant “to help people with their gender affirmation journey,” according to a government web page.

But the whole idea of a “gender affirmation journey” is a silly childish fad, not a medical issue.

What should have been a year focusing on the surgeries that would transform her body to reflect how she sees herself has been been anything but, Alexandra Lamaute says.  

“We constantly have to fight to receive something that should be much more simple,” said the 41-year-old who lives in Dieppe, N.B. and underwent breast augmentation and facial feminization surgery last year.

Why should it be more simple? When the whole idea is batshit-crazy in the first place?

Lamaute said she is considering delaying, or simply not having, vocal surgery to make her voice sound more feminine because she’s worried she won’t get reimbursed.

“My voice doesn’t really match my appearance anymore,” she said, leading to people she deals with on the phone often calling her “sir” or “young man.”

“I don’t blame anyone, but it takes a toll after a while.”

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan…

There’s paragraph after paragraph more of this infatuated bilge. Where are the adults???

Oliver Brown in the Telegraph:

After seeing the beauty of these Games defaced by the spectacle of Valentina Petrillo, a 51-year-old father-of-two, taking semi-final places in female sprinting from two women barely half the Italian’s age, you might have expected Andrew Parsons, president of the International Paralympic Committee, to commit – at the very least – to a review of the ridiculous policy that let this happen. Instead he seemed, at his closing press conference, almost to celebrate it as a watershed.

…

Parsons began these 11 days by spelling out his ambition for an “inclusion revolution”. Include everybody: that is the mantra. Even if it now means excluding women from their own category. This is not some abstract fear, but a concrete reality. We can name the two women whom Petrillo deprived here of a chance to compete under lights at the Stade de France in a Paralympic semi-final: Lorraine Gomes de Aguiar of Brazil and Spain’s Nagore Folgado Garcia. Gomes is 27, Folgado just 20.

The only explanation that fits is that including women doesn’t count as inclusion.

Is that because so many people despise women, or is it because “inclusion” refers only to literal minorities? If it’s the latter that’s fucked up, because exclusion of women has always been and still is absolutely rampant, and everyone knows it.

Those who acquiesced in this must be held to account, and the first is Parsons. All women deserve to have their sporting talents tested on a level playing field, not to have their dreams curtailed by a patently unfair rule, reduced to being unwitting pawns in the affirmation of any male-born opponent’s wishes. It is an outrage – and it cannot go on.

Keep yelling.

Women are such a damn nuisance, you know?

Surrogate mother wins access to her biological son in landmark case

She’s not actually a surrogate mother, she’s a mother.

The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, won the case after the gay couple for whom she carried the baby for nine months tried to stop her seeing her own biological child and erase her from his life. The two men claimed that the little boy would be confused if he saw his mother because he lived with them in a ‘motherless family’ and was being raised within the LGBT community.

The couple told her there was ‘no vacancy’ for her ‘just because [he] has same-sex parents’ – even though he was conceived using her egg and carried in her womb.

The child, named as ‘Z’ in court proceedings, was born in September 2020. His two fathers, a married couple aged 36 and 43, were friends with the surrogate’s sister and were desperate for a child to complete their family so she agreed to help.

In other words she agreed to do them a massive favor, and they repay her by going back on the agreement and trying to keep her away from her own baby.

[S]he signed a parental order handing responsibility for the child to the men along with a second order ensuring that she could have regular contact with the child, who lived permanently with his fathers.

But the gay couple reneged on that agreement – leading to the doorstep argument that sparked them threatening to dial 999 unless she left, the court heard. ‘G’ had secretly recorded the altercation and while the audio was not shared as part of the ruling, the judge in the case said it was ‘rightly described as “horrendous”,’ not least because it was in the presence of their son. The men then pursued a series of legal cases against her that would cut ‘G’ from the boy’s life.

Male entitlement is a thing to behold.