We’re in the era of assault rifle lapel pins.

Recently, Republican members of Congress, Rep. George Santos and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna have been spotted wearing lapel pins resembling miniature AR-15 rifles.

“Where are these assault weapon pins coming from? Who is passing these out?” Democratic Rep. Jimmy Gomez tweeted.

In another tweet, Gomez noted that Luna had worn the pin at an Oversight hearing less than 48 hours after her state of Florida experienced a mass shooting that wounded 11 people.

So? Mass shootings smell like Freedom.

The mystery of the lapel pins has now been solved. Republican Rep. Andrew Clyde from Georgia owns a gun store and has now taken responsibility for handing them out.

“I hear that this little pin I’ve been giving out on the House floor has been triggering some of my Democrat colleagues,” he said in a video posted to Twitter. “Well, I give it out to remind people of the Second Amendment of the Constitution and how important it is in preserving our liberties.”

The liberty to shoot up schools and Walmarts and Targets and gay bars and hospitals and subway trains and Krogers and FedEx and bowling alleys…

The congressman owns Clyde Armory in Athens, which makes millions selling military-style rifles, body armor, ammunition, and other weapon accessories.

His handing out of the lapel pins comes after there have been an estimated 54 mass shootings in the United States so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

Democratic Rep. Cori Bush noted that lawmakers wore the pins during National Gun Violence Survivors Week.

Goddam Democrats have no sense of humor.

Apparently there’s a rumor going around that Ron DeSantis is ordering female athletes to tell him all about their periods, and apparently the rumor is false.

Social media users are suggesting the conservative Republican governor, who has been an outspoken critic of transgender athletes, is again using sports to stoke controversy as he weighs a run for president in 2024.

The AP is trying to sort fact from fiction here, but the AP itself gets it wrong in the usual way – the issue is not “transgender athletes.” People have been so well trained to hide the truth on this subject that they do it even when debunking bullshit.

But the proposed mandate hasn’t had final approval, and wasn’t developed by DeSantis’ office.

…

DeSantis and Diaz’s offices didn’t respond to emails seeking comment this week, but Harrison stressed the proposed changes are not in response to concerns about transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, as some social media users claim.

“There is absolutely no support of the argument that their recommendation is aimed towards addressing an individual group of people,” he wrote in an email.

It’s about tracking the effects of sports on menstruation; it’s not about verification of who is actually female. Which ought to be obvious anyway, because how could that possibly work? Are people thinking DeSantis plans to send cops to check girls for signs of menstruation? “Pull out that tampon and show it to me right now!”

Deep breaths, people. Check for plausibility first.

I went out in the wind and rain early this afternoon, and I did get pretty cold and wet, but it was fun too. (It looks stormier now.) When I got home and got reasonably dry I stood for a while looking out the window at the wind n rain and I guess thinking about weather and climate and the planet and doom, and thought (not for the first time) that it’s bizarre yet not bizarre that now that we know we’ve broken the planet and are pushing it steadily over a cliff is when a surprising number of us start thinking humans can magically change sex. You’d think we’d be intensely focused on the real, the physical, the material, the truth about actions and consequences and outcomes. You’d think we would, but instead lots and lots of us are lost in a dream of magic identity that transcends mere bodies and carries us off into a heaven of…I don’t know, Eddie Izzards and India Willoughbys I guess.

In other words we’re all mind-body split again, including [many of] those of who used to recognize mind-body dualism when we saw it, and reject it with contumely.

So I was happy to see ‘Gender Identity’ Is A New Gnostic Gospel by Matt Osborne.

“Trans women are women, trans men are men” is a gnostic statement. It presupposes a division of the body from the thinking being — the definitive sophistry of esotericism. Like all religious movements in history, “gender identity” is an alchemical pastiche of ideas and borrowed rituals.

Take the mind-body split of Cartesian dualism, add queer theory, and announce your pronouns.

The result, these new gnostics tell us, is literal transmutation of the flesh through magical utterance. “I feel like a woman, therefore I am one.” “Some penises are female, some lesbians have penises.” “I am my true self now.” The phrase “gender euphoria” replaces dysphoria, for they are experiencing hormonal rapture, a transcendence of mere flesh-matter by the divine gender-soul.

And that’s one of the reasons it’s so massively irritating to those of us who don’t believe in magical transcendence of that kind.

I said read the rest but I can’t keep away from that Slate piece on the guns despite restraining order ruling. I have to yell at it some more.

Justice Clarence Thomas’ majority opinion in Bruen held that all restrictions on the right to “armed self-defense” are presumptively unconstitutional. The only gun safety laws that pass legal muster, Thomas declared, are those with “historical analogues” from 1791 (when the Second Amendment was ratified) or 1868 (when it was applied to the states). This sea change in the law created a flood of litigation in the lower courts as litigants tried to prove that modern gun restrictions were not deeply rooted in American history. Courts have been receptive, relying on Bruen to strike down a slew of laws targeting the criminal use of firearms.

But it isn’t 1791 any more, nor is it 1868. We don’t want to live in 1791 or 1868. We don’t want to live as if it were 1791 or 1868. Clarence Thomas wouldn’t be on the Supreme Court if it were 1791 or 1868. His odds of being a judge of any kind would not be great. His odds of going to law school wouldn’t be great. Neither would any women’s.

In his opinion for the court, [Judge Cory] Wilson declared that there is no deeply rooted tradition of disarming individuals under a restraining order for domestic abuse. The modern law “embodies salutary policy goals meant to protect vulnerable people in our society,” he wrote, but courts have no power to weigh “those policy goals’ merits.” They may only look to U.S. history. And the record compiled in this case failed to prove that domestic abusers were routinely disarmed in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. “Our ancestors,” Wilson wrote—meaning the white men who wrote the laws—“would never have accepted” such a practice.

Of course they wouldn’t, which is why we shouldn’t consult them.

Wilson acknowledged that people deemed “dangerous” were denied the right to bear arms, including slaves and Native Americans. But, he asserted, these people were disarmed “by class or group, not after individualized findings of ‘credible threats’ to identified potential victims.”

Ah. I see. Saying “no guns for you” is ok if you say it to slaves and Native Americans but not if you say it to white guys who like to batter women. Lucky us to have such astute judges.

Wilson also speculated about a parade of horribles if the government could remove “irresponsible” or “non-law abiding people” from “the scope of the Second Amendment.”

“Could speeders be stripped of their right to keep and bear arms?” Wilson asked. “Political nonconformists? People who do not recycle or drive an electric vehicle?”

Ah, powerful point, and the idea that women should be safe from violent men is just as whimsical and politically correct as recycling. Let the punching begin!

Of course, domestic abusers are categorically different from speeders and dissidents. There is a reason why the government disarms them today: They are at exponentially heightened risk of using their gun to commit murder. As I wrote in November, an abuser’s access to guns makes it five times more likely that a woman will be killed. More than half of intimate partner homicides are committed with guns. An American woman is shot and killed by an intimate partner every 14 hours. Domestic abusers are also disproportionately likely to commit mass shootings: Nearly 60 percent of mass shootings between 2014 and 2019 were related to intimate partner violence, while 68 percent of mass shooters had a history of domestic violence.

Yebbut schools were much smaller in 1868. Can’t disagree with that, can you! Case closed.

Domestic violence was not deemed a criminal offense for most of American history. When women were denied equal citizenship, the men who wrote and enforced the laws viewed wife-beating as a mere “familial affair” beyond the province of the courts. Legislators and judges alike saw domestic abuse as a natural part of family life, to be dealt with privately and punished only in the most extreme and murderous situations. It’s no surprise, then, that the historical record shows no history of laws keeping guns out of the hands of abusers. The very notion that men should not be allowed to abuse their wives and girlfriends is a modern belief that only developed in the 20^th century.

Right, so it’s just trendy, like tofu or not wiping out whole species for the hell of it, so [bronx cheer].

Slate reports:

The Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess a gun while under a restraining order for domestic violence, the 5^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday in a decision with alarming implications for gun violence in America.

What is a restraining order restraining if it’s not restraining gun-having, one wonders. Maybe it’s about table manners. No elbows on the table.

Although mass shootings and intimate partner murders are heavily linked to domestic violence, the 5^th Circuit held that the government cannot disarm alleged abusers solely because they are subject to a civil protective order. The court vacated the conviction of a man, Zackey Rahimi, who possessed a gun after allegedly assaulting his girlfriend, and invalidated the federal law that prevents alleged abusers from bearing arms. If upheld, its decision will prove lethal to countless Americans who rely on the government to protect them from intimate partner violence.

This is a horrible backward country, and it’s going more backward by the day. Soon Afghanistan will look like a utopia of equality and fairness compared to us.

Thursday’s ruling in U.S. v. Rahimi springs from the Supreme Court’s recent decision in last year’s Bruen, which dramatically expanded the scope of the Second Amendment. Justice Clarence Thomas’ majority opinion in Bruen held that all restrictions on the right to “armed self-defense” are presumptively unconstitutional

Let’s have more guns, and more and more and more. Let’s play cowboys until we’re all dead.

The law in question here is a federal statute that bars individuals from possessing guns if they are “subject to a court order that restrains [them] from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner.” The case began in 2020, when Rahimi’s ex-girlfriend accused him of assaulting her. A Texas court then issued a civil protective order restraining Rahimi from harassing, stalking, or threatening his ex-girlfriend (or their child). Rahimi agreed to this order, which also explicitly barred him from possessing a gun. Yet officers later discovered a rifle and a pistol in his home. Prosecutors then charged him with unlawfully possessing the guns and secured a conviction.

After the Supreme Court issued Bruen, Rahimi argued that his conviction was unconstitutional. In the district court, Justice David Counts—a Donald Trump appointee—agreed, striking down the federal law. And on Thursday, a three-judge panel of the 5^th Circuit upheld Counts’ decision. The panel was composed of two Trump appointees, Judges Cory Wilson and James Ho, as well as the arch-conservative Ronald Reagan appointee Judge Edith Jones.

Read the whole thing if you want to feel sick with rage.

H/t Screechy Monkey

The ACLU has organized what it says are lawmakers targeting “LGBTQ” rights into six categories plus “other.”

They are

Accurate IDs

Civil Rights

Fress Speech and Expression

Healthcare

Public Accommodations

Schools and Education

Under Accurate IDs they say

These bills attempt to limit the ability to update gender information on IDs and records, such as birth certificates and driver’s licenses. This puts transgender people at risk of losing jobs, facing harassment, and other harms. Trans, intersex, and nonbinary people need IDs that accurately reflect who they are to travel, apply for jobs, and enter public establishments without risk of harassment or harm.

But what the ACLU means by “Trans, intersex, and nonbinary people need IDs that accurately reflect who they are” is that trans etc people need IDs that DON’T accurately identify who they are. The ACLU is talking about the new kind of ID that instead of recording the simple facts, records the ID-haver’s fantasy about xirself.

Under Free Speech & Expression they tell us

Despite the safeguards of the First Amendment’s right to free expression, politicians are fighting to restrict how and when LGBTQ people can be themselves, limiting access to books about them and trying to ban or censor performances like drag shows.

But what does it mean for trans people to “be themselves”? It means pretending to be what they are not, which is an odd way for people to Be Themselves. It also, as we know all too well, frequently interferes with other people’s right to be literally non-fantasyly themselves.

Under healthcare:

These bills target access to medically-necessary health care, like Medicaid, for transgender people. Many of these bills ban affirming care for trans youth, and can create criminal penalties for providing this care. 

That is at the very least disingenuous. “Affirming care”=non-medically necessary amputations, sometimes followed by stripping healthy tissue from arms or thighs to make a simulacrum of a penis or a vagina, with frequently miserable results. That’s not “health care” as commonly understood. It’s risky at best and a horror at worst.

Public accommodations:

Public accommodations bills seek to prohibit transgender people from using facilities like public bathrooms and locker rooms.

That’s just a straight-up lie. No they don’t.

Schools & Education:

State lawmakers are trying to prevent trans students from participating in school activities like sports…

Again, just a lie. No they aren’t. They’re trying to prevent boys from competing in girls’ sports.

The ACLU is a disaster zone.

H/t Sackbut

Advertising on that Guardian article:

Hur hur guys hur hur.

There is audio.

A newly released audio recording offers a behind-the-scenes look at how former US president Donald Trump’s campaign team in a pivotal battleground state knew they had been outflanked by Democrats in the 2020 presidential election.

But even as they acknowledged defeat, they decided to “fan the flames” of allegations of widespread fraud costing Trump victory there, which were ultimately debunked – repeatedly – by elections officials and the courts.

In other words they decided to amplify a lie, knowing it was a lie. Not surprising on one level, but there are other levels.

The audio from 5 November 2020, two days after the election, is surfacing as Trump again seeks the White House while continuing to lie about the legitimacy of the outcome and Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 win.

…The audio centers on Andrew Iverson, who was the head of Trump’s campaign in the state.

“Here’s the deal: comms is going to continue to fan the flame and get the word out about Democrats trying to steal this election. We’ll do whatever they need. Just be on standby if there’s any stunts we need to pull,” Iverson said.

“Stunts we need to pull”=lies we want to tell.

Iverson is now the midwest regional director for the Republican National Committee. He deferred questions about the meeting to the RNC, whose spokesperson, Keith Schipper, declined comment because he had not heard the recording.

How convenient. “Talk to the bosses, who will say they know nothing, nothing. Repeat forever.”

The meeting showcases another juxtaposition of what Republican officials knew about the election results and what Trump and his closest allies were saying publicly as they pushed the lie of a stolen election. Trump was told by his own attorney general there was no sign of widespread fraud, and many within his own administration told the former president there was no substance to various claims of fraud or manipulation – advice Trump repeatedly ignored.

To put it more bluntly, the meeting is yet more evidence of how shamelessly Trump and his gang tell lie after lie after lie.

The ACLU is getting more captured by the day.

So much wrong in that one simple sentence.

The health care they have in mind has nothing to do with LGB people.

There’s no such thing as “gender-affirming” health care. Amputating parts of your body to match a fantasy that you’re the opposite sex is malpractice, not health care.

Promoting these reckless claims about needing amputations to match a personal fantasy is a million miles from what the ACLU should be doing.

Dragging lesbians and gay men into this foul campaign to encourage self-mutilation is absolutely not what the ACLU should be doing.

Originally a comment by Sastra on Lord Falconer.

Whenever I’m accused of fear mongering and creating a problem out of nothing because transwomen are no more violent than other women I always try to point out that they’re tacitly admitting that if transwomen WERE more violent than natal women, then they must believe that there’d be cause for alarm. So — what’s the figure and remedy?

If their level of violence were — oh, let’s say it’s hypothetically the same as men — would that be enough to put safeguards in place? What would those safeguards consist of? What if transwomen were more likely to be violent than males in general? In their view of things, is there a particular percentage increase where some solution is proposed? Would transwomen at any point cease to be women?

They don’t answer, and explain it’s because I’m asking hypotheticals that haven’t and won’t happen. But that shouldn’t matter. They ought to be able to think it through anyway. They can’t think it through because “transwomen are just like other women” isn’t and can’t be a conclusion. Conclusions can be falsified. Instead it’s a fundamental assumption which can’t be falsified with any evidence— and they don’t want to see that.

Willoughby says he felt as if he were being lynched. Great sense of proportion that guy has.

What’s “amazing” about pretending to change sex? Would it be amazing to pretend to be an airplane or a sardine or a block of cheese? What is so particularly amazing about trans people? Apart from their success at hijacking everything, that is.

“It’s only trans women that people are gettin’ upset about,” he says. And why might that be Willz? It’s because trans women are men, abusing this deranged new ideology to steal women’s rights, ruin women’s sport, and generally undo all the work women have done over the past six decades to be seen and hired and promoted and talked to as equal human beings. That’s why. You’re stealing everything that’s ours and we don’t like it.

Later he says it’s a right for “anyone who’s trans” to apply to be in women’s prisons.

India Willoughby was on BBC Question Time this evening. There are some clips…

“The individual is a rapist.”

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on There are buttons they can push.

During the second year of the pandemic, I was listening to a frightening story on the BBC as the UK government declared a new period of lockdowns. There was no consideration for women who lived with violent men. A woman reported that she was listening to the news with her abuser as Johnson made the announcement. I don’t recall if it was her husband or not, but he looked over at her and said “Let the games begin.” He knew that he had her isolated. It was chilling, and I had that same feeling that I get when I am watching a horror movie, that I want to turn it off; but it was even worse because it wasn’t a movie nor fictional but a very common reality for many women and especially during the pandemic.

It’s been my observation in reading and listening to abused women, and some studies I had read in college, that such men use the unpredictability over whether or not they will be menacing or violent to keep their victims off balance and it’s a way to control their behavior. The buttons are hidden, and their victims will be tentative on whatever they say or do in order to avoid accidentally pulling a hitherto unknown trigger for rage. The claim that their victim is responsible for the violence is post-hoc justification.

What happened in Parliament during that debate mimicked what these men do, and they full well knew the effect that they were having on their female colleagues.

From last week:

Imagine the outrage if, after the discovery that yet another rapist had been found amid the ranks of the Metropolitan Police, the Commissioner had told women to calm down. “The vast majority of officers,” he might have told protesters, “are likely to be safe.”

The thought is preposterous. Yet it is the very argument made by those defending Scottish legislation that would allow people to change their gender in law without existing safeguards. Lord Falconer, Lord Chancellor under Tony Blair, dismissed the complaints of those concerned about the privacy and safety of women, saying, “The vast majority of [applicants] are likely to be genuine.”

No skin off his noble ass, is it. It’s only women who are put at risk this way, so [yawn] who cares?

It is not difficult to see the risks. Already, a Scottish judge has ruled that “the meaning of sex for the purposes of the [Equality] Act … is not limited to biological or birth sex, but includes those in possession of a GRC…stating their acquired gender, and thus their sex”.

In other words, trans women with a certificate must always be treated as women: allowed into single-sex spaces, such as changing rooms, prisons and schools; permitted to provide intimate care to female health patients; sanctioned to participate in women-only domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centres. With no meaningful safeguards stopping men acquiring the necessary certificates, and with them the right to enter women-only spaces, the scope for abuse is clear.

And what’s also clear, horribly, is the complete indifference to women on the part of The People In Charge. Tough shit, girls, you’ll just have to suck it up; now on to important stuff.

More tipping points than we thought:

Trees set ablaze in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest could contribute to melting glaciers in the Himalayas and Antarctica because distant ecosystems essential to regulating the Earth’s climate are more closely connected than previously thought, new research has found. 

Scientists have discovered a new atmospheric pathway that originates in the Amazon, runs along the South Atlantic, then across East Africa and the Middle East until it reaches central Asia, according to a paper published this month in Nature Climate Change. That connection, which stretches 20,000 kilometers (12,400 miles) across the globe, means that when the Amazon warms, so does the Tibetan Plateau, whereas the more it rains in the Amazon, the less it rains in Tibet.

So Bolsonaro sealed Tibet’s fate and thus much of Asia’s along with Brazil’s.

The study is among the first to investigate the interaction between ecosystems at risk of reaching a climate tipping point — a point of no return that would transform them irreversibly. More significantly, the newly-discovered pathway suggests that the collapse of one ecosystem could destabilize others too, leading to a cascade of tipping events across the planet.

Scary enough yet?

The latest report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change saw an increased probability that the Amazon will cross a tipping point. The question now is what that might mean for the Himalayas, one of the world’s great reserves of fresh water, which is already seeing unprecedented glacial melt. 

Just India, Pakistan, China – no biggy.

The things people say, and write, and publish. It’s astounding.

Many ways, such as complete androgen insensitivity syndrome…and what else? Name one – just one of those “many ways.”

The “presence of a penis” of course isn’t the issue.

As for biological male being a socially constructed category – then how did all these billions and billions of critters get conceived and gestated and born? If female and male are mere social constructions how has conception ever happened? Is it all just a Mystery?

What’s “socially constructed” is that absurd “in every way that matters.” Oh really? So it doesn’t matter that women do the gestating and birthing? It doesn’t matter that men are bigger and stronger than women? It doesn’t matter that men can rape women but women can’t rape men? What does matter then? Clothes, hair, makeup? Is that it?

Staggering. MSP asks Sturgeon if a rapist who “changed their gender after being charged by the police” should be considered a woman, and her oh so cute answer is that a rapist should be considered a rapist.

But that’s not the question. We already consider a rapist a rapist; the question is whether we consider a man who is a rapist a woman.

H/t latsot

Rolling Stone on one of Trump’s more hideous triumphs:

By 9:27 p.m. Bernard was dead. In that moment, he became the ninth of 13 people executed in the final six months of the Trump administration — more federal executions than in the previous 10 administrations combined. Of the 13, six were put to death after Trump lost the election, his Justice Department accelerating the schedule to ensure they would die before the incoming administration could intercede. Before Trump, there had been only three federal executions since 1963; in January 2021, Trump oversaw three executions during a single four-day stretch.

In short Trump is a serial killer. The killings were legal, but they were far from legally required. Trump and his people made haste to do the killings while they still could. Trump chose to have 13 people killed. He’s not legally a murderer, but he’s killed more people than your average murderer.

As he geared up for another election, Trump White House sources say, the president was telling advisers that carrying out capital punishment would insulate him from criticism that he was soft on crime. And in his attorney general, Bill Barr, a longtime death-penalty advocate, he had the perfect accomplice.

Cool, so Trump killed 13 people for the sake of his re-election.

The executions, carried out in the name of law and order, took place at a time of peak lawlessness within the White House. While his administration killed prisoners at an unprecedented clip, Trump spent his final months attempting to overturn the 2020 election, culminating in the Jan. 6 ransacking of the U.S. Capitol. 

The ransacking that got five more people killed.

The killing spree ended with Trump’s first term, as President Biden suspended capital punishment on the federal level, but it may only have been a pause. The former president is running again — and opened his 2024 campaign with a speech that promised more executions if he wins: “We’re going to be asking [for] everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts,” Trump said in his November campaign announcement. “Because it is the only way.”

Of course, he has a record.

Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for the death penalty dates back decades. His first real foray into politics was a public call for executions after five teenagers of color were arrested in the brutal rape and assault of a female jogger in New York City in 1989. “Bring back the death penalty. Bring back our police,” screamed a full-page ad Trump had placed in the New York Daily News at the time. The Central Park Five, as the young men came to be known, were later exonerated by DNA evidence, after they had served years in prison. But Trump never apologized for the ad.

Or anything else. He’s not an apologize kind of guy. He has none of the qualities necessary for a person who apologizes: no compassion, no conscience, no generosity, no basic decency, no empathy, no ability to look at himself from the outside and perceive flaws. He doesn’t even have receptors for that most basic feeling of happiness or relief in making someone else feel better.

Now there’s someone who really knows how to woman.