Some commentary on the Special Master ruling:

There are lots more like these. Fun reading for a change.

Appeals court strikes down special master in Trump Mar-a-Lago documents case

A federal appeals court panel on Thursday halted an outside review of thousands of documents seized from former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence, ruling that a lower-court judge was wrong to appoint an expert to decide whether any of the material should be shielded from criminal investigators.

…

Trump sought the outside arbiter, known as a special master, after the FBI executed a court-approved search of Mar-a-Lago, his home and private club, on Aug. 8, retrieving more than 13,000 documents related to Trump’s time in the White House. About 100 of the documents were classified, and some contained extremely sensitive government secrets, according to court records.

U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon of Florida agreed to appoint Judge Raymond J. Dearie of Brooklyn as special master to review the documents, rejecting the Justice Department’s argument that presidents do not retain executive privileges after leaving office.

Who ya gonna believe, the Justice Department or an underqualified judge appointed by a criminal lunatic?

H/t Screechy Monkey

Originally a comment by Papito on Call the expert.

Every once in a while one of these misogynist twerps spurts out a rant that lays out all the hatred they normally try to keep hidden.

Not only does young master Baron insist that all women must agree with him on the definition of feminism, but he insists that if they don’t, then they are imposing the patriarchy. Not him, the man who is telling women what they are allowed to think, but them, women who refuse to listen to a man. That, per Aidan, is the true patriarchy.

This argument reminds me of the schoolyard taunt “I’m rubber, you’re glue! Words bounce off me and stick to you!” No, the man telling woman what to think isn’t representing the patriarchy; he’s rubbery liberation, if only those damn women would listen. Boioioing!

The silly little fellow can’t even keep his words straight. First he claims British feminism excludes a kind of women (and, in doing so, somehow slavery something…), but then his obvious distaste for the W word takes over, and it’s all “trans people” from there on out. Of course, that slavey, husbandy old British feminism is perfectly happy to include the subset of trans people which are women. It’s just the men who are trans people who aren’t included as women. But Baron can hardly bring himself to say “women” except as a sort of curse word. Oh, holy trans people, put upon by those horrible, aggressive, perpetrating… women.

Is this young fellow so unfamiliar with being outside that he imagines great packs of aggressive, perpetrating women roami up and down the streets looking for nebbishy ideologues with blue hair? Is this what his (slavey, husbandy) mommy told him would happen if he goes outside? And which people are these hardcore feminist street thugs beating up, the trans people who are women or the trans people who are men? Where is this immense amount of physical assault Aidan thinks women are committing? Video after video, event after event, arrest after arrest has trans-identifying men committing physical assault against women. Day after day. Where is any demonstration of it happening in the other direction? He’s a paramedic; do you think his ambulance is picking up scores of trans people who have been physically assaulted by women?

I suspect it’s simply that Baron believes that not only can he insist women agree that they’re not feminists, he is, and he’s not the patriarchy, they are, but that he’s not of the violent cohort, they are. Rubber, glue, QED.

The stubborn facts about violence include that men commit violence at much greater rates than women do. And that doesn’t change at all when these men become trans people. Still men, still violent at higher rates, still on average bigger and stronger than women. And no, those facts don’t give a damn about Aidan Baron’s feelings.

Heaven help the woman who gets picked up in Aidan Baron’s ambulance.

Man puts himself in charge of feminism.

Sure, what’s not to like?

KANYE WEST PRAISED Adolf Hitler during a Thursday interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. 

“Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler,” Ye said. “Also Hitler was born Christian.”

Especially Hitler. Plus he was born Christian, so obviously good & bringing something of value to the table.

“I see good things about Hitler also” Ye said. “I love everyone. Jewish people are not going to tell me you can love us, and you can love what we’re doing to you with the contracts, and you can love what we’re pushing with the pornography. But this guy that invented highways, invented the very microphone that I use as a musician, you can’t say out loud that this person ever did anything good, and I’m done with that.”

Hitler didn’t invent jack shit. He got highways built so that he could speed up the Anschluss.

“We got to stop dissing the Nazis all the time,” Ye said after the show returned from break.

Yeah no we don’t.

Of course she does.

Sturgeon rejects UN concerns about reform of Scotland’s gender law

She rejects women’s concerns, too. Men who claim to be women are the only people who matter.

Nicola Sturgeon has described the concerns of a UN special rapporteur about plans to reform how people change their legal sex in Scotland as “not well founded”.

During a robust session of first minister’s questions, Sturgeon also said Shona Robison, the minister in charge of the controversial gender recognition reform bill, would meet the special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, next week.

The Scottish Conservative leader, Douglas Ross, repeatedly challenged Sturgeon to delay the bill – which was the subject of the Scottish National party’s biggest ever backbench revolt last month – after a highly critical letter from Alsalem to the UK government.

In it she raised concerns that the reforms “would potentially open the door for violent males who identify as men to abuse the process of acquiring a gender certificate and the rights that are associated with it”.

But Sturgeon is entirely confident that men who want to abuse women are far too honorable and decent to exploit trans idenninies in pursuit of their hobby.

Sturgeon said the bill had gone through lengthy public consultation and was undergoing intense parliamentary scrutiny. “It’s really important that we remember all of us see protecting women and girls as a priority, but I hope all of us also see protecting the rights of trans people as important too,” she said.

But what rights? It’s not a “right” for men to go into spaces reserved for women.

Sackbut pointed out this cloying image:

Naaaaaaaaah.

That’s just the old self-esteem movement updated for even more solipsistic times.

No, parents shouldn’t treat their children like gods. No, parents shouldn’t be constantly wooing their children like lovers. No, parents shouldn’t be training their children to think they’re miraculous and supernatural. Unconditional love, yes; an infinite stream of flattery, no.

And this “become yourself” shit needs to die. As I keep saying to the point of monotony, the cult of the self needs to die. Encourage children to have a spine, think critically, resist peer pressure when necessary, all that, but obsess over a special unique magical Self, no.

With only four or five weeks to do anything with them, the House Dems finally have Trump’s tax returns.

Sort of.

The supreme court ordered the release of six years of returns last Tuesday, rejecting Trump’s plea to stop the treasury from acting.

On Wednesday, the release of the tax returns was first reported by CNN. According to the network, which cited an unnamed aide to the Democratic committee chair, Richard Neal, Democrats on the panel were due to be briefed on Thursday on the “legal ramifications on section of the tax law that … Neal used to request Trump’s tax returns” but would not immediately see the returns.

Well let’s do all this as slowly as possible so that nothing will happen before the Republicans take over the House.

It had long been customary, though not required, for major party candidates to release their returns. But Trump was the first major-party presidential candidate in four decades not to release his tax returns, as he sought to keep secret the details of his wealth and the activities of his real estate company, the Trump Organization.

Which is one of many reasons it’s not a cute or fun idea to make a corrupt real estate profiteer a head of state. Crooks have the wrong kinds of motivation for the job.

Joan Smith on another heartbroken dude:

In an interview veering between self-pity and entitlement, Bridges claimed to be ‘heartbroken’ after being refused permission to ride for Wales as a woman in the Commonwealth Games. (British Cycling has suspended its policy on transgender athletes while it carries out a review.) Bridges also claimed to understand the anxieties of female athletes who don’t want to compete with biological males, but dismissed them because ‘I am not a man’. 

Which is funny, because he is a man, and this whole business of dismissing women’s anxieties about being displaced by him and men like him is the very thing women are anxious about.

Not many people, one would guess, really believe that men can become women, but trans activists have created a climate where the fear of being labelled ‘transphobic’ inhibits honest responses. Bridges’s interview is an egregious example, linking criticism of trans participation in women’s sport with the murder of five people in an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs last month. The deaths of two trans people in the attack ‘are directly related to dehumanisation and demonisation of trans people in the media, online, and in debates such as those about sports,’ the cyclist claimed.

It’s tempting to observe that ‘directly’ is doing a lot of work there, but it’s more important to ask whether anyone at ITV Wales actually read this piece of malevolent hyperbole before they tweeted a link. Doesn’t anyone at the channel feel uneasy about publishing a claim that female athletes who defend sex categories in sport are in some way responsible for the actions of a mass killer in the U.S.?

My guess is no, no one at the channel does. It’s the fashionable thing, to see women as the enemy and trans people as their poor fragile trampled victims.

They have got to be kidding.

An Oxford student union official has apologised for her supposedly trans- exclusionary stance after objecting to the abolition of the women’s officer role.

Ellie Greaves, the vice-president for women at Oxford’s student union, put out a statement after a backlash against her comments in The Times.

The union is replacing its women’s officer with a liberation and equalities representative from next year. The reorganisation of union leadership will keep the same number of roles — one president and five vice-presidents — but female students will lose a dedicated women’s officer. The union said this was because the role was created at a time when women could not get full degrees and colleges were segregated, and that the position prioritised one protected group over others.

And because women are bitches and cunts and Karens and don’t deserve any kind of protection or rights or officer or anything else just for them. Bitches.

Sharon Udott, president of the Oxford Feminist Society, said: “It’s incredibly important to have a women-focused role in 2022. To say that it is redundant in this day and age is an incredibly privileged position to hold. From violence against women to advocating for increased support and funding for women’s health, these issues don’t change when the year does.”

Well she’s going to be on the naughty step.

Students took issue with some of her comments, The Oxford Student website said on Tuesday. She was asked at a student council meeting last week: “What do you have to say to the hundreds of students who were consulted regarding [the role review] . . . who agreed that this would be a good change for inclusivity, equality and the priority of intersectionality?”

What do you have to say to the hundreds of students who think inclusivity, equality, and the priority of intersectionality=women don’t matter? What do you have to say to the hundreds of fucking fools at this university who cannot wait to get rid of every trace of feminism until no one even remembers it was ever a thing?

They must have beaten her up, because she went full grovel.

Greaves issued a statement on Tuesday, saying: “The comments I made in the article contribute to a bio-essentialist, narrow-minded narrative of what being a woman is, including the prioritisation of women over minorities. I cannot apologise enough for the damage and hurt I have caused the trans community.”

Fuck the trans community. What about the hurt they’ve caused women? When is someone going to apologize for that? When is someone going to apologize enough for that?

Oxford Student Union said of changes to the women’s officer position: “The role has not been replaced but augmented to include more underrepresented and marginalised communities who currently do not have sufficient representation.”

What communities? You know – men who say they are women.

And another thing. It’s so typical of the maudlin hand-wringing hanky-drenching sympathy for men who claim to be women along with complete indifference toward actual women. Look at this insulting dreck:

Awwww, his journey, cheating women at their own sport. His “competing at an elite level” but actually not doing that because he competes against women and he has the advantage that male athletes have. Imagine a news outlet getting all soppy and flattery about a big hulking adult male competing against children. Why is it not ok to cheat children that way but it’s fine to cheat women?

Awwwww social media backlash – but isn’t that because he cheats? Because he’s a cheater? Because he cheats women, and it’s not fair?

“THE RACE TO BE ME” forsooth. But that’s not what it is, it’s a race to be someone he’s not, in order to cheat at his sport.

It’s possible that he really does have “gender dysphoria,” that he really does want to “live as a woman,” but even if it is, that doesn’t justify his cheating. He should stay out of athletic competition if he can’t stand to compete against his own sex. End of story.

Mara Yamauchi on “Emily” Bridges:

Bridges is horrified and terrified yet women are murdered at a far higher rate than trans people are. What’s he got to be so terrified about? Does he ever pause to think about the terror of women?

Being self-obsessed is not the same thing as being self-aware. At all.

Yes he IS a man. And a lot of other things, none of them good.

I had much the same thought.

As I said Monday, Adichie didn’t reduce it to the absurd, it IS absurd. It comes pre-absurded.

In fact…how is Zoe Williams not just the Guardian version of Lady Susan Hussey?

Hilarity:

As fallout from Donald Trump’s meeting with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes continues, a far-right activist has claimed the meeting was a set-up, meant to “make Trump’s life miserable”.

Sigh. Now I have to catch up with the Trump news. I overlooked the meeting and the fallout.

NBC News reported that in an attempt to “send a message” to the former president, Milo Yiannopoulos, a rightwing provocateur and former Breitbart editor, helped arrange for Fuentes to travel to Mar-a-Lago in Florida for a dinner between Trump and the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West.

Trump ate with the pair. He’s been criticized for doing so.

Ye, who like Trump is running for president in 2024, said he used the dinner to ask Trump to be his vice-president, only for Trump to insult his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian.

Hahahahahahachokehahahahahahaha god don’t you wish you’d been a fly on the wall when Mr West asked Trump to be his VP? Haaaaaaaaaahahahahahahaha

“Trump started basically screaming at me at the table telling me I was going to lose,” Ye said in a video since deleted from social media but transcribed by Newsweek. “I mean, has that ever worked for anyone in history? I’m like, ‘Woah, woah hold on hold on Trump, you’re talking to Ye.’”

Seriously. Dude, who do you think you are?

A source close to Trump told NBC the former president was left furious by the meeting.

Hahahahahaha you don’t say.

“He’s crazy. He can’t beat me,” Trump said of Ye, according to the source, who also said “Trump was totally blindsided” by Fuentes’s presence, adding: “It was a set-up.”

Oh my goodness, totally blindsided, how surprising and shocking for such a disciplined thoughtful man.

On Wednesday, the Associated Press reported that Trump’s campaign was “putting new protocols in place to ensure that those who meet with him are approved and fully vetted”. Among those protocols, the AP said, citing unnamed sources, is a requirement that Trump is accompanied by a senior official at all times.

falls to floor in shrieks of laughter

Wait who is doing the obsessing here?

Arwa Mahdawi wrote a column on creepy advertising by Tampax and Balenciaga, but in the process she managed to take a swipe at The Designated Enemy.

If any brand has licence to make jokes about things being up vaginas, it’s Tampax. Sexualising tampons, however, is revolting. Still, the tweet had the intended effect, I suppose, which was to get people talking about Tampax. The gender-neutral language also sparked a heated argument about trans people because, hey, what doesn’t spark a heated argument about trans people these days? While I admit spending 60% of my life on Twitter isn’t healthy, it’s not as unhealthy as spending 99.99% of your waking hours obsessing over trans people’s right to exist, which is what a depressing number of people seem to do.

No they don’t. That’s a stupid lie, which keeps being told despite the billions of corrections.

It’s not that we think trans people don’t have a right to exist. Saying we do implies, none too subtly, that we want genocide of trans people. The issue is not existence, it’s definition. We think that trans people don’t have a right to define themselves as literally the sex they are not, and then proceed to help themselves to the rights that go with being that sex.

Definition is not the same as existence. I’m not a tulip, and I don’t cease to exist if I’m told I’m not a tulip. You can swap any noun for “tulip” and it remains true.

Alex Massie in The Spectator:

Yesterday Nicola Sturgeon spoke at an event celebrating 30 years of the charity Zero Tolerance and its long running – and essential – commitment to ending violence against women. In a revealing sign of the times in Scotland today, organisers emailed those attending the event to warn them certain subjects should be ignored. As they put it: ‘We wish to create a safe and supported environment for our guests and ask you to support us in this aim by refraining from discussions of the definition of a woman and single sex spaces in relation to the gender recognition act.’

But…how then will they know what anyone is talking about? If they don’t know people are talking about women as opposed to women and men who say they are women, how can they understand the discussions at all? This is the problem, isn’t it. When you’re talking about a subject that affects women specifically, then it muddies the waters to drag in men who say they are women. This is exactly why it’s a bad idea to pretend that men can be women.

…for the moment and whether Sturgeon likes it or not, this is the hot-ticket women’s issue in Scotland. I say women’s issue but, really, it’s not just a women’s issue. It is, in the end, a choice between those who wish to inhabit a reality-based world and those who insist truth is an endlessly moveable, malleable, feast. 

Yes but also no. The truth v fantasy aspect is very important, but it’s also very important that it’s women who are the Designated Enemy.

Sturgeon said:

‘Much of what I’m going to say today is about male violence against women because it is men who commit violence against women. In my long experience, most men who commit violence against women don’t feel the need to change gender to do that. Those who do, my argument is we should focus on them because they are men abusing a system to attack women. What we shouldn’t do is further stigmatise a group of women who are already too stigmatised.’

By which she means men who say they are women.

It’s not stigmatising men who say they are women to say they are men. The intrusion or offense or aggression is from the other direction. It’s an insult to women for men to insist that being a woman is just a matter of assertion. No, it isn’t: it’s a matter of being born with a female body, of growing up vulnerable to various forms of aggression from men, of being not as big or fast or strong as men, of being the prey not the predator. Women can no more afford to pretend men are women than gazelles can afford to pretend cheetahs are gazelles.

Good grief.

First I see this:

Then I see a reply saying Lady SH is Lady Susan Hussey so I hie me to Google for information on Lady SH and find a bouquet of headlines saying she’s resigned. I chose the BBC:

Lady Susan Hussey quits over remarks to charity boss Ngozi Fulani

The late Queen’s lady-in-waiting Lady Susan Hussey has apologised and resigned after she repeatedly asked a black British charity boss where she was from.

Ngozi Fulani, a charity founder, was questioned about her background at the charity event at the palace on Tuesday. Ms Fulani said she was “totally stunned” by Prince William’s godmother’s comments.

The palace described the comments as “unacceptable and deeply regrettable”. An eyewitness to the conversation, Mandu Reid, told the BBC Lady Susan’s questions had been “offensive, racist and unwelcoming”. She said she had a “sense of incredulity” about the exchange in which Ms Fulani was interrogated about where she was from, even though she had already explained she was born and lived in the UK.

This is their job, pretty much the whole of it – celebrating and rewarding people who do good work. Royalty and the nobility are obviously an absurd anachronism with little or nothing to justify their status, so surely the most basic duty they have is to do the celebrating and rewarding properly. It’s been common knowledge for years that singling certain kinds of people out for the “Where you from?” interrogation is, yes, racist. Persisting in the question after a very clear response that it’s not an ok question is off the charts. That’s without even talking about the bit where Lady SH moved Ms Fulani’s hair.

The Telegraph solemnly reports:

A non-binary senior US nuclear official has been charged with stealing a suitcase at an airport.

The owner of the suitcase however is non-non-binary. She’s not a man, even half.

Sam Brinton, 35, became the most prominent genderfluid person in the US government in June, overseeing the disposal of nuclear waste.

He’s a man non-binary as opposed to a woman non-binary.

The appointment of the MIT graduate, who uses the pronouns “they” and “them”, was hailed at the time by diversity campaigners.

By laughably credulous “diversity campaigners.” A pale man who calls himself “them” and has a high-up government job is not much of a blow for diversity.

When Brinton took up the post in June they tweeted a picture from their office wearing Stars and Stripes stilettos.

They wrote: “As one of if not the very first openly genderfluid individuals in federal government leadership, I was welcomed with open arms into the Department of Energy.”

Not one of the very first self-obsessed goons though.

Found guilty.

A federal jury on Tuesday convicted Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes of seditious conspiracy for leading a months-long plot to unleash political violence to prevent the inauguration of President Biden, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The panel of seven men and five women deliberated for three days before finding Rhodes and a co-defendant guilty of conspiring to oppose by force the lawful transition of presidential power. Rhodes and all four co-defendants on trial were also convicted of obstructing Congress as it met to confirm the results of the 2020 election. Both offenses are punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

…

The indictment brought against Rhodes, 56, and other Oath Keepers associates in January was the first time the U.S. government leveled the historically rare charge of seditious conspiracy in the massiveJan. 6 investigation. He is the highest-profile figure to face trial in connection with rioting by angry Trump supporters who injured scores of officers and ransacked offices, forcing the evacuation of lawmakers.

Rhodes and followers, dressed in combat-style gear, converged on the Capitol after staging an “arsenal” of weapons at nearby hotels, ready to take up arms at Rhodes’s direction, the government charged. Rhodes’s defense said he and co-defendants came to Washington as bodyguards and peacekeepers, bringing firearms only in case Trump met their demand to mobilize private militia to stop Biden from becoming president.

Oh is that all. How is that a defense? They’re not allowed to mobilize private militia to stop Biden from becoming president. That’s a no-no. It’s not permitted; it is forbidden. Not ok, not cool, not high spirits. No no no no no bad citizen, bad, bad, leave it.

The Justice Department arrested Rhodes in January and Tarrio in June after an internal debate over whether the magnitude and organization behind the Capitol attack merited bringing rarely used seditious conspiracy charges. Bringing the politically charged count posed a higher risk at trial because it required that prosecutors prove the defendants harbored an intent to forcibly oppose the federal government, compared to the charge of conspiring to obstruct a proceeding of Congress, which is punishable by the same 20-year maximum prison term.

I’m hoping Trump’s head explodes. Very literally.

I’m looking for more on this claim by anthropologist Dan Hicks that Bentham “contested immediate emancipation.”

It’s certainly possible in the abstract, given utilitarianism’s “greatest happiness of the greatest number” principle. The obvious objection is that lots of people can be made happy about the sufferings of a smaller number of people, so let’s not do it that way. Actual utilitarians wrestled with the problem; working imperialists, not so much. How about in the concrete? Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews has a relevant article:

Classical Utilitarianism, on one reading, is the view according to which an action, rule, policy or social institution is right if and only if it is designed to advance aggregate well-being, hedonistically construed. Relying on some version of this moral framework, the Classical Utilitarians — Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick — advocated for a wide range of social, political and legal reforms.

Both their reformist agenda and the time at which they lived led each of the Classical Utilitarians to intellectual entanglements with British imperialism, colonialism and related issues (e.g., race and slavery). However, the nature and extent of their involvement with and relationship to the British imperial project and colonialism in general has not yet been properly or fully analysed. The purpose of this nicely assembled and timely volume is to remedy this situation and, as the editors state in their introduction, ‘to bring out, to engage with, the different aspects of the utilitarian legacy that bear directly on questions of race and empire’.

Sounds like a good read.

The two papers on Bentham are among the most interesting and illuminating in this volume. In his article, “Jeremy Bentham on Slavery and the Slave Trade”, Fred Rosen responds to the view that Bentham failed to have the appropriate moral reaction to slavery and slave trading. Bentham’s error, it is claimed, is that he held that the security of the property of slave owners had to be balanced against equality in deciding the right public policy to have regarding slavery. This problem is seen clearly, critics contend, in Bentham’s advocacy of a gradual rather than immediate emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery.

In reply, Rosen demonstrates that Bentham’s position is both more sophisticated and more plausible than critics acknowledge. Relying on a little-known letter published in the Public Advertiser on June 6, 1789, Rosen shows that Bentham was clear on the issue of slave trading: it should end without compensation to slave traders. He advocated gradual emancipation, not because he wrongly gave weight to the security and protection of private property, Rosen continues, but out of concern for the protection of slaves: he wanted to ensure that the abolition of slaveholding did not make slaves worse off. For in conjunction with emancipation, what is needed is another economic and social system not based on slavery, ‘one that provided subsistence and security for the newly freed slaves and did not leave them in a worse position in relation to their former masters’.

You know what? He was not wrong about that. US history from 1865 on is an infinite encyclopedia on the subject. Many “freed” slaves absolutely were in a worse position in relation to their former masters, which is why David Oshinsky titled his book about what happened after Reconstruction was killed off Worse Than Slavery.

So it looks as if Hicks’s remark is less than fully accurate.