Originally a comment by iknklast on A cold, dark, black emptiness.

It takes MASSIVE amounts of fuel just to get off the planet. Transporting the ingredients of biospheres too isn’t doable.

Not to mention the ecological issues. We don’t have much success building ecosystems on Earth, in places where there is existing soil, a seed bank, and a nearby highway to readily move things from one spot to another. I worked on one demonstration project – just a five mile stretch of a lake, to show it could be done. We moved aquatic plants from south central Oklahoma to south eastern Oklahoma, a three hour drive in good situations, but five hours when you are going slow and stopping to water plants. More than half of them didn’t survive the journey. The seeds/bulbs/etc we used? Didn’t even germinate, even though we knew those plants were able to live in that lake.

The project was budgeted at $300,00 and went over budget before we even started the planting. That was for a small research project with a small crew of college boys who served as interns, and only two full time staff, one a temp the other an intern – in short, not highly paid, but as knowledgeable as any other expert.

Did we succeed? Sort of…we established plants that lived for one and a half seasons. The project was abandoned as too expensive.

We haven’t moved very far on our knowledge of building ecosystems since then, though you will see glowing reports on the web, I’m sure. People need to justify their grants. It was my job to justify the grant, and to persuade the funders that going over budget was reasonable (it was – the budget was about three to four times too low for what was needed).

Keep in mind, we had good soils with adequate nutrients (better than adequate phosphorus), water available at every step of the way, a source of materials within a reasonable distance, and a crew of ten. Plus three boats, two trucks, and the Corps of Engineers available. We failed. Not because the project was undoable, but because we didn’t know enough, and we didn’t have enough money, and the locals weren’t going to put any more money into it.

The only people I tend to see thinking we could go to Mars/Moon/exoplanet are engineers and technicians. Biologists know better. Building a colony on another planet is more than just getting people and building materials to the planet. You have to get water there. Know how much water weighs? You have to get plants and animals there. Humans cannot live without the resources we have on earth; we evolved on this planet for a reason. The only way to hope to get them there is to decimate every economy on Earth, and every ecosystem on Earth.

Those of us not wealthy enough to afford the price tag? We’ll be working back here in diminishing situations for the rich colonizers – who probably won’t live long, just long enough to decimate this planet.

From Pliny:

The abject stupidity around this subject is breathtaking.

Fascinating, Sturgeon, but how does anyone know which are the “trans women” and which are the abusive men? How do you know that zero abusive men claim to be trans women? How is anyone supposed to know for absolute certain that all trans women are sincerely deluded as opposed to seizing an obvious opportunity to abuse women and get away with it? How does anyone know what the real threats are? How do you know what the real threats are? How do you justify being so cavalier and so smug about this?

But it’s the right-on kind of misogyny.

So lets read about this charming young fella. [Updating to say: probably not a fella; see comments.]

An SNP equalities officer has apologised for a series of social media outbursts including one threatening violence against women. In now deleted posts, Cameron Downing, 23, said he wanted to “beat the f[uck] out of some terfs and transphobes”.

The old familiar a man wanted to beat the fuck out of some women.

In another, he claimed: “I f[ucking] hate terfs and transphobes with such a passion they make me want to SCREAM!”

Not Putin, not Nazis, not Trump, not rapists, not femicides, not men who rape and murder women, but women who don’t believe that men are women. Those are the people he singles out for rage and hatred.

Downing has been an equalities officer for the SNP’s London branch since August 2022 and previously worked in the same role in 2021. When confronted about the Twitter posts, he said: “I apologise for these tweets and for any offence caused to the LGBTQ+ community and have long since deleted them.”

Hmm. So if he’d said he wanted to beat the fuck out of some Jews he would apologize for any offence to the LGBTQ community?

Never mind, he wears nail polish, he must be a wonderful person.

Putin responds:

The past few hours have seen wave after wave of explosions, not just here in Kyiv, but all across this vast country, from Lviv in the west to Kharkiv in the east and Odesa in the south.

For those of us who were here when Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February, there’s an element of déjà vu. We’ve been told to spend as much time as we can in the basement, as further attacks, using missiles and drones, are expected.

But this is also different. The explosions here in Kyiv are much closer to the centre. Not distant thumps from the suburbs, but loud reverberations close to streets and locations we’ve come to know well in the past eight months.

It’s difficult to tell what is being targeted, but a statement from Ukraine’s ministry of culture said museums and the Philharmonic building had been hit.

One video circulating on social media showed a huge crater in a children’s playground.

Another showed a missile slamming into Mayor Vitali Klitschko’s glass bridge, a popular tourist spot and viewpoint above the Dnipro River.

Putin identifies as the boss of Ukraine. Ukraine doesn’t see it that way.

Eva Kurilova at Reduxx tells us:

In their push to destroy female sports, gender activists have dropped any veneer of concern about keeping sporting competitions fair and safe for female athletes.

On September 26, Biathlon Canada introduced a new policy on gender inclusion that allows men unrestricted access to the female category on the basis of self-declared gender identity. In other words, all a man has to do is say he is a woman, and he’s allowed to cheat his way to a female athlete’s spot on the podium.

According to the Biathlon Canada website, the policy was passed with the unanimous approval of the board of directors and is intended to outline “how the organization will create respectful and inclusive environments for participation that value the individual’s gender identity and gender expression.”

But by doing that the organization will create insulting and hostile environments that disvalue the individual’s sex. Most people don’t claim to have a “gender identity” that contradicts their sex, so it’s not at all clear why any athletic organization would decide to pamper gender identity while ruining women’s sports.

The policy is five pages of drivel about gender idenniny.

Where one might expect to see references to studies and data about sport performance, the document instead presents readers with a Gender Unicorn to use as a “framework of understanding the different categories of human identities.”

In other words a childish cartoon. “Yo ladies we’re driving a tank through your sport and here’s an adorable cartoon to explain why.”

It’s so fucking insulting it’s beyond belief.

Let it sink in that a sporting organization is using a purple cartoon unicorn to explain a policy that strips the female category of all protections.

It has sunk in. The result is a lava flow of rage.

In the Biathlon Canada Gender Inclusion Policy – Information Document & FAQ, the organization further asserts that, “for any competition that falls under Biathlon Canada’s jurisdiction, participants will compete in the gender category that is the most gender affirming and/or safest for them.”

But that’s an attempt to square the circle. You can’t do both. If you pick “gender affirming” as Biathlon Canada has then you make it literally impossible for women to compete in the gender category that is the safest for them. Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuh.

What Ian did:

Hurricane Ian has shown just what Florida is up against in a world where global warming is, as climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe described recently, “putting hurricanes on steroids.” Ian blew ashore with winds of 150 miles per hour, and pushed storm surges of 12 to 18 feet before moving across central Florida, where it caused extensive inland flooding. 

Ian splintered and washed away homes, broke bridges, toppled trees, tossed boats, submerged roads and fell power lines in communities like Fort Myers, Sanibel Island, Naples and the Orlando area. It caused $45 billion to $55 billion in property damage, according to a preliminary estimate from Moody’s Analytics. There are now fears that Ian will make the state’s insurance industry, already pushed to the brink by previous hurricanes, tip further toward collapse.

And it’s not as if there’s any reason to think another such hurricane won’t come along.

A core problem, experts said, is that too many people are living in high-risk areas in a state with the highest risk from hurricanes.

Or to put it more bluntly, people should be getting out of Florida.

Florida’s new spending on resilience is important, said Richard S. Olson, professor and director of the Extreme Events Institute and the International Hurricane Research Center at Florida International University. “I am not going to say it’s a Band-Aid; it is helping, of course,” said Olson, who researches the political fallout from disasters. “But is it enough when you consider we have had 70-plus years of coastal and barrier island development?” In the 1950s, Florida’s population was less than 3 million. Now, there are 22 million Floridians.

“A lot of those people wanted to live near the water,” Olson said. “Florida is a peninsula surrounded on three sides by warm water, in a hurricane zone. What could possibly go wrong? You have to question the development model.”

They wanted to live near the water, but not like that.

Florida public radio told us last February that the state made a lot of star appearances in the latest IPCC report:

Climate change has already changed places like Florida permanently and irreversibly — affecting coral reefs, leading to higher property values and increasing inequality for vulnerable populations in the state, according to a new global report from the world’s top scientists.

The nearly 2,000-page report had a global focus, but Florida was repeatedly used as an example of a place where the impacts of climate change were already being felt, both economically and environmentally.

Which is unsurprising seeing as how it’s a narrow peninsula in a rising sea.

The report specifically mentions Florida multiple times, including:

• Tidal flooding worsened by sea rise has led to almost $500 million in lost real estate value from 2005 to 2016 in Miami-Dade alone, “and it is likely that coastal flood risks in the region beyond 2050 will increase without adaptation to climate change.”
• Miami-Dade’s efforts to raise roads and build stormwater pumps have raised property values, leading to inequality for vulnerable populations
• Floridians could be forced to retreat from the coast as sea levels rise
• Florida’s coral reefs are bleaching and dying as temperatures rise
• As coral reefs die, Florida could lose up to $55 billion in reef-related tourism money by 2100
• Harmful algal blooms along Florida’s west coast spurred by climate change led to massive economic losses

Oh and also hurricanes. Bigger stronger wetter windier hurricanes.

An excerpt from William Shatner’s new book Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder is doing the rounds, for good reason. It’s written “with” Joshua Brandon, so the quality of the writing may be due to him.

We got out of our harnesses and began to float around. The other folks went straight into somersaults and enjoying all the effects of weightlessness. I wanted no part in that. I wanted, needed to get to the window as quickly as possible to see what was out there.

I looked down and I could see the hole that our spaceship had punched in the thin, blue-tinged layer of oxygen around Earth. It was as if there was a wake trailing behind where we had just been, and just as soon as I’d noticed it, it disappeared.

I continued my self-guided tour and turned my head to face the other direction, to stare into space. I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.

I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.

I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.

That’s always how it strikes me, when I see a photo of earth from Out There. That’s obviously far less visceral and intense, but the basic idea is the same. Save it, cherish it, protect it, put it first – it’s all we have.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Its vital helpline???

And, as always, I wonder if the ‘abuse’ suffered is just more people stating truth about reality. They have a very low threshold for abuse.

We are supposed to accept that stating Reality is hateful, and that we should just shut up and stop mentioning it. Fuck that shit. I propose that we should turn things around, and point out things that are actually hateful, and in some instances, actually violent. I’ll start.

Telling children that they are “born in the wrong body” is hateful.

Saying that so-called “puberty blockers” are harmless and reversible is hateful.

Mutilating children and calling it “gender affirming” or “lifesaving” care is hateful.

Counseling any of the above without parental consent is hateful. (Of course parents doing this to their children is hateful, too.)

Demanding that people acquiesce to, accept, or repeat a lie is hateful. It is particularly hateful when the demand to do so is called “Being kind.”

Claiming that wearing particular clothing or affecting particular mannerisms and behaviours is all that is needed for a man to “become” or “identify” as a woman is hateful.

Redefing “woman” in such a way that it can include men is hateful.

Redefining homosexuality as “same gender attraction” is hateful.

Demanding that lesbians accept men as “lesbians” is hateful.

Imprisoning men who “identify” as women with women is hateful.

Men who “identify” as women demanding access to women’s single-sex spaces, positions, and facilities is hateful.

Allowing men who “identify” as women access to women’s single-sex spaces, positions, and facilities is hateful.

Demanding people lie about the sex of men who “identify” as women is hateful.

Erasing the words “woman” and “women”, or reducing women to mere body parts orbodily functions in the name of “inclusion” is hateful. It is particularly hateful when there is no effort of equal scope and thoroughness to remove “man” and “men,” or reduce them to bits of anatomy or bodily functions in equivalent contexts and situations.

To accuse women defending their sex-based rights of being bigots is hateful.

Claiming to be the target of “genocide” when one isn’t is hateful.

Accusing people who simply do not agree with genderist claims of bigotry, hatred and murderous intent is hateful.

To tell people that they are the targets of hatred, bigotry and murderous intent when they are not, is hateful.

I could go on, but I won’t; you get the idea. Feel free to add to this list. It’s time we put the real purveyors of actual hatred on notice, and on the defensive.

Trump tried to use the documents he’d stolen to get the documents he’d failed to steal.

Late last year, as the National Archives ratcheted up the pressure on former President Donald J. Trump to return boxes of records he had taken from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago club, he came up with an idea to resolve the looming showdown: cut a deal.

Mr. Trump, still determined to show he had been wronged by the F.B.I. investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, was angry with the National Archives and Records Administration for its unwillingness to hand over a batch of sensitive documents that he thought proved his claims.

In exchange for those documents, Mr. Trump told advisers, he would return to the National Archives the boxes of material he had taken to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla.

But they were all government documents, that belonged and still belong to the government, not to Donald Crime Boss Trump. You don’t get to use stolen documents as a bribe to acquire more stolen documents. Haberman and Schmidt of the Times say Trump took the documents, but it would be clearer to admit that he stole them. They weren’t his, and he’d been told they weren’t his, so his taking them was theft.

Mr. Trump’s aides never pursued the idea. But the episode is one in a series that demonstrates how Mr. Trump spent a year and a half deflecting, delaying and sometimes leading aides to dissemble when it came to demands from the National Archives and ultimately the Justice Department to return the material he had taken [stolen], interviews and documents show.

In other words he spent a year and a half lying, making his people lie, and attempting extortion.

In the closing weeks of his presidency, the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, flagged the need for Mr. Trump to return documents that had piled up in boxes in the White House residence, according to archives officials.

“It is also our understanding that roughly two dozen boxes of original presidential records were kept in the residence of the White House over the course of President Trump’s last year in office and have not been transferred to NARA, despite a determination by Pat Cipollone in the final days of the administration that they need to be,” Gary M. Stern, the top lawyer for the National Archives, told Mr. Trump’s representatives in a 2021 letter, using an abbreviation for the agency’s name.

Here’s a startling piece:

Mr. Cannon told associates that the boxes needed to be shipped back as they were, so the professional archivists could be the ones to sift through the material and set aside what they believed belonged to Mr. Trump. What is more, Mr. Cannon believed there was the possibility that the boxes could contain classified material, according to two people briefed on the discussions, and none of the staff members in Mr. Trump’s presidential office at Mar-a-Lago had proper security clearances.

Well yes but also Trump’s presidential office at Mar-a-Lago is just an office in a large resort: it’s not a secure facility. Nobody at Mar-a-Lago had proper security clearances and they all had potential access. Putin could have an agent there mowing the greens for all we know.

It was around that same time that Mr. Trump floated the idea of offering the deal to return the boxes in exchange for documents he believed would expose the Russia investigation as a “hoax” cooked up by the F.B.I. Mr. Trump did not appear to know specifically what he thought the archives had — only that there were items he wanted.

Well, you know, they’re in the box marked “Documents That Will Expose the Rushya Investigation As a Hoax.”

Mr. Trump’s aides — recognizing that such a swap would be a non-starter since the government had a clear right to the material Mr. Trump had taken from the White House and the Russia-related documents held by the archives remained marked as classified — never acted on the idea.

Aka Trump’s aides recognized the “swap” as attempted extortion via stolen material and decided not to stick their necks out quite that far.

Florida. Floods. Insurance.

Homeowners insurance policies typically don’t cover flood damage, and most people living in Ian’s path across Florida didn’t have a separate flood insurance policy. Inland areas that experienced historic rainfall and catastrophic floodwaters were especially unprepared, according to a CNN analysis of FEMA flood insurance data.

Because usually the catastrophic flooding happens on the coasts, not inland.

In Seminole County, northeast of Orlando, more than 5,200 residential buildings have been damaged by the storm, primarily due to flooding, according to a county spokesperson. “We’ve never had anything to this nature,” said Jay Zembower, a Seminole County commissioner, calling the flooding “a 500-plus-year event of quick rainfall in a short window of time.”

But “a 500-plus-year event” doesn’t mean anything now, because The Climate Is Changing.

Congress could also pass additional disaster aid – like lawmakers did in the wake of previous major hurricanes, like Katrina, Sandy and Harvey. But it could take months or longer for the funding to be approved and for affected communities to receive it, Wright said.

Experts like Wright said that the widespread damage from Ian should be a wake-up call that far more homeowners around the US need to purchase flood insurance – even if they don’t own a waterfront property. That’s especially the case as climate change leads to stronger and more frequent storms.

Yes but at the same time, insurance isn’t magic. It’s not an infinite supply of money that will never disappear and will always be there if you just buy it. At some point the disasters are going to outrun the insurance companies and federal insurance.

The Daily Mail picked up the University of Southern Maine story.

A group of students at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, Maine are calling for their professor to be fired after she said in class only two sexes exist. 

Christy Hammer, a professor of education, allegedly made the statement during a heated debate about gender identity in her  ‘Creating a Positive Learning Environment’ class, causing an uproar among the graduate students.

Only one student agreed with the educator. The rest maintained both biological sexes and social genders are on a spectrum.

…

The class is a requirement to complete the graduate-level Extended Teacher Education Program and become a certified teacher in Maine. 

So, as we know, the university is offering an alternative section for the class while declining to fire Hammer.

Ok so wait a second here. These are graduate students in education, and they’re being enabled to say and maintain and insist a fatuous untruth about basic biology. How is that ok? How is that going to work out in the future? Are education schools just going to nod placidly and allow students to go out into the world of school maintaining a fundamental lie about human biology? Might there possibly be any drawbacks to such a move?

Are grad students in education going to start having their own astronomy next? Their own climate studies? Their own special unique chemistry?

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba replying to the question “Why did a guy who seemingly wanted to diddle kids join an organization that wanted to mutilate them?” on Wearing the mask.

I’d say it’s because sexuality is inextricable from the transgender package. A transgender person is a sexual being, and so a transgender child is a sexual child. Narcissistic AGPs use the concept of the trans kid to validate their own fantasies by making their fetish an intrinsic, unalterable character trait. Pedophiles, on the other hand, use the sexuality of rainbow subculture to sexualize children.

Pedophiles get their jollies from this even if they never once meet a trans kid. They get vicarious thrills by setting up children to be abused, as well as the thrill of being in control of a child’s sexual life, after the fashion of a pimp. They get to hear trans kids talking about sexual things and even get to talk with them about sexual things in public. They get to sexualize children in public. And the fact that there’s not a goddamn thing most people can do about it without being labeled some sort of -ist or -phobe gives a rush of power.

Why wouldn’t a pedophile support transing kids?

And seriously, anyone who falls for the idea that destigmatizing pedophilia would help in any way to reduce instances of child abuse needs to be slapped. Pedophilia doesn’t bear a stigma randomly and spontaneously. We revile pedophilia because it’s the emotional component to something we revile: sexual activity with children. Someone who has the desire or urge to do something is, all else being equal, more likely to do that thing than someone without that desire or urge. Obviously. So we stigmatize that mental state in the interest of child safety. And that’s assuming we restrict pedophilia to meaning only the sexual attraction to or desire for children, which isn’t actually the case. Like with so many of these Critical Theory-derived rhetorics, the strategy is to temporarily deny a meaning, then forget that denial when advantageous. In this case, they deny that pedophilia refers to sexual activity with children, as though the words “engage in” never appear in front of “pedophilia”, “necrophilia”, and the like.

Nicola Sturgeon says JK Rowling isn’t a feminist, she (Sturgeon) is.

Like hell.

Nicola Sturgeon has suggested that JK Rowling is not a “real feminist” as she lashed out at the Harry Potter author’s accusation that she is a “destroyer of women’s rights” over her plan to allow people to self-identify their legal gender.

Lash out all you want but if you take women’s rights away you’re not a feminist.

In a rebuke to Ms Rowling, Ms Sturgeon said that “real feminists as I consider myself to be” focus on the “real” threats to women posed by abusive men and “lawmakers who want to take away our rights”.

Trans women are abusive men. What they’re currently doing to women is highly abusive.

She argued that predatory men that attempted to abuse the process to gain access to women’s safe spaces, such as female changing rooms, would be guilty of a criminal offence.

Yes and Sturgeon would have smoothed the way for them.

Plus the fact that it’s a “criminal offence” means pretty much nothing, given that rape itself is almost never prosecuted in the UK. If rape isn’t prosecuted does she think invading women’s toilets will be?

Dismissing opposition to the Bill, which attracted a huge protest from women’s rights campaigners this week outside the Scottish Parliament, she said scrapping it would be “further stigmatising and discriminating against a tiny group in our society that is already one of the most stigmatised”.

Is that even true any more? If it is, it’s certainly not the whole truth: the tiny group is also one of the most glorified and pampered and flattered. Women are told to shut up and fuck off and go away while men who call themselves women are wrapped in cotton wool and given ice cream.

Asked on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme whether she was a “destroyer of women’s rights”, Ms Sturgeon said: “No, I’ve spent my entire life campaigning for women’s rights and am a passionate feminist with lots of evidence behind that.”

But she’s now setting fire to women’s rights, so I really don’t give the tiniest shit about her biography.

“Men are the risk to women, not trans women. Any man who seeks to abuse any process to attack women, we should deal with that. We shouldn’t stigmatise further an already stigmatised group of people,” she said.

Trans women are men. Trans women now are also men who have been enthusiastically encouraged to shout and rage and fume at women who fail to agree that they’re women, so yes, trans women damn well are a risk to women. Repeating the stupid mantras accomplishes nothing.

Ms Sturgeon said there were “many, many real threats” to women such as physical and sexual attacks and the removal of abortion and reproductive rights in countries such as Iran.

“There are no shortage of attacks on women that feminists, real feminists as I consider myself to be should be focusing on right now,” she added.

“The threat to women in our society today is not from trans women. It is from abusive men and from lawmakers who want to take away our rights and that is what we should be focusing on.”

But she’s one of them – she’s one of those lawmakers taking away our rights. She’s helping abusive men who claim to be women abuse women.

Oh good, YET ANOTHER man explaining what a woman is and how wrong we’ve all been to think we knew.

Sally Hines as FGEN issued a “statement” (aka a blog post) last March:

FGEN is an international network of feminist academics and others whose aims are wholly political in that we seek to oppose transphobia wherever it becomes apparent – whether in a university in Central London or on the prairies of the midwestern United States. 

So, the F shouldn’t be there at all. It’s not a feminist network, it’s an anti-“transphobia” network, i.e. a network dedicated to insisting that men are women if they say they are and no one is allowed to disagree. No feminism in sight.

We aim to promote the human rights of trans and gender diverse people worldwide to end the exclusion of trans people, and to provide an authoritative voice against the increasing transphobia masquerading as scholarship in academia.

So why do we call ourselves feminist? To deceive! Mind you, Sally Hines would say it’s to take feminism back from the evil terfs, but that’s the same thing.

Sally Hines founded a thing called the Feminist Gender Equality Network, aka FGEN.

Tell us more:

The Feminist Gender Equality Network (FGEN) is a cross-sector, interdisciplinary international organisation that adopts an intersectional feminist framework in order to:

1. advance the understanding of gender and sex as fluid categories

What’s feminist about that though? If gender and sex are fluid categories, how can feminism exist? What does it mean? What is it for?

2. protect the rights and needs of people of all (or no) gender

Then why call it feminism? Why not call it peopleism? If it’s for people of all or no gender (what that means is a question for another paragraph, or another day) then why name it after women? Why claim to be both feminist and all-peopleist? Why not just drop the feminism instead of including it and then declaring it meaningless? Why not skip the middle part and just go straight to the no feminism?

3. counter transphobia and transmisogyny in social life and institutions, legal structures, political movements and media and cultural representation

Then why call it feminism? Why not call it transism? Why call it feminism and then talk about “transmisogyny” with no mention of misogyny itself? Transmisogyny, weirdly, refers to non-belief that men can become women, which is an abuse of meaning because it has nothing to do with misogyny.

4. counter sexism and gender-based violence and discrimination

Finally something recognizable as vaguely feminist, but given the three that precede it it seems very feeble and perfunctory. Anyway you’re queering gender so what is gender-based violence? And which gender do you have in mind?

5. further intersectional understanding and political mobilisation to stress the relationship between gender marginalisation and other social inequalities

Or, in your case, probably more like put every other social inequality you can think of ahead of “gender marginalisation” – which is anyway a feeble and deceptive way to talk about abuse of women.

6. forward self and bodily autonomy and reproductive choice and rights

And by “bodily autonomy” you mean freedom to try to disguise oneself as the other sex, and you place that ahead of abortion rights, as if it were more urgent and important.

What a destructive fool Sally Hines is.

Reduxx has further detail on the Jacob Breslow question – Jacob Breslow Associate Professor at the London School of Economics, that is.

The academic who recently resigned from a charity that promotes the medical transitioning of children had for years been writing blog entries related to pro-pedophilia activism and “minor attraction.”

Activism around sex with children, that is.

“Activism” forsooth – as if the common understanding that it’s extremely wrong to force sex on children were just another outdated unexamined prejudice like the one that says women are stupid and inferior or the one that says non-white people are stupid and inferior.

It’s not. Sex is not good for children. Adults forcing or coaxing or tricking them into sex is destructive and loathsome. It’s like a clip I saw yesterday that froze me in horror and pity –

It seems pretty simple. Don’t treat children that way.

In 2011, Breslow, then a PhD student, spoke at a symposium titled “Pedophilia, Minor-Attracted Persons, and the DSM: Issues and Controversies,” hosted by pedophile advocacy organization B4U-Act. The stated purpose of the symposium was to lobby the American Psychiatric Association for changes to the diagnostic definition of pedophilia in order to “reduce stigma” against “minor-attracted people” (MAPs).

So that those people could rape children with impunity. That’s Associate Professor Breslow.

Founded in 2009 by convicted child rapist Michael Melsheimer, B4U-Act had apparently been approved by the founders of infamous pederast activist group, the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). After B4U-Act’s creation, Melsheimer had informed other pedophiles that his organization’s approach would be focused around garnering public support for normalizing pedophilia by falsely claiming the intention was to prevent child sexual abuse.

When in fact the goal was to prevent the prevention of child sexual abuse.

At their symposium, Breslow read from a paper in which he rejected the understanding of pedophilic attraction to children as being inherently harmful, and supported the concept of pedophilia being classified as a sexual or political orientation.

By the same token it’s not inherently harmful for adults to put on terror-masks and scream in the faces of sobbing screaming shaking toddlers.

“Allowing for a form of non-diagnosable minor attraction is exciting, as it potentially creates a sexual or political identity by which activists, scholars, and clinicians can begin to better understand Minor Attracted Persons”…read Breslow’s abstract.

Oh joy, an idenniny – an idenniny for the raping adult, that is, not for the sobbing screaming shaking child. We can better understand adults who rape children! As for the children they rape, well they obviously don’t need to be better understood, the little sluts.

Following news of Breslow’s pedophilia apologism, further damning revelations have come to light, with a feminist Twitter user exposing WordPress blog entries written by Breslow from 2009 to 2017. Twitter user @Scottish_Woman first drew attention to the old blog, providing evidence that Breslow’s sordid history with pedophile sympathizing was far longer than previously thought.

Many entries by Breslow advocate for reframing pedophilia as a sexual identity comparable to homosexuality.

But of course it’s not comparable. Molesting children is not a sexual identity, it’s a crime against children.

Oops there goes the Kerch bridge:

Ukraine is exploding with excitement this morning.

Videos of the damaged Crimean bridge have spread like wildfire on social media; this is already being compared to the sinking of the Russian warship Moskva in April.

“The guided missile cruiser Moskva and the Kerch bridge – two notorious symbols of Russian power in Ukrainian Crimea – have gone down,” tweeted Ukraine’s ministry of defence.

“What’s next in line, Russkies?” it went on.

Ukraine has a brilliant sense of humor.

Ukraine’s inventive social media activists are gleefully pumping out memes to celebrate the occasion.

And Ukraine’s second largest bank, Monobank, says it has already issued a new debit card design featuring the collapsed bridge.

Oleksii Danilov, Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security Council, wasn’t the only one noting that the attack came just a day after Vladimir Putin’s 70th birthday, tweeting a video of the damaged bridge next to Marilyn Monroe’s famous performance of Happy Birthday, Mr President from 1962.