Aw yeah.

The Telegraph reports:

The Society of Authors has been “lost” to cancel culture, members fear, after free speech rebels failed to oust the current chairman in a row over gender ideology.

It can be confusing trying to pick out who is for free speech and who is for cancel culture in this dispute. Joanne Harris was exercising her free speech when she used the violent attack on Salman Rushdie to sneer at JK Rowling, but critics see her sneering as an abuse of her role as chairman.

The UK’s largest writers’ union has faced an internal revolt over claims it has not properly defended gender-critical authors from being “cancelled” if they do not agree with prevailing opinions.

…

Writers including Julie Bindel and Amanda Craig brought a motion at its annual general meeting on Thursday night, which sought to have Harris removed as president. They brought another that aimed to introduce “robust” measures to protect free speech.

Both were voted down. The smelly little orthodoxy won big.

I can’t help finding the Elon Musk car crash funny. Dude bounces in shouting threats and insults at his employees and guess what, most of them quit.

Twitter has told employees that the company’s office buildings will be temporarily closed, with immediate effect. In a message seen by the BBC, workers were told that the offices would reopen on Monday 21 November. It did not give a reason for the move.

The announcement comes amid reports that large numbers of staff were quitting after new owner Elon Musk called on them to sign up for “long hours at high intensity” or leave.

And they said “We’re already working long hours at high intensity so fuck you, we’re out.” Musk’s only option was to scream “Fine, then I’m closing the building!!”

Ain’t capitalism great?

Well that’s one way to get away with murder: become a Head of State.

The US has determined that Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader – Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – has immunity from a lawsuit filed by murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancé.

…

[I]n court filings, the US State department said he has immunity due to his new role as Saudi prime minister.

So if you’re a murderer the thing to do is get a new role as prime minister.

It was always highly unlikely that the US, as Saudi Arabia’s strategic partner and arms supplier, was ever going to facilitate the arrest of MBS. But granting him immunity in this way will cause some relief in the Saudi royal court and has provoked a storm of protest from human rights groups as well as Mr Khashoggi’s fiancée.

And disgust in anyone paying attention.

Mr Biden declined to talk to Mohammed bin Salman when he first became president.

But over the summer, President Biden said he wanted to “reorient” relations, ahead of a visit to Saudi Arabia in July.

Right, because Saudi Arabia is such an important “ally.”

His visit – in which he was pictured fist-bumping the crown prince – was criticised as validating the Saudi government following Mr Khashoggi’s murder.

Because it did.

Amnesty’s Agnes Callamard wrote on Twitter: “This is a deep betrayal. Another one. First disregarded by Pres. Trump. Then Pres. Biden’s fist bump… At all points, they had other choices.”

And Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the Biden administration had “sold Jamal Kashoggi’s blood for Saudi oil”.

Those SUVs don’t run on pixie dust you know.

Joanne Harris remains.

The novelist Joanne Harris has seen off an attempt to remove her from a leading position at the UK’s largest trade union for writers, illustrators and translators, after members comprehensively backed her in a vote.

…

In a vote of its members at its AGM, held online, a resolution to unseat Harris as chair of the Society of Authors management committee fell by 608 votes to 143. It represented 81% of voters backing her.

Too bad. She seems very unpleasant to me – bratty, sneery, flippant, and a bully.

The move to oust Harris followed a row earlier this year over her response to the stabbing of Salman Rushdie in New York state. The Booker prize-winning author lost sight in one eye and the use of a hand in the onstage knife attack.

Harris was criticised for launching a Twitter poll in the wake of the attack and after a death threat to the Harry Potter author JK Rowling, who had expressed solidarity with Rushdie.

Harris asked authors if they had ever received a death threat, offering a choice of answers: “Yes”, “Hell, yes”, “No, never” and “Show me, dammit”.

In other words it was snide mockery of JK Rowling, because all the cool kids think she’s a “transphobe.” But apparently the members like that kind of thing so whatever.

Billy Bragg says those evil women caused harassment of trans people to increase, doubters asked for evidence, he produced “people said.”

Several students said. Hearsay Your Honour. Also what was the baseline? Also, we know from long irritating experience that many trans activists call any kind of disagreement or skepticism “harassment,” so no, “several trans students have reported” doesn’t add up to evidence. At all.

The vacuous smug bullies are out in force today.

Only Kathleen didn’t say anything about being “offended.”

Condescending shits like Billy Bragg probably.

Amanda Brunton calls Stock names and urges people to go protest her talk, then whines about people talking back. Solidarity forever wot wot?

The people they hire at Cambridge these days. Good grief.

Childish as well as censorious.

It’s right there on the sign – votes for WOMEN.

Today in women’s prison news:

A prisoner who identifies as a woman – despite having the physicality of a tall man – battered a fellow inmate in the male wing of a Scottish jail after being made the subject of “comments” by other lags, a court heard on Wednesday.

Having the physicality of a tall man=being a man. He has the physicality of a tall man because he is one.

Katie Dolatowski, 22, a convicted paedophile who sexually assaulted a 10 year old girl in a Fife supermarket, was serving a sentence in Polmont Young Offenders’ Institution for physical assault.

Let’s pause to notice this. He’s a tall man who assaulted a ten year old girl. He’s not a good person. He’s pretty much the worst kind of person – one who uses superior strength to harm and injure and terrorize people who aren’t as tall and strong as he is, for his own jollies. He’s a very bad man, yet here’s a newspaper bowing and scraping to his “marginalized idennniny” as if he were a fragile delicate flower brutalized by society.

Falkirk Sheriff Court was told she had been placed in male accommodation in the prison “notwithstanding” her identifying as a woman.

As he should have been. Men who assault women, let alone little girls, should never be placed in female accommodation. Neither should any other men, but especially the rapists and batterers should not.

Appearing in the dock at Falkirk Sheriff Court flanked by security guards, Dolatowski, whose last address was given on court papers as Dunfermline, Fife, pleaded guilty to assaulting Mr Patterson by punching him repeatedly on the head and body.

Not something a woman would be able to do.

Solicitor Kelly Howe, defending, said: “She identifies as female, but, notwithstanding that, she had been placed in the male prison population at Polmont, and the court can probably anticipate the difficulties that caused her.

Can anyone imagine the difficulties that his being placed in the female prison population would cause the women in that prison population? Can anyone manage to care?

In March 2018, Dolatowski sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl in the toilet of Morrisons supermarket in Kirkcaldy. The terrified youngster was grabbed by the face, shoved into the cubicle, and ordered to remove her trousers.

The attack came a month after Dolatowski had filmed a 12-year-old girl on the toilet in another supermarket in the Fife town. For the sex offences, she was placed on a three year community payback order and banned from having contact with children.

#Not Our Crimes

And a pony.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced the launch of a new guaranteed income program for the city’s transgender community on Wednesday.

Why? Why them in particular? Why not people who need it rather than a particular “community”?

The Guaranteed Income for Trans People (GIFT) Program will provide low-income transgender residents with $1,200 each month, up to 18 months to help address financial insecurity within the community.

Why?

The city also said that the new pilot program is the first guaranteed income initiative to focus solely on transgender people and will provide 55 eligible participants with temporary income. Additionally, the city said it will provide the same individuals with “wrap-around” direct services, such as gender-affirming medical and mental health care, case management, specialty care services and financial coaching.

Why? Why them in particular?

“We know that our trans communities experience much higher rates of poverty and discrimination, so this program will target support to lift individuals in this community up. We will keep building on programs like this to provide those in the greatest need with the financial resources and services to help them thrive,” said Mayor London Breed in a statement.

Transgender communities, experience poverty and economic instability at disproportionate rates according to the city.

“The US Transgender Survey, which is the only largescale study of trans people in the United States, in 2015 found that 33% of trans people in California were living in poverty,” said Pau Crego with the San Francisco Office of Transgender Initiatives.

Is that a good reason to give them but not other people living in poverty a guaranteed income?

“We hope that our guaranteed income program will be the beginning of a reparative process to change the inequities experienced by our communities, help them survive in a world that is constantly debating their right to exist, and empower them to engage in healthcare services in a meaningful and life-changing way,” said JM Jaffe, executive director of Lyon-Martin Community Health Services.

Which “communities” though?

That’s the trouble with this robotic stale language: you can’t tell what the hell they’re talking about or what they think they mean by it. It’s just a group of units of goodspeak, which don’t actually tell us anything. Reparative process, inequities experienced, debating their right to exist, empower them, meaningful – the phrases are like a stack of poker chips. Arrange them in pretty combinations and that’s the job done for today.

Man explains how indifferent he is to women and their petty selfish desire to compete in sports against other women:

Australia’s most successful male Olympian Ian Thorpe has hit back at [criticized] a decision by international swimming’s governing body Fina to ban transgender women athletes from elite female competitions.

The swimming great, who won five gold medals at the Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004 Olympic Games, said the sport’s leaders had made the wrong decision.

“This is a very complicated issue, I can’t deny that, and I am personally opposed to the position Fina has taken on this,” he said. “I am for fairness in sport, but I’m also for equality in sport. And in this instance, they’ve actually got it wrong.”

It’s not “equality” in sport for men to be allowed to compete against women.

Also, and all too obviously and familiarly, it’s no skin off his ass, is it. If it’s no skin off your ass maybe you should just shut up about it. It’s very easy for men to say “Oh let trans women compete against women, that’s equality.” It will never ever ever ever ever cost them anything. It will only ever cost other people anything. That’s why they should shut up about it. They’re breezily giving away other people’s rights, not their own.

Following a storm of controversy, and a campaign of harassment against a swimmer who won an American collegiate event, Fina banned transgender women from competing in women’s races unless they had transitioned before the age of 12.

What a disgustingly dishonest paragraph. There was no “campaign of harassment” against William Thomas. The Australian Associated Press lies about the facts and suppresses the relevant details about William “Lia” Thomas.

Fina’s June ruling was welcomed by some of Australia’s Olympic stars, including Tokyo gold medallists Cate Campbell and Emily Seebohm, who had previously voiced concerns about “fairness” and physiological differences between men and women.

Note the scare quotes on “fairness” – as if fairness had nothing to do with it. There were no scare quotes for “campaign of harassment” which was in fact a lie, but there are scare quotes on fairness as if it were in fact fair for hulking Lia Thomas to take all the prizes.

The five-time Olympic champion called Fina’s decision a “temporary solution” that failed to consider the implications it could have on the gender-diverse community.

Thorpe has failed to consider the implications of all of this for [not “on”] the women community.

What. an. asshole.

I went for an explore this afternoon, and on the way home I experienced the following:

• On the return leg of the trip I transferred to a different bus downtown, and as it arrived and I made for it there was a woman lying on the sidewalk seizing. People were approaching her so I didn’t stop, and anyway there’s always a heavy police presence in the area because it’s an open air drug den. A block away is the McDonalds where there was a mass shooting a few years ago.
• I sat on the first front-facing seat and a woman sat in front of me in the side-facing seat. She had a paper bag from which she took some fired battered chunks of something, fish or chicken, and a little tub of sauce, and she proceeded to pull some of the batter off each chunk, dip it in the sauce, and eat it, then dip the bits of batter in the sauce and eat those, then lick her fingers. There were quite a few chunks and she ate them all. She was maybe a foot away from me and the smell was nauseating, not to mention the sight.
• I did another transfer at the big stop outside KEXP, just up the block from Climate Pledge Arena. It’s a nice place to transfer because while waiting you can use the rest rooms at KEXP, get some water, get warm or dry or both. I got some water then wandered up the street to the corner and just as I got there a maniac on a bike crossed from the other side at speed, heading right for me. I stopped walking and he gave me a little thank you wave, as if I’d done it to be nice. I’d done it so that he wouldn’t smash my skull on the sidewalk.
• There was a guy in front of one of the bus stop benches leaning over with his face almost on the bench and his butt in the air, with his pants falling off. He was kind of weaving back and forth and making cryptic gestures.

All this was in the space of 20 minutes.

Sometimes big city living is a bit much.

They’re not taking it lying down.

Anthony Zurcher at the Beeb tells us some ways Trump won’t find it such a doddle this time. There’s all the legal jeopardy for instance.

The former president is currently defending himself against a criminal election-tampering inquiry in Georgia, a civil fraud case targeting his business empire in New York, a defamation lawsuit involving a sexual assault allegation, and federal probes into his role in the Capitol attack and his post-presidential handling of classified material.

That’s five separate items. Bit of a drawback in a chief exec, maybe.

Also Ron DeSantis, unfortunately, is not Jeb Bush.

Above all…they don’t love him any more.

According to exit polls from the recently concluded midterm elections, Mr Trump is simply not very popular – including in the key states he would need to win to secure the presidency in a general election.

In New Hampshire, only 30% of voters said they wanted Mr Trump to run for president again. Even in Florida, that number only rose to 33%.

Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you like the play?

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Stripes.

It makes one wonder how many other officials and officers with the Scottish government feel it is incumbent upon them to police women in this way. How much of the machinery of government has been reprogrammed to automatically, unquestioningly defend the gender virus that has invaded it? Some Americans are concerned with courts “legislating from the bench.” Well in Scotland, they’ve skipped all that; trans-activism’s extra-legal infiltration has reached down to the committee level, so we have “legislation from the security guard.” How much of this shit has gone on that we don’t know about, that has not been commented upon publicly? If they get away with it, it becomes, de facto, the new standard, benchmark, and beach-head.

Ratchet, ratchet, ratchet. Another inch of ground stolen. Silence means consent. Particularly when the theft is quiet and secret, behind closed doors where it’s meant to be.

“We’ve been using women’s toilets for years! You can’t stop us now!”

You can’t stop us now!

You can’t stop us now!.

Now, you can’t stop us!

Each equally gloaty and threatening.

But remember, be kind!

There are no women – women don’t exist – it’s all been a misunderstanding. There are people, and there are men, and there are trans women – but there are no women.

The word “woman” could be erased from specialist NHS clinics dealing with female health issues under proposed new transgender inclusivity rules.

That should improve health care for women (for what?) out of all recognition.

A report proposing new NHS treatment guidelines in Scotland suggests “a general move away from gendered healthcare” and warns that trans people are put off attending services if they are targeted at a certain sex.

Are women put off if services are not targeted at a specific sex? Could such a policy mislead or confuse women? If so would that matter? Do women matter at all?

It states that trans men may feel “really uncomfortable” if they have to attend a “women’s health clinic” for services such as contraception or cancer screening programmes.

And we can’t have that, so we’ll pretend that women just don’t exist, and refer to them as owners of body parts.

The Scottish NHS has previously been criticised for omitting references to women from public health campaigns and instead using terms such as “people who menstruate”.

A Scottish Government-backed advice leaflet designed to teach young people about periods referred to “those of us that have both our ovaries and a womb”.

Which is already confusing. Does it mean a womb and both ovaries? Or a womb and one or two ovaries? Who knows? They introduce a pointless ambiguity in the rush to be inclooosive.

The report states: “Systems within NHS Scotland need to allow for increasing gender identities for patients, specifically including non-binary identities. This should be done as part of a general move away from gendered healthcare.

“Transgender individuals may be uncomfortable seeking reproductive health care or contraception when the services’ ‘target audience’ is advertised in a way that is incongruent to their gender identity (eg a transman may be really uncomfortable attending “women health clinic” for a coil or for a cervical smear).”

Therefore, for the sake of that petulant narcissistic pretend-man, all women have to be concealed from NHS language. Where did all the adults go???

Here we go again.

An event later this month:

But wait. Before you pencil it in on your calendar –

What do I find when I click on the event?

The wonders of social media:

Andrew Tate says women belong in the home, can’t drive, and are a man’s property.

He also thinks rape victims must “bear responsibility” for their attacks and dates women aged 18–19 because he can “make an imprint” on them, according to videos posted online.

In other clips, the British-American kickboxer – who poses with fast cars, guns and portrays himself as a cigar-smoking playboy – talks about hitting and choking women, trashing their belongings and stopping them from going out.

“It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up bitch,” he says in one video, acting out how he’d attack a woman if she accused him of cheating. In another, he describes throwing a woman’s things out of the window. In a third, he calls an ex-girlfriend who accused him of hitting her – an allegation he denies – a “dumb hoe”.

And to the surprise of no one, all this makes him wildly popular.

Styled as a self-help guru, offering his mostly male fans a recipe for making money, pulling girls and “escaping the matrix”, Tate has gone in a matter of months from near obscurity to one of the most talked about people in the world. In July, there were more Google searches for his name than for Donald Trump or Kim Kardashian.

He achieved this sudden stardom by telling his followers to “flood social media with videos of him,” and apparently it worked. The cash is pouring in.

In less than three months, the strategy has earned him a huge following online and potentially made him millions of pounds, with 127,000 members now paying the £39 a month to join Hustler’s University community, many of them men and boys from the UK and US.

Yet despite much of the content appearing to break TikTok’s rules, which explicitly ban misogyny and copycat accounts, the platform appears to have done little to limit Tate’s spread or ban the accounts responsible. Instead, it has propelled him into the mainstream – allowing clips of him to proliferate, and actively promoting them to young users.

Great, because what the world needs right now is lots and lots of male people whipped into a frenzy of hatred of women. $$$

Has Trump started to bore even The Base?

In the least surprising news of the year, a low-energy Donald Trump announced that he is running for president again last night. The speech itself was also predictable, hitting the traditional authoritarian and nativist favorites. We heard about the “invasion” at the border and “radical Democrats” in the White House, all spiced up with the usual combination of self-complimenting anecdotes and self-serving lies that we have come to expect from the former president.

In other words we’ve seen this movie before. Seeing as how it’s not exactly Casablanca or Doctor Strangelove, we’re not particularly excited about seeing it again.

What was much more interesting was the almost complete absence of prominent Republicans in Mar-a-Lago and even the lukewarm interest of the US media. At various channels, journalists were “analyzing” Trump’s run while the former president was giving his speech on mute in the background. Even Fox News’s Sean Hannity cut into the speech after a little over half an hour.

New speech just like the old speech. There’s not much point in actually listening to it. (To sane people of course listening to Trump at all is torture.)