Martina has a finely honed sense of humor.

The photo is courtesy of Princess Ivanka’s Instagram, and there’s widespread hilarity at the fact that she cropped out Junior’s Fox News Lady who was on Princess’s left wearing black.

But the family values joke is interesting as well as funny. It’s sort of a family photo from King Don’s harem. Having them pose together is…odd, isn’t it? I don’t get out much so I don’t really know, but is it usual for wedding photos to have that harem vibe? Is it usual to put the current sex toy in the photo along with the previous one? If Ivana hadn’t fallen down the stairs and been buried on King Don’s golf course would she have been there too? Are Tiffany and Melania close?

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on For months.

It’s possible that the GOP is in a bit of a box here — Trump is popular enough with their base that they can’t afford to abandon him (and couldn’t if they wanted to), but toxic enough with everyone else that he screws up their chances of winning elections.

I mean, really, what’s the argument for Trump’s appeal to the general electorate, as opposed to Republican primary voters? It seems to boil down to:

1. He eked out an Electoral College victory in 2016.

2. He didn’t get utterly blown out in 2020.

But (1) isn’t really that impressive an accomplishment. It’s actually pretty rare for a party to win three consecutive presidential elections — George HW Bush in 1988 is the only time it’s happened since Truman in 1948. And while I think Clinton’s weaknesses as a candidate are often overstated, it’s fair enough to say that she wasn’t an especially strong candidate. Add to that some ratfucking by the Russians and James Comey, and the media’s addiction to covering every Trump rally live, and ignoring every policy issue that wasn’t EMAILZZZZ, and in retrospect the closeness of the race is a testament to Trump’s toxicity, not some secret electoral magic he possesses. I think the polling miss in 2016 led people to the conclusion that Trump had some magic secret appeal, instead of “Trump almost, but didn’t quite, blow a very winnable election for the GOP.”

And (2) isn’t exactly a huge achievement either. The election looked closer than it was due to the “red mirage” effect of counting GOP-heavy votes first, the quirks of the Electoral College, and again polls overstated the Dems’ lead. But it’s unusual for incumbent presidents to be defeated at all, and globally most elected leaders actually experienced a “rally around the leader” effect from COVID that Trump managed to blow.

Basically, a Trump-free GOP probably would have won 2016 and 2020 easily, and (if for some reason they had lost in 2020), would have had a big win in 2022 due to normal midterm thermostatic reaction. (2018 would probably have been a GOP loss with any GOP president in office for the same reason.) Trump almost cost them 2016, did cost them 2020 and turned a big win in 2022 into a draw.

Of course, this doesn’t give me a lot of comfort, because elections are so close that it’s still possible Trump could win in 2024 in spite of himself. So he’s not just the GOP’s problem. But he may be primarily the GOP’s problem!

The Beeb reports on the suffragette scarf exclusion zone:

The Scottish Parliament’s presiding officer has apologised after a woman was ejected from a committee meeting for refusing to remove a scarf in suffragette colours.

The woman was asked to leave a session of the equalities committee, which was discussing proposed reforms to Scotland’s gender recognition laws.

Sorry sorry sorry it was all a mistake. We haven’t yet made it illegal to mention the suffrage campaign.

The colours have been associated with the suffragette movement, which campaigned for women to be given the right to vote in the early 20th century. More recently, they have also become associated with those opposed to changes to gender recognition laws.

You mean those opposed to the total displacement and erasure of women.

SNP MP Joanna Chery – a vocal critic of the gender reforms – tweeted that the removal of the woman was a “disgraceful episode for Scottish democracy”, adding: “This is not the Scotland I entered politics to promote.

“It’s completely out of step with what the suffragettes fought for, the spirit of the enlightenment and indeed the founding principles of the Scottish Parliament”.

They’ll know better next time. They’ll prevent such women from getting in the door.

Via chainring, more bullying nonsense from the gruesome narcissist Sandy O’Sullivan:

An Australian professor recently said that he ‘misgenders’ students when they choose not to use a preferred pronoun in class. 

There’s no such thing as a “preferred pronoun,” in class or anywhere else. It’s an idiotic concept. People can’t swap sex, and issuing commands on “preferred pronouns” isn’t going to change that. People can pretend to swap sex in some circumstances, mostly personal and private, but they can’t force anyone else to play along. They don’t get to change the language for everyone to humor their stupid childish insistence on playing let’s pretend 24/7 in all company.

“I do suggest if you’re teaching online, you ask students to put their pronouns next to their name. Some students, like some staff, don’t want to,” Sandy O’Sullivan tweeted Jan. 9. “Fair enough, I advise students that if they don’t, I’ll just use they/them or their name.”

See Dusty O’Rourke age 6, who calls his sister poopyhead at the dinner table over and over again until he gets sent to his room without dessert.

This is a grown-ass adult, an academic, and here he is bullying students with “play my childish game or I’ll call you ‘them’.” Not his job. His job is to teach them, not force them to play his fatuous word games.

New York University explains on its website that, “Using the wrong pronouns for a person. Misgendering someone can be done intentionally or unintentionally, and it can have a long-lasting harmful impact.”

No it can’t. Also, there’s no such thing.

I’m beyond bored with people like O’Sullivan trying to force everyone to be as childish as they are – “they” meaning people like O’Sullivan; it’s an authentic plural.

Originally a comment by latsot on Poking with a stick.

“Y’all” is very often used, at least by gender identity ideologues, for the purposes of reverse no-true-Scotsmaning.

It’s used to imply that a large group of people hold some ludicrous caricature of an already crazy view, then as an increasing number of counter-examples are presented, the target of the y’all switches to smaller and smaller groups, right down to some girl who goes to a different school, who you wouldn’t know.

It’s both more socially acceptable and more slippery by nature than “you people” because of implausible deniability (“oh, I didn’t mean all feminists are in favour of eating babies, how could you possibly have thought that?”) and because it can more easily slip in either direction, depending on how the argument is going (“no no no, I meant feminists in general which might or might not include this group specifically”).

But, most importantly, if this conversation is taking place on Twitter (and it usually is) the y’all is right there at the top of the thread, with its original implication, and that’s what most people will see.

Trump skipping:

The special US House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack is weighing whether to issue a contempt of Congress referral for Donald Trump after the former president skipped a closed-door deposition with the panel that was scheduled for Monday.

He didn’t “skip” it. He flouted it, he snapped his fingers at it, he pissed on it.

The committee’s Democratic chair, Bennie Thompson, said that the contempt of Congress referral targeting Trump “could be an option” – though the Mississippi congressman added that the panel would have to first address a lawsuit filed against it by Trump’s lawyers on Friday. The suit challenged the subpoena ordering Trump to appear at the deposition as a violation of executive privilege.

Unemployed Florida man doesn’t have any executive privilege. He’s not an executive now.

In a joint statement with Liz Cheney, the outgoing Republican congresswoman and vice-chair of the committee, Thompson said that Trump’s lawsuit “parades out many of the same arguments that courts have rejected repeatedly over the last year”.

“The truth is that Donald Trump, like several of his closest allies, is hiding from the select committee’s investigation and refusing to do what more than a thousand other witnesses have done,” which is to testify in accordance with panel-issued subpoenas, they said.

Four Trump allies have already been held in contempt of Congress after refusing to comply with committee subpoenas.

They didn’t refuse, they just “skipped” them.

Some Republicans worry that maybe possibly Trump has some bad qualities. This is the first they’ve heard of it and they’re concerned.

The Republicans’ failure to deliver the must promised “red wave” in the midterms was a significant blow to Trump’s claim to be the voice of his party’s voters, not least because of the defeat of key candidates endorsed by him. But backing from the grass roots, which gave him a tight grip on the Republicans for years and kept its hostile leadership at bay, has been eroding for months.

Months. Not years, months. Up until a few months ago he was a reasonable compassionate intelligent guy, then suddenly something went wrong.

Republican county chairs and activists say the former president’s support has fallen as a result of his continued pushing of election conspiracy theories, the investigations into his businesses and political actions, and his attacks on his most threatening challenger, DeSantis.

That stuff was fine between 2015 and a few months ago, but now it’s unfine.

Trump’s deriding of his Florida rival as Ron “DeSanctimonious” days before the midterms was a last straw for some. Then he took to Fox News to warn off DeSantis from running for the presidency, saying “he could hurt himself very badly” and threatening to “tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering”.

“I think he would be making a mistake. I think the base would not like it. I don’t think it would be good for the party,” said Trump.

Burl said she was “shocked” by the former president’s attack on DeSantis.

Yeah it’s very shocking, unlike everything he’s done before.

A Labour MP.

More of this kind of thing please.

Soz about the purple green and white scarf:

The presiding officer of the Scottish parliament has been forced to clarify that suffragette colours “are not, and never have been” banned on the Holyrood estate after a woman wearing a purple, green and white scarf was removed from a meeting of the equalities committee.

It’s scarves that have been banned on the Holyrood estate. Yes?

Alison Johnstone – the Holyrood equivalent of the Commons speaker – issued a statement later in the day describing the action by security staff on Tuesday morning as “an error” and apologising on behalf of the Scottish parliament.

The member of the public, who was observing a discussion of amendments to the Scottish government’s controversial gender recognition bill, posted on social media that “the Scottish parliament is now policing clothing colours”.

She later confirmed to the Guardian that she had been asked to remove the item but refused, and was then informed by security staff that the scarf was “political” because it was “associated with the women’s movement”.

In fact, if you think about it, women are political. They should be kept out of everything.

Johnstone’s full statement said: “Let me make one thing crystal clear, suffrage colours are not, and never have been, banned at the Scottish parliament. We actively support and promote universal suffrage in a number of ways at Holyrood and will continue to do so.”

That’s so very interesting. Note what she doesn’t say. She doesn’t say “we actively support women’s suffrage” – no no, that would be an obscenity, and would cause Holyrood to disintegrate into a pile of sawdust. The word “women” must be avoided at all cost.

The Glorious Cause.

What’s the rallying cry?

“FUCK YOU BITCH” over and over and over.

Monster egotist promises to continue monster egotistical plans. Now there’s a surprise.

Donald Trump is expected to announce his 2024 presidential campaign on Tuesday night as planned, according to multiple sources close to the former US president, inserting himself into the center of national politics as he attempts to box out potential rivals seeking the Republican nomination.

Of course he is. He’s bored.

Trump’s remarks were being finalized late into the night with a pair of speechwriters and his political team, the sources said, with aides keen for the former president to convey a degree of seriousness as he seeks voters to elevate him to a second term in the White House

You mean a degree of sounding like a grownup as opposed to a petulant noisy child? Don’t be silly.

The group urging a delay feared that Trump could sink the Senate runoff for Republicans as he is widely considered to have done in 2020, when he focused on his own angry complaints about the 2020 election rather than helping the party’s two candidates, who both ended up losing.

You can’t have it both ways. If you choose, with your eyes open, a furious narcissist as your party’s top guy, it’s silly to expect him to stop acting like a furious narcissist just because he will ruin everything for you. You brought him, you take him home.

To get ahead of rivals, reinforce his status as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, and if nothing else, seize the limelight, Trump has been itching for some time to launch his 2024 campaign and has already started laying the groundwork for the effort.

Seize the limelight above all. He’s been out of it for two years, he misses it desperately.

Ah yes, so very progressive.

That’s “Ima beat yo’ ass, bitch.” From a very very very white guy.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie points out that the abuse of JK Rowling is classic sexism. One way we can tell is that men don’t get targeted the way she is.

“I think that she’s been treated abominably. And, I think a lot of that treatment is because she’s a woman,” she said. “I think that a man who aired his views, reasonable views, would not be treated in that way.”

Is Graham Linehan perhaps a counter-example? He’s certainly been a target, but JKR gets a lot of specifically sexual/sexist abuse. I don’t think that happens to men the same way.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Adichie told journalist Emma Barnett she thought it was “very dangerous” that people were “refusing to engage with what she (Rowling) said”, but were instead “hurling insults”. 

…

Adichie said some young people in Lagos, Nigeria, viewed Rowling as “transphobic” and even thought that “she wants to kill trans people”.

But when challenged about where in Rowling’s writing that had been stated or implied, “none of them could point it out to me”, she said.

Similarly, speaking with students on a US university campus, the author said she “felt as though they were repeating party lines”.

Part of the problem, she said, is that the strident opinions of young people are going unchallenged by adults.

Also that strident opinions of people old enough to know better are going unchallenged by people old enough to know better. There’s an orthodoxy-policing thing going on even among people over 19.

The 45-year-old said: “I sometimes feel as though we have abdicated our responsibility as grown-ups because I know what it was like to be young. I thought I knew everything. Now, I look back, I’m like, I knew nothing. I was wrong in many of my sort of fierce positions.”

Same. I’m very confident I didn’t know everything when I was young. Very confident indeed.

Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on What the future implications might be.

It sounds bloody awful, to be honest. It’s the ‘no co-morbidities part which has hitherto kept people alive long enough to survive the waiting list, get appropriate treatment, and go on to have a healthy life.

If you are suicidally miserable because you are in severe, intractable, possibly increasing pain from a condition which will imminently kill you, and want to die because facing further pain is pointless, then euthanasia is obviously a lot less cruel than making you wait for natural death.

However, if you are suicidally miserable solely due to a treatable mental illness or disorder, then it is the failure to treat which is immensely cruel, and killing you because you might appear to want that in the moment, because of under-funding of the resources which would restore your health, is abhorrent.

We’re seeing the same short-term thinking in the treatment of dysphoria in teens; the only difference is that the teens who undergo the appalling medical and surgical alternative to real treatment are still alive afterwards, and can sue for the abuse.

A dead person cannot sue; I don’t want to have to find out whether or not their bereaved families can.

Not that SciAm article again. How many biologists have to point out how many times that it’s woo-woo crap?

Is it medically assisted death or is it disposal of people with mental illness and no resources? The Globe and Mail:

Canada will have one of the most liberal euthanasia laws in the world, joining only a few other countries that allow assisted dying for mental illness.

It will be the most controversial expansion of MAID since a Supreme Court ruling led the federal government to legalize euthanasia in 2016. At that time, MAID was only for patients with a foreseeable death, but Parliament – with Bill C-7 – removed that requirement in 2021.

The original version of the bill did not allow assisted death for patients with mental disorders as a sole condition because, the government said at the time, there were outstanding questions about how illnesses such as depression could be safely included, and what the future implications might be. The Senate disagreed, removing that exclusion before the bill passed, but with one caveat: Parliament would study the issue for two years before any of those patients could receive MAID.

With four months to go, there is still no consensus in the mental health community – and, in fact, doctors remain deeply divided. There are no finalized national standards, no transparent review process in place to watch for mistakes, and hospitals are still figuring out how they would implement the change.

Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Canada’s largest psychiatric teaching hospital, has said that assisted dying shouldn’t expand without more study. And the Canadian Mental Heath Association has raised serious concerns about expanding MAID without first increasing mental health care funding. In Quebec, after public consultations, a legislative committee has recommended against the province expanding MAID to mental illness at all.

I don’t know what I think about this. It’s very thorny. Is it just brutally disposing of people who don’t fit in well enough or aren’t useful enough? Or is it humanely helping people for whom living is a misery?

Expert dissension, a law without clarity, the arbitrary legislative finish line – all of this would be worrisome, even in normal times. But Bill C-7 passed before the full consequences of COVID-19 were known, before the pandemic ripped through the health care system and left it in tatters.

The law requires patients asking for MAID to be informed of possible treatment options that might alleviate their suffering. But this assumes those are readily available. Instead, wait times to see mental health clinicians have only increased.

Psychotherapy, a recommended treatment for most mental disorders, remains too expensive for many Canadians. In Toronto alone, an estimated 16,000 people are waiting for supportive housing for mental illness and addiction.

In Ontario, nearly 6,000 patients with the most severe mental disorders are on a years-long list for specialist community-based care.

So it becomes a resources issue, a money issue, which is surely a very bad reason to help people kill themselves. Then again there’s still the issue of people whose lives are nothing but misery.

The rising cost of rent and foodis also taking a particular toll on people with chronic mental illness, who are often already the poorest in society – and the very candidates who will qualify for assisted dying under the new law.

Assisted dying for people who can’t afford the rent…no that doesn’t sound good at all.

Another snip from the Times article:

The first trans patient treated with blockers, from age 13 to 18, moved on to testosterone, the male sex hormone. Halting female puberty had offered emotional relief and helped him look more masculine. As the Dutch clinicians prescribed blockers, followed by hormones, to a half-dozen other patients in those early years, the medical team found that their mental health and well-being improved.

“They were usually coming in very miserable, feeling like an outsider in school, depressed or anxious,” recalled Dr. Peggy Cohen-Kettenis, a retired psychologist at the clinic. “And then you start to do this treatment, and a few years later, you see them blossoming.”

Wait. Wait just a minute. Think about this. What else is going on here? Besides the “treatment”? There’s a clue right there in what she says. A few years later. How do they know that’s the treatment working as opposed to teenagers becoming young adults? Am I wrong in thinking it’s a fairly common experience to be better at life after the teenage years? Am I wrong in thinking it matters that the brain isn’t fully developed until age 25? I would really, seriously like to know if they took the passage of time into account in their thinking. The wording of Dr. Cohen-Kettenis certainly doesn’t look that way.

The New York Times rows back just a little:

As the number of adolescents who identify as transgender grows, drugs known as puberty blockers have become the first line of intervention for the youngest ones seeking medical treatment.

Which is a very worrying observation all by itself. The number of adolescents who identify as transgender is growing…so the medical system is stepping in to block their puberties. The medical system is treating something that’s obviously a trend, a fashion, an idea-based cool kids thing to do, as a reason to interfere with a crucial stage of development. It’s batshit crazy.

But as an increasing number of adolescents identify as transgender — in the United States, an estimated 300,000 ages 13 to 17 and an untold number who are younger — concerns are growing among some medical professionals about the consequences of the drugs, a New York Times examination found.

Good but what took them so long?

Dutch doctors first offered puberty blockers to transgender adolescents three decades ago, typically following up with hormone treatment to help patients transition. Since then, the practice has spread to other countries, with varying protocols, little documentation of outcomes and no government approval of the drugs for that use, including by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Well, hey, it’s just a little thing, like cutting your fingernails or ripping out your pubic hair, so no need for all those fiddly precautions and documentations. Right?

Well not quite, on account of how for instance it may weaken the bones.

“There’s going to be a price,” said Dr. Sundeep Khosla, who leads a bone research lab at the Mayo Clinic. “And the price is probably going to be some deficit in skeletal mass.”

Oh well, bones. Nobody sees them, so why worry?

Many physicians in the United States and elsewhere are prescribing blockers to patients at the first stage of puberty — as early as age 8 — and allowing them to progress to sex hormones as soon as 12 or 13. Starting treatment at young ages, they believe, helps patients become better aligned physically with their gender identity and helps protect their bones.

But that could force life-altering choices, other doctors warn, before patients know who they really are. Puberty can help clarify gender, the doctors say — for some adolescents reinforcing their sex at birth, and for others confirming that they are transgender.

Newsflash: people never know who they really are. That’s not a thing. People change from year to year and from moment to moment – there is no “really are.” Forget about the self, forget about Who You Really Are, look outward and move on with life.

Republican governors and lawmakers in more than a dozen states are working to limit or even criminalize the treatments, as some in their party also seek to restrict access to sports and bathrooms, ban discussion of gender in public schools, and call into question whether transgender identity even exists.

Even in a “wait let’s think some more about this” piece they can’t get it right. Nobody is seeking “to restrict access to sports and bathrooms.” Nobody wants kids who claim to be trans to hold their pee all day or give up sports. The issue is toilets divided by sex and sports divided by sex. Yes it’s very unfortunate that the Dems are so stupid and wrong on this and that the Republicans for once are right, but don’t put a brick on the scale by wording things wrong.

Ah yes the old “My beliefs are not an ideology!!!” gambit.

Really. There is no transgender ideology. Then what does “transgender” mean? What does “cis” mean? What does “transphobia” mean? What does “terf” mean? What are “trans rights”? What do we talk about when we talk about trans people and trans rights and transphobia?

The ideology is all there is. The whole thing is an idea, one that rejects reality and chooses fantasy in its place. Without the ideology all the dressing up and poster-creating make no sense.

No you can’t say men are not women. If you try there will be blood.

Sorry, sovereign women don’t speak after all, because the “activists” won’t let them.

“Trans-Exterminationists.” As if feminist women who point out that men are not women are thereby exterminating men who claim to be women. Exterminating them, like with Zyklon-B. We’re not exterminating anyone, we’re telling the truth about men and magic gender, in order to defend our rights, which have always been precarious at best, since contempt for women is all but universal, drummed into us as soon as we can understand words and gestures.

And what’s this “our turf” shit? Apart from the pun? It’s not “their” turf, it’s a public space. Women are allowed to leave the house, we’re allowed to meet up and gather, we’re allowed to speak. This isn’t fucking Afghanistan.