I’ve been re-reading The Turn of the Screw, and I’m reminded of why I so dislike Henry James’s Late Style. I’ll give you a sample of why.

It was a pity that, somehow, to settle this once for all, I had equally to re-enumerate the signs of subtlety that, in the afternoon, by the lake had made a miracle of my show of self-possession. It was a pity to be obliged to reinvestigate the certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it had come to me as a revelation that the inconceivable communion I then surprised was a matter, for either party, of habit. It was a pity that I should have had to quaver out again the reasons for my not having, in my delusion, so much as questioned that the little girl saw our visitant even as I actually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she wanted, by just so much as she did thus see, to make me suppose she didn’t, and at the same time, without showing anything, arrive at a guess as to whether I myself did!

This is supposed to be not an impersonal narrative voice, not Henry James, not a novelist, but a governess.

A few (long) sentences later:

Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in this review, I should have missed the two or three dim elements of comfort that still remained to me. I should not for instance have been able to asseverate to my friend that I was certain—which was so much to the good—that I at least had not betrayed myself. I should not have been prompted, by stress of need, by desperation of mind—I scarce know what to call it—to invoke such further aid to intelligence as might spring from pushing my colleague fairly to the wall. She had told me, bit by bit, under pressure, a great deal; but a small shifty spot on the wrong side of it all still sometimes brushed my brow like the wing of a bat; and I remember how on this occasion—for the sleeping house and the concentration alike of our danger and our watch seemed to help—I felt the importance of giving the last jerk to the curtain. “I don’t believe anything so horrible,” I recollect saying; “no, let us put it definitely, my dear, that I don’t. But if I did, you know, there’s a thing I should require now, just without sparing you the least bit more—oh, not a scrap, come!—to get out of you. What was it you had in mind when, in our distress, before Miles came back, over the letter from his school, you said, under my insistence, that you didn’t pretend for him that he had not literally ever been ‘bad’? He has not literally ‘ever,’ in these weeks that I myself have lived with him and so closely watched him; he has been an imperturbable little prodigy of delightful, lovable goodness. Therefore you might perfectly have made the claim for him if you had not, as it happened, seen an exception to take. What was your exception, and to what passage in your personal observation of him did you refer?”

Said no one to anyone ever.

It makes me feel like Kingsley Amis writing to Philip Larkin – “No she didn’t, no he didn’t, no they didn’t.”

Jawad Iqbal in the Times last week:

Is the prominent Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran a suitable choice to chair the highly influential Commons health and social care committee? She belongs to a party that has responded with deafening silence to the landmark Cass review, which recommended sweeping changes to the way the NHS treats under-18s who are unsure about their gender identity.

Moran is also on record as believing that “trans women are women” and said she was “disgusted” when Kemi Badenoch, who has pushed for single-sex spaces, was made women and equalities minister under the previous Conservative government. Would campaigners for same-sex healthcare to help safeguard women and girls feel confident that she can be open-minded and fair?

Liberal Voice for Women, the party’s gender-critical group which campaigns for women’s rights, has also voiced concern. It described the Lib Dems’ position on transgender healthcare — in 2015 the party called for the use of experimental puberty blockers in children with gender distress — as “woefully and dangerously outdated”.

Aka sheer quackery.

Hadley Freeman is skeptical:

“There are many forms of the human body. I see someone in their soul and as a person. I do not really care whether they have a male body.”

Well, she says that, but is it true? What if a male body is following her persistently? What if a male body follows her into an otherwise empty restroom [aka toilet] and stands in front of the cubicle she’s in, so close that she can see his feet? What if he goes into the next door cubicle and she watches his feet as first one disappears and then the other and she looks up to see him staring at her over the partition? [That’s a real thing; it’s happened to me.] What if a male body starts hassling her in the street, and gets closer and closer until he’s pressed up against her, shouting into her face while he grips her arms?

And so on. Fuck off with that not caring lie. Of course she cares, in certain circumstances. That’s why she has no right to laugh off the caring of other women for the sake of men cosplaying women.

I’d say she’s definitely not the right person to chair the Commons health and social care committee.

The Taliban says listen listen listen what we’re doing is fine because it’s Islamic law.

In the three years since the Taliban takeover, it’s become clear that even if edicts aren’t strictly imposed, people start self-regulating out of fear. Women continue to be visible in small numbers on the streets of cities like Kabul, but nearly all of them now are covered from head to toe in loose black clothes or dark blue burqas, and most of them cover their faces with only their eyes visible, the impact of a decree announced last year.

“Every moment you feel like you’re in a prison. Even breathing has become difficult here,” said Nausheen, an activist. Until last year, whenever new restrictions were announced, she was among small groups of women who marched on the streets of Kabul and other cities, demanding their rights.

The protests were violently cracked down on by the Taliban’s forces on multiple occasions, until they stopped altogether.

Nausheen was detained last year. “The Taliban dragged me into a vehicle saying ‘Why are you acting against us? This is an Islamic system.’ They took me to a dark, frightening place and held me there, using terrible language against me. They also beat me,” she says, breaking down into tears.

Ok fine, it’s an Islamic system. That’s because Islam despises women. It’s famous for it. The other monotheisms aren’t feminist religions, but Islam wins the award for Worst Of All.

Islam gets that men think about sex all the time, but where it goes wrong is in deciding the way to manage that is to turn women into black blobs that can’t talk and are seldom allowed outside.

Taliban government deputy spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat, who didn’t want to be pictured with a woman or sit directly opposite me, justified the new edict, which came accompanied with copious footnotes – references to religious texts.

“The law approved by the supreme leader is in accordance with Islamic Sharia law. Any religious scholar can check its references,” he says.

Yeah whatever; we don’t care. Islamic Sharia law is horrible woman-hating garbage. Women are not receptacles for the penis, they are fully human people just as men are, only not as sex-obsessed. Sharia sees the world entirely through male eyes, and that’s why it’s so warped.

Shireen is part of a network of Afghan women running secret schools quietly rebelling against the restrictions. Already operating under a great deal of risk, often having to move the location of the school for safety, the new law has compounded her fears.

The danger of discovery is so great, she cannot speak to us at home, instead choosing a discreet location.

“Every morning I wake up asking God to make the day pass safely. When the new law came, I explained all its rules to my students and told them things would be more difficult. But I am so tired of all this, sometimes I just want to scream,” she says. “They don’t see women as human beings, just as tools whose only place is inside the home.”

Tools and penis receptacles.

I asked Hamdullah Fitrat about the Taliban government’s responsibility towards women and girls in their country who are being driven into depression and suicidal thoughts because they’re banned from education.

“Our sisters’ education is an important issue. We’re trying to resolve this issue which is the demand of a lot of our sisters,” the spokesman said.

No they’re not. They’re still taking rights away from their “sisters”; they are not restoring any.

The Respectable Meeja continue to pretend Trump is normal.

Journalist Parker Molloy recently detailed the media’s extensive efforts to “rationalize Trump’s incoherent statements,” tracing back to his catastrophic covid response. The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote back in June about the media’s “bias toward coherence” when covering Trump. But the question still remains why the press insists on covering Trump like a normal politician.

Legacy media bristles at the accusation that they treat Trump more generously than past presidential candidates, both Democrat and Republican. New York Times publisher AG Sulzberger claimed in a recent self-serving Post op-ed that Democrats want his paper to “cast aside neutrality and directly oppose [Trump’s] reelection.“ But that’s a strawman argument. The problem isn’t that the Times is “neutral.” The problem is that the Times in particular artificially balances the scales with coverage that makes it seem as if Kamala Harris is running against a normal Republican candidate, a wacky, off-color Mitt Romney.

Because, it seems, if they reported on him without artificial “balance” it would come across as unbalanced aggression. It’s such a fine trap, from Trump’s point of view. He’s exaggeratedly awful, incompetent, stupid, abusive, mendacious, corrupt, sadistic – so if you point that out you look “biased” and he looks like the victim. The worse he is the less the media can afford to say how bad he is.

A common defense of the media’s Trump coverage is that it’s almost impossible to detail every awful thing he says and does. But there’s a consistent narrative through line with Trump: He’s a criminal who’d use the power of the presidency to seek revenge on his enemies. That’s not complicated, and his every action supports this thesis. The mainstream media simply chooses to ignore the obvious.

It’s not complicated, and it’s true, but if they say it they’ll get yelled at.

Officer Diddums on the job:

The police are recording too many hate crime incidents and getting involved in disputes that include “hurt feelings”, the police watchdog has warned in a new report.

Selectively though. Always selectively. The hurt feelings of men who call themselves women matter; the hurt feelings of women do not.

The report was commissioned in September last year by Suella Braverman, when she was home secretary, after she said officers were pandering to politically correct causes, such as taking the knee.

And such as pretending that men who claim to be women are in fact women.

She ordered a new code of conduct, which came into effect in June, that introduced a higher threshold for the recording of NCHIs. Under the code, NCHIs would be recorded only if the incident was “clearly motivated by intentional hostility” and where there was a “real risk of escalation causing significant harm or a criminal offence”.

Despite the new guidance, the number of NCHIs recorded by the police has risen. Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is planning to reverse the changes and restore requirements for police officers to record NCHIs in an attempt to crack down on the significant rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia since the October 7 attacks on Israel.

But not hatred of women. Never ever hatred of women.

The report found that some forces could not even distinguish between non-crime hate incidents and hate crimes. It said: “They record and attend more of these incidents than they need to.”

The report also found that police forces were allowing officers to wear rainbow lanyards, saying that in some cases it caused negative comments and perceptions among members of the public. However, it acknowledged it helped recruitment in areas with high numbers of LGBT people.

There are no “LGBT” people. That’s a meaningless category.

Meanwhile rape goes unprosecuted.

Tom Nichols on that guy:

Here is part of what he posted early Saturday evening over at his personal rantatorium, Truth Social:

CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again.

How do you watch the Sanctity of something? How do you watch the Sanctity of an election? Especially one that is in the future?

(I will just note that I refuse to believe that Trump really coughed up a word like skulduggery on his own. Spelling it incorrectly does point to him, but the likelihood that someone else is writing these posts is a reminder that Trump is surrounded by people who have no objections to his plans and will willingly carry them out.)

I think Trump writes them but maybe he asks one of the surrounding people what’s a good word for dirty tricks.

But the very first question at the debate should reflect a basic paradox in this election: How can any meeting between Trump and Harris be a “debate” if Trump has already made clear that he rejects the foundations of the American system of government?

Debates are based on good faith and shared assumptions about democracy. Trump bellows at us, over and over, that he couldn’t give a damn about any of that. He’s running because he wants to stay out of prison, get revenge on his enemies, exercise untrammeled power, and gain access to even more money. Are we really expecting a give-and-take about, say, child care (a subject on which Trump was spectacularly incoherent a few days ago) between a candidate who will govern as a traditional president and a would-be junta leader who intends to jail his opponents—including, possibly, the woman standing next to him and the reporters grilling him?

No, of course we’re not. The man is both evil and profoundly stupid.

How’s the reporting on all this? Not great.

I can’t give you a lot of headlines about all of these mad comments because, for the most part, they don’t exist. (Reuters summed up the raving on Saturday as “Trump Revs Up Small-Town Base in Wisconsin,” which is true, in the way that a 1967 headline saying Mao Encourages Chinese Intellectuals to Aid With Agricultural Efforts would be true but perhaps incomplete.) The New York Times had nothing about Trump’s weekend comments on its front page today. This morning’s Washington Post homepage simply said: “Harris Hunkers Down for ‘Debate Camp,’ Trump Opts for ‘Policy Sessions’ as Showdown Looms.” This headline is no doubt an accurate account of what’s happening in the campaigns, but “Trump says he will inevitably win and prosecute his opponents for fraud anyway” is probably more important than whether he is being briefed yet again on policies he doesn’t care about or understand.

This is the system being a system. If the Times and the Post did report on all his ravings they would be accused of libbrul bias, so they primly ignore most of them.

Several writers at The Atlantic, including our editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, have raised the issue of the “bias toward coherence” that prevents many journalists—and millions of Americans—from saying out loud that the Republican nominee for the presidency of the United States is emotionally unstable and a menace to the Constitution.

Ah, right, that’s what I was getting at. It’s almost funny, in a horrible way. Trump is so off the charts stupid and evil that reporting on him truthfully looks abnormal. Head he wins tails we lose.

This is not going to change in the next two months. But if Trump’s comments this weekend are not the first questions at the debate—if his threat to democracy is not the only question—then there is no point in debates at all.

I don’t think there is much point in The Debates anyway, really. They’re just a Thing, the way football is a Thing.

What is a woman?

Anneliese Dodds, the Minister for Women and Equalities, has said in response to a written question asking whether the government plans to amend the legal definition of what a woman is:

“We are proud of the Equality Act and the rights and protections it affords women. The Government does not plan to amend legal definitions in the act.” 

Hundreds of women are coming to Parliament on Wednesday on a mission to change her mind as part of the Stand up for single-sex services campaign.

If “women” no longer means “women” then how can women have rights specific to women?

They are going to tell her, and other MPs, how the Equality Act is failing to protect women, and how men who claim to be women are gaining access to women’s spaces, services and sports. 

…

This is being allowed to happen because of confusion about the interaction between the Gender Recognition Act and the Equality Act. It could be fixed with a one-line amendment, introduced through secondary legislation, using a power provided for by the last Labour government for exactly this purpose. 

…

If Anneliese Dodds is proud of the political heritage of the feminists who came before her, she should listen to the women and men who are coming to Parliament on Wednesday. They will tell her that the law is not working. If she wants to live up to the legacy of the brave women who fought for women’s rights, she needs to listen and to act.

Will she?

Oh how sad, people in Canada have to pay for some of their Magic Gender Care.

A new gender-affirming care provision under the federal government’s employee health plan — a change touted as a major win for transgender plan members — has turned into an ongoing struggle for some trans workers who say they’re rethinking future surgeries because they’re already running into walls getting claims reimbursed. 

I have to wonder why the government pays for mutilations in the first place.

Gender-affirming care encompasses a number of treatments, including mental health counselling, hormone replacement therapy, genital surgery, breast augmentation, pectoral implants and even something as basic as a haircut.

Genital surgery, they say cheerfully, when what they mean is amputation/mutilation.

Plan members can have up to 80 per cent of each treatment covered, to a lifetime maximum of $75,000, for procedures performed in Canada but not covered by provincial or territorial health plans. It’s meant “to help people with their gender affirmation journey,” according to a government web page.

But the whole idea of a “gender affirmation journey” is a silly childish fad, not a medical issue.

What should have been a year focusing on the surgeries that would transform her body to reflect how she sees herself has been been anything but, Alexandra Lamaute says.  

“We constantly have to fight to receive something that should be much more simple,” said the 41-year-old who lives in Dieppe, N.B. and underwent breast augmentation and facial feminization surgery last year.

Why should it be more simple? When the whole idea is batshit-crazy in the first place?

Lamaute said she is considering delaying, or simply not having, vocal surgery to make her voice sound more feminine because she’s worried she won’t get reimbursed.

“My voice doesn’t really match my appearance anymore,” she said, leading to people she deals with on the phone often calling her “sir” or “young man.”

“I don’t blame anyone, but it takes a toll after a while.”

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan…

There’s paragraph after paragraph more of this infatuated bilge. Where are the adults???

Oliver Brown in the Telegraph:

After seeing the beauty of these Games defaced by the spectacle of Valentina Petrillo, a 51-year-old father-of-two, taking semi-final places in female sprinting from two women barely half the Italian’s age, you might have expected Andrew Parsons, president of the International Paralympic Committee, to commit – at the very least – to a review of the ridiculous policy that let this happen. Instead he seemed, at his closing press conference, almost to celebrate it as a watershed.

…

Parsons began these 11 days by spelling out his ambition for an “inclusion revolution”. Include everybody: that is the mantra. Even if it now means excluding women from their own category. This is not some abstract fear, but a concrete reality. We can name the two women whom Petrillo deprived here of a chance to compete under lights at the Stade de France in a Paralympic semi-final: Lorraine Gomes de Aguiar of Brazil and Spain’s Nagore Folgado Garcia. Gomes is 27, Folgado just 20.

The only explanation that fits is that including women doesn’t count as inclusion.

Is that because so many people despise women, or is it because “inclusion” refers only to literal minorities? If it’s the latter that’s fucked up, because exclusion of women has always been and still is absolutely rampant, and everyone knows it.

Those who acquiesced in this must be held to account, and the first is Parsons. All women deserve to have their sporting talents tested on a level playing field, not to have their dreams curtailed by a patently unfair rule, reduced to being unwitting pawns in the affirmation of any male-born opponent’s wishes. It is an outrage – and it cannot go on.

Keep yelling.

Women are such a damn nuisance, you know?

Surrogate mother wins access to her biological son in landmark case

She’s not actually a surrogate mother, she’s a mother.

The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, won the case after the gay couple for whom she carried the baby for nine months tried to stop her seeing her own biological child and erase her from his life. The two men claimed that the little boy would be confused if he saw his mother because he lived with them in a ‘motherless family’ and was being raised within the LGBT community.

The couple told her there was ‘no vacancy’ for her ‘just because [he] has same-sex parents’ – even though he was conceived using her egg and carried in her womb.

The child, named as ‘Z’ in court proceedings, was born in September 2020. His two fathers, a married couple aged 36 and 43, were friends with the surrogate’s sister and were desperate for a child to complete their family so she agreed to help.

In other words she agreed to do them a massive favor, and they repay her by going back on the agreement and trying to keep her away from her own baby.

[S]he signed a parental order handing responsibility for the child to the men along with a second order ensuring that she could have regular contact with the child, who lived permanently with his fathers.

But the gay couple reneged on that agreement – leading to the doorstep argument that sparked them threatening to dial 999 unless she left, the court heard. ‘G’ had secretly recorded the altercation and while the audio was not shared as part of the ruling, the judge in the case said it was ‘rightly described as “horrendous”,’ not least because it was in the presence of their son. The men then pursued a series of legal cases against her that would cut ‘G’ from the boy’s life.

Male entitlement is a thing to behold.

Continuing the theme, Jacky Davis in the Observer on Saturday:

he British Medical Association is both a trade union and a professional organisation. Professional activities such as its successful campaigns around seatbelt legislation and smoking have added weight to its standing as a union. It is not noted for drama and histrionics.

So there was significant surprise when its governing body, the BMA council, recently voted to reject the recommendations of the Cass review…

BMA members were genuinely outraged. Letters to the BMJ accused the council of bringing “the BMA and the medical profession into disrepute”. One correspondent said they were “more shocked than anything I can think of in 40 years of practising medicine”. Some members, aghast at the BMA adopting such an irrational policy, resigned after decades of union membership. A letter accusing the BMA of being secretive and opaque, and of going against the principles of evidence-based medicine and ethical practice, quickly attracted 1,500 signatures, 1,000 of whom are BMA members. The signatories include many high-profile names in the profession, people not normally inclined to sign protest letters.

So what’s the deal? How did this happen?

How did the BMA end up so completely out of touch with its members? In brief, the union is the victim of entryism, a political strategy whereby members of an organisation join a larger organisation in order to influence and change its policies. Resident (previously known as junior) doctors were angry about the sharp fall in their pay since 2008 and organised a group called DoctorsVote to campaign for full pay restoration. Part of the group’s strategy was to get its members on to the BMA council, which they did with great success, taking almost half the voting seats in 2022.

So far, so reasonable: the BMA is a trade union and its core role is to improve the working conditions of doctors.

But, of course, the BMA council didn’t stop there.

DoctorsVote is disciplined when it comes to pursuing its agenda (which turned out to go beyond full pay restoration to include entrenched opinions on the transgender debate), and in voting group members on to BMA committees.

And of course the entrenched opinions on the transgender debate aren’t medical, in fact they’re more the opposite of medical. The opinions are religious rather than medical.

So why did the BMA, which is not a scientific body such as Nice, feel it could criticise and undermine Cass’s work? The BMA has allowed itself to get into a position whereby a vocal minority of council members with an anti-Cass agenda have engineered policy that the membership have not been consulted on and do not agree with. While they are sincere in their beliefs, these council members have no hard evidence for their opposition, and good intentions aren’t enough to guide medical practice. It must be underpinned by evidence.

And this is especially important when the contested policy is very bad for people. It’s not a good idea to help patients ruin their bodies on the basis of a political belief that contradicts medical realities.

When doctors clash:

The British Medical Association has threatened the reputation of all UK doctors by rejecting the findings of the landmark Cass review of transgender healthcare, a leading member of the BMA has told the Observer.

Dr Jacky Davis claims that the doctors’ union’s stance on the Cass review is “irrational”, has created a “fracture” between its leadership and the grassroots doctors it represents, and left the medical profession “in an uproar”.

What is that stance? Fingers in the ears shouting NONONONONO

The BMA refused to endorse the findings of Dr Hilary Cass, whose review was published in April and was widely welcomed. It claimed the review contained “unsubstantiated recommendations” and its council called on members to “publicly critique” it.

Yeah and draw moustaches on it and call it names and say nobody wants to go out with it. Nyah.

The BMA is the only medical organisation in Britain to not accept and to find fault with Cass’s findings, which were accepted by the last government and its Labour successor. It has said that it wants to carry out its own evaluation.

By which it means it wants to continue to call it names and shout at it until everyone just gives up.

Doctors on the BMA’s ruling council who have dared to challenge its criticism of the Cass review have been subject to “abuse” and its decision-making body is now shrouded in “a climate of fear and intimidation”, Davis claims.

It’s all so…Pharyngula-like. So bizarrely childish and dogmatic and religionish. So political where it should be technical and abusive where it should be…not abusive.

The union has adopted its position on Cass because a campaign group called DoctorsVote, which has led the junior doctors’ pay strikes, has used political “entryism” to gain a significant influence over the BMA and dictate its policy, Davis alleges.

Ah, that’s their Pharyngula then. The hell with technical medical knowledge, let’s just make it all political all the time, with you being the evil right-wing demons and us being the always correct glorious left-wing angels.

H/t Acolyte of Sagan

Labour brushes off women yet again:

The Government will not carry forward plans to rewrite the Equality Act 2010 that were aimed at protecting single-sex spaces, the Minister for Women and Equalities has confirmed.

Anneliese Dodds said there were no plans to update the existing legislation, which the Conservatives had promised to reform ahead of the general election.

Because women don’t matter. Men matter, and men who pretend to be women really matter, but women are so much lint on the sweater of life.

The Tories planned to rewrite the Act in order to make it clear that “sex” in the legislation means “biological sex” instead of the gender with which a person identifies.

This would have allowed public bodies to stop transgender women entering women’s lavatories or changing rooms, as well as preventing them joining all-female sports teams.

And probably many of the other intrusions and grabbings and exploitings transgender “women” have been relishing for so long. Naturally Labour can’t let that happen.

Originally a comment by Alan Peakall on Vice n virtue.

Certainty of paternity may be the ultimate material basis of the imperative for sexual control, but it does not account for religious taboos on non-procreative sexual acts. Possibly they are Gouldian spandrels emerging from cross firing of the supposed exchange instinct asserted to be disclosed by evolutionary psychologists’ study of Wason test experiments. Once humans have acquired the intellectual sophistication to recognise sexual pleasure as an inducement to reproduction, non-reproductive sex becomes a potential trgger for guilt/shame at cheating nature or Nature personified as a god. Religion as an institution then seizes on that guilt as a means of social control and incorporates it into a meme matrix. This appears still more plausible if you recall the prevalence of the cliched campaign trail barb “If he cheats on his wife, he’ll cheat on the country”.

IIRC it was Stephen Budiansky who attributed many religious impulses to a human instinct to bargain even if there is no counterparty with whom to strike a deal (fasting, human sacrifice, …) just as a beaver will attempt to build a dam in response to the mere sound of running water.

Saeedullah Safi in the Irish Times on the demolition of women’s rights in Afghanistan:

“My voice is now a crime,” says Mariam, a teacher from Kabul province. Speaking over a shaky WhatsApp connection, Mariam (whose name has been changed for her safety) describes her life as a woman under new Taliban rules. “I am terrified to leave my house,” she says. “Not because I fear the violence in the streets, but because I fear my own voice might betray me.”

Last week, the Taliban’s supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, approved new “vice and virtue” laws, which include a total ban on women’s voices in public and further restrictions on their presence outside the home.

Because, you see, if a man hears a woman’s voice it makes him think about fucking, while if he doesn’t hear a woman’s voice he will be able to keep his thoughts fixed on The Prophet. Or cricket. Or something that’s not fucking.

Women are no longer allowed to work in most sectors, attend secondary school, or visit public parks. Following the new decrees, they are now also forbidden from showing their faces or being heard in public. The Taliban’s justification: women’s voices and faces are potential instruments of vice, leading men into temptation.

Because women’s voices make men think about fucking. What’s so hard to understand?

This silence is not just a metaphorical one. The Taliban have made it literal, with new rules that ban women from singing, reading aloud or even speaking in their own homes if their voices can be heard by men outside. The consequences for disobedience are severe – women who violate these rules can be detained and punished at the discretion of Taliban officials.

It has to be this way, because women make men think about fucking.

Speaking up for the women of Afghanistan.

Wow, what a funny joke.

Trump issues threats:

Former President Donald Trump, who makes frequent false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen through rampant fraud, warned Saturday that he would attempt to imprison anyone who engages in “unscrupulous behavior” during the 2024 race results.

No he didn’t threaten to attempt to imprison, he said he would imprison. Trump never tempers what he says with an awareness of limitations on his power, he just issues the threatyest threats he can come up with.

The threat was issued in a post on Truth Social, his social media website, and repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, accusing Democrats of “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery.”

“The 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” he wrote.

See? Nothing about attempting there, just will be prosecuted. Pure strongman.

He continued, “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

Will be will be will be, because he will be will be will be the dictator who will order it to happen.

Also note the idiotic “unfortunately” placed, as always, in the wrong place so that the meaning is rendered ambiguous. He always does that. Why is it unfortunate that such “levels” have never been seen before in “our Country”?

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Trump began making baseless warnings of election interference that grew louder after he lost and culminated in a mob attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in an attempt to block certification of Biden’s election. He’s begun making similar statements ahead of the 2024 election.

Because he intends to steal it and he’s laying the groundwork. Subtle he’s not.

How sweet.

Notice anyone missing?

Urrgghh I did not know this – Trump has been campaigning in sundown towns.

Howell, Michigan. LaCrosse, Wisconsin. Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Mosinee, Wisconsin.

These relatively small cities — spread across midwestern swing states and far from dense metropolitan areas — all have one thing in common: They are former “sundown” towns, where threats of Jim Crow-era violence enforced racial segregation.

After a series of rallies in major cities to kick off his general election campaign, the Republican presidential candidate zeroed in on a handful of cities with familiar pasts.

That’s really really really disgusting.

Viral criticism across social media has argued that Trump’s latest campaign stretch isn’t a coincidence but a “dogwhistle” to racist supporters. Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign accused the former president of deliberately campaigning in the former “KKK capital of Michigan.”

His campaign denies it, but then why did they go to obscure backwater cities instead of the big obvious ones?

The town of Howell has long been associated with the Ku Klux Klan’s presence in Michigan, thanks to the state’s former “Grand Dragon” Robert Miles, who recruited auto workers into the KKK and staged hate rallies and cross burnings in the majority-white county.

“This is where Donald Trump is choosing to hold his rallies,” said a TikTok user whose video linking the former president’s “troubling pattern” of campaign rally sites to “sundown” histories has been shared widely across social media.

“You got a presidential candidate for the GOP doing a sundown town tour around the country, not looking for political gain,” he added. “He’s fucking rallying the troops.”