Jon makes an important point.
Politics, justice, freedom struggles, equal rights campaigns – none of that is about “kindness.” Keep your damn kindness and just give us what’s rightfully ours.
Kindness is a good thing in its place, but expanded out of its place it can be intrusive and patronizing and ultimately infuriating. Give us our due and then don’t bother us.
Helen Lewis says social justice crusades are a kind of substitute religion for The Young.
In the U.S., the nonreligious are younger and more liberal than the population as a whole. Perhaps, then, it isn’t a coincidence that they are also the group most likely to be involved in high-profile social-justice blowups, particularly the type found on college campuses. They’ve substituted one religion for another…
…Many common social-justice phrases have echoes of a catechism: announcing your pronouns or performing a land acknowledgment shows allegiance to a common belief, reassuring a group that everyone present shares the same values.
See also: those annoying yard signs (I bet you don’t have them in the UK – you luckies) that advertise the inhabitants’ virtues. The one I hate most leads with “IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE” and then lists the pieties. The pieties are mostly quite acceptable pieties, but I’m extremely tired of the smug self-admiring advertisement of them.
As politics has usurped religion, it has borrowed its underlying concepts, sometimes putting them into new words. John McWhorter, a linguist and Atlantic contributing writer, recently published a best-selling book reflecting on what he sees as the excesses of America’s racial-justice movement. Its working title was “The Elect,” after the Calvinist idea of a group chosen by God for salvation. (In the end, it was published under the more provocative name Woke Racism.) “The hyper-woke—who were firing people right and left, and shaming people right and left—think that they’re seeing further than most people, that they understand the grand nature of things better than the ordinary person can,” McWhorter told me. “To them, they’re elect.”
And being elect means they need to chastise the unelect.
Helen points out that Trump fans are another kind of elect.
There’s no escape.
Could it be that forced pregnancy will keep Republicans from taking over?
Abortion and Donald Trump will both appear on November’s ballot. On Tuesday, Pat Ryan, a Democrat and a decorated Iraq war veteran, upset Republican Marc Molinaro in a special congressional election in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley. Ryan won 52-48 after pre-election polls had painted him as the clear underdog.
…
On the campaign trail Ryan made abortion a central issue. “Choice is [on] the ballot, but we won’t go back,” he posted to Facebook hours before the polls opened. “Freedom is under attack, but it’s ours to defend.”
…
There is a clear backlash against the US supreme court’s evisceration of the rights to privacy and personal autonomy.
Whose rights to privacy and personal autonomy? Not everyone’s; only women’s. I doubt it’s mere clumsy writing that made Lloyd Green obscure that fact. Avoiding the word “women” has become second nature to many journalists and opinion writers.
Tudor Dixon, Michigan’s Republican candidate for governor, spoke of the upside of a 14-year-old rape victim carrying the child to term. “The bond that those two people made and the fact that out of that tragedy there was healing through that baby, it’s something that we don’t think about,” Dixon told an interviewer.
Weirdly, even there he manages to avoid saying “girl.”
Anyway, I hope he’s right about the backlash.
A female comic and healthcare worker says she has been spat at on the street and shunned by long-time colleagues for daring to put on a performance about biological women.
Award-winning funny woman Elaine Miller’s Fringe show Viva Your Vulva: The Hole Story has been the target of abuse from those judging her as a “transphobe”. She says that at the end of the Edinburgh show she makes a reference to the importance of language in getting across healthcare messaging.
Like not saying “people” should get tested for cervical or testicular cancer? That kind of importance of language?
Her crime she says is not mentioning transwomen because they are “not relevant to the topic” of female biological anatomy.
Ya that kind.
In an interview with the Scottish Daily Express, Ms Miller said the show is about anyone with female anatomy, including trans men and non-binary individuals. She said: “I think my crime is that it’s only about female people and I don’t mention trans women at all because they are not relevant to the topic and that seems to have upset people.”
You know, somebody should lock Trump and trans women (yes all of them) in a room to duke it out for Who Is Most Self-obsessed On The Planet.
Trump thinks “executive privilege” is something like a guarantee of absolute monarchy – a magic holy term that empowers him to have take keep do say deny lie about whatever he wants. He thinks all he has to do is say the documents are covered by “executive privilege” and that’s the last word on the subject. In short he has a child’s idea of what being president means and what having been president means.
That’s why his exchanges with the National Archives were at cross-purposes.
The National Archives and Records Administration recovered more than 100 documents bearing classified markings, totaling more than 700 pages, from an initial batch of 15 boxes retrieved from Mar-a-Lago earlier this year, according to newly public government correspondence with the Trump legal team.
The numbers make clear the large volume of secret government documents recovered months ago from former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate, well before FBI officials returned there with a search warrant on Aug. 8 and removed an additional 11 sets of classified records. The warrant reveals an FBI investigation into the potential unlawful possession of the records as well as obstruction of justice.
In Trump’s tiny mind there can’t be such a thing as “unlawful possession” of documents from his Absolute Monarchy.
The figures on documents were included in a May 10 letter in which acting archivist Debra Steidel Wall told a lawyer for Trump, Evan Corcoran, that the Biden administration would not be honoring the former president’s protective claims of executive privilege over the documents.
Does not compute. They’re not “claims,” they’re Absolute Reality just as he was Absolute Ruler. He was the god-king so the papers from his god-kingship are protected by his godly kingyness. Executive privilege. Woman man person camera tv.
The archivist’s letter says the Justice Department had found “no precedent for an assertion of executive privilege by a former President against an incumbent President to prevent the latter” from obtaining from the National Archives presidential records that belong to the federal government and that are needed for current government business.
“Precedent”? What is this “precedent” of which you speak?
Once again the question arises: what about copies? Why isn’t the reporting explaining to us why there is so much agitation over The Documents with no mention of copies?
Anyway. Rolling Stone reports:
IN THE WEEKS after the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid, former President Donald Trump repeatedly made a simple-sounding but extraordinary ask: he wanted his lawyers to get “my documents” back from federal law enforcement.
Trump wasn’t merely referring to the alleged trove of attorney-client material that he insists was scooped up by the feds during the raid, two people familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone. The ex-president has been demanding that his team find a way to recover “all” of the official documents that Trump has long referred to as “mine” — including the highly sensitive and top secret ones.
Sources close to Trump agree with outside legal experts that such a sweeping legal maneuver would be a long-shot, at best. “I hate to break it to the [former] president, but I do not think he is going to get all [the] top-secret documents back,” says one Trump adviser. “That ship has probably sailed.”
But why is it implied that the documents are unique? Why wouldn’t Trump have multiple copies in multiple places? What are we missing? Is it that the originals have copy-proof Somethings that mean copies are essentially worthless? Or what?
Oh dear. That sounds way too much like “What is this drivel, throw it away and hand in the actual assignment by tomorrow or you get an F for the course.”
All the narcissism.
“Buckle up everybody it’s time to talk about my”
Stop right there.
Updating to add: It’s a parody.
“You can’t criticize or dispute ____, ____ is a mother’s child!”
The mum of a Scots transwoman who is competing in a women’s professional golf tournament has hit out at Judy Murray after she criticised her daughter’s place in the competition.
Why “the mum”? Why baby talk? Other people’s mothers aren’t “the mums,” they’re the mothers. We’re not all 6. Also why bother with a link for “mum”? Also stop saying “hit out at” when you mean “disagreed with” or “criticized.”
But the real point is, that’s not “her daughter,” it’s her son, which is why it’s not fair for him to be competing in a women’s tournament.
Hailey Davidson, from Stair in Ayrshire, became the first transgender woman to earn a Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) tour card and is currently taking part in the LPGA and Epson Tour Qualifying School in Palm Springs, America.
That is, Hailey Davidson is cheating a woman out of a place in the LPGA and Epson Tour Qualifying School in Palm Springs, America. It’s not cute.
Tennis coach Judy Murray branded the decision to allow the trans athlete to compete as ‘wrong’ and unfair on the other competitors.
Sharing a tweet about the golfer, the tennis coach wrote: “No. Not fair at all. Protect women’s sport. Listen to the facts, the scientists and the medics. This is wrong.”
As, of course, it is.
Sandra, who spoke to the Record from her home in Florida, where she lives with Hailey said: “Shame on Judy Murray for attacking another mother’s child.”
That’s idiotic. Every single human being is “another mother’s child.” Trump is a mother’s child. Putin is a mother’s child. Mass shooters are all mothers’ children. Torturers are mothers’ children. Even men who claim to be women are mothers’ children; that doesn’t mean we can’t say they’re wrong.
“You do not know my daughter Hailey and most importantly you know absolutely nothing about transgender men or women and therefore have no rights whatsoever to give your opinion on something you know nothing about.”
How does “Sandra” know what Judy Murray knows about trans people? Even if she does know, what right does she have to tell Murray not to talk about men in women’s sports?
None.
This is an interesting point – by claiming executive privilege he’s confessed.
Lawyers are laughing at Trump’s filing.
It might be tempting to scrutinize the filing as if it were a serious legal document, submitted in a credible way. That would be a mistake. Orin Kerr, a conservative law professor at UC Berkeley, noted overnight that many actual lawyers “are giggling at Trump’s motion, and how poorly it was done.”
Go on, just say it. Badly. The word is “badly.” There’s no need to soften it with “poorly.” Trump isn’t poor, he’s bad.
Among the many problems is the fact that it’s oddly late. The FBI executed its search warrant on Monday, Aug. 8. At that point, federal law enforcement officials reclaimed classified materials the former president brought to his glorified country club, taking stock of what he improperly took. Two weeks later, Trump’s lawyers went to court, apparently in the hopes that the FBI would stop reviewing the documents.
The FBI, with once voice: “Oops! Sorry! Our bad!”
The idea that the FBI’s search was “shockingly aggressive” is even more difficult to take seriously. The Justice Department tried a series of lesser means, including subpoenas and in-person meetings in the hope of avoiding this step. When Team Trump refused to cooperate, the FBI went to court, obtained a search warrant, and executed it in the least aggressive way possible: The bureau sent plain-clothed agents who coordinated in advance with the Secret Service.
I’m guessing that “shockingly aggressive” is trumpese for lèse-majesté. One doesn’t rifle the cupboards of the god-emperor.
The former president keeps calling it an illegal “break-in” and “raid,” hoping that the public will imagine swarms of agents in tactical gear, pointing assault weapons at scared Mar-a-Lago customers. That’s plainly absurd.
To adults it is. Trump aims everything toward people as childish in their thinking as he is. It turns out there are a hell of a lot of them.
Perhaps most entertaining was an accompanying written statement from Trump, which read in part, “This Mar-a-Lago Break-In, Search, and Seizure was illegal and unconstitutional, and we are taking all actions necessary to get the documents back, which we would have given to them without the necessity of the despicable raid of my home, so that I can give them to the National Archives until they are required for the future Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Museum.”
Would have given to them when? He’s only had a year and a half already. Also they’re not his to “give” to the National Archives, much less to grab back for his “library.”
That said, misguided court filings sometimes work, and in this instance, the case was assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon — a Trump-appointed Federalist Society member, who was confirmed after Trump’s 2020 defeat, and who has a reputation as a far-right jurist.
Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum.
It never ceases to amaze me the way “inclusive” is for trans people but never ever for women. I still say I was never given the option to agree or disagree with the proposition “women are no longer an oppressed group in any way.”
See by giving customers a choice of male or female changing rooms they’re not being “an inclusive retailer,” because they’re excluding female people who don’t want to risk being spied on or assaulted while they try on a bra. It’s stupid and mindless to call it “inclusive” to give men carte blanche to do that.
Regarding Julia Mason and Leor Sapir’s op-ed “The American Academy of Pediatrics’ Dubious Transgender Science” (Aug. 18): In its recommendations for caring for transgender and gender-diverse young people, the AAP advises pediatricians to offer developmentally appropriate care that is oriented toward understanding and appreciating the youth’s gender experience. This care is nonjudgmental, includes families and allows questions and concerns to be raised in a supportive environment. This is what it means to “affirm” a child or teen; it means destigmatizing gender variance and promoting a child’s self-worth. Gender-affirming care can be lifesaving. It doesn’t push medical treatments or surgery; for the vast majority of children, it recommends the opposite.
That’s what “gender-affirming care” means? It doesn’t mean cutting off breasts or penises, or constructing new “front holes” or penises from bits of colon or chunks of arm?
Huh. That’s not how Boston Children’s Hospital uses it. Someone should let them know.
Law-mavens are following the Maralago adventures with keen interest. [Updating to add: the bit about not having a lawyer turns out to be a mistake. H/t Screechy]
Typical Trump, too – always with the overkill. It’s like that hideous gilded apartment in Trump Tower.
The NY Times on Trump’s lavish archive of classified documents:
The initial batch of documents retrieved by the National Archives from former President Donald J. Trump in January included more than 150 marked as classified, a number that ignited intense concern at the Justice Department and helped trigger the criminal investigation that led F.B.I. agents to swoop into Mar-a-Lago this month seeking to recover more, multiple people briefed on the matter said.
There are levels here. He wasn’t supposed to have any documents: they were never his to keep. Multiply that by a very big number for classified documents. Multiply again for the huge number of them.
In total, the government has recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mr. Trump since he left office, the people said: that first batch of documents returned in January, another set provided by Mr. Trump’s aides to the Justice Department in June and the material seized by the F.B.I. in the search this month.
More than 300 separate crimes.
The previously unreported volume of the sensitive material found in the former president’s possession in January helps explain why the Justice Department moved so urgently to hunt down any further classified materials he might have.
And all this is happening, let’s not forget, at a hotel. A place with hundreds of people wandering around at all times. Trump stole hundreds of classified documents and kept them at his hotel.
Mr. Trump’s allies insist that the president had a “standing order” to declassify material that left the Oval Office for the White House residence, and have claimed that the General Services Administration, not Mr. Trump’s staff, packed the boxes with the documents.
Why would that make it ok? Trump’s saying “declassify all this stuff, I’m taking it home” doesn’t change the nature of the stuff.
The Society of Authors has advice for us.
A lot of authors I follow are annoyed by the condescension of “play nicely.” I read some of the thing we were told to have a peep at, and was struck by a certain omission.
The Society of Authors is committed to promoting professional behaviour throughout all its activities, and to tackling and preventing bullying, harassment and racism in all their forms.
Why racism only? Why not sexism? (There are others, too – classism, xenophobia, etc – but women are half of everyone, so we’re a particularly big item to ignore.)
Bullying, harassment and racism have no place on our premises, in our communications, or in any other environment in which we operate.
But sexism does have a place there?
Our approach
We condemn any kind of racist, hate or unprofessional speech.
Again – why specify racism and leave all the other kinds of hate speech unspecified? In particular why leave the one that targets half the population unspecified?
I asked them but I don’t suppose they’ll answer.
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Steve’s nails.
Does Steve think that the only way to rebel against gender stereotypes is to pretend that sex isn’t binary? Does Steve not understand that gender stereotypes aren’t the same as biological sexes? Does Steve think it’s impossible for him to wear nail polish if males and females are in any way different sexes? Does Steve think that by declaring himself neither male nor female he’s on the path to convincing us all that male and female literally don’t exist? Or is it not a matter of whether sex differences do or don’t exist, but whether they should or shoudn’t exist?
None of this makes any sense for more than a second or two. One goes from “ok, nonbinary is like gender bending” — fine so far I guess — but then one sees “oh, wait, they’re saying they’re neither male nor female because they’re gender bending” and after about two seconds of thought, the whole thing just turns into a self-contradictory jumble that doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense.
That this Travis person can write an entire book without putting so much as two seconds of thought into what he’s talking about is such an incredible level of narcissism, in the words of Ron Burgundy, I’m not even mad; that’s amazing.
Brendan on the narcissism of I don’t even have to say whose narcissism it is.
In his new book None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary, nonbinary writer Travis Alabanza cites this dilemma [to paint the nails or not to paint the nails] as proof of the ‘oppression [of] the gender binary’. He introduces us to Steve, a man who had ‘wanted to paint his nails for years’. But he didn’t because, like the rest of us cis squares, he’d been conditioned into ‘upholding the gender binary’ which says men don’t do that.
But then he saw Alabanza on stage and was EmPowered to paint those mofos.
Alabanza is moved by this brave strike against the forces of oppression. ‘My urge was to hug him’, he writes. Free at last! Thank God Almighty, free at last!
It’s almost too ridiculous for words. There’s page after page in this memoir-cum-nonbinary-treatise about Steve and his nails. Alabanza refers to the ‘trials’ of Steve, to Steve’s ‘oppression from the gender binary’. Turning the histrionics up to 11, he says he found himself ‘mourning Steve’s lost time’. Just to remind you: Steve wasn’t dead or in jail or under house arrest; he just didn’t paint his nails.
It is of course the case that we’re all limited in what we can do by a billion conventions, and that can be more or less sad, limiting, frustrating, and so on. But, as Brendan hints so subtly, there is a limit. It’s not all that sad, for the most part. The Steves of the world could surely wear nail polish for the weekend, for instance, and then remove it if they didn’t want to be giggled at on the job.
The story of Steve’s oppressed unpainted fingernails is only one mad example of gender-binary ‘oppression’ in Alabanza’s book. There’s also the tragic tale of Alabanza feeling he cannot go out in public dressed as a witch.
He can though, but people might laugh at him. Now if he did it in for instance Nigeria he could get himself killed, but Alabanza isn’t talking about Nigeria. He’s talking about getting laughed at.
Alabanza says in his book that the reason he couldn’t go into the ‘male changing rooms’ is because it would be an ‘unsafe place to change’. The men in there would pose a threat to him; he would be ‘at risk from harassment’. So the solution is to make all spaces ‘gender-neutral’ and allow those same men you fear to go anywhere they like, including into the girls’ changing room? The arrogance of this position, the narcissism of it, is astonishing.
But all too typical.
Idiots.
Notice anything missing? Of course: what’s always missing.
It’s not our bodily autonomy, i.e. everyone’s. It’s specifically women’s bodily autonomy. Women are not allowed to be entirely free because women have the responsibility of making the new humans. It is women who are dominated and pushed around by laws against abortion, and it’s yet another insult to women when political campaigns pretend it’s all of us.
The whole post by MoveOn which doesn’t mention women once:
The GOP thought they could strip away our bodily autonomy without facing any consequences. But the recent election in Kansas, one of the country’s most conservative states, proved them WRONG.
The anti-abortion measure on the ballot was defeated in every congressional district in the state. Even in the most conservative districts, people of all political stripes turned out to support abortion. And, crucially, the election’s turnout—which was expected to be relatively low—went through the roof.
Do you know what that means? We can turn the midterm elections this November into a referendum on abortion rights, and we can WIN.
MoveOn wants to get the message out for this fall that we’re going to Roe the Vote and make sure there’s a public, visible movement nationwide to ensure the fight over abortion access is front-and-center for voters.
We’ve just printed a big batch of these stickers and are giving them away for free, while supplies last. Click and order your sticker now while supplies last to proudly display your support for abortion rights and remind those in power that we, the people, hold the real power in this country—and we demand reproductive freedom.
We, the women, demand that you say “women” when you talk about abortion rights.
Let’s insult women some more.
“Hannah” Mouncey is an enormous man. The one woman on this panel is a friend of Mouncey’s.
