Well of course he does.
Just sit down and shut up, Peter. You’re not the boss of women. You don’t get to tell women it’s tough shit when some man decides to invade their sport and destroy their chances. It’s obviously unfair and we shouldn’t have to see you gloating about it like the woman-hating pig you are. Just sit down.
Robin DiAngelo has hit a bump in the road. It’s about goddam time. Hadley Freeman writes:
Last week DiAngelo was accused of plagiarism. To understand why that’s interesting, you need to know that DiAngelo is the most successful anti-racism trainer in the world. Her book White Fragility: Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Race became a blockbuster bestseller in 2020, after Floyd’s murder.
And of course she donated most of the profits to anti-racism efforts by non-white people, right? Right?
Nah, we know she didn’t. We’ve talked about her massively successful grift before.
She charged up to $20,000 to hold anti-racism workshops at companies like Microsoft and Google, where — in the words of one participant who later gave an interview to the podcast Blocked and Reported — DiAngelo would tell white people that if they had “any reaction to the anti-racism work that isn’t agreement or submission, then that’s proof [they’re racist]”. The “anti-racism work” was little more than white people being told to accept they’re racist.
She holds the anti-racism workshops and by god she gets the big bucks for doing it. Wouldn’t you think she would tell Microsoft and Google to ask non-white people to hold their anti-racism workshops? Wouldn’t you think that would be kind of an anti-racist thing to do? Wouldn’t you think she’d be asking them “What are you asking me for???”
20 grand for an hour of chatting about her book – nice for some, as the saying goes.
The few writers on liberal publications who suggested DiAngelo’s theories weren’t hugely helpful — to anyone of any race — are black, such as John McWhorter at The Atlantic. White liberal journalists gave her glowing reports.
Hmm. All of them?
After Floyd’s murder, my local bookshop devoted its front section to books about race, and not the kind I grew up reading, like Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Instead they were books with scolding titles like How to Raise An Antiracist, by Ibram X Kendi, “one of the world’s leading anti-racist scholars” (according to his own website), and DiAngelo’s White Fragility.
The thing about Kendi, as I’ve written here at some point, is that he’s a terrible writer, and not much of a thinker.
All this led to a lot of grifters getting a free pass to chide the general public about racism. Only 33 per cent of the money donated to Black Lives Matter in the US between 2020 to 2022 actually went to charitable causes; tens of millions went instead to its co-founder Patrisse Cullors and her family and friends. Kendi’s Centre for Anti-racist Research at Boston University, which he founded in 2020, raised over $55 million in donations. Last year it was announced the centre was downsizing because of poor management by Kendi, and even an extremely sympathetic profile of Kendi in The New York Times in June couldn’t deny that.
A dud writer, thinker, and manager. Grifters gonna grift.
Now a complaint has been filed that DiAngelo plagiarised parts of her 2004 doctoral thesis, Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis.
I read a selection of side-by-side selections from her thesis and the sources a couple of days ago and they’re pretty damning. It’s fine to draw from other people’s work, of course, but you have to do one of two things: paraphrase what they say, or put it between quotation marks. “Paraphrase” doesn’t mean “change two or three minor words.” She did the latter.
The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative US website, broke the story, and good for it. But this is infuriating to old-school liberals like me, who believe racism is a problem and also believe in critical thinking. DiAngelo was clearly a crackpot, and yet the liberal media showered her with adoration instead of the scrutiny she deserved. Prejudice should not be treated as a partisan issue, but liberals — just as much as conservatives — make it so with stupidity like this. Racism is real, but the anti-racism industry became an absolute racket, which enriched some and improved nothing.
Now let’s do those two women who charge people vast sums to be abused over dinner.
More on the bullying and persecution of Jenny Lindsay:
A series of often dumbfounding reports over recent days about the crisis in Creative Scotland included a revelation that shows why the organisation must be closed, immediately.
In June, Lindsay announced the forthcoming publication of her book Hounded, which examines the troubling modern phenomena of women being bullied out of jobs and public life for expressing views about gender and sex that don’t align with voguish opinion.
Five years ago, Lindsay – then one of the country’s leading performance poets – publicly called out a trans-identifying male writer for urging attacks on lesbians at a Pride march. Thanks to the bestupiding effects of trans ideology, Lindsay was swiftly identified among her peers as the villain of this bleak piece. She lost her career, all of her “friends”, and had to move back from Edinburgh to the Ayrshire town where she was raised.
Among those who turned on Lindsay were friends of [Alice] Tarbuck…
Whom the writer of this piece, Euan McColm, describes as
not a serious creative person but a hobbyist, interested in her subject but not, herself, talented enough to practice it to any significantly interesting degree. The little work she has had published lacks rhythm, originality and, crucially, profundity. It’s squiggly nonsense for people who want the physical feeling of reading poetry without the associated complicated emotions.
A mediocre (or worse) poet using her bureaucratic job to go after a good poet. How cozy.
So Lindsay was understandably shocked to discover – after every damned thing – that two days after announcing the publication of her book, Tarbuck had called a bookshop, urging them not to stock it.
Tarbuck, a quango employee whose sole responsibility is the nurturing and support of writers, abused her position to try to harm the career of a writer. Not only that, her behaviour was identical to that of her friends who’d terrorised the same writer back in 2019. One novelist friend asked me whether Tarbuck was stupid or sadistic, to which my reply was that she appears to be both. Perhaps this is the way in which Tarbuck, who (of course) identifies as a witch, contains multitudes.
…
Personal shame should see Tarbuck remove herself from the literary scene. And her behaviour should prevent any serious agent or publisher ever dealing with her. In the world of literature, Tarbuck should consider herself cancelled. And if she feels hard done by, she should promptly take the matter up with herself.
…
Naturally, Creative Scotland tried to cover it all up.
The organisation went through a “disciplinary” procedure and allowed Tarbuck to remain in post. Not only that, it was agreed she would not deal with “gender critical” writers to avoid a “conflict of interest”.
That is deranged. Tarbuck is a living, breathing conflict of interest. Not only was she protected, her bosses made life more comfortable for her, removing from her the triggering duty of reading and thinking about things that made her unhappy, and allowing her to stay, a malevolent presence, a schoolyard bully given legitimacy, and then protected, by cowardly and amoral philistines.
All this because Tarbuck is a prisoner of trans ideology and Lindsay isn’t. You’d think trans people were the most important and the most persecuted people on the planet when in fact they are neither. They’re mostly over-privileged whiners who’ve been told they’re the most important and the most persecuted by a pack of fools.
The simple fact that an organisation established to support artists protected an employee who tried to cancel an artist is all we need to know. What happened was not merely an offence against Jenny Lindsay, it was an offence against art.
Naive artists, writers and musicians have spent much of the past week urging the Government to step in with a financial boost for Creative Scotland. It’s time for them to wise up.
Our national arts quango now exists only to employ those who work for it.
If you’re an artist with hopes for the future, you should be demanding Creative Scotland’s closure, not begging like a fool for it to be given a lifeline.
Creative Scotland is not creative.
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Blame feminists.
What has Western society *overall* been able to do?
Saudi Arabia (and any other state that enshrines in law the subordination and oppression of women) should be a pariah state the way South Africa was under apartheid. But, as in many other instances, geopolitics trumps human rights, unless the human rights abuse can be turned to tactical geopolitical advantage and used to embarass an opponent. Saudi Arabia sits on top of an ocean of oil, so it gets a pass because oil. But given many cultures’ blindness to sexism (as opposed to racism, which “everybody” knows is “bad,” such that most try to keep their racist thoughts private or secret if they can), the chances of foreign policy being redirected to advance the rights of women are pretty close to zero.
I think that by now feminism absolutely should have this kind of power to end injustice toward women…
Indeed. But even within the West, I don’t think there’s a single country that has succeeded in leveling the playing field for women on anything other than a temporary, piecemeal basis. The near-overnight triumph of trans “rights” against the interests and safety of women and girls has shown just how fragile, halfhearted, and tenuous the supposed commitment to women has been. The idea that anyone should have been able to redefine “woman” in law so as to include men is insane. It should not have been possible. It should have been unthinkable. But instead of being laughed off the stage, this redefintion has been embraced in a state-enforced, nightmare mash-up of Orwell and Kafka.
Who else but women could have had their rights sold out from under them with such ease and thoughtlessness?** What better demonstration of the continuing, comparative powerlessness and unimportance of women in the West? We can’t afford to be smug. Given our recent history, and how breezily women’s concerns over the destruction of their rights were swept aside, what guarantees do women have that, given the right circumstances, we might not ourselves slide into the kind of barbarism*** Boghossian is decrying? None. Both the ability and inclination to control and dominate women are already there to a frightening degree (see above re: trans “rights”). It’s not that the urge to subordinate and control have come back; they never went away.
Feminist principles should be on the same foundational status as equality before the law and one person, one vote with regards to establishing and maintaining the basic rule of law and democratic norms*, not some kind of a sop rolled out as an afterthought if women get uppity. If that means that some of our “foundations” need to be dug up and redrafted, then so be it.
*We’ve seen plenty of examples of the difficulties many nations have in preventing tyrrany and corruption, and upholding justice unswayed by power and money. Gwynne Dyer suggests that this is part of a longer struggle that has played out over millenia:
**Not to mention the defeat of Roe v. Wade in the United States.
*** Not intending to Godwin myself, but if Germany could launch the Holocaust, no country is proof against the potential for state supported barbarism and evil. As the world slides into climate catastrophe, what are the chances that the “climate” for human rights will improve? Women are always on the chopping block. The potential for widespread, extreme “populist” responses to deteriorating global conditions puts them in more danger, not less. Unless their rights are firmly re-established and strengthened now, the risk women face in the future only worsens. (Not that laws will necessarily protect them, but better to have something in place rather than very little or nothing. It would be nice if the powers that be could be persuaded to telegraph something other than “disposability” when it comes to women’s rights and safety.)
Maybe the way to break Trump is to shrug him off.
The standout moment in Kamala Harris’s first interview as Democratic presidential nominee consisted of a mere seven words: “Same old tired playbook. Next question, please.”
That was her answer when CNN’s Dana Bash brought up Donald Trump’s recent outrageous suggestion that the vice president, who is the daughter of Indian and Jamaican parents, “happened to turn Black” as a matter of political expediency.
Let’s hope Harris continues to shrug off Trump’s racist and misogynist attacks. It’s clearly driving him crazy.
I’m no good at shrugging things off, myself. I prefer to try to hammer them into the ground like a frustrated Bugs Bunny. But if Harris is driving him crazy by yawning in his face, hooray!
Meanwhile, in its efforts to get the former president back on track, Trump’s campaign keeps scheduling policy-focused “messaging” events, at which he is supposed to address issues that swing voters care about, such as the economy. It isn’t working very well. Trump listlessly delivers some lines from the teleprompter, then gets bored and begins recycling the rants from his rallies. He mocks the campaign strategists who want him to stick to the script and threatens to fire them.
Well that’s the thing, isn’t it. He’s never been in it for the policy side. Not really. What truly get him going is the showbiz part, the times where he gets to pretend he’s a brilliant insult comic. The other stuff is just paying his dues so that he can do the fun stuff.
Seattle Center – the site of a long-ago world’s fair, with theaters and galleries and landscaped open space – has a large block of restrooms aka toilets, with one set labeled women and the other men, in the familiar way, but also now sporting a sign that says (paraphrasing from memory) “you can use whichever restroom you feel comfortable in.” Of course it enrages me anew every time I walk past it, but not just for the obvious reason. The slightly less obvious reason is the idiocy of the wording, because if some hulking guy “feels comfortable” stomping right on into the women’s toilets then guess who no longer does “feel comfortable” – eh?
So. Yeah.
Same fucking thing. “We’re all simply using the facilities we feel safe in.” No we’re not, you stupid fucks, not any more, because this whole stupid poster is one long invitation to men to make sure we don’t feel safe no matter which facilities we set foot in.
Some men harass women in the street because “spread your legs for me right now” and some men harass women in the street because “you are a whore and God hates you.”
Unbelievable but true—Germany now has its own morality police. A Muslim man in Berlin is chasing down two women for their ‘improper hijab,’ lecturing them on how to dress ‘correctly.’ This isn’t just harassment; it’s a terrifying echo of the Hijab police we’ve battled in Iran and Afghanistan—now taking root in the heart of Europe. For years, we’ve been silenced, accused of ‘Islamophobia’ when we dare to speak out against the brutality we endure for refusing to cover ourselves ‘properly’ in the name of religion. But silence is complicity. We will not be silent. We will fight against this oppression of women, wherever it rears its ugly head. This incident isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s the direct result of a foreign policy of appeasement, where the rights and dignity of women are bartered away in the name of diplomacy. But let me be clear: our rights are not up for negotiation. From Tehran to Berlin, to Kabul, leave women alone and try minding your own business for a change. #MyCameraIsMyWeapon
Peter Boghossian raging at “western” feminists for what Allah-botherers do to women.
Don’t play the clip. Word is it’s as horrible as you’d expect.
I’m a feminist, and I suppose I’m “western.”
Not one but two men beating women in a women’s race.
Originally a comment by KBPlayer on The magic in everyday life.
During the Edinburgh Festival I saw Jenny Lindsay in a talk with a guy called Darren McGarvey. McGarvey was host of a series of talks on the Industrial Trauma Complex, i.e. how people frame their traumas, and the dangers of airing them (see a quote below about the lived experience and how airing it can harm the sufferer). McGarvey is from a very tough Glasgow background (and looks it) and a recovering addict. He got known as a rapper and then as writer and talker on social issues eg The Poverty Safari and The Social Distance Between Us, about class poverty and class differences.
The talk was well attended, almost all women including the former MP Joanna Cherry, who is known in these parts for her doughtiness on the gender issue. I don’t remember much about the substance of what was said – Jenny repeated the story of her hounding and the general shoddiness of her fellow creatives. What got me was McGarvey, who is known as a fearless commentator on social affairs, was so tentative in introducing Jenny, who in comparison to his rough guy’s looks and scruffy clothes, was smartly dressed and well groomed. He wanted to assure us that no offence was meant, that if anyone felt vulnerable they should be careful. He was full of trigger warnings.
Christ, I thought, we have bought a ticket and this is the Edinburgh Fringe, supposedly the arts festival where you think outside the envelope and push the box, and we are supposed to react like a bunch of Morningside Matrons circa 1972 at the flash of a breast at an experimental theatre.
As it was, Jenny was warmly received and I hope she made some money after the crappy time she’s been having. I think her book will do well and she should get some more gigs.
Concerning lived experience… I think this is very good. As an offshoot of this how much of the creative arts are about supposedly authentic autobiography. In one form it’s sharing the trauma, in another it’s where influencers create an instagrammable life and can never enjoy an experience for its own sake, but must submit it to an saudience.
“I am one of those people often referred to as having ‘lived experience’ – a label given to those of us who are not professionally qualified to assert the things we do who are instead authenticated by the adversities we have suffered. If you spend enough time online, you’re sure to encounter someone like me.
We have strong opinions which we often express with passion and conviction. We believe our experiences are important. That they may shed light on certain social and cultural challenges, backfilling the knowledge gaps so evident among a well-meaning managerial class. From addiction, to homelessness, criminal justice, gender-based violence, racism, housing, mental health and trauma, our lived experiences, which take the form of stories, are regarded by many (and by ourselves) as the solutions to a complex puzzle.
Missing pieces which, when truly grasped by decision makers and wider society, could help shape a more compassionate, informed, and inclusive future. But that’s not the whole story. Our lived experience is also a commodity. One which adds immeasurable value to workplaces, academic research, and media enterprises dominated by middle class professionals.
Every day lived experience permeates culture, driving engagement on social media platforms, generating millions of views, clicks and comments. Posts and status updates, online think-pieces, video essays, news segments and shortform clips online are disseminated, debated, and deconstructed.
In a free market, our willingness to eagerly supply the rapacious demand for authenticity and social realism can certainly leave us with a sense that we are making waves. That we are having an impact and making a difference. Regrettably, the allure of presenting ourselves as recovered (because that’s the nice little bow most people want their affirming lived experience testimonies wrapped up in) may pull us further from the truth of who we are and what we suffer from. In essence, by falsely portraying ourselves as the finished article, our vulnerability increases.
We may be prompted onto a platform to air our trauma publicly by others who’ve done no such thing, and are therefore ill-equipped to provide the necessary insight, support, or aftercare we might require. Our expectations may inadvertently rise, sensing we are on the cusp of some breakthrough which has previously eluded us, only to be dealt a crushing blow upon the realisation that people we thought were friends and allies (because we often attach intensely to anyone who gives us the time of day), were simply associates engaged in a transaction of some kind. And we may experience the nip of negative consequences, when our stories reach a level of prominence we did not foresee, provoking unpleasant reactions in others, be they strangers we’ll never meet or friends and family members who share neither our recollections of what happened, nor our desire to make a public display of it.
This lived experience movement ought to come with some caveats, not simply for the benefit those of us putting it all out there, but also to people on the lower slopes of their own recovery from trauma, who look those of us with a platform for an examples to follow, like we did our favourite artists.
There is a darker side to this lived experience moment, which must be articulated with great care, so as not to stoke unnecessary tumult. Though I suspect those currently riding the wave will find some of what I am going to say extremely challenging, no matter how delicately its put.
So let me first say this: I do not believe people with lived experience are being deliberately exploited by anyone; we have agency and participate willingly in most cases. I wish to cast no aspersions on organisations which have in recent years sought to platform, collaborate with, or even employ the lived experienced.
My concern is that we, the individuals being invited to share intimate details of our lives, are often not as well as we believe. We are often not as firm in our footing in life as we appear. Indeed, the demons of childhood trauma we’d all like to think long banished, wait patiently. We worry that showing vulnerability may result in a withdrawal of interest – abandonment.
We are afraid to assert ourselves and our needs, so make commitments we are unsure we can fulfil while accepting terms and conditions we often sense are unfair – conflict averse and overly compliant. And we often don’t understand the fullness of the consequences that may lie ahead when we agree to sing for our suppers – impulsivity.
Our desire to help others, to participate, to be seen to be achieving, and, yes, to gain affection and security and love, is often so overwhelming that we push aside any lingering doubt as to our fitness to engage in the risky public exhibitionism which may come to define us.
And let’s not forget, we decant our traumas into a rowdy and unforgiving public square where, once disclosed, they cannot be un-disclosed. “
The tedium gets ever more tedious.
A women’s college in Virginia has instituted an admissions policy that bars transgender women next school year because of a new interpretation of the founder’s will.
Sweet Briar College, a private women’s liberal arts school, said the policy stems from the legally binding will of its founder, Indiana Fletcher Williams, who died in 1900. Sweet Briar’s leadership said the document requires it to “be a place of ‘girls and young women.’”
So in other words they’re not changing anything, they’re just pointing out that the college is still a girls’ college, as it’s been all along.
The phrase “must be interpreted as it was understood at the time the Will was written,” Sweet Briar’s president and board chair wrote in a letter earlier this month to the college community. The new policy requires an applicant to “confirm that her sex assigned at birth is female, and that she consistently lives and identifies as a woman.”
…
The new guidelines are facing criticism from some students and most faculty. They warn the politically fraught policy could repel potential students — not just transgender women — when women’s colleges have been closing, going co-ed or merging with other schools. Sweet Briar nearly shuttered in 2015.
…
Association President Isabella Paul, a senior who identifies as nonbinary, told the AP that at least 10% of students use different pronouns and wouldn’t fit in the policy’s description of women. “And there are allies here who may identify as women but have friends and lovers and family members who are nonbinary, genderqueer and transgender,” Paul said. “So this is also affecting their pride in their institution.”
Ah yes pronouns, and women who identify as non-binary, and friends and lovers and family members who have their own luxury gender identities – add it all up and you get There Are No Women Left so you might as well admit it and give up. Women are so last century and let’s pretend they just plain don’t exist anymore. That will be Utopia.
Women’s colleges in the U.S. began to admit transgender women about 10 years ago, including Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and Spelman College, a historically Black school in Atlanta.
“What it means to be a woman isn’t static,” Mount Holyoke’s then-President Lynn Pasquerella told the AP in 2014. “Early feminists argued that reducing women to their biological functions was a foundation of women’s oppression.”
What it means to be a woman isn’t static – ok great so let’s change it to mean “slave born to push out babies and submit to men.” Cool?
Nicholas Hite, a senior attorney with LGBTQ+ rights group Lambda Legal, said Sweet Briar’s policy could be problematic because it explicitly attempts to define for current students what it means to “live and identify as a woman.”
“That’s something that every cis and trans woman should be able to decide for herself,” Hite said.
Right. Every man should be able to decide for himself that he knows what it means to “live and identify as a woman” and that he is a woman and that all women who dispute him are men and should be punished for getting in his way. That is a very good plan and I am very clever.
The faculty senate president said the new policy will likely shrink the pool of already precious applicants.
“It really excludes any student who would be offended by those positions … who doesn’t want to be in a place where discrimination is codified in this way,” Brown said. “I think it’s a financially disastrous decision for the college.”
Yes it’s the height of evil to know the difference between women and men.
Another woman marked out for silencing:
As a self-styled witch, Dr Alice Tarbuck offers online Tarot card readings for £50 an hour and courses in how to embrace the ‘magic’ in everyday life. Her freelance lessons run throughout the year and are described as ‘perfect for anyone with an interest in the history, ethics and practice of witchcraft’. But the rest of the time the author and poet has another role – as a ‘literature officer’ for controversial arts quango Creative Scotland, currently at the centre of a political firestorm.
…
Her role was to provide backing for writers as part of Creative Scotland’s mission to help people and organisations to ‘make work of quality and ambition that enriches life in Scotland for everyone’. But Dr Tarbuck used her position for a very different purpose – an attempt to suppress a ‘gender-critical’ book, which raised concern about radical trans rights activism, and which she deemed to be transphobic – more of which later.
She contacted at least one bookshop and asked its managers not to stock the title – Hounded: Women, Harms and The Gender Wars, by Jenny Lindsay – which ‘charts the often hidden and unspoken harms women face for prioritising and defending sex-based language and rights’. Ms Lindsay was alerted to Dr Tarbuck’s intervention and made a formal complaint against the literature officer – who says she enjoys ‘getting to be hands-on, helping to make authors’ work the best it could be’.
Unless, of course, the author in question has the unmitigated temerity to know that men are not women.
Some 147 people work for the organisation, including four in the public relations department plus the 24-strong board and ‘senior leadership team’ headed by Mr Munro, who is on a salary of £125,000-£130,000 with a pension pot worth £470,000. Their job is to help artists such as Ms Lindsay, the writer who penned the book that sparked such a visceral reaction from Dr Tarbuck.
Ms Lindsay is exactly the sort of artist Creative Scotland was set up to help – and she needed all the support she could get. Five years after trans rights activists led a hate campaign that destroyed her livelihood, the poet had fought back with a new book on the ‘hounding’ phenomenon. Ms Lindsay wrote in the Mail last year about her ordeal, which began after she objected to a call from a male writer for ‘violent action’ against lesbians at a Pride march.
Now why would any woman object to male writers calling for violent action against lesbians at a Pride march? Isn’t it universally acknowledged that men are allowed, indeed encouraged, to threaten uppity women with violence?
She announced this July that Hounded would be published in October. Two days later, Dr Tarbuck contacted at least one bookshop to demand that they refuse to stock it.
Ms Lindsay has learned to be stoical but admits she ‘wasn’t prepared for someone with serious gatekeeping power using her position to attempt to undermine both my ability to forge a new partnership with independent bookstores, and for this to be treated as in any way a normal thing to do for any writer, never mind one in Tarbuck’s position’.
And it’s all the more astounding given that Tarbuck herself is a woman. One woman writes a book objecting to men calling for violence against women, and another woman hastens to use her influence to tell bookstores to refuse to stock it. “Hello, bookstore? Do not stock this book that objects to men calling for violence against women. I can make things bad for you if I want to, I have power, I’m a bigwig at Creative Scotland.”
Furthermore, Creative Scotland apparently told the Mail that it had had a word with Tarbuck and informed Lindsay of the fact and Lindsay had said she was “content with the process.”
But Ms Lindsay insists that she did not know the outcome until the Mail informed her.
So Creative Scotland simply told a brazen lie? Unless you believe their account rather than hers. I’m finding it difficult to believe their account.
Creative Scotland refused to say whether Dr Tarbuck had tried to pressure any other bookshops into boycotting Ms Lindsay’s book.
Earlier this month, it emerged that an influential arts charity which told bookshops not to sell titles written by gender-critical authors had secured Creative Scotland funding. The quango awarded a grant worth more than £64,300 to Literature Alliance Scotland (LAS).
LAS, Scotland’s largest literary network, was thrown into turmoil after a statement was posted on its website claiming ‘Terfs’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) – a derogatory term for those who do not believe that trans women are women – were in league with fascists and calling on venues not to offer them a public platform.
Godalmighty, it just gets worse and worse and worse. Is there something in the water in Scotland or what? They’ll be going full Taliban at this rate.
The courts are forcing people to lie on pain of arrest and/or massive fines.
A podcast episode of Hoss and Hopf had to be deleted by court order because the moderators called a trans-identified man “a man” and used male pronouns to refer to him. The podcasters may be facing potential prison time or a fine of up to €250,000.
Germany thinks men who pretend to be women are the Jews. Nuh uh. The people being punished for not saying men are women are the Jews. (Not literally, obviously, but in the sense of being the party that is being treated like scum.)
In the controversial podcast episode, the hosts discussed the case of Laura Holstein, formerly known as Nicolas. Holstein, a balding male who now identifies as a “woman,” has made multiple headlines over the past few months related to him demanding access to female spaces. Most recently, Holstein, with the support of the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency, has been pursuing legal action against a female-only gym in Bavaria.
So, he’s a man who enjoys bullying women into calling him a woman. We’re familiar with the type.
In a post to social media, Hossainpour posted screenshots of the letter they received from the court. Among the orders made in the document are that the two hosts are prohibited from “distributing, publishing or having third parties distribute or publish” statements that correctly sex Holstein.
Courts are telling people to lie – and not just any lie, but the lie that members of the dominant/domineering caste are actually members of the dominated caste. It’s a peculiarly loathsome lie, yet it’s hugely popular right now.
In the court’s letter, the hosts were accused of violating Holstein’s “personal rights” by referring to him as male, because he is “legally and socially recognized as a woman.”
Hossainpour explained further: “It is noteworthy that the court saw an ‘extraordinary urgency’ here – as if the use of biologically correct terms represented an immediate danger that could not be postponed. One inevitably wonders whether other, perhaps actually urgent cases had to take a back seat for this.”
Urgency forsooth. It’s hard to think of things that are less urgent.
In addition to being forced to delete the episode, the hosts are facing a €250,000 fine for violating the law and, if this cannot be paid, up to six months in prison. If the offense is repeated, they could be handed a two year prison sentence.
That’s a lot of money…all for telling the truth.
Is it bonkers to ban outdoor smoking?
Keir Starmer is on a collision course with the hospitality industry and political opponents after signalling plans for major curbs on outdoor smoking.
The proposals, not denied by the prime minister, would potentially prohibit tobacco use outside pubs and restaurants, including on pavements. The restrictions would come on top of existing plans to gradually outlaw smoking year by year.
While the latter proposal was devised under Rishi Sunak, the Conservatives argued restrictions on outdoor smoking were about “social control”, with Priti Patel – among those standing to replace Sunak as Tory leader – calling them “beyond stupid”.
Well let’s wait a minute here. Lots of restrictions are about social control, because that’s the whole point. There are things we don’t want people doing to us, so we restrict those things.
What is smoking after all? It’s not any kind of necessity. It’s not something people have to do to live or thrive. It’s rather the opposite – something some people like to do despite the fact that it’s bad for their health.
Ok so it’s a pleasure, an optional pleasure. Other things being equal, of course optional pleasures should not be banned, but in the case of smoking, other things are obviously not equal. Smoking is bad for the people who do it, as well as for the people who don’t.
But maybe there’s some benefit to smoking that balances out the harm it does?
Maybe. What is it? What is that benefit?
Damned if I know. In theory it’s a form of pleasure; people do it because they like it. But it’s a very odd thing to do for pleasure when you think about it. “Let’s inhale some harsh hot smoke!”
Word is that nicotine triggers a pleasure reaction in the brain, and that’s why it’s addictive, but do smokers in general look as if they’re having a really fun time while they’re smoking? Like hell they do. They look about as thrilled as fentanyl addicts do when folded in half at a bus stop.
Smokers keep smoking because it’s addictive, of course. It could be true that they also derive genuine, otherwise unattainable pleasure from it, but the view from outside is the actual pleasure is barely detectable.
In short the plus side isn’t much of a plus. The negative side is very negative indeed. Smoking definitely affects non-participants as well as participants. Nevertheless there is outrage.
The plans were met with despair by the pub industry, which claimed restrictions on outdoor smoking could harm a fragile sector still recovering from Covid. However, health experts backed the idea, while polling showed it had majority support among every demographic and voting group apart from Reform UK supporters.
And pub owners.
The measures would be included in an already-announced tobacco and vapes bill, which intends to gradually make all smoking illegal by prohibiting the sale of tobacco to people born on or after January 2009. When this was announced in July’s king’s speech, it did not mention changes to outdoor smoking.
As public health is devolved, the measures would apply to only England, with the other UK nations deciding if they wanted to follow suit.
Asked about the report during a visit to Paris, Starmer did not deny the plans. “My starting point on this is to remind everybody that over 80,000 people lose their lives every year because of smoking,” he said.
“That is a preventable death, it’s a huge burden on the NHS and, of course, it is a burden on the taxpayer. So, yes, we are going to take decisions in this space, more details will be revealed, but this is a preventable series of deaths and we’ve got to take action to reduce the burden on the NHS and the taxpayer.”
Preventable deaths versus the kind of joy you see in your basic smoker getting a fix.
I just want to underline this trendy new brand of feminism.
What she says:
I’m so baffled by terfs – trans exclusionary radical feminists. I don’t understand how anyone takes them seriously when they’re so fucking ugly.
How much more feminist can you be?
Ah yes the “sex workers” – especially the ones who happen to be children. Julie Bindel in Al Jazeera:
In recent decades, so-called “sex workers’ rights” campaigners working to decriminalise pimping and buying of sex have attached themselves, just like trans rights activists, to the movement for the rights of same sex attracted people. This was a logical – and highly beneficial – move on their part. Being seen as part of a proud, widely-respected social justice campaign undoubtedly helps their efforts to perpetuate the myth that “sex work is work” and “prostitution is liberating”.
One of the more…er…surprising moments of the hostile divorce between Freethought Blogs and me was when Greta Christina and her enforcers labeled me a big meany to “sex workers.” Won’t somebody please think of the pimps?
Their acceptance into what came to be called the “LGBTQ+” movement, however, has been incredibly harmful to the most vulnerable members of society, and especially children.
Recently in California, for example, so called LGBTQ+ activists have successfully mounted opposition to planned increased penalties for adults soliciting sex from prostituted children.
In April this year, Republican Senator Shannon Grove put forward a bill that would have made soliciting a minor for sex, or agreeing to engage in any form of commercial sex with a child, a felony offence, carrying a mandatory jail time and a requirement for sex offender registration for repeat offenders.
“The crime of purchasing a child, of any age, for sex in the state of California should be a prison felony,” said Grove. However, LGBTQ+ activists, opposed the bill citing concerns about “unintended consequences”. They claimed that increased penalties for those who abuse minors caught up in the sex trade will affect the LGBTQ+ community “disproportionately”.
Meaning members of “the LGBTQ+ community” are disproportionately abusing minors in the sex trade, and “activists” are defending that. How very progressive.
You might think that harsher penalties for buying and selling children for sex should be a no-brainer, but these activists argued that “studies have shown that LGBTQ+ people, particularly gay and transgendered individuals, are more likely to be charged with sex offences compared to their heterosexual counterparts”. They went on to state that “LGBTQ+ individuals are nine times more likely to be charged with sex crimes, and are thus more likely to be incarcerated – which will in turn lead to increased difficulties in finding housing and employment.”
If these here LGBTQ+ individuals are nine times more likely to be committing sex crimes against children then maybe the activists should be rebuking them rather than trying to help them continue committing sex crimes against children. Wouldn’t you think?
Who would have thought that in the US state of California, it would be this difficult to protect children from men wanting to purchase them for sex? And why is the California LGBTQ+ community trying to frame soliciting of children for sex as part of a sexual identity rather than a depraved, inexcusable crime?
Why indeed. Who knew the enigmatic “+” meant pimping out children? No wonder it’s enigmatic.
That people are advocating for decriminalisation of prostitution, and lenient sentences for those who buy sex from minors, in the name of protecting the rights of gay and trans-identified men, means something has gone terribly wrong with the movement for lesbian and gay rights. However it is dressed up, this is nothing more than child abuse apologism. It should be countered, for the benefit of children as well as lesbians and gays who want the movement for their rights to be urgently divorced from harmful prostitution advocacy.
Damn right it should.
These eight incredible Canadian Women, Elle Canada exclaims, then promptly goes on to reveal that #1 and #3 are men (while #2 sports a tight bandage over her hair and neck because Islam is such a women-friendly religion).
Quadruple threat Vivek Shraya is all the things: musician, writer, actor and artist. Last year, she debuted her Canadian Screen Award-winning CBC web series, How to Fail as a Popstar, which is based on her own adventures growing up in Canada and trying to make it big and become the world’s first trans, brown Madonna. Shraya is also the founder of the award-winning imprint VS. Books, which offers publishing opportunities to emerging BIPOC writers. Meanwhile, her last book, 2022’s People Change, was included on CBC Books’ list of 26 Canadian Books to Read for Pride Month.
Yay he’s trans and brown, so Elle Canada gets two prizes for incloosivitee.
No one walks the talk more than Ontario member of provincial parliament Sarah Jama. Since the conflict in Gaza began in October 2023, she has repeatedly called for a ceasefire and spoken in defence of the Palestinian people. After a kaffiyeh ban was introduced in the Ontario legislature in April, Jama continued to wear hers anyway—again and again, even after being removed.
Ah yes “the conflict in Gaza began in October 2023” – when Hamas slaughtered a bunch of people at a music festival. That “conflict.”
Few log as many overtime hours as Fae Johnstone, executive director of Wisdom2Action, an LGBTQIA2S+ consulting firm that facilitates the improvement of LGBTQIA2S+ inclusion for non-profits, government agencies and other organizations. The Ottawa native, who is also the executive director of the Society of Queer Momentum, has worked long and hard advocating for more rights and social support for the queer community, particularly amid resurgent homophobia, transphobia and misogyny.
Fae Johnstone is misogyny.
Elle Canada is a sour joke.
It’s almost as if this controversy isn’t medical at all but purely political.
‘Witch-hunt’: BMA tries to identify who leaked planned opposition to Cass review
The British Medical Association (BMA) has been accused of undertaking a “witch-hunt” to try to identify which senior figure leaked that it was set to oppose the landmark Cass review on transgender healthcare.
It has warned its ruling council’s 69 members that whoever tipped off the media about its stance should own up or face their non-cooperation being seen as “an act of dishonesty”. Critics said its action is “disgraceful”, “Orwellian” and “witch-hunt-like”.
In other words not medical, not technical, not about evidence or argument, but a matter of loyalty and commitment. Politics rather than epistemology.
The BMA has been heavily criticised by key medical figures since it voted on 17 July to in effect reject Dr Hilary Cass’s report. It is the only medical organisation in the UK to not accept and find fault with her findings, which were accepted by the last government and its Labour successor.
It’s the Guardian saying all this. Something has shifted. No doubt the Cass report itself helped that shift.
The union has been in turmoil ever since. Its dismissal of the report as “unsubstantiated” has led to a serious split, resignations and huge tension within the body that represents about 195,000 doctors – a large majority of the UK medical profession.
As it should. The dismissal is outrageous – political instead of medical.
Dr Clare Gerada, an ex-BMA council member and ex-chair of the Royal College of GPs, said: “I think the BMA are blaming the messenger, not themselves.” She questioned why it had adopted such a controversial position on such a sensitive subject without asking members for their views first. She is among an array of leading doctors who have signed a letter voicing serious concern at the BMA’s stance.
The edifice is tilting.
Not vulgar enough yet? He can do more!
Donald Trump has reposted a crudely misogynistic comment about Kamala Harris on Truth Social in a move that reprised his past record of sexist behaviour and brazenly flouted pleas from members of his own party to emphasize issues over personal attacks.
With fresh polls showing Harris further improving her standing – and widening the gap with her opponent among women voters – Trump drew online opprobrium by sharing a vulgar post on his social media site implying that the Democratic nominee owed her political rise to sexual favours.
Trump is a rapist, and proud of it, while he tries to pretend to believe that Harris is that other thing. Your basic good old boy has done his share of raping because if he hadn’t he would be a pussy, i.e. a woman ew gross. Men can’t do any wrong and women can’t do anything right. Heads they win tails we lose.
The post – originally posted by another user – featured photos of Harris and Hillary Clinton alongside the comment: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…”
…
The Harris campaign made no immediate response to Trump’s latest burst of social media activity, which followed disclosures of an altercation between his campaign team and staff at Arlington national cemetery, the resting place of fallen US military heroes, during a visit on Monday.
However, the CNN host Anderson Cooper – in a lengthy segment – said the posts took Trump’s previous campaigning to a “whole other level”.
“This is the Republican candidate for president and the 45th president of the United States, talking about two women who, no matter what you think of their politics, are two of the most accomplished women in American political history,” Cooper said.
Whatever. Women are all filthy whores who won’t have sex with us. They must never get their filthy hands on any kind of power.
