Erm……..what?

Shahrar Ali didn’t mention trans women, and what he said is not about trans women.

Imagine using violence against women to say “fuck feminism.”

How kind: Putin is “offering talks.”

A little earlier we told you the Kremlin had signalled Russia was willing to hold talks with Ukraine.

Blamblamblam ready to hold talks yet?

But as the Russian military pounds targets across Ukraine, it’s hardly an olive branch.

In fact, the Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, insisted the Ukrainian army would have to lay down its arms first and surrender. And his boss, Vladimir Putin, called on Ukrainian troops to overthrow their leader, President Zelensky.

Ya that’s not offering talks, it’s ordering surrender.

Meanwhile, also from BBC Live, Russia is unimpressed by UK “sanctions.”

The BBC understands that this will take the form of an asset freeze, but not a travel ban – which is what the EU has announced too.

Prof John Heathershaw, who leads research into international kleptocracy at the University of Exeter, warns Russia “will not take these sanctions seriously” due to the UK’s “kleptocracy problem”.

“There are professional ‘enablers’ that help Russian kleptocrats obscure their ownership and sources of wealth, gain UK residency and property, and launder their reputations,” he says.

Tackling this, he says, would involve regulation that is “opposed” by many big businesses.

So there you go. We’d love to help Ukraine…but not to the extent of annoying kleptocrats or big businesses. Priorities, people.

Who is labeling which what?

Texas’ crackdown on gender affirming care for kids follows the chilling strategy the state used last year to limit abortion access, gay rights advocates warn.

Though Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Attorney General Ken Paxton’s (R) announcement that gender-affirming care for transgender children is abuse that must be reported and investigated may not survive legal scrutiny, it will likely prevent at-risk children from seeking necessary medical treatment, advocates said. Similar to Texas’s recent abortion law (SB 8), the goal is to scare medical providers from offering certain services.

Ok wait just a damn minute here. Remind us what “gender-affirming care” is? Oh right, it’s surgeries and/or puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones – i.e. permanent changes to the child’s body in response to a nebulous state of mind that has been labeled “gender dysphoria.” It’s a drastic intervention with no actual medical necessity, in response to a claimed psychological state. Is that really such an obvious benefit to the child that no state should enact laws mandating caution?

I don’t trust the current Texas legislature as far as I can throw it, that much is true, but reporting on this subject needs to be careful and precise. Tampering with children’s hormones or genitals isn’t just straightforwardly “gender-affirming care” or any other kind of care. It is at the very least risky, and in some cases it will be a disaster.

Abbott’s letter to his agency heads “is very directly saying ‘members of the public report these families, report these children to the state and the state will potentially prosecute them,’” said Dara Purvis, a professor of law at Penn State Law and scholar of family law and gender identity.

It’s definitely not a great plan but then it’s also not a great plan to have doctors stopping or surgically altering puberty on the basis of a belief in wrong-body puberties.

“This combines the vigilante technique of SB 8 with I would describe it as state violence against families and against children,” she said.

But what about the violence of switching puberties?

Medical guidelines don’t recommend children start puberty blockers until the first signs of puberty or start sex hormones until they have the mental capacity to give informed consent, which is typically 16. Sex reassignment surgeries aren’t recommended under the age of 18, under the guidelines from the Endocrine Society.

That still leaves a lot of room for children and adolescents to make drastic decisions they could regret a few years later.

Horrible.

As Russian forces advance on the Ukrainian capital, the authorities are calling on the population to do everything they can to resist the invading troops.

Both the Ministry of Defence and the Interior Ministry are appealing to Kyiv residents to “inform us of troop movements, to make Molotov cocktails and neutralise the enemy”.

A leaflet with step-by step instructions of how to make petrol bombs has been posted on the Ministry of the Interior’s social media.

Interior Ministry adviser Vadym Denysenko says 18,000 machine guns “have been handed out in Kyiv to all volunteers, all those who want to defend our capital with weapons in their arms”.

They’ll be massacred.

A BBC team encounters some of the home guard.

As we head out on to the streets of Kyiv we find Ukrainian civilians now bearing arms to protect their country.

Men in trainers and jeans with rifles slung across their backs man checkpoints, and hidden in the trees on the side of the road are other young volunteers lying on the ground behind anti-tank weapons.

As we push on further we find professional soldiers braced for a last stand. They are accompanied by Ukrainian artillery and tanks facing the Russian position, less than 30km from the heart of the capital.

And we soon find signs of the battle drawing even nearer with a truck ablaze in the middle of the road.

Around the corner, my colleague Abdujalil Abdurasulov and I find Olena’s family, a group of five.

They’ve got a flat tyre at the worst possible time. They frantically try to change it as they bundle a baby into the back seat.

“We’re really afraid”, Olena’s mother tells us, before another loud bang silences everyone.

Horrible.

Don’t even bother trying.

A former NHS chief executive has been told not to apply to work with a transgender clinic because she believes that a person cannot change sex.

Kate Grimes, who has a history of transforming troubled hospitals, was told not to waste her time applying for the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust as her belief in biological sex was “not a viewpoint” they want.

What next? People have to believe in god, or witchcraft, or reincarnation, or homeopathy to work for the NHS? Belief in obvious well-established facts shouldn’t be a disqualifier for a medical institution.

The Tavistock has now been accused of breaking equality law by discriminating against those with gender-critical beliefs, just months after the appeal court ruled it was protected under the Equality Act.

“Gender-critical” is kind of superfluous, really. We just believe that sex is what it is, and that it’s not magically changeable. We believe what everyone has always believed. Some beliefs of that kind are wrong, of course, and can be changed via evidence or argument or both. But “men are not women” isn’t that kind of belief. There hasn’t been a new discovery that shows men are women if they say so. We’re not wrong to go on believing (i.e. knowing) that men are not women.

The trust, which provides a national service for treatment of gender dysphoria including for children, is recruiting for a new chairman and non-executive directors after an external review found multiple corporate governance problems and “deep seated” cultural issues.

And why? Because of this absurd new belief that men are women if they say they are, the one that is apparently a prerequisite for working there.

Ms Grimes is now calling on Sajid Javid to intervene to ensure that an external body takes over the process and to launch a review into the processes. In a letter to the Health Secretary, Ms Grimes said that the trust was “exacerbating its governance failures – and breaking the law – by refusing to interview anyone who believes biological sex cannot be changed”. 

And guaranteeing that it will get only dogmatists applying.

Ms Grimes told the Telegraph that patient safety was at risk if “clinicians are working from a belief system rather than evidence-based care”.

Indeed. They might as well hire Charles Windsor for the job.

Well this is great. Putin is actually off his rocker, and he’s promising to use the nukes if we don’t do everything he says.

Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a catastrophic new European war, combined with the sheer weirdness of his recent public appearances, has raised questions in western capitals about the mental stability of the leader of a country with 6,000 nuclear warheads.

That is, has revealed that Putin is crazy as a bedbug, which is unfortunate since he has the capacity to destroy the planet.

Following Putin’s speech on Monday, an Elysée official made an unusually bold assessment that the speech was “paranoid”. Bernard Guetta, a member of the European parliament for Macron’s grouping, told France Inter radio on Thursday morning, after military invasion began: “I think this man is losing his sense of reality, to say it politely.” Asked by the interviewer if that meant he thought Putin had gone mad, he said “yes”.

Don’t look up.

Putin frequently refers to that huge arsenal, and made a thinly veiled reference to them when he launched the war on Ukraine.

He said: “Whoever would try to stop us and further create threats to our country, to our people, should know that Russia’s response will be immediate and lead you to such consequences that you have never faced in your history. We are ready for any outcome.”

At least we won’t have to worry about climate change any more.

They’re in the northern suburbs.

Fighting has reached the northern suburbs of Kyiv after a night of missile attacks on the Ukrainian capital to prepare for a major Russian assault, as president Volodymyr Zelenskiy pleaded for more international help and tougher sanctions.

First ya gotta do us a little favor though.

Air raid sirens wailed over the city of 3 million people and heavy gunfire and explosions were heard in a residential district on Friday morning. Ukrainian officials warned that Russian military vehicles were approaching the city from the north-west.

…

“Horrific Russian rocket strikes on Kyiv,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, tweeted. “Last time our capital experienced anything like this was in 1941 when it was attacked by Nazi Germany. Ukraine defeated that evil and will defeat this one.”

Lavrov says Russia’s doing this to free Ukraine from oppression.

Republicans admire Putin.

Pompeo has a great deal of respect for the man who has ordered the invasion. Those are his words, not mine: “I have enormous respect for him.” Even though Pompeo says he saw the attack coming, he’s spent the lead-up lavishing praise on Vladimir Putin. In an interview last week, he called the Russian president “very savvy” and “very shrewd,” adding, “I consider him an elegantly sophisticated counterpart and one who is not reckless but has always done the math.” In January, he said, “He is a very talented statesman. He has lots of gifts … He knows how to use power. We should respect that.”

That’s held up well. Not reckless. Elegantly sophisticated. Very talented statesman. Lots of gifts.

Trump’s Ukraine policy was all over the place: He sent weapons to Ukraine, something that the Obama administration had refused to do. He also accepted Putin’s seizure of Crimea, and he infamously tried to withhold aid from the Ukrainian government in exchange for help in the presidential election, leading to his first impeachment.

And by “help in the presidential election” David A.Graham means “dirt on Biden.”

Yet at an event at Mar-A-Lago last night, Trump, like Pompeo, praised Putin’s strategic genius: “I mean, he’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.”

And that’s definitely the right yardstick. Rights, sovereignty, borders, peace, truth, fairness, international law – none of that matters, it’s all about being smart and smashing the neighbors.

Tucker Carlson, another orthodox Trumpist and the dominant conservative pundit of the moment, is unreservedly pro-Putin. “Why do Democrats want you to hate Putin?” he asked Tuesday. “Has Putin shipped every middle class job in your town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked your business? Is he teaching your kids to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Does he eat dogs?”

No, no, no, no, and you know what else? He’s not even a communist! Not even slightly! He’s just a thug! Isn’t that glorious? Don’t you just love him?

Via a Facebook friend (a public post):

Tapestry. Ukrainian artist Olga Pilyuhina

Russians protest.

Thousands of people protested President Vladimir Putin’s attacks on Ukraine in cities across Russia on Thursday, a striking show of anger in a nation where spontaneous mass demonstrations are illegal and protesters can face fines and jail.

More than 1,700 people were arrested in at least 47 cities across the nation, according to rights group OVD-Info. The group was declared a foreign agent last year, when Putin launched a sweeping crackdown on activists, rights groups and opposition figures.

The protests came with an outpouring of horror from liberal Russians, social media influencers, athletes, actors, television presenters and others.

Brave people.

Russia’s Investigative Committee warned it would track down protest organizers and participants, threatening “severe punishment for mass riots.” At least 290 people were arrested in Moscow, 128 in St Petersburg, 50 in Perm and 37 in Yekaterinburg, OVD-Info reported. More than 290,000 people signed a petition against the attacks on change.org.

…

Human rights activist Marina Litvinovich urged Russians not to cry and “not to be afraid, but to just come out and say that they are against the war,” in comments on social media. Calling on people to protest is an offense under Russia’s restrictive laws.

That’s Trump’s “savvy” friend.

What I’m wondering though is what on earth is in this for Putin? I could see what’s in it for him when it’s the slow creeping whittling away, but a full-on invasion? Isn’t that awfully risky? Doesn’t it remind him at all of Hitler’s big mistake going in the other direction?

Looking to see who is explaining, I find again Anne Applebaum three weeks ago.

But of all the questions that repeatedly arise about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, the one that gets the least satisfactory answers is this one: Why?

Why would Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, attack a neighboring country that has not provoked him? Why would he risk the blood of his own soldiers? Why would he risk sanctions, and perhaps an economic crisis, as a result? And if he is not really willing to risk these things, then why is he playing this elaborate game?

Well at least we can eliminate that last question from our inquiries.

Nor do we need to know that much about the more recent history of Ukraine or its 70 years as a Soviet republic—though it is true that the Soviet ties of the Russian president, most notably his years spent as a KGB officer, matter a great deal. Indeed, many of his tactics—the use of sham Russian-backed “separatists” to carry out his war in eastern Ukraine, the creation of a puppet government in Crimea—are old KGB tactics, familiar from the Soviet past. Fake political groupings played a role in the KGB’s domination of Central Europe after World War II; sham separatists played a role in the Bolshevik conquest of Ukraine itself in 1918.

And just a few years later Stalin was deliberately starving Ukraine.

The crucial thing about Putin, it seems, is that he’s an oligarch. He and his cronies use their government roles to steal everything, and pro-democracy uprisings are a threat to them.

All of which is a roundabout way of explaining the extraordinary significance, to Putin, of Ukraine. Of course Ukraine matters as a symbol of the lost Soviet empire. Ukraine was the second-most-populous and second-richest Soviet republic, and the one with the deepest cultural links to Russia. But modern, post-Soviet Ukraine also matters because it has tried—struggled, really—to join the world of prosperous Western democracies. Ukraine has staged not one but two prodemocracy, anti-oligarchy, anti-corruption revolutions in the past two decades. The most recent, in 2014, was particularly terrifying for the Kremlin. Young Ukrainians were chanting anti-corruption slogans, just like the Russian opposition does, and waving European Union flags. These protesters were inspired by the same ideals that Putin hates at home and seeks to overturn abroad. After Ukraine’s profoundly corrupt, pro-Russian president fled the country in February 2014, Ukrainian television began showing pictures of his palace, complete with gold taps, fountains, and statues in the yard—exactly the kind of palace Putin inhabits in Russia. Indeed, we know he inhabits such a palace because one of the videos produced by Navalny has already shown us pictures of it, along with its private ice-hockey rink and its hookah bar.

Putin’s subsequent invasion of Crimea punished Ukrainians for trying to escape from the kleptocratic system that he wanted them to live in—and it showed Putin’s own subjects that they too would pay a high cost for democratic revolution. The invasion also violated both written and unwritten rules and treaties in Europe, demonstrating Putin’s scorn for the Western status quo. Following that “success,” Putin launched a much broader attack: a series of attempted coups d’état in Odessa, Kharkiv, and several other cities with a Russian-speaking majority. This time, the strategy failed, not least because Putin profoundly misunderstood Ukraine, imagining that Russian-speaking Ukrainians would share his Soviet imperial nostalgia. They did not. Only in Donetsk, a city in eastern Ukraine where Putin was able to move in troops and heavy equipment from across the border, did a local coup succeed. But even there he did not create an attractive “alternative” Ukraine. Instead, the Donbas—the coal-mining region that surrounds Donetsk—remains a zone of chaos and lawlessness.

This is why he favored Trump, and used Facebook to help him win.

Putin is preparing to invade Ukraine again—or pretending he will invade Ukraine again—for the same reason. He wants to destabilize Ukraine, frighten Ukraine. He wants Ukrainian democracy to fail. He wants the Ukrainian economy to collapse. He wants foreign investors to flee. He wants his neighbors—in Belarus, Kazakhstan, even Poland and Hungary—to doubt whether democracy will ever be viable, in the longer term, in their countries too. Farther abroad, he wants to put so much strain on Western and democratic institutions, especially the European Union and NATO, that they break up. He wants to keep dictators in power wherever he can, in Syria, Venezuela, and Iran. He wants to undermine America, to shrink American influence, to remove the power of the democracy rhetoric that so many people in his part of the world still associate with America. He wants America itself to fail.

So he’s thrown in all his chips.

I’ll never understand why people can’t (or refuse to) think clearly about this. It’s not as if it’s subtle or obscure. From the Guardian Australia:

Liberal MP Bridget Archer has blasted fellow Tasmanian senator Claire Chandler’s controversial legislation allowing sporting groups to exclude transgender people from single-sex sports as “a vanity bill” and “not government policy”.

Why is it even “controversial”? Obviously men need to be kept out of women’s sports. Everybody knows perfectly well why. If women’s sports aren’t limited to women then there are no women’s sports. Why shouldn’t women have sports?

Archer – who crossed the floor in an effort to secure protections for transgender children during the recent parliamentary debate about religious discrimination – characterised her colleague’s proposal as “unnecessary and divisive”.

There. Like that. How can she say it’s unnecessary? How can she throw women overboard like that? Why is she refusing to think clearly? Or pretending to be unable to?

She said the Coalition needed to desist from a culture war that had real world implications for vulnerable people.

Again. Why the stupid reversal? It’s women who are vulnerable to losing their sports, and/or to being injured while playing them. In this conflict women are far more vulnerable than men who say they are women. Why is Archer pretending not to know that?

H/t Omar

The malice and spite know no bounds. Ever.

Rachel Rooney alerted us.

Did what?? So I had to go searching.

And here’s her work:

Just looks normal, right? But the actual list has four writers.

[Update] Annoyingly, the image crops off the fourth title so it still doesn’t show.

/Update

If trans activism were really “progressive” or enlightened or rights-based its adherents wouldn’t do things like this and then brag about having done them. Trans activism is a magnet for malevolent egomaniacal bullies.

The ACLU might be right about this.

It might be, but it might not.

It’s not a slam-dunk that it’s right though. It’s not just obvious that it’s right to allow and even encourage teenagers to do irreversible things to their bodies because they believe there’s a mismatch between their bodies and what sex they are. It’s not just obvious that it’s better to let a teenager take puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones years before her or his prefrontal cortex has matured. It’s not just obvious that this should be called “gender-affirming” as opposed to “reckless endangerment.”

The ACLU doesn’t know that this belief in a gendered soul is going to become universal knowledge. The ACLU doesn’t know it’s not a fashion as opposed to a new true belief that no one knew until ten or twenty years ago. The ACLU is not a set of psychologists or endocrinologists, it’s a civil liberties campaign group that’s going all-in on a novel and bizarre belief about inner selves at odds with the bodies they live in. The ACLU is setting fire to its own work.

Putin is speedy, we have to give him that. A couple of days ago he was just declaring a couple of bits of Ukraine not bits of Ukraine, and now it’s straight up invasion. I suppose Trump is watching tv full of chuckles, exclaiming at how savvy and impressive his buddy is.

Putin says don’t worry, “Russia” has no plans to occupy Ukraine. Apparently it plans to smash it instead.

In a pre-dawn TV statement Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia did not plan to occupy Ukraine and demanded that its military lay down their arms. Moments later, attacks were reported on Ukrainian military targets. Ukraine said that “Putin has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine”.

Russia’s military breached the border in a number of places, in the north, south and east, including from Belarus, a long-time Russian ally. There are reports of fighting in some parts of eastern Ukraine.

But this isn’t occupation, it’s just attacking. Whole different thing.

From Fair Play for Women:

The Inner Court of Session in Scotland has ruled that guidance issued alongside the census, which informs transgender people they can register as male or female regardless of their legal status, was lawful.

So what does the legal system in Scotland think a census is? Just a kind of diary? A thingy where people get to tell us about their innermost selves? While we pay no attention because we’re too busy talking about our own innermost selves?

It seems pretty silly to throw away money on a “census” that isn’t a census, and it also seems pretty silly to have an inaccurate “census” – that isn’t a census because it permits counterfactual answers.

This means that the census in Scotland in 2022 will not collect clear and reliable data on sex.

In the words of the Scottish Government’s counsel “the census is a ten yearly collection of data from the population used to inform strategic policy and allocation of resources and understanding of the country’s population”. The ability of public authorities and researchers to use the data from this year’s census for this purpose has now been damaged.

It’s a collection of data – not a collection of fee-fees. You can’t inform policy and allocate resources and understand the country’s population if you tell people “Go ahead and lie about yourself on the census.”

Awwww nuts.

The two prosecutors leading the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his business practices abruptly resigned on Wednesday amid a monthlong pause in their presentation of evidence to a grand jury, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The stunning development comes not long after the high-stakes inquiry appeared to be gaining momentum, and throws its future into serious doubt.

The prosecutors, Carey R. Dunne and Mark F. Pomerantz, submitted their resignations after the new Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, indicated to them that he had doubts about moving forward with a case against Mr. Trump, the people said.

There’s still the state case, but nuts all the same.The more cases the better.

The pause coincides with an escalation in the activity of a parallel civil inquiry by the New York state attorney general, Letitia James, whose office is examining some of the same conduct by Mr. Trump….Mr. Trump has disputed the notion that he inflated his property values or defrauded his lenders, and has accused Mr. Bragg and Ms. James, both Democrats who are Black, of being politically motivated and “racists.”

Ah yes, racism, which is when black prosecutors investigate white trumps.

David Aaronovich looks at a disparate (not to say eccentric) group of populist Putin fans/NATO dislikers.

There’s Stop the War, Nigel Farage, Alex Salmond, and of course the RCP/Spiked gang.

In that strangely influential nexus created by the implosion of the Revolutionary Communist Party and its re-communion in the Brexit Party, the Institute of Ideas, Spiked Online, numerous discussion programmes and the House of Lords, the view was the same. Through January Spiked warned of western “meddling” in Ukraine, and mocked the “disarray of the West” and its insistence on an outmoded alliance. Last week their leading columnist on this subject denounced western warnings concerning Putin’s intentions. Despite all the hyperbole concerning hostilities, “of course, nothing happened. Russian soldiers didn’t cross the border.” Spiked’s authors then went back to talking and tweeting about the foreign issue most exercising them — the authoritarian regime of Justin Trudeau of Canada.

Maaaaaaaasks.

Meanwhile on another Russian TV station, this time in Russia, Donald Trump’s former secretary of state and putative Republican candidate Mike Pompeo was shown saying of Putin that he is “very shrewd, very capable. I have enormous respect for him.”

Pompeo calls him shrewd, Trump calls him savvy. The boot in the face and its fan clubs.

Weeks away from the presidential election in France the far-left and far-right candidates were also agreed. Marine Le Pen opined that “like it or not, Ukraine belongs to the Russian sphere of influence” and the EU and Nato should butt out, while Eric Zemmour advocated the dropping of all sanctions against Russia, including those imposed after the Salisbury attack. The main left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon defended the Russian military build-up, given that Ukraine was “associated with a hostile power”, ie America.

And then Putin gave his speech, explaining that Ukraine belongs to Russia, end of story.

The speech might have been rambling and emotional but its motivation was clear. And it immediately created a quandary for many West-blamers and Putin-understanders. How would you square your belief in national sovereignty and the effective declaration by the Russian president that Ukraine shouldn’t have any? Over on Spiked the headline suddenly appeared: “Hands off Ukraine: Russia must immediately withdraw from Ukrainian territory”. The territory, you will recall, that days earlier was only threatened in the West’s imagination. For softer Corbyn supporters the condemnation of Putin by their other great hero Bernie Sanders allowed an opportunity for a quiet retweet and you could almost hear the sigh of relief as the “send” button was pushed.

For over a decade now left and right populists alike have opposed western policy towards Russia. Corbyn famously, like Salmond and the Spiked outfit, questioned whether Russia was behind the Salisbury poisonings. On the left Russia stood as a flawed bulwark against imperialism, on the right against the supranational machinations of the New World Order (the EU, Nato, the UN, whatever). 

What if Putin is just a bad guy, like Trump? Just an alumnus of the KGB who likes power and bullying?

Ok seeing the headline on the BBC main page Police take budgie lost in storm under their wing I had to click on it, just for the headline. It’s a different headline on the article itself, not as winsome or amusing, but since I’m there anyway you might as well learn about the budgie rescue.

Transport Police in Essex have named their new recruit Barry after finding him “slightly shaken up” at Southend Victoria station on Monday.

Naturally he was shaken up. Budgies don’t take trains.