Oh, yes, that’s fine then. Call us cunts all day long if you think we’re “transphobes” i.e. women who don’t agree that men who call themselves women are women. Cunts are very filthy disgusting things after all, which is why men are so much better at being women than women are.
You’d think this was the only civil liberties issue on the planet. I see variations on this ad often and I don’t see ACLU ads that talk about mass incarceration or abortion rights or workers’ rights or any other civil liberties you’d think the ACLU would care about. Maybe this is because of Facebook’s algorithms but I talk about women’s rights a lot more than I talk about trans rights yet the ACLU seems to want to convert me. All it’s doing is convincing me it’s completely lost the plot.
So I’m reading. First item: the title, subtitle, and first sentence all carefully obfuscate the issue in the way the obedient media outlets always do.
Title: Critics accuse trans swimming star
But the issue isn’t “trans” it’s man. He has an unfair advantage because he’s a man competing against women.
Subhead: The NCAA champion has sparked controversy and become a hate figure among conservatives, but statistics show little evidence that she performed any differently to other women, Io Dodds reports
That one’s a whole list of obfuscations. He became a “champion” by competing against women. He didn’t randomly become “a hate figure”: he cheated women out of their chances to be champions. We’re very far from all conservatives – most of us are fiercely feminist. “She” is a he. Women aren’t “other women” in relation to him, because he’s not a woman. Io Dodds is a trans woman, i.e. a man. He “came out” as a transwoman in June last year.
First sentence: In 17 March, Lia Thomas became the first openly transgender athlete to win America’s top trophy in university sports when she swam to victory in the women’s 500 yard (457 meter) freestyle race. Yet again the sly “transgender athlete.” The point is that he’s a trans woman i.e. a man. He has the body of a man.
Now for the rest of the article.
Her right to compete in women’s races, and sometimes her gender itself, has been attacked by sports stars, politicians, activists, her competitors, and even some of her teammates’ parents, as well as protesters at the NCAA championship last week, who argued that her time living as a man gives her an unfair advantage.
No, not his “time living as a man” ffs, his male body.
After that it’s a few thousand words of strenuous special pleading which seems to boil down to “she didn’t get the highest score ever therefore it was totally fair.”
The speed of Russia’s transformation to Soviet-style “self-purification” has been astonishing. When Russia invaded Ukraine last month, state TV went to wall-to-wall propaganda blaming Ukrainian “neo-Nazis” and “nationalists.” Now, shadowy pro-Putin figures are daubing the words “traitor to the motherland” on the doors of peace activists and others.
The propagandists are seriously busy – I’ve even had a couple here trying to post the “Ukraine–>neo-Nazis” crap in comments.
Despite the risk of fines and jail time, others keep protesting. More than 15,000 people have been arrested since the war started.
Anastasia, wearing a jacket with the words “No to War,” was grabbed by riot police earlier this month as she walked toward a small group of protesters in Moscow. She was arrested and fined.
“It makes me really angry,” said Anastasia, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons. “On top of anger, I feel a kind of desperation and sadness and regret, specifically a regret that there is nothing good in the future any more.”
Cars carrying imperial flags and bearing the letter Z, a symbol of support for the war, have appeared in Russian cities and towns.
Kirill Martynov, political editor of Novaya Gazeta, was denounced as a traitor and dismissed recently by two universities where he taught two philosophy courses. A parent had heard him tell students that civilians were being killed in Ukraine.
He got out of Russia.
[T]here is a thread of messianic rhetoric from top Russian officials, pro-Kremlin journalists, religious figures and academics, laying out the mission to revive Russian greatness. They revile Western liberalism and applaud conservative, authoritarian orthodoxy.
Make Russia Great Again. It’s not a coincidence that Trump drools over Putin.
Donald Trump chose a rally in Georgia on Saturday night once again to praise Vladimir Putin, calling the Russian president “smart” even as he said the invasion of Ukraine amounted to a “big mistake”.
Putin is “smart” the way any successful crook is “smart.” It’s not a very admirable form of intelligence.
The Republican former president also had warm words for China’s president Xi Jinping and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and referred to such leaders collectively by saying: “The smartest one gets to the top.”
The “smartest” in the sense of the most ruthless, shameless, brutal, determined, conscienceless.
He spoke admiringly of Xi in terms of the fact that he “runs 1.5 billion people with an iron fist” and referred to Kim as “tough”.
That’s Trump all over: admiring the iron fist. We’re living in a world of abject power-worship.
After Donald Trump lost the November 2020 election to Joe Biden, Fox skewed further from news to comment, ending its 7pm nightly broadcast, firing the political editor who had been part of Fox accurately projecting on election night that Trump had lost the crucial state of Arizona and promoting Tucker Carlson, the populist commentator and host who has consistently downplayed the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, by extremist Trump supporters, the New York Times noted.
Carlson and other voices aired by Fox have spent the past four weeks playing down Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, going soft on Putin, and undermining the messages of the invaded country’s sovereignty and the Biden administration and Nato in supporting Ukraine.
What is that? Just, Force? The worship of pure Force, stripped of all other values and moral concerns? Or, even more simply, the worship of Bad? Look for the worst people on the planet and grovel to them?
Top women cyclists who have helped Great Britain to historic triumphs face losing their team places after a trans woman announced she would now compete in female events.
Emily Bridges has continued to race against men for the past year while undergoing hormone therapy, and her successes include a gold medal at the recent University Championships in Nottingham.
However, her testosterone levels are now low enough to meet the criteria set out by British Cycling, the sport’s governing body, for her to compete against women.
So he’ll be guaranteed to win everything in sight! Progress!
The 21-year-old recently spoke candidly about her transition and revealed it was ‘always the plan’ to compete in women’s events.
‘After starting hormone therapy I didn’t want to race in the male category any more than I had to,’ she told Cycling Weekly magazine.
And of course what he wants is all that matters. What those stupid women in the female category might want is of no importance at all – they’re mere fodder for his ambitions.
Team GB’s women cyclists, including Laura Kenny, the country’s most successful female Olympian ever, have enjoyed unparalleled success in recent years, including five gold medals at the last three Games.
Blah blah blah. She’s not stunning and brave, she’s just some woman.
There have been more than 70 separate attacks on hospitals, ambulances and doctors in Ukraine with the number increasing on a “daily basis”, says the World Health Organization (WHO).
Most have damaged hospitals, medical transports and supply stores, but the WHO has also recorded the “probable” abduction or detention of healthcare staff and patients.
“We are concerned that this number is increasing daily,” the WHO’s Ukraine country representative Jarno Habicht told the BBC.
“Health facilities should be safe places for both doctors and nurses, but also patients to turn to for treatment. This should not happen.”
Because the war in Ukraine is an international armed conflict between two states, the Geneva Conventions apply.
…
Under Article 18 of the Conventions, civilian hospitals “may in no circumstances be the object of attack, but shall at all times be respected and protected”.
A breach of that rule can be investigated by the International Criminal Court in the Hague and, if found to be a war crime, individual perpetrators can be prosecuted and punished.
The US is not part of the ICC. I guess that’s because the US wants to be free to commit war crimes. Putin withdrew Russia from the court in 2016.
Heavy periods, debilitating pain and infertility – those are some of the causes of endometriosis, a condition that affects one in 10 people of any age in the UK, who are assigned female at birth.
They mean women. Endometriosis affects one in ten women in the UK. Simple, clear, easy to understand. The way they put it not so much.
But what is it really like living with the gynaecological condition?
Two women shared their story for Endometriosis Awareness month.
There you go! Gynaecological; women; you can say it.
A Russian-Canadian academic (he emigrated to Canada from the Soviet Union) writes a public Facebook post about Putin’s absurd invocation of JK Rowling:
Earlier today, Putin railed against the alleged “Russophobia” in the West and, moronically enough, attempted to compare Russia to J.K. Rowling in that context.
He shared JKR’s prompt response. The rop comment on his post? Rebecca Solnit libeling JKR.
What a stunningly ugly and untrue thing to say – especially to a Russian-born critic of Putin at this particular time.
She goes on in the same vein, on and on. Kill the witch blah blah blah kill her some more.
She recommends a piece by Laurie Penny of all people.
More from Solnit:
Leaving aside that this is a sarcastic remark, I wouldn’t say that at all, because obviously she’s not commanding any armies or slaughter, but she is advocating for harm against vulnerable people with distortions of fact, and those views do result in real violence and death. (Americans think she’s a solo act; as a feminist who gets interviewed by Europeans regularly, I know her views are quite widespread there.) Putin is a homophobe who has pushed violence and persecution of gay men and other queer people, so they have some things in common.
Disgusting lie. She is not “advocating for harm against vulnerable people.”
We don’t have to choose. There are millions of advocates for Ukraine who are not advocating harm and discrimination elsewhere.
She’s not “advocating harm and discrimination.”
Iossel points out what you’d think Solnit could have thought of herself.
Rebecca Solnit This is not about us. Not about us at all. The absolute majority of people in Russia have no idea what this argument is about. It’s a luxury, discussing this now.
It’s a luxury and on the part of Solnit it’s rude and intrusive and callous. I used to admire her writing.
Solnit replies, still rudely intrusively callously:
This is a conversation taking place in North America where trans people are also dying of violence and being targeted for hate. Which is why I think it’s worth rethinking highlighting her as a hero.
Trans people aren’t “dying of violence” more than other people; that’s a myth. Russia’s war on Ukraine is a more significant issue right now than what JK Rowling has said about women and trans women, especially when discussing a post by a Russian-born academic talking about that war.
Solnit continues her lecturing until Iossel tells everyone to take it elsewhere and limits who can comment. What a shitshow.
Russia has approximately 6,000 nuclear warheads – the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. In an interview on Saturday, Medvedev said Russia’s nuclear doctrine did not require an enemy state to use such weapons first.
It’s a nuclear doctrine, you see. Bullies have a fist doctrine, murderers have a gun doctrine, Russia has a nuclear doctrine.
He said: “We have a special document on nuclear deterrence. This document clearly indicates the grounds on which the Russian Federation is entitled to use nuclear weapons. There are a few of them, let me remind them to you: number one is the situation, when Russia is struck by a nuclear missile. The second case is any use of other nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies.
“The third is an attack on a critical infrastructure that will have paralysed our nuclear deterrent forces. And the fourth case is when an act of aggression is committed against Russia and its allies, which jeopardised the existence of the country itself, even without the use of nuclear weapons, that is, with the use of conventional weapons.”
Medvedev added that there was a “determination to defend the independence, sovereignty of our country, not to give anyone a reason to doubt even the slightest that we are ready to give a worthy response to any infringement on our country, on its independence”.
There you go. It’s all very official and written down. No one can complain that it’s not clear. Russia has a right to use the nukes if someone in charge claims to think its independence needs defending. You can’t say fairer than that.
A mayor in a Ukrainian town occupied by Russian forces has been released from captivity and the soldiers have agreed to leave after a mass protest by residents.
Slavutych, a northern town close to the Chernobyl nuclear site, was taken by Russian forces but stun grenades and overhead fire failed to disperse unarmed protesters on its main square on Saturday.
The crowd demanded the release of mayor Yuri Fomichev, who had been taken prisoner by the Russian troops.
Attempts by Russian troops to intimidate the growing protest failed and on Saturday afternoon Fomichev was let go by his captors.
I find that quite astonishing. Usually invading troops who fail to intimidate the populace just move on to the mowing them down stage. This seems to hint that some (or perhaps most) Russian soldiers don’t want to make war on the people of Ukraine.
Western officials have said that Vladimir Putin had planned to take Ukraine’s capitals within days of announcing his “special military operation” on 24 February but had come across unexpectedly fierce resistance.
And maybe unexpectedly unfierce attack? By reluctant soldiers who don’t see Ukrainians as enemies?
Maybe the trans people aren’t getting enough recognition after all, so let’s create trans athlete divisions…. Give them what they want; proper divisions with little sexless statuettes for the winners.
But that’s not what they want. Having a separate trans division would deny them their validation as “women” in exactly the same way that “third space” toilet facilities would. Trans activists don’t want a solution that’s “fair” that does not give them the hit of affirmation they crave. They don’t want to put a spotlight on their “transness”, they want to be centered, celebrated, and rewarded for their “womanliness.” The idea behind TWAW and “NO DEBATE” is to bulldoze over the fact that they are not women. The point of institutional capture was to use the power of these institutions like so many medieval siege engines to breach the boundaries of women’s spaces quickly and quietly, without discussion or consultation, so that TiMs’ presence in them would become a fait accompli. Somehow, this was disguised and passed off as a progressive, compassionate movement. Only one thing stood in the way. Women. Women’s resistance is painted as bigotry and hatred, instead of the defence of women’s rights and safety. To put this struggle in another way, it’s aggressive, “colonial expansion” vs. spirited, self-defence of the “homeland.”
The TiM argument that “we’ve been in women’s washrooms for years” is more gloating than anything else. The denial of a conflict of rights is hard to maintain without the strenuous denial of women’s legitimate needs. Proponents of this supposedly “progressive” position are forced to publicly defend more and more indefensible things, Thomas’s blatant cheating among them. Add that to prisons, hospital wards and women’s shelters. It’s amazing how much some of them are able to stomach with a straight face. Without the collusion of the media, it would be much more difficult. Ophelia has highlighted so many stories where the denial of the material reality of sex completely transforms the meaning and import of headlines and entire stories, with ideological positions passed off as “politeness” and ” journalistic style guides” rather than an active taking of one side (and one side only) at the hearts of these very stories. Actual, unbiased neutrality would not do this.
Sometimes it just takes the breath away. This isn’t some pink-hair young adult, this is a middle-aged man with a book to advertise, and this is how he presents himself to the world.
At what point did you think a middle aged man traveling to shout aggressively outside a meeting hall full of women discussing how to lessen violence against women and children was a good and noble act?
— Shropshire Wendy. UltraTerf (@SResisters) March 24, 2022
I’ve now written two columns about Thomas, and it is striking how many people — almost all of them liberal — have spontaneously erupted when I told them what I was writing about. All made the same complaint: It’s not fair.
What’s striking about that? Of course it’s not fair. The unfairness is laughably (enragingly) obvious. He’s mocking us.
There’s little question that Thomas has retained some of the many biological advantages conferred by male puberty, such as height, heart and lung capacity, and strength. But the obvious rejoinder is that of course biology isn’t fair; it never was, and never can be.
That rejoinder is not obvious at all. It’s flippant and insulting.
We aren’t going to be educated out of our feeling that there are major differences between biological men and women. The male/female performance gap appears at puberty in most sports, and quickly becomes so large that most cisgender women would never be able to compete at more elite levels if we weren’t segregated into our own leagues. Women’s sports exist to benefit us, not to keep us from hogging men’s glory.
Quite, which is why the obvious rejoinder isn’t obvious.
#WPUKManchester Around 200 trans rights activists, gathered in St Peter’s Sq, Manchester at 7pm, to attempt to silence, intimidate and disrupt a WPUK meeting, at the nearby Mechanic’s Institute. pic.twitter.com/s1sBW4atUm
Three decades ago, the newly independent country of Ukraine was briefly the third-largest nuclear power in the world.
Thousands of nuclear arms had been left on Ukrainian soil by Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But in the years that followed, Ukraine made the decision to completely denuclearize.
In exchange, the U.S., the U.K. and Russia would guarantee Ukraine’s security in a 1994 agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum.
Oh really. That’s not going all that well.
It is clear that Ukrainians knew they weren’t getting the exactly legally binding, really robust security guarantees they sought.
But they were told at the time that the United States and Western powers — so certainly at least the United States and Great Britain — take their political commitments really seriously. This is a document signed at the highest level by the heads of state. So the implication was Ukraine would not be left to stand alone and face a threat should it come under one.
Fast forward to today. Is Ukraine left to stand alone against the Russian invasion? Pretty much…although the US apparently is sending shitloads of heavy-duty missiles and the like.
Mind you it’s easy to sit on the sidelines and criticize. It’s not as if I want to see the US get into a shooting war with Russia.
JK Rowling has hit back at Vladimir Putin, after the Russian president cited her in a wide-ranging speech that saw him criticise “cancel culture”.
Pause for correction: she hasn’t “hit back”; she has rejected the comparison.
At a televised meeting on Friday, Mr Putin compared recent criticism of the Harry Potter author to that faced by pro-war Russian composers and writers.
“Pro-war” is sloppy too, since the issue isn’t war in general but this specific “war” which is an unprovoked attack by a massive nuclear-armed country on a much smaller one with no nukes.
In the lengthy speech, which was given to the winners of various cultural prizes, President Putin claimed Russian composers and writers were being discriminated against.
“They are trying to cancel a thousand-year-old country,” he said.
No we’re not. Tolstoy and Turgenev remain on our shelves, Chekhov plays still fill theaters, Balanchine is still an influence on ballet. We wouldn’t dream of canceling them, it’s Putin we’d like to cancel.
Rowling’s response:
Critiques of Western cancel culture are possibly not best made by those currently slaughtering civilians for the crime of resistance, or who jail and poison their critics. #IStandWithUkrainehttps://t.co/aNItgc5aiW
The messages, which do not directly reference Justice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results — and how receptive and grateful [Mark] Meadows said he was to receive her advice. Among Thomas’s stated goals in the messages was for lawyer Sidney Powell, who promoted incendiary and unsupported claims about the election, to be “the lead and the face” of Trump’s legal team.
…
Trump spoke publicly during this period about his intent to contest the election results in the Supreme Court. “This is a major fraud on our nation,” the president said in a speech at 2:30 the morning after the election. “We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
But of course he was lying about that; there was no fraud. Trump on the other hand pursued the fraudulent claims that the election was stolen. It’s all very scuzzy.
In her text messages to Meadows, Ginni Thomas spread false theories, commented on cable news segments and advocated with urgency and fervor that the president and his team take action to reverse the outcome of the election. She urged that they take a hard line with Trump staffers and congressional Republicans who had resisted arguments that the election was stolen.
What “hard line”? Like, bullying, pressure, coercion? Threats? Punishment? What? What right does this person have to urge a White House official to coerce staff to overthrow an election?
It’s interesting how…commonplace, trashy, unintelligent it all is. She comes across as barely literate and shockingly credulous. Just another Fox News oversharer.
She says, not taking herself at all seriously, not bragging at all, not boasting about how self-deprecating she is, not accusing other people of what she’s doing herself.
I see this claim a lot, in fact: the claim that people in the UK are massively self-deprecating. It’s a self-defeating claim, because it’s self-flattering. You can’t convince us how self-deprecating you are by bragging about how self-deprecating you are.
