Good bit of No thanks Choss, aka lèse-majesté:

Channel 4 News has turned down an interview with the Prince of Wales after refusing to sign a “draconian” contract with a string of demands including the pre-vetting of all questions and right to control editing.

They don’t half think well of themselves, do they, the royals.

The extremely tight level of control and censorship has not stopped some outlets from broadcasting interviews: Sky News ran an interview late last month covering topics including global warming. 

Why talk to Choss about global warming though? There are thousands of people who know more about it, so why talk to the son of the daughter of the son of the yadda yadda yadda just because he’s famous and rich?

Channel 4 News felt that it could not conduct an interview under such terms, which included a 15-page contract full of limitations and restrictions. It cancelled an interview with Prince Charles that was due to be conducted by Jon Snow on Sunday at the British ambassador’s residence in Paris, on the eve of the Paris climate change talks.

Silly idea anyway. He’s just a royal. He can use his position to draw attention to the problem, that’s sensible enough, but the detail work should be by people who really know something.

The contractual stipulations surrounding Prince Charles were first made public by the Independent, which cited clauses in the contract such as: if the interviewer goes off script, Clarence House staff present have the right to “intervene and halt filming”.

Diddums is so fragile he has to have staff present?

Labour shenanigans tonight:

The ACLU website, surprisingly, has a section for women’s rights.

A look back at history shows that women have made great strides in the fight for equality, including women’s suffrage and inroads in equal opportunity in the workplace and education. 

Despite the tremendous progress made in the struggle for gender equality, women still face violence, discrimination, and institutional barriers to equal participation in society. 

Through litigation, advocacy, and public education, the ACLU Women’s Rights Project pushes for change and systemic reform in institutions that perpetuate discrimination against women, focusing its work in the areas of employment, violence against women, and education.  

I wonder if they’ll be updating the wording.

In the employment realm, laws and workplace policies that exclude women from certain job sectors and allow them to be forced out of the workplace when they become pregnant or return to work after having a baby cause persistent disparities in women’s income, wealth, and economic security. 

Notice what that doesn’t say. It doesn’t say “laws and workplace policies that exclude people from certain job sectors and allow them to be forced out of the workplace when they become pregnant or return to work after having a baby cause persistent disparities in people’s income, wealth, and economic security.” It’s interesting that the ACLU as a whole is allowed to talk about women but the Twitter account is not.

Survivors of gender-based violence face discrimination when police, schools, landlords, and other institutions fail to adequately address and prevent violence and also when laws and policies penalize them, impeding the ability of women and girls to live safely and with dignity.

The ACLU should study its own page.

Under Current Issues we get Pregnancy and Parenting Discrimination. Again, no move to replace “women” with “people.”

Firing women because they are pregnant, or treating pregnant workers worse than other workers who are also temporarily unable to perform some aspects of a job, has been illegal since 1978, when Congress enacted the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. But employers still do it, and, unfortunately, some courts have upheld these practices when employers come up with a “pregnancy-blind” reason to leave pregnant workers out in the cold. When women are pushed out of the workplace, they lose important income and benefits, contributing to a gender wealth gap between men and women. After they give birth, women workers are the targets of discrimination if they need to pump breast milk to remain on the job. The ACLU has long fought back against these discriminatory practices in the courts and legislatures.

They do say “pregnant workers” twice but they say “women” four times so I’ll not gripe.

Texas Freedom:

Natalie Wester and her husband were waiting for their appetizer to arrive when the server came to their table, not with the fried jalapeños, but an ultimatum.

Take your masks off or get out.

On Sept. 10, the couple left their 4-month-old son, Austin, with his maternal grandmother and went to Hang Time Sports Grill & Bar in Rowlett, Tex., a Dallas suburb — a rare night out for the young parents, Wester told The Washington Post…

]T]hey got kicked out in what Wester called a “bizarre” incident because they chose to wear masks to protect Austin, who has cystic fibrosis and is immunocompromised. The restaurant bans customers from wearing masks as part of its dress code, something owner Tom Blackmer said is his right as someone who purchased and has invested in a private business.

Except that it’s not a dress code, it’s a medical issue.

After they made their way into the restaurant, Wester and her husband, 25-year-old Jose Lopez, put the masks back on, met some friends and ordered drinks and an appetizer.

About 30 minutes later, their server came over and sat next to Wester. She told her that the manager had sent her “because I am nicer than he is. … But this is political and I need you to take your masks off.”

But this is not political, it’s simply made political by fanatical I can do whatever I wanters.

Wester and Lopez left the restaurant.

Oops.

Two Alabama YouTubers who became known for online resale tips and vaccine denialism have both died of COVID-19. Tristan Graham succumbed to the virus three weeks ago in Huntsville, and Dusty Graham died Thursday, according to the GoFundMe page operated by their children. In one of the final videos on their now-deleted channel, “We are ALIVE and still Reselling on eBay,” the couple discussed why they would never get immunized. Dusty said, “I’ve got my own passport. It’s called the ‘Bill of Rights.’ I think this will be all behind us in a couple of years.” The couple blogged under the moniker “Alabama Pickers” about the best ways to resell secondhand items on eBay.

They encouraged other people to be Covid “skeptics.” That’s not a good thing to do.

Even shamans aren’t safe.

A Sri Lankan shaman who touted a potion which he said would protect people against Covid-19 has died with the disease, his family says.

Of the disease rather than with it, I think. The disease unfortunately is not dead at all.

Eliyantha White treated sports stars and top politicians with the potion, which he said came to him in a dream.

The sports stars and top politicians must be pretty dim. Medicine via dream is not really the way to go.

His potion was publicly endorsed by Sri Lanka’s former health minister, Pavithra Wanniarachchi, who subsequently spent two weeks in intensive care with Covid.

Former health minister endorses dream-based potion to prevent lethal disease. Shouldn’t health ministers know better than that?

It’s annoying having to agree with the Federalist and disagree with the ACLU but it happens, especially when the ACLU has been hypnotized by the gender fanatics.

The American Civil Liberties Union erased women this week when it tweeted an altered quote from the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, removing the words “women,” “her,” and “she” from the quotation. 

…

This incident is one more example of the left’s overarching campaign to erase women by undermining and distorting our understanding of gender as a scientifically legitimate category of classification.

This is where it gets annoying. Since when has the left campaigned to erase women??? The left got a massive wake-up slap on that subject more than 50 years ago, and since then it’s been the right campaigning to maintain the gender status quo and the left campaigning to bring women out of the kitchen…until the last few years.

The altered quote follows leftists like Rep. Cori Bush using the phrase “birthing persons,” and the pro-abortion organization NARAL defending her use of the term, saying that “it’s not just cis-gender women can get pregnant and give birth.” The Biden administration even erased women when it replaced “mothers” with “birthing people” in maternal health guidance.

Also irritating to agree with National Review:

Ginsburg’s oft-stated view was that the legal right to abortion was necessary in order to give women equality with men, because men did not have to fear unwanted pregnancies. To remove the references to sex is to destroy this argument and to substitute in a completely new one.

Because men didn’t have to fear unwanted pregnancies or go through them or have their lives disrupted by them. Men didn’t have to give birth to babies they never wanted to conceive. Men could plan their lives with a sense of confidence and freedom that wasn’t fully available to women.

Most of those who have criticized the ACLU for this behavior have noted that, once again, the organization has caved to the terminally woke. And, indeed, it has. But there is another point that needs making, and that is that what the ACLU has done here represents a flat-out repudiation of the core value for which the ACLU is supposed to stand: anti-censorship.

Altering people’s speech so that it fits in with contemporary societal norms is censorship. Yes, it’s also pathetic and revisionist and Stalinist and manipulative and, sadly, wholly indicative of where the Left seems ineluctably to be headed these days. And no, it’s not the same — or as bad — as when the government does it. But it’s censorship nevertheless. For whatever reason, the ACLU is scared of offending people who believe that it is bigoted to imply that only woman can have babies. And so, in an attempt to head off their criticism, it has altered a famous quote from a famous woman who implied that only women can have babies. In doing this, it has censored her.

She didn’t so much imply it as take it for granted, as she took for granted that everyone knows what a woman is, and what laws are, and what pregnancy is, and what unwanted pregnancy is, and similar basics. There’s no need to imply what everyone already knows. (Sometimes what everyone already knows is wrong…but other times it isn’t.)

In 1861, Alexander Stephens said of the Confederacy: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” Mercifully, this idea does not fit well with our modern sensibilities (or, for that matter, with the Declaration’s). Should the United Daughters of the Confederacy follow the ACLU’s lead and respond to this by redacting the parts of the sentence that give it its core meaning? Should they attempt to limit the discomfort of their members by amending the quote so that it reads:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that [some people] [are] not equal to [other people].

And if not, why not? The claim that they’re different because one is being done “for bad” and one is being done “for good” is just special pleading. Indeed, it is worse than special pleading: It is the acceptance of the Soviet-esque idea that it is acceptable to rewrite history if it helps the cause of progress. Everyone in America should reject this. But the ACLU? They should be setting their hair alight.

Instead, they’re setting ours alight.

Pretending not to see.

“Inclusive” language forsooth – it’s not inclusive at all, it excludes women from discussion of our own rights. Altering an existing (and quite famous) quotation defending women’s rights to remove all mention of women is obvious and grotesque exclusion of women. That guys like this pretend not to see it is infuriating. (He’s not stupid; I checked. He’s not stupid, he’s doing it on purpose.)

Wtf? They removed five of her words from a 54-word passage. They systematically removed “women” and “her” from a passage about women’s rights. How could anyone get a different “impression”?

Brackets commonly denote a minor change for reasons of clarity or accuracy, they don’t commonly denote swapping multiple words that change the meaning to its opposite. No newspaper or magazine editor would countenance that kind of “changing a word in a quote” unless it were introduced with “consider how the passage would look altered thus” or similar. So yes it fucking is a misquote, because it’s radically different from what RBG said.

I’m not the only one (we’re not the only ones) in a towering rage.

That, what Victoria said. That’s what I meant by the strangled yowl “without ‘woman’ IT MAKES NO SENSE.” If you remove “woman” wtf are you even talking about? Just random incidents floating past, not systematic subordination of a specific category of people.

Oh gosh look what have we here, why it’s an article at the ACLU about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s role as the founding director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project. The WOMEN’S Rights Project. Not the People’s Rights Project, not the Everybody’s Rights Project, not the I Don’t See Color Or Sex Project, but the WOMEN’S Rights Project. But fast forward a year (the article is only a year old) and we get some moronic “activist” actually deleting her words and replacing them with words that pretend women don’t exist.

The article is by Aryeh Neier, former Executive Director of the ACLU, and it’s about RBG as head of the new Women’s Rights Project. WOMEN’S.

Half a century ago, in October 1970, I became the executive director of the ACLU. I had a wish list, and foremost on the list was the establishment of a Women’s Rights Project.

I had been involved in a few women’s rights cases in my previous post as director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. My wife, who was a young corporate executive at a time when not many women held such posts, encountered discrimination against women on a regular basis. Most importantly, a feminist movement had been reborn in the late 1960s, and I wanted the ACLU to be part of it and to contribute expertise in litigation.

Fast forward 50 years and the ACLU is determinedly removing the word “women” from its press statements. They should be deeply ashamed of themselves.

I heard that the New Jersey ACLU had secured the volunteer assistance of a professor at Rutgers Law School who had done excellent work. Her name was Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I called her to arrange an interview.

Ruth impressed me when I met her, but what really captivated me was the quality of her written work. Her legal pleadings and briefs were powerfully argued and beautifully written, and the dominant theme that emerged from them was that women and men should not be limited by sexual stereotypes. Men could be nurturing parents and caregivers, women could be breadwinners, and both were entitled to equal treatment.

Without the ACLU job maybe she wouldn’t have been in the running for the Supreme Court, maybe Bill Clinton wouldn’t have thought of her. Yet now they’re removing the word “women” when they quote her.

This is fucking outrageous.

You see what they did there? They rewrote her words!

The words are from her testimony to the Judiciary Committee when she was nominated to the Supreme Court. They’re her words, not the ACLU’s words, and the fact that she’s talking about women in them is very very central to their meaning and importance and role in history. The ACLU has some fucking gall “correcting” them. I feel like sending them an invoice on behalf of every woman who ever donated to them – pay it all back you fucks.

Also – check it out: the Georgia ACLU managed to quote her own words in April 2019, without feeling entitled to remove the words “women” and “her” and “she” from them.

I wish I could throw a bunch of rotting potatoes at whatever twerp at the ACLU did this. If it’s Chase Strangio I hope he gets fired.

The familiar story…

Mecklenburg County [North Carolina] District Attorney Spencer Merriweather said he will not order an outside review of reported rapes and sexual assaults at Myers Park High School by the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation.

Merriweather, through a spokeswoman, refused to answer questions about whether he had confidence that the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department appropriately investigated six reported cases of rape and sexual assault that have been detailed in WBTV investigations.

The six women who reported their cases to both police and administrators said they had little or no follow-up from police. In one case, WBTV has confirmed, a CMPD school resource officer assigned to Myers Park didn’t even fill out a police report detailing the reported rape.

Maybe the police had good reasons in all six cases…but the statistics on rape prosecutions are horrifying. Only a tiny percent go to trial and only a tiny percent of those result in convictions. Do we think they’re all just a little misunderstanding?

[O]ne former local prosecutor, who now works in private practice as a criminal defense attorney, questioned why CMPD didn’t take basic steps to investigate the reported rapes and sexual assaults, including having the students participate in a forensic interview.

“There’s trained social workers. There are trained interviewers that are meant not to lead the alleged victims down a path of saying certain things happened but, at the same time, acknowledging the complications with talking to a sexual assault victim, or somebody that’s reporting that,” Jeremy Smith, the former local prosecutor said.

Yes but rape is hard to prosecute so…we don’t.

Smith said that, in his time as a prosecutor, sexual assault cases were among the toughest cases to charge and required extensive investigation by police.

“It sounds like, here, it never got past step one,” he said.

Oh well, it’s only girls.

H/t Rob

Helen Dale reviews Helen Joyce’s Trans:

Trans people are, after all, a small proportion of the population, whose individual cases are riddled with complexities. And yet we’re currently being offered striking and simplistic narratives that must be upheld if one is to be considered among the morally meritorious. It’s why I don’t want to write about trans issues with the same enthusiasm I did about Brexit. If you’re interested in intellectual history, constitutional law, and parliamentary procedure, then Brexit was like Christmas morning. Apart from certain Continuity Remain conspiracists and Leaverish swear-bears – both easily avoided – the arguments for and against were finely balanced. 

Trans isn’t like that. One ‘side’ is clearly right; the other ‘side’ is clearly wrong. Yet it’s the side that punches through wrong and comes out near Young Earth Creationism that, until recently, held the upper hand in local controversies and still does in the United States.

…

Like Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds, Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, and Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls, Trans brings out what happens when people gain social approbation by endorsing ‘high status’ narratives. Much of this status enhancement turns on believing a mental illness requiring treatment (gender dysphoria) and the behaviour attaching to it (gender non-conformity and bodily discomfort) amount to a human rights claim requiring public and legal affirmation.

Affirmation and, more intensely, validation. We have to “validate” the delusion, on pain of shunning and punishment.

The desire to make certain views unchallengeable means disagreements – especially those covered widely in the press – must be pathologised. Misrepresentation is rife, with criticism and debate offered by dissentients given implications that weren’t there and weren’t intended. This moves to catastrophising, whereby expressing any doubt is characterised in ways that invoke extinction. Stop Trans Genocide MMA fighter McLaughlan’s shirt read last Saturday. The classic catastrophising in trans activism is ‘you are erasing my/our/their existence’. 

Helen notes that the four books have different appeals, which she spells out for us so that we can pick just one. Murray and Stock both have a dry wit, she tells us.

If, however, you look to grasp the extent to which gender identity ideology, both academic and popular, bears comparison with the worst sort of pseudoscience, then Joyce is your pick. I suspect Richard Dawkins endorsed Trans because, as is his wont, he spotted a quasi-religious movement whose ultimate target is not Labour’s all-women shortlists or women’s sports or even feminism as a political ideology, but Charles Darwin and evolutionary biology and beyond that the scientific method itself.

I think it’s simpler and more basic than that. I think Dawkins, like so many of us, does not like being ordered to “validate” a lie. I’ve always liked this about him, though the liking was a bit occluded during the Elevatorgate era. I think it’s not limited to evolution or even science but to the much broader category of bullshit. We (those of us who do) think it’s bullshit, and shouting won’t make us stop thinking so.

This is gorgeous to watch.

Identifying details:

It’s all so grudging.

Trans women can be excluded from some “women-only spaces” in some circumstances, Keir Starmer says, as the controversy threatens to open a bitter row in the party.

That is, women won’t be forced to have men in all women-only spaces, Starmer says, only some of them. The Independent of course simply has to put it in terms of “exclusion,” and has to put scare-quotes on the very bizarre unfamiliar shocking idea that women get to pee in a room without men in it.

The law “rightly assumes the inclusion of trans women, except in specific circumstances”, the spokesman said, normally thought to include prisons and refuges.

But everywhere else we’re required to pretend that men really are women.

A prosperous barrister sounding like an agitated teenager.

He blathers as if puberty blockers are an entirely established, uncontroversial, unquestioned health-improver with zero harms and even zero risk of harms.

But that’s not the case, and he’s in a position to know perfectly well that’s not the case, unless he systematically shoves his thumbs into his ears whenever anyone tries to tell him so. But he’s an adult, and a powerful adult at that, so he has no right to shove his thumbs in his ears and go right on promoting puberty blockers, given how drastic and life-altering the results of taking them are.

Shorter: there’s no such thing as “the wrong body.”

Sullen racist guy sues New York Times, niece, for telling the truth about sullen racist guy.

Former President Donald J. Trump filed a lawsuit on Tuesday accusing Mary L. Trump, The New York Times and three of its reporters of conspiring in an “insidious plot” to improperly obtain his confidential tax records and exploit their use in news articles and a book.

He’s a crook. He was president of the US. The public has a right to know. I don’t care if Mary Trump signed a billion NDAs, we had a right to know.

Mr. Trump’s lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court in Dutchess County, N.Y., accuses the newspaper, its reporters and Ms. Trump of being motivated “by a personal vendetta and their desire to gain fame, notoriety, acclaim and a financial windfall and were further intended to advance their political agenda.”

A personal vendetta? He was president. And a crook. It was vital information. Nobody needed any fucking personal vendetta.

The Times report cast doubt on Mr. Trump’s claim that he was a self-made billionaire who rose to wealth and fame with little help from his father, a real estate developer. Instead, the investigation found, Mr. Trump inherited the equivalent of at least $413 million, much of it through “dubious tax schemes.”

A rich kid from birth, and a crook, and the offspring of a crook. And he was president.

In a statement on Tuesday evening, The Times defended the news organization’s reporting on Mr. Trump’s taxes and said it planned to fight the lawsuit. “The Times’s coverage of Donald Trump’s taxes helped inform the public through meticulous reporting on a subject of overriding public interest,” the statement read. “This lawsuit is an attempt to silence independent news organizations and we plan to vigorously defend against it.”

I’ll just repeat that – a subject of overriding public interest. Undeniably true.

Who was Sabina Nessa?

A south-east London primary school has been left “devastated” by the suspected murder of one of its teachers after her body was found near a community centre on Saturday.

The Metropolitan police named the victim as Sabina Nessa, 28, from Kidbrooke, and said her death was being treated as murder. A man in his 40s who was arrested on suspicion of killing her has been released under further investigation.

Lisa Williams, the head of Rushey Green primary school in Lewisham, where Nessa worked, said she was a brilliant teacher.

“We are devastated by Sabina’s tragic death. She was kind, caring and absolutely dedicated to her pupils,” Williams added.

But apparently not kind and caring enough to be trending on Twitter.

I saw this yesterday, and had been thinking similar things for two or three days.

I kept wondering during those two or three days why Gabby Petito was trending so insistently on Twitter. She can’t be the only missing person in the country, I thought, so why is she trending in particular? I suppose the answer is depressingly obvious and stupid. She’s young, she’s pretty, she’s white, she’s blonde. Give her another 20 years and she wouldn’t have been trending.

So, today –

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on The manly men.

The Republicans are the party of male fragility.

You can see it in their strutting attempts to equate gun ownership with machismo and their constant braggadocio about their willingness to engage in violence (the coup/civil war fantasies, the declarations of “here are my guns, just try to come take them!”).

You can see it in their attempts to fetishize Donald Trump, of all people, as a pillar of masculinity: those bizarre Ben Garrison cartoons depicting Trump as some muscular Adonis exist for a reason. There’s really nothing wrong with having a president who is elderly and overweight and not a prime physical specimen, but they can’t accept the possibility that they might respect and even worship anyone who isn’t a paragon of manhood, lest it reflect on their own masculinity, so they like to reimagine Trump as just such a paragon.

You can see it in their sneering attempts to dismiss Democrats or left-leaning men as not being wholly men: they’re “soy boys” or “metrosexuals,” or they eat arugula or don’t know the right way to order a cheesesteak or whatever.

So yeah, on any given issue, people like Tucker Carlson will attempt to frame the Republican position as the “manly” one, whether it makes any sense or not. Being afraid of getting a potentially deadly virus? That’s for losers and cucks. Being afraid that 75 Afghan refugees will overwhelm Montana, or of going to a coffee shop in broad daylight without packing an AR-15? That’s manly man stuff.

Ergo, soldiers who refuse vaccination must be the manliest soldiers of them all. The ones who get vaccinated aren’t REAL soldiers. Probably more of those wimpy “woke” soldiers who lost Afghanistan.