Wannabe riot fizzled.

As the Republican party and Donald Trump’s more ardent supporters work to rewrite the narrative of the attempted coup, supporters of those arrested over it sought to turn it from a political to a human rights issue with the “Justice for J6” rally near the Capitol on Saturday.

As a protest, it was a flop.

Turnout was at best half of the 700 predicted by organisers, which in itself fell well short of the many thousands who stormed Congress in January. The event organiser, Matt Braynard, a former Trump campaign operative, blamed the poor attendance on government intimidation and press scaremongering.

It’s shocking when the government intimidates people just because they want to seize the Capitol, murder all the Democrats, and make Trump dictator for life.

Instagram might have something to do with it.

According to internal research leaked to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the app has made body image issues worse for one in three girls, and in one Facebook study of teenagers in the UK and the US, more than 40% of Instagram users who said they felt “unattractive” said the feeling began while using the app.

Instagram has more than 1 billion users worldwide and an estimated 30 million in the UK, with Kim Kardashian, Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande among the accounts with hundreds of millions of followers between them….

Two in five girls (40%) aged 11 to 16 in the UK say they have seen images online that have made them feel insecure or less confident about themselves. This increases to half (50%) in girls aged 17 to 21, according to research by Girlguiding in its annual girls’ attitudes survey.

Why would anyone want to look like Kim Kardashian though? She looks like a sex doll. She looks like someone who never does anything other than buff her appearance. Why don’t girls want to look like girls and women who do things, who are interesting, who have something to say?

Facebook’s in-depth research into the photo-sharing app stated that Instagram had a deeper effect on teenage girls because it focused more on the body and lifestyle, compared with TikTok’s emphasis on performance videos such as dancing, and Snapchat’s jokey face features. “Social comparison is worse on Instagram,” said the Facebook study.

Pretty much what I’m saying. Dancing, jokes, soccer, poetry, running, astronomy, rock climbing, painting – a million things other than having a Barbie doll face and tits. Why can’t girls just be people?

Beeban Kidron, the crossbench peer who sits on the joint committee into the online safety bill and was behind the recent introduction of a children’s privacy code, says Ofcom, the UK communications watchdog, will have a vital role in scrutinising algorithms.

“The value in algorithmic oversight for regulators, is that the decisions that tech companies make will become transparent, including decisions like FB took to allow Instagram to target teenage girls with images and features that ended in anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts. Algorithmic oversight is the key to society wrestling back some control.”

It makes perfect sense that it’s Facebook, of course. Facebook started out as literally face book – Zuckerberg’s judgments on his Harvard classmates who had the bad luck to be female.

This is an important point.

It’s also a gross violation of the child’s right to be told the truth.

I think that matters a lot, because children don’t know what’s true, they have to rely on adults to tell them, so it’s grossly unfair for adults to tell them lies (with rare exceptions for compelling reasons). It’s part of adults’ job to educate children, so they shouldn’t tell them stupid confusing lies about basic worldly facts.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The entitlement of children.

Mostly Cloudy #3

What on earth has happened?

As I keep saying, I think people tend to get involved in various kinds of activism or movements out of a sincere desire to do good (as they see it). But once you have identified your ingroup, other, far less admirable, motives (deference to authority, group conformity, avoiding conflict, keeping the group together, reducing cognitive dissonance, consistency with former acts or statements etc.) gradually come to supplant the original cause, even to the point of actively embracing the polar opposite of everything that got you into activism in the first place.

We see this in the case of feminists who – less than 10 years ago – knew perfectly well (as we can tell by their own words back then) how to tell a biological male from a biological female and identify which biological sex was most disadvantaged by the patriarchy, but have since gone on to deny that biological females even exist as an identifiable group, let alone have any issues worth addressing in their own right. We see it in the case of “LGBT” activists who – once again, less than 10 years ago – used to fight for increased acceptance of same-sex attraction (as opposed to attraction to people who think or feel in certain ways best left unspecified, call themselves by certain names, use certain pronouns etc.), but have since gone on to argue that same-sex attraction is the pinnacle of bigotry and evil. And we see it in the case of anti-racists who used to rage about white people appropriating the struggles of POC, but have since gone on to insist that TRAs – no matter how white – have an absolute monopoly on “non-white” feminism as well as an unlimited right to claim the opinions of POC for themselves whether the latter do in fact hold said opinions or not.

Trump sent yet another moronic (and criminal!) letter to the Georgia Secretary of State yesterday, shouting at him to cancel the Georgia vote because reasons.

Much voter fraud! 43,000! Chain of Custody rules! Many other claims! Please check it out and then decertify the Erection excuse me the Election, or whatever the correct legal remedy is, I don’t give a fuck, just put a stamp on it or a big Sharpie signature or some lipstick or whatever, just do it. I’ve told you this like a MILLION TIMES you asshole so why haven’t you done it yet? People do not understand why you don’t do it! PEOPLE I tell you. Me, and my kids, except maybe what’s her name, Tiffany’s, and all the people in the world, and some in Russia too – they do not understand why you!! Why you fight so hard that the election truth not be told? Why you? Why so hard? Why not be told? Tremendous disservice. Guy’s illegitimate, unlike me, I’m tremendous legitimate, People don’t understand why you.

Never mind Karens, it’s the Lavernes we need to worry about.

“I just believe as a non-essentialist intersectional feminist that womanhood is constituted beyond bodies, chromosomes and reproduction. Insisting trans women are always and only “males” as you say is getting us killed and denied equal protection under the law here in the States”

That “just” – it’s not a “just.” There is no “just” there. There would be no “just” to my saying “I just believe as a non-essentialist intersectional anti-racist that blackness is constituted beyond bodies, chromosomes and skin, and thus that I’m black too, like you, because I say I am, because I identify as black, because I feel black.” That would be seen as an outrageous claim, and rightly so. It’s not some little trifle that can be introduced with a “just.”

Next, “believe” – it doesn’t matter what he “believes,” or says he believes. Anyone can “believe” anything, or claim to. It’s a stupid thing to believe. Lots of things are stupid to believe, and that men can be women by saying so is one of them.

Next, “feminist” – he is not a feminist, and he doesn’t get to pretend to be a feminist to help him pretend to be a woman, and then bully and coerce us into agreeing with him that he’s a woman, and a better smarter more feminist and “intersectional” woman than we are. All of that is an obvious con game.

Next, how womanhood is constituted. It is exactly through bodies, and nothing else. It’s not a club, a mood, a state of mind, a set of clothes, a hairdo, a pronoun. It’s the body. You have a female body? You’re a woman. You have the other kind? You’re a man.

Next, “getting us killed” – no it isn’t. Murder rates for trans people are lower than the overall average, and they’re tied to sex work, not gender critical feminism.

Last, “equal protection under the law” – nonsense. Nothing we say has anything to do with denying trans people equal protection under the law.

Men who claim to be feminist women need to stop trying to bully women into agreeing with them.

Women must not have any private space away from men, says top man.

Trans women should be allowed to enter all public places, the Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey says, as he accuses Boris Johnson of stirring up “a culture war” on the issue.

Never mind Boris Johnson, never mind men fighting over who gets to boss everyone, what about women?

Nothing. Nothing about women. Ed Davey doesn’t give a flying fuck about women. He may not even realize we exist.

There’s a transcript.

“So there should not be spaces where biological males cannot go?”

“No. No, no, precisely.”

Well, that’s clear.

Janice Turner in the Times:

The resignation of [former shadow women and equalities secretary] Marsha De Cordova leaves a vacancy for a job one MP calls “the most poisoned chalice in politics”. Labour, like all progressive parties, is being torn apart by the quasi-religious schism of gender. Two warring tribes have emerged: “gender critical” feminists who believe single-sex spaces, in prisons or refuges, are needed to protect women; and LGBT Labour which argues if a biological male identifies as a woman they must, immediately and in every circumstance, be treated as female.

… De Cordova was vilified for meeting feminists who’ve formed the Labour Women’s Declaration on sex-based rights, and for declining to address Stonewall’s conference fringe meeting. Her reasons for resigning are complex, but she reportedly felt cut adrift by Starmer.

As does Rosie Duffield MP, who has endured such extreme physical threats for the crime of tweeting that only women have cervixes, she won’t attend next week’s Labour conference. Starmer has texted Duffield, a victim of domestic abuse, to say he’s sorry she felt unsafe, but offered no help with security. Nor has he publicly defended her after a year of angry demands she lose the whip. “Keir is terrified of conflict,” says one MP. “He just hopes it will all go away.”

Yeah that’s great. The man in charge is “terrified of conflict,” i.e. disagreement, so he abandons the woman to her fate, which includes threats of actual literal violence, not mere “conflict.”

In all left-of- centre political parties the gender wars are escalating. Asked on Radio 4’s Today if he believed “there should be spaces where biological males can’t go”, the LibDem leader Sir Ed Davey replied: “No.” The very morning a government report revealed an epidemic of violence against women and girls, Davey promised to scrap all existing female safeguards.

So women and girls are going to start to be afraid to leave the house. Taliban by other means.

In the SNP, civil war has broken out over its pledge, in alliance with the Greens, to push through self-ID for over-16s. A movement, Women Won’t Wheesht (shut up), was formed to oppose SNP proposals such as erasing data about biological sex from the Scottish census and denying raped women the right to choose a female medical examiner. When the Tory MSP Murdo Fraser referenced a large WWW protest outside the Scottish parliament, Nicola Sturgeon heckled: “Shame on you!” Women’s concerns, she said, are “not valid”.

The concerns of men who say they are women are not just valid but positively sacred, while the concerns of women are so much fluff.

Starmer too needs to grasp the gender nettle. These extreme LGBT activists are a small, unrepresentative hard-left group who hate him anyway: women are half the electorate. Starmer must choose a shadow equalities minister ready to defend women. Then he must defend her. Because there’s a new political slogan in town: “If you don’t respect my sex, you can’t expect to get my X.”

Oh but conflict.

Covid quack becomes random Covid bullshitter:

A doctor in Oregon has had his license revoked for continually refusing to follow COVID-19 guidelines when dealing with patients and spreading misinformation about face masks.

Turns out doctors aren’t supposed to tell whoppers about a lethal virus in the midst of a pandemic.

The Oregon Medical Board issued a final order on September 2 against Steven Arthur LaTulippe for “dishonorable or unprofessional conduct; repeated negligence in the practice of medicine; and gross negligence in the practice of medicine.” He was also fined $10,000.

…

He also spread misinformation to his patients about masks being ineffective against COVID-19 and falsely claimed they could cause carbon dioxide poisoning.

…

The physician was also recorded dismissing the importance of masks in a speech at a “Stop the Steal” rally in Salem on November 7, which backed Donald Trump‘s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.

“I hate to tell you this, I might scare you, but I and my staff, none of us, once wore a mask in my clinic,” he told the crowd, reported The Huffington Post. “And how many problems did we have in our clinic from that? Zero.”

The scientifically trained mind at work.

Girls don’t need education, any more than stoves or cribs or sex dolls need education. Female people are tools for the use of men; you don’t send your tools to high school.

The Taliban have effectively banned girls from secondary education in Afghanistan, by ordering high schools to re-open only for boys.

…

In a further sign that the recently announced Taliban government is tightening restrictions on women, the former ministry of women’s affairs building in Kabul has been handed over to the newly re-established ministry for the prevention of vice and promotion of virtue.

This was the group’s feared enforcer in the 1990s, charged with beating women who violated bars on everything from going out in public without a male guardian to an obsessively prescriptive dress code that even forbade high heels.

…

However, the Taliban are now in charge of a capital, and a country, very different from the war-battered city they took over in 1996. They are likely to face strong pushback from women, including older students, and the many Afghan fathers and brothers who want the women in their families to get an education.

“The population they have given themselves the challenge of trying to rule has doubled in size and expectations have gone sky-high compared to the 1990s. We can anticipate there will be reactions and maybe the Taliban will be forced to backpedal or consider some differences,” said Prof Michael Semple from the Mitchell Institute of Global Peace, Security and Justice.

Religious fanatics seldom backpedal.

Originally a comment by Michael Haubrich on The entitlement of children.

I think that this is a great opportunity for purveyors of alcohol and tobacconists in the UK to join in the case so that children’s entitlement to their products is recognized as valid and wise. Who are the government to deny?

Listed below are examples of products whose sale is controlled by age restriction.

Alcohol

Cigarettes, tobacco, shisha and other smoking based products

E Cigarettes and Vaping Products

Fireworks – sparklers, party poppers, caps, cracker snaps

Dangerous chemicals – cigarette lighter fuel, glue, aerosols

Acids

DVDs, Blu Rays and computer games

Dangerous Weapons – air weapons, crossbows, knives

Lottery tickets and scratch cards

Petrol

Bookmakers

Sunbeds

Advice to Traders: Staying within the law

How is it right that acids are restricted, but bases are not?

The Tavistock ruling has been overturned, as many people predicted.

The court of appeal has overturned a controversial judgment that children under the age of 16 considering gender reassignment are unlikely to be mature enough to give informed consent to be prescribed puberty-blocking drugs.

So we’re back to first do lots of harm because 15-year-olds never get it wrong about what they will want at age 30, 50, 70.

Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust, which runs NHS England’s only gender identity development service (GIDS) for children, challenged a high court ruling last year in a case brought against the service by Keira Bell, a 24-year-old woman who began taking puberty blockers when she was 16 before detransitioning. The other applicant was the unnamed mother of a teenage autistic girl on the waiting list for treatment.

…

The Tavistock had argued that the high court ruling interfered with the entitlement of children to make decisions for themselves and was based on “partisan expert evidence”.

But of course adults interfere with children’s decisions for themselves all the time. Children aren’t competent to make all decisions for themselves, because they’re children.

Bell said she planned to seek leave to appeal to the supreme court, adding: “A global conversation has begun and has been shaped by this case. There is more to be done. It is a fantasy and deeply concerning that any doctor could believe a 10-year-old could consent to the loss of their fertility.”

Cross-sex hormones are only prescribed from the age of 16 and experts say puberty blockers do not cause infertility.

Mrs A, the other claimant alongside Bell, said: “A child experiencing gender distress needs time and support – not to be set on a medical pathway they may later regret.”

Jolyon Maugham is celebrating.

So Covid is real?

Laura Loomer, an anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist running for Congress against incumbent GOP U.S. Rep. Dan Webster of Lake County, [Florida,] says she has tested positive for COVID-19.

…

Loomer, a social media provocateur, has been banned from most platforms in part for her Islamophobic statements and support of Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes and far-right activist Faith Goldy, who was banned for posting racist videos. She also has spread conspiracy theories about mass shootings and has been arrested multiple times for trespassing.

On the conservative platform Parler, she wrote in December, “I hope I get COVID just so I can prove to people I’ve had bouts of food poisoning that are more serious and life-threatening than a hyped-up virus. Have you ever eaten bad fajitas? That will kill you faster than COVID.”

So she got her wish! She must be very happy.

On Gettr, founded by Donald Trump acolyte Jason Miller, she wrote Thursday, “Yesterday I was feeling ill. I had a fever, chills, a runny nose, sore throat, nausea and severe body aches that made my whole body feel like I got hit by a bus, and after sleeping for a few hours, my symptoms started to remind me of how I felt when I had a bad case of the flu a few years ago. So I took a COVID test and it came back POSITIVE.”

She added, “I have not taken the COVID-19 vaccine, and I don’t plan on ever taking it because it is unsafe and ineffective.”

Well it’s too late to take it now.

Someone should explain vaccinations to her.

She said she was taking Azithromycin, an antibiotic that one recent study said was not effective in treating COVID symptoms, a dietary supplement called OrthoMune, and Hydroxychloroquine, the antimalaria drug pushed by Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis and others last year that studies have also shown is not that effective in treating COVID.

Cool. She should also take Ivermectin, Cyclobenzaprine, and Ciprofloxacin, because why not? Just choose random drugs off a list and pop them, but definitely don’t take anything actually recommended by people who know what they’re talking about.

Here’s a novel idea: the police should be policing violence against women. Who knew?!

Tackling violence against women and girls should be as much of a priority as countering terrorism, a police watchdog has said.

Really? You mean women and girls matter? I think that’s pushing the envelope a little too far, don’t you?

Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) called for “fundamental cross-system change” after identifying continuing failings.

Three-quarters of domestic abuse cases are closed early without the suspect being charged, its report said.

Because it’s personal. A man’s right to get violent with the nearest woman is sacred.

According to official statistics, in the year ending March 2020 there were:

• An estimated 1.6 million female victims of domestic abuse in England and Wales

• 618,000 female victims of sexual assault

• 892,000 female victims of stalking

Is the BBC kink-shaming?

Zoe Billingham, HM Inspector of Constabulary, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that police had “vastly improved” their response to tackling violence against women and girls in the last seven years.

But she warned we would not be able to “police our way out of the the breadth and depth of crimes being inflicted on women, day in, day out”.

There needs to be an “uplift in the prioritisation” of violence against women and girls, with a “bold and radical whole system approach”, she added.

How can that happen when the police are so busy validating men who say they are women, and arresting women who say men are not women? How can it happen when the entire population is being systematically trained to not give a shit about women?

Refuge, a charity providing support for women and children experiencing domestic violence, said for too long there had been a failure to implement recommendations that would improve how violence against women and girls (VAWG) is tackled.

Step one: don’t let men take that support for themselves, no matter how they “identify.”

Assistant Commissioner Louisa Rolfe, the National Police Chiefs’ Council leader on violence, said the report set out a “clear way forward” for change and that there was “no lack of commitment” for this work.

She insisted that forces were recognising violence against women and girls as a “significant priority”, adding that chief constables were signing up to a national violence against women and girls strategy and a co-ordinator would be employed to to ensure the report’s recommendations were implemented.

But they’re also signing up to a national men are women if they say they are strategy, so that can get in the way. If they arrest a man for violence against a woman and the man says he’s a woman…what then?

Peak Trans on Billingham:

These two tweets were directed at me during a Twitter spat I had with James Billingham a couple of months ago. Yes, he really is one of those men who presume to adjudicate on what feminism is. I can’t in all seriousness believe he thinks I care what he would “love” to see me do. Rather, I think these tweets were intentionally condescending to me in order to virtue-signal to his followers, who will probably applaud the insufferable arrogance of a man telling a woman old enough to be his mother how she should be doing feminism.

In order to virtue-signal and in order to tell a woman how she should be doing feminism. He loves it – he would love it even if no one applauded.

I am still against anti-feminists in the ‘atheist movement’, as he calls it – especially the ones in Humanists UK, whose numbers are growing. What has happened is that Billingham has joined their ranks as an honorary member of the trans Taliban (hat-tip to Julie Bindel for coining that very apt sobriquet). That he has done so exemplifies why we should be wary of men who self-identify as feminists. Men who genuinely want to support us know better than to do so. If your feminism includes men who talk over women – as they are wont to do – it’s not feminism.

And if your feminism “centers” men who say they are women and bullies women, it’s really not feminism.

Years ago, he was responsible for creating a ‘block bot’ on Twitter, about which Martin Robbins wrote,

The Block Bot started as a tool to create a safe space for women online and turned into a weapon to bully and silence women the community disagreed with.

There’s a great deal more about what a dedicated, persistent bully James Billingham is.

Glinner takes a cold hard look at the ineffable James Billingham:

This is James Billingham, a man who has numerous sock accounts online, such as Kilgore Sprout, Sprout of Wrath, the only Sprout and Oolon, who appears to have a burning hatred of women who are invested in safeguarding women’s or children’s rights.

Billingham spends an inordinate amount of time doing the dirty work of some of the creepiest and most dangerous gender identity extremists. He minimised the vicious assault by a large man on Maria McLachlan as a slap ‘on the shoulder’ and suggested that McLachlan, a pensioner, was ‘by far the most violent person there’, an assertion completely contradicted by footage of the attack, for which Tara Wolf was convicted.

…

Billingham takes great pleasure in infiltrating or encouraging others to infiltrate feminist groups on Facebook. He then reveals out-of context messages, leaks membership lists or doxxes members in order to cause maximum distress and disruption. The wonderful Man Friday campaign for single-sex spaces ended after screenshots that outed some members of the group were leaked and publicised by a Sprout sock account via #TERFleaks. More recently, he set up a domain name almost identical to that of the LGB Alliance, which was linked to Stonewall’s site. The LGB Alliance tracked Billingham down and raised a dispute with Nominet Dispute Resolution Service, which they won.

He’s a giggling sadist whose sadism is directed at women. He’s as creepy as Buffalo Bill.

Wadhwa continues his attack on women’s rights:

Women who oppose plans to make it easier to change gender have given a platform to “fascists who want to eliminate trans people”, according to the head of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre.

Bad lede. We don’t care about changing gender, what we oppose is the absurd dogma that people can change sex, and we oppose that because it results in outrages like domineering male Mridul Wadhwa becoming the head of a rape crisis centre, where he can bully women into obeying him or simply kick them out altogether.

Mridul Wadhwa, 43, a trans woman who was appointed chief executive in May, accused those protesting against the Gender Recognition Reform Bill of legitimising far-right discrimination of trans people.

Wadhwa is a man and thus the wrong sex to be head of a rape crisis centre. It doesn’t matter what he “accuses” us of or what he thinks we give a “platform” to; what matters is that he’s a man who has the fucking gall to go after and get and occupy a job as head of a rape crisis centre.

Step one.

The Justice Department [has] asked a federal judge in Texas to temporarily block enforcement of the state’s new law that bans abortions after about six weeks.

This step, a major move by the Biden administration against the highly controversial law, follows a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department last week. The Biden administration asked the court late Tuesday to implement the preliminary injunction while the lawsuit plays out in federal court.

Texas’ abortion ban essentially stops the procedure in the country’s second-largest state. Most people WOMEN don’t know they are pregnant before six weeks.

In court documents, attorneys for the Justice Department said Texas’ law, also called SB 8, is unconstitutional and cannot stand.

A preliminary injunction “is necessary to protect the constitutional rights of women in Texas and the sovereign interest of the United States in ensuring that its States respect the terms of the national compact,” the attorneys say. “It is also necessary to protect federal agencies, employees, and contractors whose lawful actions S.B. 8 purports to prohibit.”

At least the Justice Department still knows this law is an attack on the rights of women.

No.

No. Feminism is not a movement “based on” (or aiming to or meant to or about or for) liberating “all of us.” It’s about liberating women. Women are allowed to have our own movement, and it’s called feminism.

It’s not anyone’s movement to give away to “all of us,” because it’s specifically and explicitly about women, not people in general.

And gender critical feminism is not “ganging up on transgender people,” it’s critical of the ideology that says men magically become women by saying so.

Pandemic, you say? Well then we’ll just make sure health officials can’t take necessary steps to deal with it.

Republican legislators in more than half of U.S. states, spurred on by voters angry about lockdowns and mask mandates, are taking away the powers state and local officials use to protect the public against infectious diseases.

Because what mad impetuous fool wants to be protected against infectious diseases?

A KHN review of hundreds of pieces of legislation found that, in all 50 states, legislators have proposed bills to curb such public health powers since the covid-19 pandemic began. While some governors vetoed bills that passed, at least 26 states pushed through laws that permanently weaken government authority to protect public health. In three additional states, an executive order, ballot initiative or state Supreme Court ruling limited long-held public health powers. More bills are pending in a handful of states whose legislatures are still in session.

God we’re a stupid people.

President Joe Biden last Thursday announced sweeping vaccination mandates and other covid measures, saying he was forced to act partly because of such legislation: “My plan also takes on elected officials in states that are undermining you and these lifesaving actions.”

…

Much of this legislation takes effect as covid hospitalizations in some areas are climbing to the highest numbers at any point in the pandemic, and children are back in school.

It’s as if they think the pandemic is an angry god and they can appease it by backing off prevention. Imbeciles.