A rape crisis centre that gleefully taunts women:

From Woman’s Place UK a couple of years ago:

For the International Women’s Day episode of BBC Woman’s Hour, Emma Barnett interviewed Anneliese Dodds, the Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities, and asked her for a clear definition of ‘what a woman is’.

And didn’t get one. Of course.

Anneliese Dodds: Well, I have to say that there are different definitions legally around what a woman actually is. I mean, you look at the definition within the Equality Act, and I think it just says someone who is adult and female, I think, but then doesn’t see how you define either of those things. I mean, obviously, that’s then you’ve got the biological definition, legal definition…

Emma Barnett: With respect, I didn’t ask for that. What’s the Labour definition?

Anneliese Dodds: Oh, I think with respect, Emma, I think it does depend what the context is surely. I mean surely that is important here. You know, there are people who have decided that they have to make that transition. You know, I’ve spoken with many of them. It’s been a very difficult process for many of those people. And you know, understandably because they live as a woman, you know, they want to be defined as a woman. That’s what the gender recognition act…again a Labour…is brought into place.

And on it goes, waffle waffle waffle.

The BBC solemnly informs us that a teenager is going to “become a saint.”

Carlo Acutis died in 2006, at the age of 15, meaning he would be the first millennial – a person born in the early 1980s to late 1990s – to be canonised. It follows Pope Francis attributing a second miracle to him. It involved the healing of [a] university student in Florence who had bleeding on the brain after suffering head trauma.

So why did Carlo Acutis die? If he can heal a university student in Florence why can’t he cure himself?

Carlo Acutis had been beatified – the first step towards sainthood – in 2020, after he was attributed with his first miracle – healing a Brazilian child of a congenital disease affecting his pancreas.

Two! He’s a two-miracles guy! So why couldn’t he heal himself, if only so that he could heal more people? Seems only sensible.

The second miracle was approved by the Pope following a meeting with the Vatican’s saint-making department.

Ah yes the saint-making department, right next door to the water into wine department and across from the covering up priestly child abuse department.

Miracles are typically investigated and assessed over a period of several months, with a person being eligible for sainthood after they have two to their name.

Oh good. Good good. That’s very reassuring. No rushing into things here, it’s all very deliberate and careful. I’m impressed.

H/t Acolyte of Sagan

Yeah. Same.

The ACLU three weeks ago:

Anti-abortion politicians brought this case all the way up to the Supreme Court to deny pregnant people access to emergency abortion care that is necessary to prevent severe and potentially life-altering health consequences, and even death.

The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in Idaho v. United States and Moyle v. United States, which will determine whether politicians can put doctors in jail for treating pregnant patients experiencing medical emergencies. The ultimate decision in the case — which is expected by the summer — could have severe consequences on the health and lives of people across the country facing emergency pregnancy complications.

Etc etc etc. The ACLU doesn’t say “women” or “woman” even once in the entire piece.

It’s like writing a piece about lynching without ever mentioning race.

The fact that women are the half of humanity that creates and pushes out all of humanity is why they are treated as inferior and subordinate. It’s not some irrelevant detail, it’s central.

The ACLU would not in a million years do a piece on racism while carefully never mentioning the people who are the targets of racism. Why is it so comfortable omitting women from discussions of abortion?

Perfect. The Supreme Court says yay racial gerrymandering; let the fun begin.

The Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision along party lines on Thursday, which represented its fullest endorsement of partisan gerrymandering to date. 

In the past, legal restrictions on racial gerrymandering — maps drawn to minimize the voting power of a particular racial group, rather than the power of a political party — had the side effect of also limiting attempts to draw maps that benefitted one party or another. While the Court largely tolerated gerrymanders that were designed to lock one party into power, those maps sometimes failed because they also targeted racial minorities.

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, however, is written explicitly to permit political parties to draw rigged maps, even when those maps maximize the power of white voters and minimize the power of voters of color. Indeed, Alito says that one of the purposes of his opinion is to prevent litigants from “repackag[ing] a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim by exploiting the tight link between race and political preference.”

Exploiting it, he says. Exploiting the ugly fact that one of the two major political parties is friendly to racial gerrymandering.

Alexander achieves another one of Alito’s longtime goals. Alito frequently disdains any allegation that a white lawmaker might have been motivated by racism, and he’s long sought to write a presumption of white racial innocence into the law. His dismissive attitude toward any allegation that racism might exist in American government is on full display in his opinion. “When a federal court finds that race drove a legislature’s districting decisions, it is declaring that the legislature engaged in ‘offensive and demeaning conduct,’” Alito writes, before proclaiming that “we should not be quick to hurl such accusations at the political branches.”

Except the ones that try to avoid racist gerrymandering of course.

Keir Starmer is still pretending Rosie Duffield doesn’t exist.

Rosie Duffield was snubbed from Sir Keir Starmer’s election launch event in Kent on Thursday – even though she is the only elected Labour MP in the county. The MP for Canterbury – who has angered many in her party for her stance on women’s rights – only found out about the event on social media. No Labour leader had visited Kent for years after Ms Duffield was elected in a shock 2017 victory.

He’s so determined to exclude her that he ignores the opportunity to big up his own launch event for the sake of blacklisting her.

The Labour leader was joined by Angela Rayner, his deputy, Naushabah Khan, the party’s local candidate, and several councillors from the area. It is believed Ms Duffield only found out about the event on X, formerly Twitter, after people messaged her to ask why she was not there.

She must have done something really terrible, yeah?

The Canterbury MP has angered many in her party for supporting the right of women to same-sex spaces such as toilets, changing rooms and rape crisis centres. She was also vilified by some for saying that only women have a cervix and that transwomen are not women. Ms Duffield was subject to an internal investigation after she was accused of anti-Semitism and transphobia, after which she was exonerated. However, Sir Keir never apologised to her about the ordeal. For years he refused to meet her, but then did so for the first time in Westminster earlier this month.

And now he’s conspicuously snubbing her yet again. Misogynist much?

Oh come ON.

Meaning what, their foot slipped and they typed “gender critical” instead of “transphobic”?

Come on. It wasn’t a fumble or a blunder or a pratfall or a “genuine mistake.” It was an iteration of the trans dogma that the two are the same thing, and equally evil and deserving of punishment and exile. It was yet another instance of the hatred of women that saturates this boneheaded ideology.

Get out of here with that smarmy “genuine mistake” crap. Nobody is fooled.

Unbelievable.

Bad enough yet?

He’s still hasn’t been fired.

It’s all just a game to some of them.

As Democrats lauded the White House’s 200th judicial confirmation, though, a partisan firestorm raged in the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Republicans ground proceedings to a halt during a confirmation hearing for the latest slate of court nominees.

Among the appointees who faced questioning Wednesday morning was Sarah Netburn, tapped by the Biden administration to join the bench on the Southern District of New York.

GOP lawmakers on the committee dialed in on a 2022 case she presided over as a magistrate judge in the same district, in which she granted the request of an incarcerated transgender woman who asked to move to a women’s prison from a men’s prison. The petitioner was a registered sex offender serving a sentence for distributing child pornography.

And a man. Men should not be in women’s prisons, because it’s not safe for the women.

Republicans, pointing out that the petitioner had previously served an 18-year sentence for sexually assaulting both an underage boy and girl, framed Netburn’s decision to allow the prison transfer as a political act which put other incarcerated women at risk.

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy labeled the nominee a “political activist,” a charge which she denied.

Netburn argued that she allowed the petitioner to be transferred because she had “serious medical needs,” adding that the petitioner “had engaged in no physical violence and no acts of sexual violence whatsoever” in the years since she had completed her initial sentence.

Of course all the women in that prison had serious safety needs, but apparently that doesn’t matter.

Oops. Turns out it wasn’t the neighbors after all.

If you’re going to write a book about the Church and its hatred of women, don’t accept a glammed-up tits-out cover. Like this one:

This is how you do it:

Cover by Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin

More Wings Over Scotland on Adam Ramsay:

Since 2019 Ramsay has been the editor of Open Democracy, an activist “news” site funded – to the tune of millions of pounds a year – chiefly by large grants from American and other corporate and industrial charities like the Ford Foundation, created by the notorious racist and anti-Semitic car magnate Henry Ford.

…

These grants are provided, naturally, mostly in the name of “social justice”, “diversity” and “inclusion”. Many of the donors, like the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund which provided OD with $800,000 in grants in recent years, are deeply opaque, with their website declining to identify even which country the fund is based in and having been described by some investigative websites as “a near-bottomless pit of “dark money” […] fed by a handful of mysterious hedge fund billionaires”.

So more like Dark or Cryptic Democracy.

With crushingly predictable irony, OpenDemocracy is absolutely obsessed with other people’s funding by “dark money”

When they do it v when we do it.

OD is utterly captured by the trans movement, and nobody more so than Ramsay himself, who regularly and vitriolically lambasts the likes of For Women Scotland and gay-rights charity the LGB Alliance as “hate groups”. He continues to do so despite the latter having survived numerous attempts by transactivists to strip it of its charitable status and [its] having been confirmed as a wholly legitimate and respectable organisation by the Charity Commission after a thorough investigation in 2021.

He frequently dismisses the valid concerns of gender-critical feminists and others about women’s rights, LGB rights, child safeguarding and freedom of speech (that validity having been established by a growing string of tribunals and court cases) as an “anti-trans moral panic”.

Campbell includes copious illustration of all these claims; I recommend reading the whole thing.

Rev Stuart Campbell at Wings Over Scotland responds to Adam Ramsay’s threats toward people who dispute him:

Adam Ramsay is Definitely a Liar

Ladies and gentlemen (and non-binary genderfluids), meet Adam Ramsay.

Adam Ramsay grew up in what his family describes as a “small castle” nestled in a 1300-acre estate in Perthshire that’s been in the family since 1232.

Check out the photo of the not all that small castle.

He was educated at the extremely exclusive private Glenalmond College, which he describes as the “poshest” school in Scotland, prone to outbreaks of “chav hunting”, and whose alumni include a lot of people called things like “Torquhil”, “Crispin”, “Rupert”, “Nairne”, “Dennison”, “Ernley”, “Beauchamp”, “Ninian”, “Logie”, “Adair” and “Turtle”, none of which we have made up, as well as figures known to Wings readers like Scottish Secretary Alister Jack and Times columnist Alex Massie and his father Allan.

Check out the photo of the enormous prodigy house-style Glenalmond College.

So that’s who is bullying and threatening feminist women on behalf of Open Democracy. Tribune of the people raised in one castle and educated in another. Intersectionalism has never been so intersecty before.

What a horrible man.

“These facts” he says. What facts?

Wadhwa has dedicated the last 14 years of her professional life to supporting women who are victims of sexual violence. But for the last three years, she’s faced torrential abuse including unfounded smears that she’s a sexual predator and numerous threats of violence – all because she is trans.

But Wadwha of course is a man, so referring to him with “her” and “she” has nothing to do with facts.

The Times has run seven stories about Wadhwa since May last year, often based on complaints from small groups opposed to trans rights…

No, not opposed to the rights of trans people. Opposed to the displacement of women by men who call themselves women. Men don’t have any right to do that; doing that is not a right.

Horrible man.

Originally a comment by iknklast on Hamlet’s gotta eat.

I try to make all of this manageable for my students in Environmental Science, but they have always left the class stunned at the end of the semester. Every unit, they come up with solutions that previous units should have told them wouldn’t work. It’s difficult to carry so many interlocking things in our head at a time, and it’s natural for us to try to reduce it down to one more important thing that we can deal with. Unfortunately, we never deal with one problem before we move to another.

Save the whales? That used to be a big thing. The whales are not saved, but we’ve moved on. Ozone depletion? I almost never hear about it anymore, except by people who claim it’s over. We did a good job, but there is still a large area of depletion over Antarctica, and it isn’t likely to recover for some time. Litter? Get real. Too much focus on litter during the 70s; much of it was planned as a deliberate distraction that people could wrap their heads around and ignore larger looming problems.

This cannot be solved by focusing on doing just that one thing and then moving on. It’s like a sweater; if you unravel this thread, a lot of threads come out with it, until you are naked and there is a pile of yarn on the floor beside you. Everything (including us) is connected.

Also, something that works in one context won’t work in another. We introduced plants to solve problems a long way from where they grew as natives; gee, that worked out, didn’t it? We cleaned up the air by slurrying it through water; we cleaned the water by evaporating it into the air. When I worked for Air Quality in Oklahoma, the air and water departments were on different floors, but it was a simple one floor flight to visit. No one from air quality ever consulted with water quality; no one from water quality ever consulted with air quality. Everyone is a specialist in one thing, and doesn’t stop to consider how their one thing impacts everything else.

As a result of my rather meandering college and career path, I have education in a lot of diverse areas. It helps me at least a little when I try to pull what appear to be separate ideas but which are connected in strange, overlapping webs of confusion. When I try to explain to my students about the interconnections, I ask them if they think the economy is complicated (a simple flow chart of what companies are owned by one company is enough to elicit a yes). Then I point out that the economy is extremely simple compared to the ecology. It’s sort of like comparing a brick to the Grand Canyon.

Again – cheat by starting the report with misleading language. I wonder if anyone ever reports this stuff honestly. NBC News:

A transgender teenager was booed at an Oregon sports stadium after winning a race during the state’s high school track and field championship over the weekend.

They mean, of course, a boy was booed after winning a girls’ race.

Multiple videos posted on social media show McDaniel High School sophomore Aayden Gallagher being booed by a crowd of onlookers as she crossed the finish line first in the 200-meter race at the Oregon School Activities Association (OSAA) Track and Field State Championships on Saturday. Boos could also be heard as the teenage runner received her gold medal at the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field in Eugene, the videos show.

Yes, because he’s a boy, with the physical advantages a boy has, ruining a race for the girls by pretending to be a girl. Cheating, in short.

Gallagher’s win quickly went viral on social media, with some critics characterizing her participation in the girls’ division as unfair, arguing that those assigned male at birth are inherently stronger and faster than those assigned female at birth. 

Because they are.

Ok stop right there, three seconds in. “I pride myself on being a teacher who’s very open about her life.”

NO!

Do not pride yourself on that. Be ashamed; very ashamed.

Your job is to teach, not to blather about yourself. Calling it “being open about your life” is just your way of trying to make grotesque vanity and self-absorption sound somehow admirable. Nobody on the planet needs you to be open about your life, and children you’re supposed to be teaching need that the least of anyone.

God I hate narcissism, especially narcissism that brags about itself. “Sit down, I’m very open about my life, so I plan to tell you all about it for the next 5 hours.” Fuck all the way off.

The next 3 seconds are even worse.

“And one of the things I’m very open about is my sexuality.”

NO no no no no no. Bad dog, leave it. Don’t be open, be closed, and be closed like Fort Knox wrapped in chains about your sexuality. Your students don’t need to know and neither does anyone else. Narcissism and self-obsession are bad, don’t you get that? Times ten in a teacher of all things.

God above. I’m trying to imagine any of my teachers “being open about their sexuality.” There aren’t enough cringes in the world.

Don’t get me started on the stupid distracting swords in the ears and baubles in the septum.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The obvious answer never occurs to them.

The Earth could theoretically support a much larger population, but why?

That’s really questionable. That depends on (1) how long we want the population to survive and (2) what sort of quality of life they would have.

A lot of people think if there is land that is not holding people, we can put people there. Unfortunately, they’re wrong. Some of that land is already converted to human uses – farmland, rangeland, industrial land, government land, etc. Some of it can’t support human life. I’ve heard people say we could fill up the Grand Canyon with people. Really? Think again.

Some people seem to think that this is no more than a warehousing problem, that all we have to account for is the volume of space taken up by a human body and as long as we can account for that, the job’s done. It’s all well and good for Hamlet to claim to be a king of infinite space while bound in a nutshell, but Hamlet’s gotta eat. Among other things. The existence of every living human entails the sequestration of a minimum amount of water to drink, and cultivable land, air, and water to grow the food they need to eat (or for infants, food to support its lactating mother at least). At the other end of this process is waste disposal. Add to this the requirements of clothing and shelter, and you need more space and stuff. The global supply chains and production and delivery infrastructure is another stratum of material and energetic needs. And all of this rests on the fundamental planetary systems of physics, chemistry, and biology, geology, climate and biosphere the origins and evolution of which we played no part in, but over which we now hold the power of destruction. To put it in the simplest terms, the more humans there are), the less there is of everything else. It’s a zero sum game. More humans? More cropland. More cropland, less non-human biodiversity. Ultimately the continued existence of humanity is entirely dependent on the continued existence of a base level of everything else. Pushing beyond that level is a Bad Idea that will lead to inevitable disaster.

Our current civilization has arisen (and depends upon) a certain set of stable conditions, primarily those climatic conditions required to grow the food that feeds our numbers. We’ve done a remarkable job (so far) of dodging the Malthusian bullet, but remove that climatic stability (as we’re also currently doing a good job of) , turn agricultural zones into chaotic, continent-sized roulette wheels, and all bets are off. Without reliability, this year’s field turns into next year’s desert, and your growing zone shifts northwards into the Canadian Shield. There goes your food, here comes trouble.

Canada is mostly empty. Physically it’s enormous while in population it’s very small. There’s a reason for that.

Exactly. Try growing wheat on bare continental crust. Where’s your King of Infinite Space now.

The Times is blistering on the ERCC’s treatment of Roz Adams.

Most people will instinctively understand that Adams’ views — and actions — were wholly reasonable. For many of her colleagues, however, they were “transphobic”.

The tribunal’s verdict is scathing. “Normal concepts of natural justice” were ignored, explanations offered by staff at the centre were “a nonsense” and the investigation into Adams “should not have been launched in the first place” — it was clearly motivated by bias and the prejudice that Adams’ views were “inherently hateful”. All this led to a “completely spurious and mishandled disciplinary process” that was “somewhat reminiscent of the work of Franz Kafka”.

And what does ERCC say in response? That it has a sad.

Yet the war on Karens rages on.

Wadhwa, the judge concluded, was “the invisible hand” behind the harassment and discrimination that Adams endured. The chief executive believes that women victims of rape or sexual abuse who object to being counselled by biological males are guilty of “bigotry” and should expect to have their prejudices “challenged”.

Wadhwa is entitled to this view but others are equally at liberty to note that the interests of victims should trump gender ideology and that it is unconscionable that a rape crisis centre should privilege its own ideological certainties at the expense of the vulnerable people it is supposed to support.

The vulnerable women it is supposed to support. It’s not a dirty word.