The Mother of Swimmer video is back up.

At 3:45 she talks about calling the ACLU to ask about the obvious conflict here between women’s rights and…whatever this other thing is. She tried to be respectful, she tried to use the Approved Words.

I made clear that I didn’t want to offend, but pleaded that it seemed there was an obvious conflict here, for women who already have so much less opportunity in sports, to now have to give spaces away to individuals who identify as women. I was met with the single most stunning response I’ve ever received on any issue. [deep breath] I was told that the words “biological” and “genetic” have no business being in a discussion around sex and gender, I was told trans women are women, they’re female, they’re girls, no language that minimizes that point should be tolerated. I was told it was an offensive question, my language was out of date. I was told that sex and gender are equally important and that the ACLU is actively removing “sex” from legal documentation

It’s what???

My hair stood on end when I heard that yesterday, too, but I wanted to listen to the whole thing before flailing at the particulars, and then the video was taken down before I got back to it.

The ACLU is actively removing “sex” from legal documentation – in other words the ACLU is actively and energetically demolishing women’s rights, in full knowledge of what they’re doing. It takes my breath away.

I was told that sex and gender are equally important and that the ACLU is actively removing “sex” from legal documentation and legal language. I tried to gently prod at the preposterous arguments I was hearing, and I was met with an absolute brick wall when she concluded with “Let me tell you with certainty, the ACLU will never represent cis women against women.”

Holy shit. Holy shit holy shit holy shit.

Mother of Swimmer didn’t sleep that night.

Fox & Putin & Carlson:

Hours before Putin ordered his forces into Ukraine, Fox News’ biggest star was still praising the Russian president.

Putin’s bellicose threats towards Ukraine and assembling of up to 190,000 troops on the country’s border, was, Carlson said, a mere “border dispute”. Carlson, who played into Kremlin talking points by declaring that Ukraine was “not a democracy”, launched an apparent attempt to humanize Putin.

“Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia?” Carlson said as he then recited a rightwing tip sheet of pet causes.

Putin has never called me a racist either, nor has he called me a terf or a bigot or a CIA agent. Despite that heartwarming generosity and forbearance, I still think Putin’s an evil man and that his invasion of Ukraine is an evil act.

Carlson went on:

“Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity?”

That’s a very far-fetched kind of whataboutery. It’s possible to come up with a long list of bad things Putin isn’t doing, just as one could come up with such a long list for anyone else, but it doesn’t follow that Putin isn’t doing bad things that aren’t on the list. No one can do all the bad things at once.

By the end of the week Carlson’s colorful defense of Putin was being played on Russia 1 and the Kremlin-backed RT television network.

He’s the Lord Haw-Haw de nos jours.

It seems Tucker Carlson that’s TUCKER CARLSON of Fox News is indignant that people are saying he sides with Russia. Oh?

Salon:

Why pregnant people were left behind while vaccines moved at “warp speed” to help the masses

One way to leave pregnant women behind is to refuse to mention them, the way Salon did in the headline.

Clinical trials of COVID vaccines excluded pregnant people, which left many wondering whether to get vaccinated

And in the subhead.

A year ago, there was little to no vaccine safety data for pregnant people like Slade, because they had been excluded from clinical trials run by Pfizer, Moderna, and other vaccine makers.

The Slade in question is of course a woman. Salon knows she’s a woman.

Lacking data, health experts were unsure and divided about how to advise expectant parents. Although U.S. health officials permitted pregnant people to be vaccinated, the World Health Organization in January 2021 actually discouraged them from doing so; it later reversed that recommendation.

The uncertainty led many women to delay vaccination, and only about two-thirds of the pregnant people who have been tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were fully vaccinated as of Feb. 5, leaving many expectant moms at a high risk of infection and life-threatening complications.

Hedging their bets. Sometimes they admit it’s women, other times they pretend it’s people.

More than 29,000 pregnant people have been hospitalized with covid and 274 have died, according to the CDC.

“There were surely women who were hospitalized because there wasn’t information available to them,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Vaccine developers say that pregnant people — who have special health needs and risks — were excluded from clinical trials to protect them from potential side effects of novel technologies, including the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines and formulations made with cold viruses, such as the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

But a KHN analysis also shows that pregnant people were left behind because including them in vaccine studies would have complicated and potentially delayed the delivery of covid vaccines to the broader population.

The incoherence persists.

A growing number of women’s health researchers and advocates say that excluding pregnant people — and the months-long delay in recommending that they be immunized — helped fuel widespread vaccine hesitancy in this vulnerable group.

“Women and their unborn fetuses are dying of covid infection,” said Dr. Jane Van Dis, an OB-GYN at the University of Rochester Medical Center who has treated many patients like Slade. “Our failure as a society to vaccinate women in pregnancy will be remembered by the children and families who lost their mothers to this disease.”

It goes on and on the same way – it’s a long piece – saying mostly “people” with an occasional “women” thrown in to confuse us. The campaign to erase women from reporting and eventually the language continues.

Better hide those mega-yachts…

Oops!

Even now the ACLU is promoting its stupid all-trans all the time babble on Facebook. They’re obsessed. I’ll never understand why. Maybe because they missed out on the earlier struggles and want to experience something like them? But it’s a hiding to nothing, because the trans issue isn’t like Civil Rights or feminism or lesbian and gay rights or the peace movement. They want it to be but it isn’t. One it’s a tiny fraction of any population, and two it’s fictitious, and three it’s unavoidably narcissistic. People who aren’t narcissists don’t consider their personal discomforts worth a political campaign, let alone one that destroys the rights of women and lesbians and gays. It just doesn’t work to try to gin up political fervor about bratty narcissists telling other people what pronouns to use.

Anyway. Their wisdom:

Trans women are women.

Bad beginning. No they’re not. And as always, it’s just women they push around. They don’t bother to say Trans men are men. New boss exactly like the old boss – and they can’t even see it.

“Cisgender women should be concerned whenever an alleged concern for ‘protecting’ our well-being is invoked to justify exclusion.” — Shayna Medley & Galen Sherwin

Exclusion of what though? Of men from the class “women.” That is, of course, not “exclusion” in any pejorative sense, it’s just reality. It’s not “exclusion” to pat the dog instead of the table or the window, it’s just knowing what is what. There is nothing invidious about “excluding” men from the category “women.” The ACLU can keep its thoughts about “protecting” women to itself, because they’re bad and destructive.

Trans people have always been here.

They don’t know that. How would they know that?

“Trans people are not new. We have always been here. As long as there’s been recorded human history, we have always existed. But we have been written out of the human story — and when you come from a community that is without a full range of possibility models, it raises the question, in yourself as well as others, of whether or not you deserve rights or a place in society.”

If trans people have been written out of the human story, how do they and the ACLU know they’ve always been here?

You couldn’t make it up. “We’ve always been here, and we know this because there’s no record of it.”

It’s sad. There isn’t much time left, and apparently what little there is is going to be spent replacing women with petulant men talking about their pronouns.

Jon Pike flagged this up as a must listen and boy is he right.

I took the deep breaths during more than before, but I made it through.

I might make “mother of swimmer” a new swear.

Not playing games any more.

Climate breakdown is accelerating rapidly, many of the impacts will be more severe than predicted and there is only a narrow chance left of avoiding its worst ravages, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said.

And, one more item, does it look as if anyone is doing enough to avoid its worst ravages? Hell no.

Even at current levels, human actions in heating the climate are causing dangerous and widespread disruption, threatening devastation to swathes of the natural world and rendering many areas unliveable, according to the landmark report published on Monday.

As we keep noting – it’s already happening. Not soon, but now.

In what some scientists termed “the bleakest warning yet”, the summary report from the global authority on climate science says droughts, floods, heatwaves and other extreme weather are accelerating and wreaking increasing damage.

And they’re not all happening Somewhere Else.

Allowing global temperatures to increase by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, as looks likely on current trends in greenhouse gas emissions, would result in some “irreversible” impacts. These include the melting of ice caps and glaciers, and a cascading effect whereby wildfires, the die-off of trees, the drying of peatlands and the thawing of permafrost release additional carbon emissions, amplifying the warming further.

And that last item is a big unknown, because the scientists don’t have enough data yet.

The report says:

• Everywhere is affected, with no inhabited region escaping dire impacts from rising temperatures and increasingly extreme weather.
• About half the global population – between 3.3 billion and 3.6 billion people – live in areas “highly vulnerable” to climate change.
• Millions of people face food and water shortages owing to climate change, even at current levels of heating.
• Mass die-offs of species, from trees to corals, are already under way.
• 1.5C above pre-industrial levels constitutes a “critical level” beyond which the impacts of the climate crisis accelerate strongly and some become irreversible.
• Coastal areas around the globe, and small, low-lying islands, face inundation at temperature rises of more than 1.5C.
• Key ecosystems are losing their ability to absorb carbon dioxide, turning them from carbon sinks to carbon sources.

And still we’re not really doing anything.

We’re just a primate species, just great apes who have developed some impressive talents, but it turns out those talents have empowered us to destroy our own and everyone else’s ecosystem, without empowering us to stop.

Not only are we cooking the planet, we’re also funding Putin’s war on Ukraine.

The war in Ukraine should encourage the world to accelerate the switch to renewable energy, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has said.

…

A quarter of the European Union’s petroleum oil imports come from Russia, along with almost half its gas.

The irony that European nations are effectively paying for the war in Ukraine has not been lost on the continent’s leaders.

The panic that Putin’s actions caused in energy markets has only increased the profits Russia makes by driving up the price we all pay for energy – which is one reason we are already seeing a dramatic pivot to alternative supplies.

Maybe he’s doing it to drive the prices up.

Quack demands Fauci debate him, complains when Fauci fails to take him up on the attractive opportunity.

GOP Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz, more commonly known as Dr Oz, is facing backlash from the medical community after his sustained attacks on infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci in his campaign ads.

Oz got his celebrity-start by appearing on Oprah Winfrey’s show. He’s a woo-peddler. Fauci has other things to do.

Appearing on Newsmax last Thursday, Dr Oz said he wanted to debate Dr Fauci on vaccine mandates and natural immunity from coronavirus infections. “He is a petty tyrant. He got Covid wrong. He continues to get it wrong,” Dr Oz told the outlet.

In a separate tweet that he posted along with his campaign ad video, Dr Oz said: “It’s past time Fauci faces the fact that he got Covid wrong. So, doctor to doctor – let’s debate. This Doctor is in, are you?”

In what though?

Dang, that’s insulting.

A lesbian conference next week:

The 25th Lesbian Lives Conference will take place in University College Cork, Ireland from 4th-5th March 2022. The LGBT+ Staff Network of University College Cork, in conjunction with the community organisation LINC and scholars from University College Dublin, Cambridge University, and University of Brighton Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender Research, are delighted to host the conference.  

Great! Something for women for a change. Well done University College Cork.

The theme for the 2022 Lesbian Lives Conference is Solidarity.  

The confirmed Keynote Presenters at the Lesbian Lives 2022 Conference are:  

– Professor Susan Stryker, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Institute of LGBT Studies, University of Arizona   

Oh. Wait. Susan Stryker is a man.

He’s a man and he’s the first item on the list. They’re importing him all the way from Arizona – for a lesbian conference.

The insults just keep rolling in.

The “who cares?” people were saying “who cares?” in response to Peter Boghossian for one. I’m not a fan of Peter Boghossian’s, but this time I’m on his team as opposed to theirs.

Well, it shows it’s possible to agree on some of them, some of the time – but as I mentioned, there are people being ostentatiously indifferent and scornful. But broadly speaking, yes, there are some things that very few people will celebrate or shrug off with “I don’t care and neither should you.”

I’m seeing a weird little pocket of people on Twitter bragging about how much they don’t give a shit about Ukraine and how fake it all is and how people who are talking about it are just ____ – you know, showing off, virtue signaling, following the woke herd, that kind of thing.

Well, first of all, nukes.

Second – why wouldn’t we give a shit? Why is it wrong to give a shit, and enlightened not to?

I suppose one answer could be that we can’t do anything about it, and paying attention and giving a damn is just self-indulgent or showing off or whatever. But I don’t think that’s right. I think paying attention and giving a damn does matter to the people who are having to live through this. Material help matters more, of course, but then material help starts with giving a damn, so the two are not opposites or either-or. And I think the people huddled in their basements listening to the shells explode do need to know we’re not singing a happy tune all the while.

Also, though…trying to dig a little harder…I don’t want to be the kind of person who doesn’t give a shit. Now that I say that I think there’s a philosopher or psychologist or someone who says that’s central to morality: not wanting to be the kind of person who doesn’t have any. I wonder who. Jonathan Haidt? Joshua Green? Patricia Churchland? I’m not remembering. Maybe it’s all of them, maybe it’s common knowledge. Anyway I don’t. Seeing people make callous jokes about Ukraine makes me feel sick. I suppose you can say that’s a self-regarding reason for caring therefore you don’t actually care at all, but…I still don’t think so. I think not wanting to be cruel or callous is…better than wanting to.

India Willoughby has no shame.

I read this anorexia-child celebrity story in the Guardian because anorexia interests me, and the intersection of it with women, celebrity, fashion, conformity, the pressures on women to be hot and emaciated both at once interests me a lot. So I read down and read down and – get to this ironic juxtaposition.

Gee, I wonder why so many young women are anorexic. I just can’t figure it out, can you?

Originally a comment by Pliny the In Between on Special Alert.

My actual earliest childhood memory is of my parents whispering to each other when they thought my brother and I were asleep. Dad consoling my mother that being as we lived only a handful of miles from the US Navy’s primary ordinance depot that building a fallout shelter was probably a waste of time. That was during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I was staying at my grandma’s house the night that Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia.

I was in high school when Nixon set our strategic alert status to its highest level since the Cuban Missile Crisis in response to Soviet threats to intervene in the 1973 Arab Israeli War.

I scared the shit out of my civics teacher when my semester oral report was on the effects of a 5 megaton thermonuclear blast over our city center (it showed that our school was in the zone of ‘dead or to die later’).

From age 5 to 1991, I was quite sure that nuclear war was one of the three ways from which I was likely die.

Then the wall fell. Like millions I sighed with relief. Unlike most I lobbied my representatives to embrace a new Russia and do everything to find common ground and mutual advantage. The Cold War hadn’t been won – we’d just all survived it by the skin of our teeth.

Now we are right back where we (I) started – once again on the brink. Taken there by a handful of hateful old men. On the brink of the end because of one man’s greed and hatred. We must find a better way. We must find a way that prevents a handful from murdering us all. But all that hangs in the balance, it would seem, as to whether there is some senior Russian official or general who is as scared as the rest of us and says not on my watch.

As a flying horse, I know it’s not just horses that get Streptococcus equi.

As a nonbinary person, I know it’s not just women who get endometriosis

She doesn’t know that though, because she can’t, because it’s not true. Of course it’s “just” women who get endometriosis, on account of how it’s women only who have the endometrium. Just as you can’t have a broken leg unless you have at least one leg, you can’t have endometriosis if you don’t have a uterus. Men don’t have them; women do.

Imagine going to a specialist doctor and looking around the waiting room to see everyone is a different gender to you. They’re all staring at you, wondering why you’re there.

On the posters, in the magazines, behind the desk, in the chairs around you – no one looks like you.

As a nonbinary person with symptoms of endometriosis, this is my reality.

The article is accompanied by a photo and she doesn’t look like a man. She doesn’t even look very butch. She doesn’t look “feminine,” but come on now, so don’t lots of women, and that doesn’t make them some baffling third sex.

Around the same time my periods began to incapacitate my normal day-to-day life – when I was in university in Boston – I started to realise I was nonbinary (not strictly ‘girl’ or ‘boy’ but somewhere in the middle).

How does one “realise” such a thing? By spending too much time on Tumblr?

Experiencing menstruation as a trans person is bizarre because all of the horrible experiences that some cisgender women claim ‘make them a woman’ are experienced by trans men and nonbinary people daily.

That’s because trans men are women and some “nonbinary” people are women.

Also women don’t “claim” that menstruation “makes” us women, we just understand that it’s women who menstruate.

Even some trans women get monthly period cramps after being on hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

They may get some kind of cramping, but it ain’t period cramps.

Her story is sad, but not because she’s “non-binary.”

It’s all about _______

I do love the low carb one, I have to say.

Putin is allowed to do this because white privilege.

Bicycles forevaaaaaaaaaaaa

Putin has again threatened to use the nukes.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the Russian military to put its nuclear forces on “special alert” – the highest level of alert for Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces.

Speaking to top military officials, including Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, he said Western nations had taken “unfriendly actions” towards Russia and imposed “illegitimate sanctions”.

And what does he think he’s doing? Other than taking “unfriendly actions” toward Ukraine? And imposing “illegitimate” bombing and shooting and destroying?

But don’t worry, he’s just threatening to use them, not actually saying he’s going to.

The very public shift to high alert status is a way for Moscow to send a warning. Moving to alert status is likely to make it easier to launch weapons more quickly. But it does not mean there is a current intent to use them.

And? It also does not mean there is not a current intent to use them, let alone a future intent to use them.

It doesn’t help that he’s gone insane.