Not in your case though.

Sometimes, maybe, but in your case? No. Telling an indifferent world what “your” pronouns are, and prefacing it with “Your Saturday reminder” as if we’d asked you – that’s attention seeking, and also attention expecting, for a completely fatuous detail about how you see yourself and your plans to make us see you the same way. Of course it is. Talking about yourself when no one asked is always attention seeking to some degree. Some people can be interesting or informative or inspiring when doing that, but it takes a lot of qualities you don’t seem to have.

Ida from space:

It’s Katrina all over again, but worse.

The storm surge is what was so lethal in 2005 – it filled the basin of New Orleans like filling a bathtub, and that’s why so many people drowned. It will happen again because the hurricane developed too quickly for a complete evacuation.

And sheltering in place is grim advice in N.O. in a hurricane because much of it is below sea level, so “in place” means underwater. This is going to be another nightmare.

Owen Jones is happy though.

Note: the LGB Alliance is not “anti-trans rights.” It doesn’t want to take human rights away from trans people – of course it doesn’t. It opposes new, made-up “rights,” claimed rights that aren’t rights at all: to be “accepted” as whatever one claims to be, to be “validated” as X when one is Y, to be “included” as LGB when one is straight. Trans rights are indeed trans rights, because they’re not rights at all.

This isn’t just wordplay or pedantry, because it’s central to the war on terfs. We’re not arguing for the persecution or isolation of trans people, we’re arguing against our own persecution and isolation. We’re arguing for our ability and our right to recognize men as men when it’s relevant. That doesn’t take any actual right away from trans people, it just denies them the right to impose a personal fantasy on the entire world.

And of course Owen Jones is completely wrong to say the LGB Alliance doesn’t represent the exact people it does represent.

More on the Manchester Pride bullying via JL at the Glinner Update:

Alexander Braham was at Manchester Pride, wearing a hat and t-shirt bearing the LGB Alliance logo. While he was attending a march to protest cuts to LGB+ charities, his hat was stolen and he was abused and attacked to such an extent that police had to remove him for his own safety.

All over Twitter, people were congratulating themselves that a gay man was subjected to this violent and abusive behaviour and forced to leave a Pride event.

It seems that April Preston was one of the ringleaders. She is the Liberal Democrat candidate for Withington in the forthcoming local council elections and a member of the Lib Dem Federal Board.

Preston’s Twitter is currently locked.

Earlier this year she authored an open letter about trans rights in which she stated, “Any suggestion that trans women be segregated or restricted on the basis of their trans identity is a transphobic one… Trans women have the same right to exist in women’s spaces as any other woman.”

Her concern for ‘marginalised women’ clearly doesn’t extend to the women in prison, the women in domestic violence refuges or the women in rape crisis centres who desperately need single-sex spaces. Nor does it extend to the women whose faith or culture makes it impossible for them to share intimate spaces with males.

Not to mention the women who just don’t fucking want to, which I think is probably around 99% of us.

Oops.

A conservative radio host from Florida who criticised coronavirus vaccination efforts – and called himself “Mr Anti-Vax” – before contracting Covid-19 himself has died, his station said on Saturday.

Another crappy first sentence. Allow me. “There’s this radio host in Florida who criticized Covid vaccination efforts, calling himself ‘Mr Anti-Vax.’ Then he contracted the virus himself, and he died yesterday.”

Anyway. However you word it, don’t be that guy. Don’t campaign against vaccinations during a pandemic, and if you won’t refrain for moral reasons, refrain so that you won’t look like a pathetic jackass if you get Covid and die.

Annnnd

So now there’s a video, and my Twitter is all over it.

I’m not sure if he was rescued or expelled. Either way, he was mobbed and screamed at because he was wearing a shirt that mentions a lesbian gay alliance. So now lesbians and gays are evil? At Pride?

No, they would say. No, of course not, it’s the missing inclusion of our trans siblings that makes the screaming necessary.

But why? Trans isn’t the same thing, so why can’t some people focus on the lesbian and gay part?

Never you mind. They just can’t, that’s all.

More bragging about bullying a gay man out of Manchester Pride March:

Now LP is complaining that some people are not impressed by her “reminder” that she has special luxury pronouns.

(Calling it a “reminder” is itself conceited and self-important, because it assumes the entire world was informed of her pronouns. [I see I’ve already “misgendered” her three times, only now it’s four – it wasn’t on purpose, it’s just automatic, which is one major reason I don’t do luxury pronouns: it’s way too much effort.] Not everyone was informed, not everyone is on the Laurie Penny News list.)

Media? Are tweets “the British media”? I think of “the media” as being professional, i.e. produced by people whose job it is. Twitter is just anybody who wants to say things saying things.

Because calling a person the name the person is called is a normal social thing to do, plus it’s right there on her tweets so if people are tweeting about her tweets there’s her name, right in front of them. It’s simple. Remembering not to call her “her” is not simple that way. As I said: it’s an effort.

It gives them something to talk about though. (Who? Them who? The people of pronoun.) Maybe that’s all there is to it – something to talk about, and a way to extort extra attention without having to be interesting.

Charming.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha WHAT PART OF A WOMAN IN LOVE WITH A MAN DON’T YOU GET AS BEING TWO LESBIANS IN LOVE????????????

This is just some commercial promotion, but worth pointing at anyway.

That’s so sweet, but…

What “gender options”??? What gender options are there on commercial airlines? There aren’t any. They don’t bring you 10 miniature pretzels in a tiny bag that is either pink or blue, they don’t bring you anything that is either pink or blue, so what “gender options” are they talking about?

This shit gets stupider by the day.

Success! This is exactly the goal.

Yesssssssss – because if you endeavour to commit someone’s Special Pronouns to memory, that means you’re devoting extra time and attention and effort to that someone. Achievement unlocked! Getting people to pay extra attention to Self is the goal here and it’s working!

Sarah Ditum on Cleese and comedy and censorship:

What has John Cleese ever done for free speech? Absolutely nothing, according to the reaction to this week’s announcement that the 81-year-old comedian and actor would be fronting a documentary for Channel 4 about cancel culture. The show, which will “explore why a new ‘woke’ generation is trying to rewrite the rules on what can and can’t be said”, was met with derision before it had even been broadcast.

…

The sneering also came from fellow comics, the stand-up Robin Ince among them. Ince, 52, also seemed to think that Cleese’s age disqualified him from having an opinion: “Somewhere in middle age, the ‘young people nowadays’ gene is turned on,” he tweeted.

Which is hilarious because in fact no new idea introduced by young people is ever wrong or destructive. That’s a law of nature.

What does earn Cleese the right to an opinion is the fact that he’s spent his whole career bumping up against the limits of the sayable in comedy. That’s most obviously true in the case of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which came out in 1979. Even though the Biblical satire was explicitly not about Jesus (it was about a man who gets mistaken for the Messiah), it succeeded in offending Protestants, Catholics and Jews with roughly equal force. The Rabbinical Alliance of America told Variety: “Never have we come across such a foul, disgusting, blasphemous film before.”

The various bans, protests and attacks that targeted the film didn’t stop it from being a success, but they did make things fairly unpleasant for the Pythons. Even before Cleese found himself at the centre of this furore, he had made a concrete commitment to liberal values by instigating The Secret Policeman’s Ball in 1976, a comedy benefit for Amnesty International, which was then focused on supporting prisoners of conscience.

…

After all this, it must be baffling to find yourself positioned as the enemy of all that’s right and good. Cleese has been consistent in his principles, right through to last year when he signed a letter in support of JK Rowling’s right to speak about gender. What’s changed is that free speech is no longer as valued as correct speech. A whole strand of cultural criticism today judges comedy first on whether it’s making jokes about the right things, and a distant second on whether those jokes are funny.

I think “correct speech” should be “correct” speech – I think there should be scare quotes on the “correct” bit, because the issue isn’t truth but approval. In a great many contexts incorrect speech is and should be less valued than free speech, because there are a great many contexts where truth does matter. (Such as? Pandemics. Journalism. Science. Medicine. History. Stuff like that.) The joke with the “gender” issue is that it’s riddled with lies and fantasies, along with bullying threat-laden demands for “respect” for those lies and fantasies.

Really?

I don’t believe it. “Women with penises” were not a topic, much less an entity, in the 80s. That insulting oxymoron is only a few years old. She can wink wink all she wants to but it’s still bullshit.

Trump the treasonous insurrectionist is claiming he’s immune from everything because “executive privilege” – which I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to work, at all. I think its basic justification is so that a current president – a president actually in the job at this moment in time – can do the job without distractions or interference. There are problems with that too, as we saw for four years, but I think it is at least limited to that specific situation. It’s pragmatic, as opposed to the bestowal of a dukedom. I don’t think it makes Trump forever a Sacred Body.

Trump on Wednesday threatened to invoke executive privilege in an effort to block the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot from obtaining a massive tranche of documents it’s demanding from several US government agencies, despite his successor having the ultimate say over whether the information can be shared.

“You can’t look at the evidence that I’m a treasonous insurrectionist, because I used to have the job for reals.” Nah, that’s not right.

At least I certainly hope it’s not.

Yes, sure, the Nazis, the actual Nazis, with the concentration camps, the persecution and slaughter of leftists, labor unions, the disabled, the old, the sick, the mentally ill, the Romani (“gypsies”), lesbians and gays, and of course nearly all the Jews in Europe.

India Willoughby is not going to be sent to a concentration camp, much less an extermination camp. Nothing is going to happen to India Willoughby at all, except that fewer people will accept his claim to be a woman. That’s all. It’s not lethal, it’s not torture, it’s not confinement, it’s not forced labor, it’s just knowing a man is a man.

Why are we told we should exhibit more “kindness” toward people who are so deluded about their own importance that they claim to be victims of Nazism because a Lesbian Gay charity doesn’t endorse their fantasies?

As Anatole France remarked, the rich and the poor alike are free forbidden to sleep under bridges.

With two girls in elementary school and a mother who is a teacher, the Dringenburg household in a Milwaukee suburb had been joyous and excited about back-to-school season — until this year, when the Waukesha School District board decided to opt out of a federally funded program that would give free meals to all students regardless of family income.

Ah yes, let’s not have free meals in schools, because then poor children would have the energy to do well in school just as rich children do, and we can’t have that.

The board voted June 9 to go back to the pre-pandemic National School Lunch Program, which offers free and reduced-price lunches to students who apply and receive federal money for them. Waukesha is the only eligible school district in the state to eschew the funding.

Never underestimate the joys of spite.

In June, the board voted to forgo the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service’s extension of the Seamless Summer Option, a program to provide free meals to all students through June 30, 2022, because the pandemic was expected to burden some children’s nutrition.

Of course it was and is. People are losing jobs because of the pandemic, or having to leave jobs because the kids aren’t in school, or having other pandemic-related money-drains that pinch their ability to buy good nutrition.

Chrissy Sebald, a soccer coach and foster parent, was overjoyed last year with the district’s decision to give a free meal to all students. It meant her foster children could avoid some awkward conversations.

“Kids called them out for getting the different meals and asked them, ‘Why do you get lunch every day?’ ” she said. “When it was free for everyone, you never had to have that conversation because everyone had access to it. So I really appreciated that it evened out the playing field in a way.”

The reversal, she said, was unfair — especially to those families who live paycheck-to-paycheck but do not qualify for the aid.

But sadism is so much fun.

Julie Bindel agrees that the UK and US are not Afghanistan, but disagrees that that means feminism has finished its work and can go away now.

For example, of the tiny minority of rapes that are actually reported to police, only 1.4 per cent are charged by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). In 2018/2019, charges, prosecutions and convictions for rape in cases brought by the CPS fell to their lowest levels in more than a decade.

That’s a really astounding statistic. I keep seeing it and keep clutching my head and wondering how the fuck. Rape is in effect legal.

The past decade has seen a shift towards what I call “feminism for men” or “fun feminism”. Currently, what passes for feminism in universities and other elite settings is anything but. Prostitution and pornography have been rebranded as “choice” and “empowerment”, and harmful and degrading sexual practices have been rebranded as “kink” and liberating for women.

I think of it as Greta Christina feminism, aka not feminism at all.

I decided to write my latest book, Feminism for Women, in order to explore how and why things seem to be going backwards for women, and make suggestions to get back on the road to liberation in the context of a vicious, misogynistic backlash against our hard-won rights.

I love the title.

So easy for them to say.

No danger to women, across the board – well, he should know.