Ayaan Hirsi Ali bonfires the vanities:

We’ve become so focused on microaggressions in America that we have lost sight of the macroaggressions happening to women around the world.

In my latest book, Prey, I argue that the modern-day feminist movement in the West does not take seriously the concerns of women in working-class communities, many of whom have immigrant backgrounds, and who face a steady rise of sexual harassment and assault on the streets of their own neighbourhoods.

In today’s perverse American culture, however, more attention is devoted to the use of preferred gender pronouns than to the plight of women whose most basic rights — to education, personal autonomy, the right to be present in a public space — are either removed or under serious threat.

That’s not exactly the feminist movement though – it’s part of the feminist movement along with part of the left. There still are some of us feminists (and lefties) who despise the whole idea of “preferred pronouns.”

What will now happen to the women of Afghanistan? When asked if women’s rights will be respected, the Taliban governor of the Andar district in Ghazni province, Mawlavey Kamiil, said: “We assure this to people all over the world, especially the people of Afghanistan: Islam has given rights to everyone equally. Women have their own rights. How much Islam has given rights to women, we will give them that much.” Similarly, a member of the Taliban’s cultural commission, Enamullah Samangani, has promised that women “should be in the government structure according to Sharia law”.

This caveat is important: women will only have the rights afforded to them by Islam. Under orthodox Sharia law, women can inherit property but not at the same level as men (generally half as much); women can testify in court but their testimony is not equal to a man’s word; women have a right to divorce under specific circumstances but not a unilateral right (as men have); a male guardian is essential for a woman; a woman can have one husband whereas a man can have up to four wives.

Yet the texts of Sharia law do not fully capture the brutal reality of daily life for women under a regime like the Taliban’s. In the last period of Taliban rule, which ended with the invasion of 2001, women were forced to wear the burka when outside, if they were allowed to leave the house at all. They were not educated in any meaningful sense (other than, in some cases, the most basic religious education). They were forced into marriages (often as young girls) with men who used them as chattels. Brutal punishments for small transgressions made women little better than slaves.

Yes, the “modernised” Taliban has done some media training, but we should not be fooled. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan will be governed by the same draconian Sharia law as the Taliban regime of the past. Reports are already emerging of girls being taken as child brides, with the Taliban “ordering local religious leaders to give them a list of girls over 15 years of age and widows under 45” to marry their fighters.

Women’s faces are being whitewashed from billboards throughout Kabul. Women in Kandahar have been told not to return to their jobs at Azizi Bank, and that instead “male relatives could take their place”. In a small village in the Faryan province, the Taliban knocked on doors and demanded to be fed. If women protested, they were beaten and even killed.

And nobody asked what their pronouns are.

This took my breath away.

I know the feeling well. Women talking about women’s issues are constantly interrupted and told to talk about trans issues instead, and now this. I’m feckin fuming too, basically all the time.

Scotland’s LGBT community is frightened by the current anti-trans obsession screams the headline on a story by Josh Mennie.

I NEVER picked a “side” – I was born this way. Common decency would argue that a group of people put into the continuous, never-ending, daily cycle of defending their existence should not be simply classed as a “side”. For many of us, this “side” was never a choice. However, undermining LGBT+ rights and inclusion – the other side in the so-called debate – is a choice.

Born what way? Born “identifying as” the other sex? Nobody is born “identifying as” anything. Are there gender dysphoric infants? If so how does anyone know? How do the infants know? Infants don’t know their sex, or their “gender,” so how would they know they’re in the Wrong Body for their real sex?

Nobody puts any people in any never-ending cycle of “defending their existence” – that’s just the usual hyperbole that’s used to try to lash people into feeling ever more lachrymose sympathy for people who spend too much time thinking about themselves.

It never really was the gender debate, though. More like a misinformation war, targeting a particular sector of the LGBT+ community by divide-and-conquer tactics.

No, it’s the other way around. The T has nothing to do with the LG, and should never have been added on. Same-sex attraction and delusions about one’s own sex are completely different things.

Society is being stirred up by hate and discrimination toward a minority group. Looking back in history, every time a group has been demonised like this without challenge, it ends in absolute disaster. We have multiple historical examples of how people’s minds buy into irrational hate campaigns toward a minority grouping. Just open your history books – you won’t need to read very far.

He’s clearly never read very far in any book, because if he had he wouldn’t write so badly. It’s also clear that he knows nothing about history – “it ends in absolute disaster” is the kind of hand-waving you do when you haven’t read the homework assignment. “Can you be more specific?” “Really really bad disaster!”

This is real now. We are at a point in history where LGBT+ organisations, rape crises centres, and almost every organisation which uses trans inclusive language are being hounded to the extent it is impacting the work they do – and for what? Is it because they had the audacity to provide services to people daring to be trans? Trans people have existed for millennia. It shouldn’t be controversial anymore.

They’re not being hounded, and what it’s for is the preservation of women’s rights, including the right to avoid men when they need the rape crisis centre. That’s for what. Narcissistic twerps who think they think they think they’re in the wrong body are not a good reason to force women to share their spaces with men in the wake of sexual violence.

The argument that trans rights are eroding women’s rights is the mantra from people who cannot specify which rights would actually be eroded.

Oh yes we can. The right to women-only spaces and institutions. The right to have jobs and awards and prizes for women continue to be for women, not women and men who claim to be women – just women. The right to talk about women, and to read newspapers and magazines and books that continue to use the word “women” instead of the generic “people.” The right not to be erased from public discourse. The right not to be called “the birthing parent.” The right to have feminist organizations and institutions that are just for women. The right of women to focus on women’s issues instead of constantly being prodded to be more “inclusive” of male people. Rights of that kind. We know all too well what rights we mean.

We laugh as you do, bleed the same, cry as you will.

Yeah blah blah blah you once read a comic book version of The Merchant of Venice, go you. Nobody says you don’t, but that’s not the issue. The issue is your relentless attempts to colonize women and your refusal to take “no” for an answer. There’s a word for that.

Welp. That’s clear enough.

Although this terrorist’s motivation is not yet publicly known, and generally speaking, I understand citizenry anger directed at dictatorial Socialism and its threat to liberty, freedom and the very fabric of American society.

There is no socialism, let alone dictatorial socialism. There’s no such thing as “Socialism’s march.” Centrist Democrats are not socialists, nor are they dictators.

It’s true that the US’s future is at risk, but that’s because of climate change and authoritarian conservatives like Mo Brooks, not because of phantom “socialism” red in tooth and claw.

Surprise surprise the Taliban appear unlikely to protect women’s rights. You don’t say.

Taliban guarantees that women and girls will be able to study and work under their rule have been thrown into doubt after one of their leaders said that the decision would be left to a council of Islamic scholars.

“Thrown into doubt” – who believed them in the first place? Don’t be silly. They included the proviso “as long as/to the extent that they are compatible with sharia.” Sharia is not a human rights respecting system of laws. Sharia perceives women as inferior and as constantly on the verge of spreading their legs for any man who approaches.

“Our scholars will decide whether girls are allowed to go to school or not,” Waheedullah Hashimi, a senior Taliban leader said, less than 24 hours after the group held its first press conference and promised that women would be allowed to work and study.

But they didn’t promise that, they included the “if sharia” bit, at least in all the reporting I saw.

Zabihullah Mujahid, the previously unknown spokesman who chaired the Taliban’s first press conference as the de facto leaders of Afghanistan, had sought to present a more moderate face to the world than that of the regime that ruled with an iron fist from 1996-2001.

Mujahid vowed that the Islamic Emirate, the Taliban’s name for their nascent administration, would “respect the rights of women” before adding the caveat “within the framework of Islamic law”.

Exactly – so what did you think that meant? We already know how they interpret “within the framework of Islamic law.”

He said that women would be allowed to work “with different areas like health and education” but he would not be drawn on whether they would be allowed in public life or leadership positions.

So what did you think that meant?

Hashimi also said the ulema, or council of scholars, would decide what women would be required to wear. “They will decide whether they should wear hijab, burqa, or only a veil plus abaya or something, or not,” he said. “That is up to them.”

That is, up to the council of male religious fanatics, not of course up to the women. The male religious fanatics think women are all ravenous whores who want to fuck every male animal on the planet. There’s no ambiguity in any of this.

Yesterday the International Criminal Court (ICC) sent a shot across the Taliban’s bow, reminding them of the investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan opened last year. The statement amounted to a warning to the Taliban that its leaders could end up in the dock at the Hague.

Karim Khan, the ICC chief prosecutor, endorsed the UN security council’s assessment that there were credible allegations of war crimes in the course of the Taliban’s military offensive.

“These reports include allegations of extrajudicial executions in the form of revenge killings of detainees and individuals who surrendered, persecution of women and girls, crimes against children and other crimes affecting the civilian population at large,” he said.

Khan warned that the court “may exercise its jurisdiction over and investigate any act of genocide, crime against humanity or war crime committed within the territory of Afghanistan since May 1, 2003”.

But can they get any actual Taliban criminals to the Hague? I wouldn’t think so, but I don’t know everything.

Troublesome women object.

The deputy mayor in charge of the pesky women responds with oh no we didn’t.

But it is true – she was sacked after expressing those concerns. After; notice it doesn’t say because. Maybe the Times’s cautiousness wasn’t so excessive after all.

Women don’t matter.

The Times on the sacking of Joan Smith:

A violence against women campaigner has claimed that she was sacked by Sadiq Khan’s administration after expressing concerns about transgender women being allowed into refuges for victims of rape and domestic abuse.

Joan Smith said she was removed by City Hall after raising the issue on behalf of charities funded by the mayor that were said to be concerned about the prospect of vulnerable women and girls having to share the spaces.

Smith also believes that she fell out of favour after calling for improvements in how the Metropolitan Police identified sexual predators in its ranks, and repeatedly highlighting “endemic misogyny” after the case of Sarah Everard, who was raped and murdered by a police officer.

Note the two levels of caution here – not just the claimed and said and believed, but also the after as opposed to because. Having two levels seems a bit superfluous, because surely “after” is enough by itself.

Boris Johnson appointed her when he was mayor of London. The current mayor of course is Labour – yet again reminding us that the left throws women overboard whenever it gets the chance.

Smith has been told her services are no longer required and that her position will be taken over by an official at City Hall.

Which makes no sense, because it’s not an “official at City Hall” kind of job. It’s not a job at all in the sense of being paid or protected – it’s a public service. It’s not a bureaucratic job, it’s a call in the experts job. Joan wrote the book.

She also wrote to Khan last year to tell him that traumatised female victims of male violence should not have to share spaces with male-bodied people (however they identified); he didn’t reply.

Sophie Linden, his deputy mayor for policing, responded to a similar letter that the mayor’s approach to providing services was “led by the needs of victims and survivors on a clear principle of non-discrimination”. 

And by “clear” she means “as obscure as possible.” Discrimination is necessary in some circumstances, like for instance the circumstance in which women need a refuge from male violence. In that case it’s necessary to discriminate between female bodies and male bodies, in order to provide the refuge needed. If someone is mauled by a bear, you don’t put her in a refuge with bears “on a clear principle of non-discrimination.” You discriminate between humans and bears in order to keep them apart. It’s not an invidious form of discrimination, it’s just factual. But the piety of the moment of course is that men must never ever EVER be correctly seen as men if they say they are women. That’s all they have to do, just say. Women, on the other hand, don’t get what they need by just saying, and in fact they’re punished for saying. Joan is being punished for saying. (Not really punished, exactly, since it’s a non-paying job which she did as a public service, so really Khan is punishing the women who would benefit rather than Joan herself – but of course it’s meant as a public rebuke and ostracism and punishment all the same.)

It’s a fucking outrage.

There’s a letter.

My rage thermometer just broke.

She only wrote the book on the subject, literally THE book on the subject.

But please, tell us again how the trans craze in no way impinges on women’s rights.

Imran Khan is delighted at the Taliban win.

A day after the Taliban seized power in Kabul and President Ashraf Ghani fled the war-torn country, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan on Monday said Afghans have “broken the chains of slavery in the country”.

Unless, of course, you think women are people, and included under the label “Afghans.” For women and girls the chains of slavery have very much been re-forged.

“When you adopt someone’s culture you believe it to be superior and you end up becoming a slave to it. It is more difficult to free your mind from mental slavery. Afghans have broken the shackles of slavery,” Imran Khan said.

Maybe. But “someone’s culture” is a complicated thing. Imperialism is bad, colonialism is bad, but drastic suppression of women is also bad. Imran Khan should maybe give that a thought.

I had to go digging to find out what happened.

Hannah is Hannah Brown, who wrote a venomous piece in The Scotsman misrepresenting what For Women Scotland said.

For Women Scotland – which claims to campaign ‘for sex-based rights’ in Scotland – posted on Twitter on August 15: “Horrific regimes and movements like the Taliban also know what same-sex attraction is. They don’t check whether it’s “same gender” attraction like Stonewall and BBC. They hang, behead or shoot men for l[o]ving men and women for resisting rape.”

Yes, and? It’s the truth. The Taliban don’t care how people “identify.” The Taliban don’t terrorize and slaughter people because of their identity, they do it because of their actual physical sex. For Women Scotland doesn’t “claim to” campaign for women and girls, it does so, and their point in the tweet is that women and girls are oppressed, raped, dominated, tortured, and murdered by the Taliban on the basis of their sex – what’s between their legs, not what’s between their ears. What is it that Hannah Brown objects to? Heather knows.

Heather Herbert, LGBT+ Labour Scotland trans officer said: “Using the horrific situation in Afghanistan as a way to attack trans people shows how blinkered FWS are.”

It’s not “attacking trans people” to point out that men are not women. Pointing out how absurd and reactionary the trans dogma is, and how useless it is for actual women in desperate situations, is not “attacking” trans people. It’s not “attacking” Christians to be an atheist or to make atheist arguments, and it’s not “attacking” trans people to be an atheist about the trans belief system. Woo is woo, whether it’s about magic gods in the sky or magic gender in the brain.

“Instead of talking about how the safety of women and girls they appear to be cheering the Taliban on.”

The Scotsman needs better copy editors. Two confusion-making errors in these few short paragraphs so far.

Susan Smith, a spokeswoman for the group[,] said: “Having the language to talk about the plight of women, girls and LGB people in Afghanistan is important.

“The human rights catastrophe is happening to people because of their sex or sexual orientation and it should not be problematic to state that.

“That “activists” have used this to attack us is incomprehensible, and we only took the post down as we wanted the focus to stay on women and girls in Afghanistan.

“We made no comparison to our organisation whatsoever and to try and pretend our tweet was an attack on trans people is rank dishonesty.”

It’s also a big part of what’s wrong with the whole “movement” – this dishonest working up of outrage at obviously true factual claims like “men are not women.”

When it counts.

Well? Which is it?

Stop the presses:

British supermodel Lily Cole has revealed that she identifies as “queer” adding that she sees other labels of sexuality as too “rigid”.

Or to put it less excitingly, a model says she calls herself “queer.” Nobody cares, and life goes on.

In a new interview with the Sunday Times Style to discuss her debut book, Who Cares Wins, the mother of one, 33, said the choice of the word queer allows her to be open while protecting her private life.

Yes indeed, and it allows her to be bold while remaining cautious, it allows her to be frank while remaining bashful, it allows her to be trendy while doing nothing at all.

“If I were living in another country today, my queerness would be a crime,” she said.

If she were living in another country today her femaleness would be a crime. In Afghanistan that crime is punished with a life sentence to house arrest.

In other words, how about being less precious and self-absorbed? How about not playing into this delusion that some minute variation in how she sees herself is worth confiding to a reporter? How about looking past the self instead of obsessing about it?

In the interview, Cole, who was first scouted at the age of 14 and appeared on the cover of British Vogue two years later, also discussed the duality of the modelling world. She said the industry both empowers women while imposing impossible beauty standards.

“I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I feel that fashion is one of the only industries where women are more empowered than men — female models are paid more than male models, the consumers are predominantly female, it is a very female-centric industry. And so, in a strange way, I felt very empowered.”

She can skip identifying as queer, she can identify as thick as a plank, instead. No, being a fashion model is not “empowering.” Well paid for some, but maek u powerful, no.

No, he can’t just pop back in, “reinstated.” That’s not how any of this works.

During an event in Dallas on Sunday that was also attended by prominent peddlers of the QAnon conspiracy theory, [Sidney] Powell suggested Trump could be reinstated as president even now, saying that “it should be that he can simply be reinstated, that a new Inauguration Day is set.”

Yes definitely “it should be that” a wannabe dictator can just magically be “reinstated” despite the whole losing the election thing and the inciting a violent insurrection thing.

According to CNN legal analyst Steve Vladeck, “Powell is just making stuff up. There’s no regulation, rule, statute or constitutional provision that comes within a million light-years of what she’s describing. There is no mechanism for ‘reinstating’ a former President. There is no procedure for setting a ‘new Inauguration Day.’ ”

Well to be fair she didn’t say there was, she said it should be that there is. Totally different thing!

No less stupid though.

Meanwhile in Pakistan –

A woman was violently assaulted, thrown into the air and had her clothes ripped from her while filming a TikTok video in Pakistan, police say.

The unidentified woman said she was filming at a park in the city of Lahore when a crowd of up to 400 hundred men attacked her on Saturday.

Video of the incident circulating over social media shows a woman being forcibly picked up and dragged through a mob of hundreds gathered at Minar-e-Pakistan to celebrate Independence Day, an event marking the end of British colonial rule.

Yay, end of colonial rule, what better way to celebrate than to have hundreds of men assault a woman?

What is colonial rule?

A power imbalance. An act of aggression in which one country forces its will on another country. An intrusion. An assault that continues for decades or centuries. An injustice.

The woman, who is a TikToker in Pakistan, said she attempted to escape from the crowd along with six others when around 300 to 400 people “attacked us” and “assaulted us violently” during the struggle.

The 300 to 400 “people” were men. Newsweek shouldn’t have switched to “people.” The incident isn’t random, it’s what men do to women in many cities.

“People were pushing and pulling me to the extent that they tore my clothes. Several people tried to help me but the crowd was too huge and they kept throwing me in the air,” she added.

Well she’s a woman – women are fair game.

Footage of the incident has since garnered hundreds of thousands of views over Twitter and TikTok, with many expressing their horror, frustration and anger at the assault. The attack has invigorated public debate in the country surrounding women’s rights and protection.

A letter to the WSJ from Mark Boslaugh and Michael Mann:

In “Climate Change Brings a Flood of Hyperbole” (op-ed, Aug. 11), Steven Koonin put himself in the unenviable position of playing down climate change precisely while we are experiencing unprecedented heat waves, storms, fires, droughts, and floods that exceed model-based expectations.

Yes but these are some other kind of heat waves, storms, fires, droughts, and floods, the kind that have nothing to do with climate change.

Mr. Koonin claims that regional projections are “meant to scare people.” But the paper he cites for support addresses the “unfolding of what may become catastrophic changes to Earth’s climate” and argues that “being able to anticipate what would otherwise be surprises in extreme weather and climate variations” requires better models. In other words, our current models cannot rule out a catastrophic future.

Model uncertainty is two-edged. If we’d been lucky, we’d be discovering that we overestimated the danger. But all indicators suggest the opposite. Those who dismiss climate risk often appeal to uncertainty, but they have it backward. Climate uncertainty is like not knowing how many shots Dirty Harry fired from his .44-caliber Magnum. Now that it’s pointed at our head, it’s dawning on us that we’ve probably miscalculated. By the time we’re sure, it’s too late. We’ve got to ask ourselves one question: Do we feel lucky? Well, do we?

The trouble is, though, it’s mostly people who will be comparatively lucky who are doing the decision-making. It’s people who are already adults, most of them adults of long standing. They won’t be around for the worst stuff, and they can’t seem to bring themselves to care enough about a future that won’t have them in it to do the right things now. Everybody’s still stuck in short-term thinking. Humans may be incapable of doing anything else when it requires major upheaval. The people alive now don’t want to stop flying all over the planet and driving big SUVs and building a second house in Phoenix or Miami.

The Glinner Update on Owen Jones’s hatred of women:

No Owen, what is gruesome is your obsessive monstering of feminist women who have an analysis of sex class oppression, and who understand the structure of gender and how it harms women far better than you.

What is gruesome is your complete and unrelenting contempt for women’s expertise and knowledge about their own oppression.

I am not an ‘anti-trans obsessive jumping on the Plymouth tragedy.’

I am a feminist thinker who wrote a PhD on male entitlement, and have published and been interviewed on MRA culture, what it tells us about the structure of misogyny, the relation between male entitlement and male violence, and the narcissistic rage that is visited on women when they do not comply with what men demand from them.

We know you only have your repeated ad nauseam one-note narrative about the evil ‘sadistic’ TERFs. We know in your narrative I can only be a swivel-eyed transphobic loon who hates gay people and is in bed with the far right, even though I am, in fact, an anticapitalist bisexual radical feminist.

We know that you are completely and utterly incapable of granting for one moment that the thousands of thousands of women objecting to the demand that their sex class be erased in law and language might have some grasp of their own political situation that eludes you.

Read it all, it’s all that good.

University of Chicago research finds that it’s worse than we thought.

The researchers assessed how consistently respondents answered certain questions that were written differently but belonged to the same category. What they found was a high degree of stability among answers related to insurrectionist sentiments — equating to well over 10 million people.

“That’s a very worrisome finding,” [Robert] Pape said. “This is not just people randomly ticking boxes, but they’re consistently ticking similar boxes, meaning they are adamant about this feeling.”

Much like the Taliban.

Rather than a dying movement, the team found the insurrectionist sentiments were larger and more dangerous than they believed the movement was in March.

“We would have thought that since June is months after March — which is six months after the insurrection in January — that things would have gone the other way,” Pape said. “Keep in mind: Trump has been de-platformed. There have been over 550 arrests to punish and process, through the criminal justice system, people who participated in the January 6 insurrection.

“There were reasons to think that things were cooling off and dying down or might have been cooling off and dying down. That’s not what we see. We see the opposite.”

Also like the Taliban. Not fading away but growing.

Taliban says women can have all the rights Islam allows.

Yes, we know, that’s not even worth reporting. Of course they say that. All the rights Islam allows to women add up to

ZERO.

The Taliban’s Islam at any rate. Of course people can invent their own Islams, but it’s idiotic or cynical to think the Taliban’s Islam is anything but a life sentence for all women. No freedom no education no choice. Women are objects to be owned by men and beaten or killed if they step out of line in any way.

Taliban say they will guarantee women’s rights under the ‘limits of Islam’ following takeover of Afghanistan

Rich and poor alike are free to live under bridges.

During a Tuesday press conference, a Taliban spokesperson pledged that the new government would protect women’s rights “within the limits of Islam,” according to Sky News and other outlets

Which means no rights at all.