CNN on the treason hearings:

The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack at the Capitol held its first hearing on Tuesday with harrowing testimony from four officers who shared their stories of being attacked by the rioters.

…

One by one, the four officers who testified Tuesday — DC Metropolitan Police Officers Daniel Hodges and Michael Fanone, and Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn and Sgt. Aquilino Gonell — recounted their gut-wrenching stories about how they were attacked and their lives were threatened on January 6.

Witnesses and committee members were verklempt at times.

H[odg]es described how he was forced to scream out in agony as he was pressed between the rioters and a metal doorframe. Fanone described how he was dragged into the crowd, beaten and electrocuted repeatedly with his Taser.

“I was at risk of being stripped of and killed with my own firearm as I heard chants of ‘kill him with his own gun,'” Fanone said. “I can still hear those words in my head today.”

Dunn’s testimony included detailing pro-Trump supporters hurled racial epithets at him, calling him the n-word, something he said he had never experienced while wearing his police uniform. He described afterward how he sat down with another black officer “and told him about the racial slurs I endured.”

“I became very emotional and began yelling, ‘How the blank could something like this happen? Is this America?'” Dunn said.

Gonell, who served in Iraq, said he was more afraid working at the Capitol on January 6 than at any point in serving a war zone. “I remember thinking to myself, this is how I am going to die, defending this entrance,” said Gonell, who couldn’t hug his wife when he returned home the following morning because he was covered in chemical spray.

Many Republicans in Congress, and Trump and his goons, are pretending it didn’t happen or was no big deal (or in Trump’s case, of course, both, often in the same sentence).

The officers said the rioters they fought against were terrorists. Woven into the stories about how they and their colleagues were attacked — and in some cases badly injured — the officers expressed outrage that the violence launched by pro-Trump supporters was being ignored by the very lawmakers they protected that day.

“I feel like I went to hell and back to protect them and the people in this room. But too many are now telling me that hell doesn’t exist, or that hell wasn’t actually that bad,” Fanone said.

“The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful!” Fanone continued, raising his voice and slamming his fist on the table in one of the most powerful moments of the hearing.

And these are the cops who survived to tell us about it. Not all of them did.

Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, one of the two Republicans appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the committee, asked Gonell specifically about Trump’s comments that the crowd was loving.

“It’s upsetting. It’s a pathetic excuse for his behavior for something that he himself helped to create this monstrosity,” Gonell said. “I’m still recovering from those hugs and kisses that day, that he claimed that so many rioters, terrorists, were assaulting us that day.”

The hit man sent them.

Aaron Rupar is following the January 6 hearing for us.

As the man said – powerful.

Labour is not supporting Rosie Duffield, Labour is instead doing what the trans “activists” and “allies” ordered them to do, and “investigating” her.

LGBT+ Labour said its demand “comes after a pattern of LGBT-phobic behaviour culminating in the endorsement of tweet from a person arrested on terrorism charges which accuses members of the LGBT+ community of being ‘cosplayers’”.

And? Is LGBT+ Labour seriously pretending zero such “members of the community” are cosplayers? Many such members go on at great length about their cosplaying.

Never mind that, heads they win tails we lose.

Update, 6.50pm: A Labour spokesperson said: “The Labour Party takes all complaints of homophobia or transphobia extremely seriously. This complaint will be fully investigated in line with our rules and procedures.” It is understood that the party is looking into the matter.

I wonder if the Labour Party takes all complaints of misogyny extremely seriously.

Kidding; I don’t really wonder; of course they don’t.

Oh the confidence of a man who knows nothing at all about it.

But how do women keep predatory men out of women’s change rooms when we’re not allowed to keep men out of women’s change rooms? They don’t show up with labels on you know.

The poor poor man, and the poor poor men who say they are trans – how terrible it is that all these witchy women won’t just shut up and do what we’re told.

You have GOT to be kidding.

All of a sudden the ugliest most right-wing Republicans care about treatment of prisoners – when the prisoners in question are white guys who did absolutely nothing wrong apart from invading the Capitol, assaulting cops, trying to assassinate members of Congress, and making an energetic attempt to overthrow the government and install a dictator.

It’s enough to make you projectile-vomit.

Speaking of female v male sport clothes…

It’s almost as if the whole point is to…

Check out this complete fuckwit answering demands for specifics and evidence with a tweet of his own which is just another string of assertions. “Show me some evidence!” “Ok here’s me saying things!” Doing this over and over again. The conceit plus stupidity is quite something. Complete fuckwit inexplicably has 248 thousand followers.

“But why should we believe you that Rosie Duffield is so wicked?”

“Because I said so in this other tweet!”

Scene: a sporting goods store in Montana. A guy spots Tucker Carlson and gets in his face.

In a confrontation that swiftly went viral, a Montana man told Fox News host Tucker Carlson: “You are the worst human being known to mankind.”

The man, identified on Instagram as Dan Bailey, posted the video of the encounter in a sporting goods store on 23 July.

…

Fox News’s most-watched host, a key influence on rightwing politics and invective, has recently come under fire for questioning vaccines against Covid-19 while refusing to say if he has had one, and for stoking racial division.

“Questioning vaccines” is putting it politely. Really what he’s doing is encouraging people not to get them, and to tell everyone else not to get them. During a pandemic.

In a statement, Fox News said: “Ambushing Tucker Carlson while he is in a store with his family is totally inexcusable – no public figure should be accosted regardless of their political persuasion or beliefs simply due to the intolerance of another point of view.”

Nonsense. Some public figures should be confronted, and Tucker Carlson is way high up on that list. Vaccinations are not just a “point of view,” they’re life and death. Tucker Carlson is literally telling people to die and to encourage others to die. Yes, he deserves to be embarrassed and irritated in a sporting goods store.

Pink News is trying hard to punish a woman MP who says that only women are women.

LGBT+ Labour are calling for Rosie Duffield to lose the whip and be suspended from the party after an alleged “pattern of LGBT-phobic behaviour” from the Canterbury MP.

Yes the pattern is “alleged” all right, and the allegation is false.

LGBT+ Labour’s statement comes after Duffield liked a tweet by Kurtis Lemaster yesterday (25 July) that stated the word “queer” is being reclaimed by “heterosexuals cosplaying as the opposite sex and as ‘gay’”.

Why would that be a reason to remove the whip and suspend her from the party? They don’t say.

Rosie Duffield’s history of anti-trans activity

That is, her history of saying things Pink News doesn’t like.

The row began at the start of August 2020, when Rosie Duffield insisted that “only women have a cervix” and doubled down on accusations of transphobia by labelling the backlash against her comments a “tedious Communist pile-on”.

Well guess what, only women have a cervix. Men don’t have a cervix. Women don’t have testicles. If saying that is a reason to suspend people from the Labour party that party is not fit for purpose.

PinkNews has contacted the Rosie Duffield, who has repeatedly denied she is transphobic, for comment.

Pink News is a sewer.

Shall we read a little of that oh so edgy paper?

This paper suggests that a purposeful political embodiment of threat opens up and revisits a trans* politics of monstrosity and virality that not only questions but threatens power. Taking seriously the transphobic notion of transness as an endemic threat to feminism, gender, and rights, I present ‘trans* endemics’ as a political and scholarly strategy that asks, what does an embodiment of threat, indeed, being a threat, do as a possible site of survival and resistance for trans* bodies?

With a hey nonnie nonnie and a hotchacha.

But picking our way through the obligatory theory-speak, we find that he’s saying it’s cool for trans people (male ones, he means but doesn’t spell out) to be threatening because by being threatening they threaten power. Yes that’s right, a guy with a knife to the throat of a feminist woman is threatening power. It all makes sense now. The knife to the throat is a site of resistance for trans bodies. What else would it be?

When you see me walk down the street with my long blonde hair, heeled  combat boots, and make up to die for, are you scared? 

No. One, I don’t generally examine people walking down the street that closely. I’m usually thinking about other things, or looking at the view, or both. Two, you sound more ridiculous than scary. Three, get over yourself.

When I walk down the street, I see people who hate me and admire me; want  to kill me, and want to fuck me. They see a threat, and I see a weakness.  

You see people who don’t give two shits about you, that’s what you see.

I am both threat and threatened. I am the monster in your nightmares, I am  the lamb for the slaughter, I am the butcher. Watch me take my knife to your  throat.  

You’re not the butcher, you’re a very silly boy.

TERFs see transness as an endemic threat to feminism, a ‘social contagion’, the  frontier on which they’re going to defeat patriarchy. They don their JK  Rowling masks and shout bloody murder about ‘female erasure’.

Yeah, stupid women, why do they object to the erasure of women? Let’s all put knives to their throats.

Let us harness this parasitic imaginary and suck the cis out of feminism. Let  us be the endemic. Let us exist as the evil twin to queer theory, and let us bleed it dry for all it can offer us. Chu is wrong: trans* is more than ancillary  notion to queer. But do we have to depart from queer entirely? Is trans* even fucking here yet?

If TERFs think trans* is an endemic threat to feminism, let us be the threat to  feminism. We are the endemic, the viral, the toxic onslaught of ideology that  attacks the very core of what you hold dear. We go unnoticed, right up until  the moment they scream for mercy.  

Dude fantasizes about making women scream for mercy, and that’s a “paper” in “gender studies.”

Am I a threat to you? Do I send chills down your spine?  

Picture this: I hold a knife to your throat and spit my transness into your ear.  Does that turn you on? Are you scared?  

I sure fucking hope so. 

Those are the final paragraphs of the paper. Scholarly stuff I’m sure you’ll agree.

Gender studies=threats of violence against women? Who knew?!

“If TERFs think trans* is an endemic threat to feminism, let us be the threat to feminism…

Picture this: I hold a knife to your throat and spit my transness into your ear. Does that turn you on? Are you scared? I sure fucking hope so.”

Matt Thompson, LSE GENDER STUDIES MSc STUDENT

He’s a student taking the MSc in Gender (Sexuality) at the London School of Economics and Political Science, aka LSE.

The quote comes at the end of his paper entitled “Trans* Endemics: Embodying Viral and Monstrous Threat in Times of Pandemic”, presented at a conference (held in April 2021) for the course on Transnational Sexual Politics, taught by Dr Jacob Breslow and Professor Clare Hemmings. The session was called “No Time, No TERFs, No Norms”.

To be fair, one can argue that it’s a metaphor as opposed to a literal threat…but on the other hand we get accused of literal phobia and violence for making reasoned arguments, so I’m not sure the onus is on us to give the benefit of the doubt.

The campaign to bully women out of Labour and feminism and LGB rights continues.

It’s a lie, of course. She didn’t “endorse homophobic & transphobic content online.” She liked a tweet by a gay man on the subject of the word “queer,” which he dislikes. Disliking the word “queer” is hardly homophobic (and has nothing to do with trans anything). Liking a tweet by a gay man who dislikes the word queer has even less to do with homophobia let alone transphobia.

Acting like high-handed twitter “like” cops who hate women.

Another anti-vaxxer dies of Covid:

A California man who mocked Covid-19 vaccines on social media has died after a month-long battle with the virus.

Stephen Harmon, a member of the Hillsong megachurch, had been a vocal opponent of vaccines, making a series of jokes about not having the vaccine.

“Got 99 problems but a vax ain’t one,” the 34-year-old tweeted to his 7,000 followers in June.

But the virus was, and he died of it last Wednesday.

In the days leading up to his death, Mr Harmon documented his fight to stay alive, posting pictures of himself in his hospital bed.

“Please pray y’all, they really want to intubate me and put me on a ventilator,” he said.

In his final tweet on Wednesday, Mr Harmon said he had decided to go under intubation.

“Don’t know when I’ll wake up, please pray,” he wrote.

The praying seems to have failed.

Read with one set of assumptions this is a story of a woman bravely fighting to help her trans son. Read with the opposite set it’s the story of a woman hell-bent on having her daughter mutilated.

In terms of the real, material world that we know something about…the first set of assumptions is fantasy-based.

For over half an hour on a March afternoon, Arkansas legislators, activists and pediatricians outlined reasons why they considered gender-affirming health care dangerous, arguing in support of a bill that would ban transgender minors from accessing that care.

Notice the careful and misleading way CNN frames it (as always) – as “gender-affirming health care.” In reality it’s sex-denying medical malpractice.

The mother from Bauxite had listened as proponents of the bill claimed transgender teens like her son are too young to receive hormone therapies, which ​can help trans boys develop sex characteristics that may reduce their gender dysphoria.

Translation: The mother from Bauxite had listened as proponents of the bill claimed transgender teens like her son are too young to receive cross-sex hormones, which ​can help girls who identify as boys develop male sex characteristics, which may or may not make them feel more at home in their bodies, and which they may come to regret in a few years.

The establishment view now is that cross-sex hormones and surgeries are definitely, absolutely, unquestionably always required for children who think they are the other sex, always beneficial, always problem-free. It’s not even a maybe yes maybe no thing, it’s an absolutely yes thing and you’re evil if you’re not so sure.

At one point, the representative who introduced the bill likened gender confirmation surgery, a treatment that is not part of the standard care for transgender minors, to genital mutilation.

Because it is comparable. It may work out well for some, but the risk that it won’t is massive. It really is a drastic thing to do to a kid, and it’s not evil to point that out.

When Evans got to talk she started with saying the bill could kill her “son.”

“He is now able to live a happy and normal life as his authentic self,” she told lawmakers. “You will be taking that away from him, and it will cause him his imminent death.”

What she’s not keeping in mind is that she doesn’t know how her kid will feel about it in 5 years, 10, 20. The teenage years aren’t the most stable ones.

Evans had anticipated that the bill would pass. She quickly scheduled a mastectomy for her son.

Aka “yeeting the teets.”

Meanwhile another anti-vax propagandist learns the hard way:

A conservative radio host in Tennessee, who repeatedly spread misinformation about coronavirus and mocked vaccines but changed his tune after falling seriously ill, was still fighting for his life on Saturday, weeks after contracting the virus.

Phil Valentine, who hosts a talk radio show on 99.7 WWTN-FM in Nashville, is hospitalized and is receiving supplemental oxygen while in critical care battling COVID pneumonia, his family said in a statement Friday.

I wonder if, while fighting for his life, he’s thinking at all about the people who listened to his misinformation about coronavirus and mockery of vaccines. I wonder if he’s feeling any shame at all about people he put in the hospital with his radio chatter. I wonder if he’s worrying about how many of them are as desperately ill as he is. I wonder if he feels any fucking remorse.

In a blog post in December, days after doses of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine [were] first authorized for emergency use in the United States, Valentine said he was simply following the logic in deciding not to get vaccinated.

“I’m not an anti-vaxxer,” he wrote. “I’m just using common sense. What are my odds of getting Covid? They’re pretty low. What are my odds of dying from Covid if I do get it? Probably way less than 1 percent. I’m doing what everyone should do and that’s my own personal health risk assessment. If you have underlying health issues, you probably need to get the vaccine. If you’re not at high risk of dying from Covid then you’re probably safer not getting it.”

Even if that were true (which it’s not), it overlooks everyone else. Vaccines protect the vaccinated but they also protect the population.

His brother, Mark Valentine, posted an impassioned message to Facebook on Wednesday, suggesting that watching Phil Valentine who was “fighting for his life,” had persuaded him to get vaccinated when he was previously not inclined to do so.

“Having seen this up close and personal I’d encourage ALL of you to put politics and other concerns aside and get it,” he added, noting that he wouldn’t wish his brother’s condition on his worst enemies.

Yes well this is the thing: politics should have nothing to do with it. This is a non-partisan apolitical politics are beside the point issue if ever there was one. It’s only dribbling morons and psychopaths who pretend it’s political.

Apparently hating Democrats is an excellent reason to risk getting the virus and dying.

Many people here and elsewhere in the Southeast are turning down Covid-19 vaccines because they are angry that President Donald Trump lost the election and sick of Democrats in Washington thinking they know what’s best.

Hey people in the Southeast? That’s a really really really stupid reason to risk getting and transmitting the virus. That’s about as stupid as it gets. If you get the virus and die it will be you who’s dead, not the pesky Democrats. If you transmit it to other people and they die they will be the ones who die, not the pesky Washington Democrats. This is called cutting off your nose to spite your face.

The pushback from both state officials and people who refuse vaccination underscores the extent to which the federal government may never be able to convince rural, conservative populations in parts of the South to get the shot.

And it’s not just rural, conservative populations.

How did that happen? I have no idea.

One day last week in Sheffield, Melton and Grabryan were sitting in a large van in front of a local church. Its parking lot displayed a small white sign advertising Covid-19 vaccine to anyone who wanted it.

Only 18 people showed up. It’s been like that for weeks. At one point, Grabryan laid his head back on the van’s cushy seat, shaking it side to side. “I’ve been out to the funeral home for more visitations this year than I have before,” he said. “There’s no one in this area that doesn’t know someone who was affected by it.”

That’s not “hysteria” – it’s just reality.

Louisiana regional medical directors and physicians described a horrific last two weeks marked by overcrowded ICUs, people showing up to emergency rooms after suddenly developing shortness of breath, and Covid-19 patients clinging to their last hours before abruptly letting go and dying. Almost all of these people died because they chose not to get the vaccine.

To punish the Democrats. I don’t think they’ve thought this through carefully.

The state has recorded an average of 2,400 coronavirus cases in the last 14 days, an uptick of more than 230 percent from the two weeks prior. The patients seeking medical help are younger than ever before, between 30 and 60 years old. And they are dying. Two of the doctors at Our Lady of the Lake hospital say they both lost unvaccinated family members to Covid. In the past several weeks, two nurses in the hospital nearby died, too.

…

Doctors and health officials in Alabama and Louisiana say their only hope for getting people vaccinated is if the media outlets that message to these areas, primarily Fox News, start advocating people get the shot, instead of pushing them away from the jab.

But Fox News isn’t going to do that, because…

…I don’t know why. I can’t understand it. They’re promoting death, for the most frivolous of reasons, and I can’t get my head around it.

Alex Massie has a fine blast of rage at the bullying of JKR:

Today, like yesterday and like tomorrow too, the most famous person living in Scotland will probably receive at least one death threat and all but certainly be the lucky recipient of plenty of other promises of violence. And today, like yesterday and probably like tomorrow too, very few people will bother to be concerned about this. There will be no vigil, no statements of support or solidarity, no suggestion this is a monstrous state of affairs to be deplored by all decent people, no indication at all, in fact, that there is anything to see here at all. It will be just another day in the life of JK Rowling.

Even if the Scottish parliament were sitting, no politician would draw attention to the abuse heaped upon Rowling for the crime (sic) of thinking women’s rights and those of trans people may sometimes conflict. Scottish PEN will remain silent and so will the actors and other artists whose fame and fortunes have in large part been made as a result of Rowling’s work. That may be their right, but it is craven nonetheless.

All this is because they declare she is transphobic. No need to establish that she really is; it’s enough to say it.

Last week, drawing attention to one threat made against her, Rowling acidly observed, “Now that hundreds of trans activists have threatened to beat, rape, assassinate and bomb me I’ve realised that this movement poses no risk to women whatsoever”. It is important to note that these threats are not confined to the fetid swamps of social media. At a Trans Pride march in London last month, activists carried signs emblazoned with the messages “Rot in Hell Rowling” and “Kill JK Rowling”.

Progressive yeah?

Nor is there any way of avoiding the obvious truth that Rowling’s thought crimes are exacerbated by her sex. She not only dares to say what she thinks, she has the audacity to do so as a woman. The level of hatred directed towards her is sex-based too. It cannot be explained away by her wealth or celebrity; it is of a type and an obsession that is wearily familiar to many women. To put it simply: there are plenty of men who hate women and it is always a mistake to forget this.

I used to think the hatred had gone underground a little.

Ha.

Many of the loudest voices in the so-called trans-rights movement are not those of trans people themselves but, rather, of men whose self-professed alliance with trans people often seems like a convenient cloak for rampant misogyny. Any woman who dares note this can count on receiving a vastly greater measure of abuse than a man making the same argument might. This has always seemed telling.

The relish with which Rowling’s haters assail her is also revealing. The violence wished upon her may often be a lurid fantasy but such fantasies are themselves acts of male violence. Some men get their kicks in truly miserable fashion.

No no they’re Being Kind.

The Independent tells us that women just love women’s toilets.

We do?????

I must not be a woman then; I don’t love any public toilets, because they’re, you know, public toilets. It’s not exactly a luxury environment, nor is it a breezy bright day in the mountains. It’s a public toilet.

Public spaces where women feel entirely safe can be few and far between: a 2019 report by the Trades Union Congress found one in two women have been sexually harassed at work. Survey data from reviews site FitRated found 71 per cent of women have had an uncomfortable interaction at the gym, and a YouGov survey last year found that 55 per cent of women in London have been a victim of some form of sexual behaviour by a stranger on public transport.

But! But! There is one saving grace.

Enter the women’s bathroom, a place of camaraderie and bonding.

A place of what?

That’s where women have to go to find safety and camaraderie? That’s pathetic.

Whether it’s at the giant loos in Wetherspoons (and those central fountain-style sinks), the toilets at crowded train stations or at your favourite club, complete with a friendly attendant who has lollipops, hair grips and hairspray on hand, the feeling of the ladies bathrooms is unmatched.

Oh yes the toilets at crowded train stations are divine, if you can even find any.

A night out at a club has many highlights; there’s getting ready with friends, pre-drinking in the taxi, the strangers you meet in the smoking area, but there’s nothing quite like the girls you meet in the bathroom. “Those interactions with kind strangers are something that a lot of people, including myself, have been missing since Covid,” Bella says.

Ah well, there’s my problem, I’m not acquainted with this “night out at a club” phenomenon, and don’t want to be. It sounds repulsive. And it kind of has to be repulsive, doesn’t it, if the highlight is hanging out in the toilets?

For Joss Prior, 45, these girls provided a sense of safety on her first Pride since she transitioned to living as a trans woman.

But you were just saying the toilets were the one safe place for women. Joss Prior, 45, is a man.

Never mind, I have to go get dressed up to hang out in the sewer. You wouldn’t believe how much fun we have down there.

Arizona state Senator Wendy Rogers:

An Arizona Republican who called for a new presidential election in the state and the recall of President Joe Biden‘s electors has said she likes two famous Confederate generals but doesn’t like “traitors” to the U.S.

Yo! Confederate generals were traitors. Go back to school and learn what the Confederacy actually was.

Our culture is racist pancake mix and instant rice?

I did not know that.