Without legal permission

Nov 18th, 2024 8:55 am | By

We need some clarity on the details.

President-elect Donald Trump on Monday confirmed he would declare a national emergency to carry out his campaign promise of mass deportations of migrants living in the U.S. without legal permission.

Interesting ambiguity there. Which without legal permission? Migrants living in the US or Trump carrying out mass deportations?

Already, he’s tapped several immigration hard-liners to serve in key Cabinet positions. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem was picked to be homeland security secretary, pending Senate confirmation. Former Acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan was named “border czar.”

Homan previously discussed his vision for mass deportations, saying they would first concentrate on expelling criminals and national security threats. He didn’t rule out deporting families together.

It’s not clear how they plan to distinguish among criminals and non-criminals. It’s not clear how they will know which are which, or even how they think they will know that.

There are an estimated 11 million unauthorized migrants living in the U.S. without legal immigration status. Removing them could cost billions of dollars per year, according to estimates from the American Immigration Council.

If that’s true, why not issue them legal immigration status? Why have it both ways? Having it both ways just gives the trumpists ammunition.



Hackles in up position

Nov 18th, 2024 8:42 am | By

With little consolation anywhere we have to take some from internecine quarrels.

Elon Musk weighed in over the weekend on the increasingly tense battle for Treasury secretary in the second Trump administration—and that has reportedly raised the hackles of some Trump advisers, who worry his influence might have grown too large.

Oh surely not. Musk is a very cautious humble self-effacing guy.

The Washington Post reported that Musk’s endorsement via social media of Howard Lutnick, who is co-leading the Trump transition team, could add confusion to the process. One adviser suggested to the Post that Musk was acting as a “co-president” and could be overstepping his advisory role with Trump.

Not possible. He’s a genius. There’s no such thing as overstepping when you’re a genius.

Musk played a significant role in Trump’s re-election, putting over $100 million of his own money into a political action committee focused on Trump and appearing at several rallies.

This is good. Bad men with way too much money are the ideal people to run a government.



Don’t spread misinformation she wrote

Nov 17th, 2024 2:39 pm | By

Yet another iteration of Margaret Atwood v the wicked gender critical women.

The evidence for it is as always promptly forthcoming.

Audience: She did not delete them.
https://twitter.com/AjaTheEmpress/status/1858208854456127737

The good old slug sex :) defense.

https://twitter.com/cyberfrontier/status/1858095143494033846

It has always surprised me, from her. She’s been allergic to smelly little orthodoxies throughout her career, yet somehow this extremely smelly one gets a pass. Why? Why has she always resisted being called a feminist but not resisted signing that utterly stupid letter?
https://twitter.com/yatakalam/status/1858108974660219128
Eeeeuch.


In two hours flat

Nov 17th, 2024 11:39 am | By

Sometimes speed is not the goal. Sometimes it’s downright dangerous. That’s why speed limits exist.

Trump is zooming.

President-elect Trump has set a modern record for staffing his government, with 12 Cabinet-level appointments in the 12 days since the election.

That’s five times faster than President Biden made the same number of picks for his administration — and four times faster than Trump’s pick for his first administration, according to calculations for Axios by David Marchick, dean of the Kogod School of Business at American University and an expert on presidential transitions.

And it’s confirmation that he’s a reckless brainless wrecking ball.

Trump either “has the best and most efficient transition ever,” Marchick said, or “is blowing up all norms and making picks on the fly without vetting, research or Senate consultations.”

And it could not be more obvious which explanation is the right one.



Few people, after all

Nov 17th, 2024 11:11 am | By

Alex Massie writes a think piece about whatisawoman without much apparent thinking.

Few people, after all, hold a GRC. Nevertheless the theory also matters, not least because expanding the definition of woman, and indeed, that of man, creates a cascade of further questions. The distinction between people who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and hence qualify for a GRC and those we might dub “lifestyle” trans people is both important and, I would add, a means of protecting GRC-holders themselves.

What is legal, after all, is not the same as what is decent. The social reality of trans people and their rights to dignity and respect, including being addressed and, typically, treated as they would wish to be, is not altered by the court’s ruling one way or the other. There are worse things than indulging a material fiction and most of the time, in most circumstances, little if any harm can come from doing so.

Notice anything missing?

What about the social reality of women? What about women’s rights to dignity and respect? Since when is it a “right” for people to be “addressed as they would wish to be” in the sense of “addressed as something they are not/the opposite of what they are”? Since when is it a “right” for men to be addressed as women?

That’s not a genuine right. It’s a pseudo-right, a neo-right, an invented right, a right too many. There is no “right” to lie about yourself; in many official contexts it’s a crime. Playful fictions that don’t make any difference to anything are one thing, and men insisting with menaces that women have to pretend the men are women are very much another.

I’m tired of men being flippant about this issue that doesn’t do them any harm.



Maybe you do, but we don’t

Nov 17th, 2024 3:44 am | By

I honest to god thought this was just one more Twitter fool mouthing the platitudes, but it turns out she’s an MP and government minister (in Canada…of course).

How many weeks days months do trans people get???

It’s certainly way more than anyone else gets. Other marginalized or neglected or persecuted sets of people get one day if they’re lucky. Trans people The trans communinny get multiple days, weeks, months. Why is that?

Will they ever grasp that all this overkill simply fosters annoyance at best and hostility at worst? Skip the luxury pseudo-persecution and focus on people who really do need attention and assistance.



Schindler v N95 masks

Nov 16th, 2024 10:56 am | By

And the replies are taking this completely seriously.

Right, because rules to avoid contagion during a pandemic are exactly the same as Nazi genocide.



The Great North Road

Nov 16th, 2024 10:35 am | By

Good old reliable BBC.

Also when’s the last time the Beeb aired a new comedy telling the story of a group of lesbians living in Rochdale? Or anywhere else?
https://twitter.com/Glinner/status/1857818545108754472

Graham adds: it’s not real, it’s chat gpt. Which is a good joke in itself, real or not.



A breathtakingly loose connection to the truth

Nov 16th, 2024 9:02 am | By

About the Kennedy Hazard:

Even among the chaos generated by Donald Trump’s recent cabinet picks, one stands out for the extensive suffering and lasting institutional damage it may cause: his choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Health and Human Services Department.

Modern public health is one of civilization’s great achievements. In 1900, up to 30 percent of infants in some U.S. cities never made it to their first birthday.

But that’s 124 years ago. Nobody has a personal memory of it. There are probably some people who have sorrowful memories of parents who never got over an infant death (or two or more) but none who held the dying baby themselves.

The danger isn’t merely that Kennedy — who has almost no experience in government or large-scale administration, and who has shown a sometimes breathtakingly loose connection to the truth — would be incompetent or misleading. At the helm of a department with over 80,000 employees and a $3 trillion budget, one that oversees key agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, he would have control over the nation’s medicines, food safety, vaccines and medical research. With that power he could inflict significant harm to the public health system — and to the public trust that would be needed to rebuild it once he’s gone.

And the trouble is, he’s like Trump in being supremely convinced of his own sagacity. Two stupid ignorant men who think they know better than those pesky nerds who actually studied disease and disease control.

Outside of the medical community, few people still know about all the diseases whose safe and effective vaccines he is lying about, so let me remind you about one of them: diphtheria. Once known as “the strangling angel of children,” it causes its young victims to slowly and painfully suffocate, turn blue and gasp as a thick film fills their throat. They lie dying for many agonizing days. The disease has been all but wiped out, but in Spain a few years ago, it cost the life of an unvaccinated boy of 6. His distraught antivax parents promptly vaccinated their surviving child.

Kennedy doesn’t mention those gruesome realities. The core of his method is to mislead and confuse with selective citations that overlook key, even overwhelming evidence. He has falsely suggested that AIDS isn’t caused by H.I.V. With no evidence, he once mused that Covid was deliberately made to target Black and Caucasian people, while ensuring that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” 

So naturally Trump put him in charge of public health. If it ain’t broke, smash it to pieces.



Guest post: Trumpism and wokeism are both post-truth ideologies

Nov 15th, 2024 5:36 pm | By

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug at Miscellany Room.

We are all familiar with attempts to classify ideologies and political systems in terms of different axes, or dimensions, or coordinate systems (individualist vs. collectivist, egalitarian vs. hierarchical, libertarian vs. authoritarian, universalist vs. identitarian etc.). There is a tendency to lump one’s political rivals together by selectively emphasizing the axes along which their positions happen to coincide to the exclusion of all the others. There is also a tendency to distance oneself from groups one does not like to be associated with by selectively emphasizing the differences and ignoring the similarities. E.g. back in my movement atheist days accomodationists often accused “militants” like myself of being “just like the fundamentalists” (“just as dogmatic”, “just as intolerant of opposing views” etc.), and from a certain point of view they were right: Even if hard-line atheists and religious fundamentalists disagreed on pretty much all the specific answers, not to mention how those answers were derived in the first place, at least they both agreed that the answer mattered, and to the accomodationists that was exactly the problem. Accomodationists and moderate believers also disagreed on the specific answers, but shared the same indifference to truth and reason, as well as the same commitment to bland, indifferent centrism and bothsiderism.

I’m increasingly inclined to think that the main battle of our time is not between “the Left” and “the Right”, but between those, whether Left or Right, who still respect facts and logic and care about classical liberal values (universal rights, individual liberty, free expression, academic freedom, basic democratic rules of the game etc.) and those who don’t. As I keep saying, Trumpism and wokeism are both post-truth ideologies. As much as the woke crowd hate Trump (i.e. not nearly as much as they hate the “wrong kind” of leftists!), they absolutely love what he has done to factual discourse. For all their mutual antagonism, Trump-supporters and wokesters both want to live in a world in which sound volume and endless repetitions trump (no pun intended) facts and the biggest bully, capable of mobilizing the biggest mob, has a blank check to take whatever he wants and destroy anyone who gets in his way.

We keep talking about the political “Left” vs. the political “Right” as if it were obvious what we are talking about, when, in fact, these are umbrella terms, each covering a vast range of very different, and even mutually hostile, movements, ideologies, political systems etc. Talking in terms of “Left” vs. “Right” makes it sound like the people on the “Left” are all on the same side against everyone on the “Right”, when in fact a person on the moderate center-Left who believes in liberal values almost certainly has more in common with someone on the moderate center-Right who also believes in liberal values than either of them does with Fascists, Communists, Trump-supporters, or wokesters.

To me the defining feature of “leftism” is that “leftists” tend to “side with the underdog” as they see it (in practice, of course, seeing it that way in the first place may require acceptance of some extremely dubious truth claims, academic theories, ideological doctrines etc., but still…). They tend to see the world as inherently unjust and unfair, i.e. as a place where certain groups, simply by accident of birth, start out at a major disadvantage while others get an almost insurmountable head start. Furthermore, this inherent injustice perpetuates itself from one generation to the next, leaving the disadvantaged groups perpetually last in line. Breaking out of this vicious cycle is going to require active political interventions, from gradual reform to armed revolution.

For most of my life, “leftists” tended to be the ones who were trying to get away from boxes and labels and different standards of treatment for different groups of people (judging people by the “content of their character” rather then the color of their skin etc.). As (iirc) Nick Cohen once pointed out, women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals etc. were not asking for special treatment: What they were objecting to was precisely the fact that they were given special treatment. That’s what “discrimination” means! Woke identity politics, by contrast, is all about boxes and labels and treating people differently according to group identity.

Despite efforts to equate wokeism with “cultural Marxism”, Marxists believed in objective truth and claimed it for themselves. To the woke any appeal to “objective truth”, as well as “evidence”, “logic” etc. is just a naked exercise of power to force oppressed groups into accepting the self-serving narratives of their oppressors. Marxists were mainly concerned with class, the one axis of privilege and marginalization that the woke don’t care about at all. As many others have pointed out, “Marxism” without any consideration of class is rather like a doughnut after you have removed everything except the hole: Pretty much indistinguishable from nothing. Both Marxists and wokesters invoked a concept of “false consciousness”, but according to Marxism the oppressed (i.e. the working class) were blind to their own oppression, and therefore needed the Communist Party to do their thinking for them. According to wokeism it’s the oppressor classes themselves who are blind to their own privilege etc. etc.

The people on the “Right”, on the other hand, tend to see themselves as siding with “the deserving”. Fiscal conservatives and libertarians interpret “the deserving” in meritocratic terms (the hard working, the competent, the achievers etc.). The “American Dream” was all about being “self-made” and making it to the top through personal effort without outside help. Indeed, the greatest heroes were the ones who managed to overcome great obstacles and opposition and prove everybody else wrong (“I did it my way” etc.). Fiscal conservatives and libertarians also tend to see the world as inherently just and fair. Or, if there is anything unfair about it, it’s mainly unfair to the deserving who keep getting held back by burdensome regulations while having the fruit of their accomplishments confiscated and redistributed to the undeserving (the lazy, the incompetent, the bums). By contrast cultural conservatives, religious fundamentalists, fascists etc. see their own group as more deserving than all others by virtue of their superior ancestry, ethnicity, culture, religion etc. Everyone else is considered undeserving by virtue of who they are, rather than anything they’ve ever done.

There is a tendency among leftists to portray Trumpism as simply the logical consequence of what “conservatives” have been up to all along, when, in fact, the betrayal of the idea of meritocracy in favor of a system that favors personal loyalty to the leader over accomplishment is almost certainly more offensive to the old-school conservatives than to leftists who think there is no such thing as “meritocracy” anyway: Just unearned privilege perpetuating itself from one generation to the next. Traditional conservatives also tended to emphasize values like character, integrity, and personal responsibility (far more than Leftists who are more sympathetic to blaming the “system” for personal shortcomings), whereas fascists emphasize brute force and the ability to bend the world to one’s will, and dismiss any appeal to such fake “values” as “slave morality” rooted in resentment, envy and the need to discredit what one is too weak to do oneself (cf. Nietzsche). The same disdain for “do-gooders” and the same amoral commitment to winning by any means necessary is obvious in kleptocrats like Trump and Putin. The sentiment is admirably captured in this quote from the gangster movie Goodfellas:

For us to live any other way was nuts. Uh, to us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day, and worried about their bills, were dead. I mean, they were suckers. They had no balls. If we wanted something, we just took it. If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again.

This is not the inevitable implication of favoring lower taxes, more privatization, and less government spending.



I’m leaning toward the Hulkian rage

Nov 15th, 2024 3:35 pm | By

Gee. It’s only taken them ten or fifteen years.

But the realities of human biology raise legitimate questions about any notion that trans women should always and everywhere be treated exactly like cisgender women.

YA THINK??????????

Jesus fucking christ we’ve only been saying that at the top of our lungs for literally years only to be branded terfs and transphobes and cuntbitchwhores. Why did it take the Washington Post bigwigs all this time to discover what we’ve been shouting at them since forever?

After his party’s election defeat on Nov. 5, Rep. Seth Moulton (Massachusetts) offered some blunt advice: “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. … I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Mr. Moulton’s remarks sparked an immediate backlash within his own political camp. His campaign manager quit. A state legislator accused him of “scapegoating transgender youth.” A city council member in Salem, Massachusetts, called for him to resign. The Bay State’s governor, Maura Healey, opined that Mr. Moulton was “playing politics with people.”

Guess what, Governor: the people who insist that men must be allowed to compete against girls aka run over them on a playing field are also “playing politics with people” only the politics they’re playing are ruthlessly unfair to women and girls.

Even Tufts University briefly got in on the act when David Art, chair of the political science department, reportedly called Mr. Moulton’s office and told him not to contact the university to recruit interns in the future.

Tough shit for any political science students who might have wanted to intern with Rep. Moulton, yeah?

Trans women’s participation in sports raises thorny questions about fairness — but that should not preclude Mr. Moulton from speaking his mind. Trans people deserve to be treated with dignity, and the law should protect them from discrimination in areas such as employment and housing. But the realities of human biology raise legitimate questions about any notion that trans women should always and everywhere be treated exactly like cisgender women.

As we’ve been saying. And saying. And saying.

…unless the data show that transitioning can fully erase the effects of male puberty, the country will also need a frank and open debate about the trade-offs between inclusion on the one hand and safety and fairness on the other. And yet too often, efforts have been made to avoid or prevent discussion of those trade-offs by labeling debate inherently transphobic. This is not how a healthy democracy makes decisions.

By labeling debate inherently transphobic and by labeling women who debate monsters, bitches, transphobes, cunts, Karens, evil cruel arrogant sadistic right-wing pieces of shit. That is not how a healthy democracy or a healthy left wing makes decisions.



Guardian sleuthing

Nov 15th, 2024 10:28 am | By

The Guardian is on the case.

Daily Telegraph readers have woken up this week to successive front-page headlines alleging a grave threat to free speech, triggered by a star columnist’s “Kafkaesque” encounter with police. The rightwing broadsheet described how Essex police had told Allison Pearson on her doorstep last weekend that she was under investigation for allegedly stirring up racial hatred in a tweet last year.

The Telegraph and Pearson say they are unaware which post caused two officers to knock on her door at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday.

But the Guardian thinks it has found the tweet in question.

Note the peculiar wording though – the tweet that “caused two officers to knock on her door at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday.” No it didn’t. It didn’t bodily pick them up and hurl them at her front door. It prompted them maybe, or motivated them, but it didn’t cause them to pay her a surprise visit early on a weekend morning.

There’s a lot of that kind of thing in the piece, because of course there is. Manipulative wording is essential for manipulative journalism.

It is a retweet by Pearson of a photograph posted several months ago amid heightened tensions over the policing of Gaza protests. It shows a group of people of colour posing with a flag on a British street, flanked by three police officers. The photograph angered Pearson, who wrote a tweet condemning the Metropolitan police: “How dare they. Invited to pose for a photo with lovely peaceful British Friends of Israel on Saturday police refused. Look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters.”

That’s harsh, certainly, but is it police level harsh? In the context of all the harshness on the subject that’s all over TwitterX?

The Guardian says the photo is actually of a Manchester protest so the police are not from the London force.

The implication that the Muslims pictured are antisemitic and supporting Hamas is undermined by the green and maroon flag they are holding. The flag is used by supporters of the Pakistani political party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). It also, rather clearly, has the word “Pakistan” written on it.

A reasonable point, but is it a point the police need to make? By terrorizing someone early on a weekend morning?

The person who complained to the police is not Muslim nor one of those pictured. They are a former public servant with training in criminal law. They wish to stay anonymous, fearing reprisals, especially from far-right elements, but told the Guardian the post by Pearson was “racist and inflammatory” – which she denies.

It may have been, but is it really the job of the police to knock on the doors of people over arguably racist and inflammatory tweets? Are there no intermediate steps?

The row has led Essex police to report the Telegraph to a media standards body, claiming some of its reporting has been false. The force has also set up a “gold group”, used by police to deal with a critical incident.

There! That’s an intermediate step right there.

How many “gold groups” do the police set up when a woman reports a rape? Any? Any at all?

The Telegraph and Pearson castigated police and said the visit was an affront to free speech and freedom of the press. Their disbelief was shared by senior lawyers, the former Telegraph journalist Boris Johnson and other leading Conservatives, as well as Elon Musk.

Yeah yeah yeah, but I despise Boris Johnson and especially Elon Musk, but I too think the police action is grotesque.

The complainant first went to a different force, in April, which passed it on. Essex police initially did not wish to investigate, but then reviewed their decision and decided they should.

The complainant said: “As a former public servant, I was concerned about the tweet that Pearson put out last year so much so that I reported it to the police … I have no political affiliation and will call out racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia when I see it.”

Oh will you, you’ll call it out will you. Well come and get me, because I despise Islam. If you wonder why, start with three words: women in Afghanistan.

“This is not a debate about free speech; this is about a journalist who tweeted something false during the height of the tensions in London following the 7 October atrocities.

“She could have tweeted an apology stating she was wrong. She didn’t.”

But it’s not a police matter when someone fails to apologize.

H/t Dave Ricks



Mal comm

Nov 15th, 2024 7:18 am | By

The Telegraph on the grotesque bullying of Maya Forstater by the police:

Ms Forstater was investigated for 15 months by Scotland Yard after a complaint that her June 2023 post about a transgender GP was allegedly a malicious communication.

I don’t believe she was actually investigated for 15 months. I think she was just made to twist in the wind for 15 months. I really don’t think Scotland Yard spent 15 months “investigating” a single tweet.

Police contacted her two months after the post on X in June 2023 to say she was being invited to a voluntary interview to give her side of the events.

Despite asking a series of questions about the details of the allegation, she was told only that it related to a post “targeted” at a member of the transgender community. The officer said they could not divulge any more because the “victim” was susceptible to further comments.

She was warned that if she failed to attend the police interview voluntarily, she would be marked as “wanted” on the Met Police’s system for which she would eventually be arrested.

So attending the police interview is not “voluntary” at all. You can’t claim the interview is voluntary and say not attending the interview will lead to being arrested.

Her experience prompted her to contact [Allison] Pearson after reading about her case. Pearson was told on Remembrance Sunday by Essex police that she was under investigation for allegedly inciting racial hatred in a tweet a year ago.

“When I read the article describing her experience as Kafkaesque, it is exactly what my experience was,” said Ms Forstater. “From the start, the officer was saying there’s a victim and I was being told I had committed a crime but was not told what the tweet was.

How is that even legal?



Malicious?

Nov 15th, 2024 6:58 am | By

Tyranny via the CPS:

https://twitter.com/MForstater/status/1857164057301664094
“We can confirm our investigation has now concluded, with no further action to be taken.”

The process is the punishment indeed. Rape is largely ignored, but by god a single tweet by some rebellious bitch of a woman must be punished by 15 months of police harassment.



Just get sick

Nov 15th, 2024 2:51 am | By

The party of more disease won.

President-elect Trump says he’s going to let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “go wild on health.” That has many pediatricians nervous, because of RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine rhetoric. When another vaccine skeptic, Joseph Ladapo, became surgeon general in Florida, some doctors there say vaccine hesitancy got worse.

“It’s because people in power, like our surgeon general, as an example, are pushing this anti-vax message,” says Dr. Jeffrey Goldhagen, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Florida College of Medicine and president of the International Society for Social Pediatrics and Child Health.

Vaccine hesitancy has been growing in Florida. The routine childhood vaccination rate for kindergartners is now at 90.6%. That’s the lowest rate in more than a decade — and it’s well below the threshold needed for herd immunity against highly contagious diseases like measles.

Whatever. It’s worth spreading dangerous diseases in order to stick it to the libs.

When a measles outbreak occurs, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises parents to keep unvaccinated children at home after exposure, to stop the disease from spreading. But Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo’s advice was quite different: He told parents of unvaccinated children that it was up to them to decide whether to send their children to school or keep them home.

Freedom. Freedom freedom freedom.

Ladapo has become a frequent target of critics who say his stances on vaccines go against established science. Last year, the CDC and FDA sent Ladapo a letter reprimanding him for spreading misinformation about COVID vaccines and fueling vaccine hesitancy. Now, Ladapo has been mentioned as a possible candidate to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. So has RFK Jr.

Yes, because freedom, and also because medical science is for libs while guesswork and unreasonable optimism are for the good people.



One tweet, three police forces

Nov 14th, 2024 4:42 pm | By

It just gets nutser and nutser.

Three police forces called in to probe Allison Pearson tweet

Three of Britain’s biggest police forces were involved in the investigation into a Telegraph journalist’s social media post.

Allison Pearson, an award-winning writer, is being investigated by Essex Police for allegedly stirring up racial hatred in a social media post last November.

The force has refused to tell her any details about which post on X, formerly Twitter, is being investigated, or who made the complaint against her.

How do they get to refuse to tell her what they’re investigating?

Two police officers called at her home at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday to tell her she was under investigation and invited her to a voluntary interview. She was told, however, that the officers were not allowed to disclose the specific focus of the inquiry.

It gets worse with every iteration. “WAKE UP!! We’re here to tell you you’re under investigation and invite you to our place for a chat but we’re not going to tell you a damn thing about why you’re under investigation so yaboosucks can we eat your breakfast now?”

The Telegraph understands that the post was reported to the Metropolitan Police as a potential breach of the Malicious Communications Act in November last year. The case was then passed to Sussex Police, which marked it as a possible non-crime hate incident (NCHI) as well as a potential malicious communication.

Did none of them stop to ask what are we doing here, why are we freaking out over a single tweet, don’t we have anything more important to do?



Spot the contradick

Nov 14th, 2024 11:23 am | By

I’m trying to catch up on the Essex case, but I have to interrupt myself for a minute to deal with one bit of incoherent drool. “CA” is a manager at the theatre in question.

Sarah: “There was a man in these toilets who refused to leave and shouted in my face “I AM A WOMAN”. This is a safeguarding issue and I want to complain.” CA: “It is not possible, or appropriate, for us to police the gender identity of those who access the toilets.. we want everyone to feel comfortable and use the toilets appropriate for them and for their circumstances.”

Me: NO YOU DON’T.

You don’t you don’t you don’t. Why do you say you do when you know you don’t?

That’s the whole fucking point.

Sarah was exiting the women’s room when a man came barging in and she told him he was in the wrong toilet. CA the manager here is trying to make him “feel comfortable” at the expense of the woman in the women’s room and of all other women who might want to use that women’s room at that time. She’s just lying when she says the theatre wants everyone to feel comfortable.

They need to stop getting away with that “We juss wann evereebuddy to be happeee” shit. It’s not true, they don’t mean it, it’s an insulting lie. Stamp on it whenever you see it.



Let’s surprise her

Nov 14th, 2024 10:40 am | By

If it’s a non-crime why are you banging on my door on a Sunday morning?

A Telegraph journalist is facing a “Kafkaesque” investigation for allegedly stirring up racial hatred in a social media post last year.

Allison Pearson, an award-winning writer, has described how two police officers called at her home at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday to tell her she was being investigated over the post on X, formerly Twitter, from a year ago.

Oh come on. Two cops. Unexpected. 9 fucking 40 in the morning on a weekend. Over a tweet from a year ago. Why on earth could that not have been a phone call or email or just plain mail? Even if the tweet deserved investigating, which I doubt.

When Pearson asked what she had allegedly said in the tweet, the officer said he was not allowed to disclose it.

Then what the hell did he and his colleague bang on the door for?

However, at this time last year, she was frequently tweeting about the October 7 attacks on Israel and controversial pro-Palestinian protests on the streets of London.

The officer also refused to reveal the accuser’s name. Pearson recalled: “‘It’s not the accuser,’ the PC said, looking down at his notes. ‘They’re called the victim.’”

Unless they’re women, of course. Women are always the perps.

Last year, Suella Braverman, then the home secretary, raised the threshold for police recording non-crime hate incidents over a perceived threat that laws posed to freedom of expression.

It was amended following a Court of Appeal ruling in favour of Harry Miller, a former police officer, who successfully challenged the previous national policy for forces to record gender-critical views as non-crime hate incidents.

Judges said the policy had had a “chilling” effect on his freedom of speech.

Under the change, officers are only allowed to record a non-crime hate incidents if the incident is “clearly motivated by intentional hostility” and where there is a “real risk of escalation causing significant harm or a criminal offence”.

And who decides when the criteria are met? The police, of course.



Filthiest word in the language

Nov 14th, 2024 7:07 am | By

Um………..man up?

U ok hun?


An inclusivity policy

Nov 14th, 2024 6:24 am | By

Being inclooosive is all very well, but you can’t be inclooosive of everything all the time for the simple reason that sometimes you need to be specific. Specificity requires exclusion.

A trustee and PR director of Britain’s oldest breastfeeding charity has resigned after it introduced an inclusivity policy that allowed men to attend support groups.

This is one of those times. Breastfeeding is inherently “exclusionary” in the blunt factual sense that men can’t do it. It’s not that spiteful bitchy women decided to make it exclusionary, it’s that men can’t breastfeed.

Given the fact that men can’t do it, what can possibly be the point of being inclooosive of men in breastfeeding support groups? What can a man’s motive for attending be other than creepy prurient intrusion? Why do women have to be inclooosive of leering men in breastfeeding support groups?

Miriam Main is leaving La Leche League GB (LLLGB) after a diktat from the global organisation elicited fears that volunteers would have to give advice to transgender women.

Directors at the charity’s British arm have already requested that the Charity Commission intervene over the inclusivity policy, which permits biological males to seek support from the organisation.

Main resigned on Monday, saying that she refused to help biological men “perform a poor imitation of breastfeeding”, which she said put babies’ safety at risk.

Documents produced by LLLGB on transgender and non-binary parents stated that it “supports everyone who wants to breastfeed or chestfeed in reaching their goals”. It said: “We do not discriminate based on sex, gender or gender identity.”

There again – just as with exclooosion, sometimes you have to “discriminate.” Men can’t breastfeed, end of story. The demand to be allowed to “chestfeed” a chemical soup to an infant is trump-level disgusting.

Zion Tankard, executive director of La Leche League International, said: “We respect Marian’s decision regarding La Leche League International. Her contributions and legacy are highly valued as a founder. We will continue to uphold the values of empathy and understanding that are central to La Leche League.”

If “empathy” here means encouraging men to feed infants a chemical soup, then it’s an empathy too far.