On the one hand women are terfs, on the other hand women are those bitches who won’t have sex with every man who asks. (Women who do have sex with every man who asks are of course sluts.)

An Ohio man who was part of an online community of “incels,” or misogynists who blame women for denying them what they believe is their right to sexual intercourse, was arrested on Wednesday and charged with plotting to shoot students in sororities, federal prosecutors said.

Not trans women, please note, just women. We’re constantly told about how vulnerable trans women are, but they’re not the targets of incels. I go on thinking trans women are not as vulnerable as women.

From July 2019 to March 2020, according to a federal indictment, Mr. Genco was active on a website for “incels,” short for involuntary celibates, a label that members of the community claim for themselves.

And a label that assumes men are somehow owed sex with women, which in turn assumes that women have no right to refuse to have sex with a man.

On Aug. 3, 2019, Mr. Genco wrote a manifesto titled “A Hideous Symphony,” by “Tres Genco, the socially exiled Incel,” in which he stated that he would “slaughter” women out of “hatred, jealousy and revenge,” prosecutors said. That same day, Mr. Genco searched online for sororities and a university in Ohio, which was not named in a federal indictment.

On Jan. 11, 2020, prosecutors said, Mr. Genco wrote another document entitled “isolated,” in which he said: “If you’re reading this, I’ve done something horrible. Somehow you’ve come across the writings of the deluded and homicidal,” prosecutors said. He signed the document, “Your hopeful friend and murderer.”

All because he can’t get sex with a woman on demand.

It’s weird to feel that entitled.

Again we are reminded that the US is trembling on the brink.

The House speaker, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, announced on Wednesday that she would veto the two top Republicans appointed by the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, to the new select committee investigating the Capitol attack, saying the Trump-allied congressmen could threaten the integrity of the investigation.

That’s one of the reasons we’re trembling on the brink – the fact that some Republicans approved of the attack aka insurrection, and some helped it.

But the move triggered McCarthy to pull all five of the Republicans he had chosen off the committee if Pelosi wouldn’t seat the whole cohort – and threaten to set up their own investigation into the 6 January Capitol attack.

The move didn’t trigger anything; McCarthy decided to try to use it to push the US over the brink into being an authoritarian state.

The Republican House minority leader’s actions also spurred Liz Cheney, the lone Republican appointed to the committee by Pelosi and therefore not one of the five effectively withdrawn by McCarthy, to stand on the steps of the Capitol on Wednesday afternoon and decry his actions as “despicable and disgraceful”.

Cheney also accused McCarthy of trying to “prevent” Americans from knowing the truth of how the Capitol attack occurred.

“The American people deserve to know what happened. The people who did this must be held accountable, it must be an investigation that is sober and gets to the facts,” she said, adding that, however “at every turn the minority leader has tried to get the people not to know what happened”.

Well it doesn’t look good.

Pelosi said in a statement that she was rejecting Republicans Jim Banks and Jim Jordan from the panel because of their remarks disparaging the inquiry and their ties to Donald Trump, who will be the subject of the select committee’s investigation.

Jim Jordan ffs – that guy is the worst.

McCarthy had included Banks and Jordan – both outspoken Trump allies who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s election victory – among his picks on Monday, foreshadowing a bitter partisan fight over the direction of the inquiry.

Yes see that’s no good – voting against certifying Biden’s election is an anti-democratic move, an authoritarian move, a let’s be a failed state now move. It’s an attempt to overturn a legitimate election in order to re-install an evil corrupt authoritarian. It’s not acceptable.

House Democrats were outraged with Banks’s appointment in part because of a statement released on Monday night in which he inexplicably blamed the Biden administration for its response to the 6 January attack, which took place during the Trump administration, the source said.

During and as a result of the incitement of the Trump administration. It didn’t just happen on his watch, it happened immediately after he told them to go do it.

Banks also drew the ire of Pelosi and House Democrats after he arranged a trip for House Republicans to join Trump at a recent event at the southern border alongside an individual who participated in the Capitol attack itself.

That’s nice. That’s a nice touch.

What it does to people.

No they don’t. He must have been looking at the biblical arguments instead. Gender critical arguments don’t involve ew ick or god.

Aw yeah old lady feminism, how gross is that. Feminism is for women who can wear bikini bottoms to play volleyball, not crones and witches.

It takes zero contortion to accuse Gorski of both.

There’s no such thing as “trans misogyny” any more than there’s such a thing as “trans racism.”

It’s not “the truth” that “trans and non-binary people have been here forever.” It may be, and probably is, the truth that people who have felt discomfort with their own sex and/or curiosity about being the other sex have been here forever, but “trans” has been expanded and expanded and expanded to mean far more than that, and the far more is mostly batshit crazy. There’s no reason to assume that that particular brand of crazy – so shaped by Twitter and other modern forms of media – has always existed.

It’s not “the fact” that JK Rowling is using her platform to spread violence against trans people all the time. It’s not even close to a fact, aka true, in fact it looks kind of libelous to me. Saying that men are not women is not “spreading violence” against those men. It’s not true that JKR is transphobic or that she “continues to create hate” or has created hate in the first place. (Meanwhile Mr Van Ness should take a harder look to the way some trans activists talk about and to women.)

It’s not true that trans women are women.

Truth matters. It matters what’s true and what isn’t.

Life expectancy in the US has fallen.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data showed the average US lifespan dropped from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77.3 years in 2020. Researchers said the pandemic was mostly to blame for the decline, with record-high drug deaths also noted as a contributing factor.

The data comes amid a resurgence of Covid-19 cases across the country. Hospital rates are also on the rise with daily deaths now almost 50% higher than last week, according to officials.

More than 600,000 Americans have died so far during the coronavirus pandemic.

That’s not what they mean – they mean from or because of the pandemic. I know this because that’s the number. I think they’re avoiding asserting causality, for some reason, but the result is just confusion. Many more than 600k of us have died during the pandemic.

The report, released on Tuesday, also noted that racial and ethnic disparities in life expectancy had grown during the pandemic.

Hispanic men saw the sharpest decline – with 3.7 years knocked off their average life expectancy within the year alone. Black American men also saw a 3.3-year drop, down to an average of just 68 years. Black and Hispanic women also saw sharper declines than both white men and white women. 

“It is impossible to look at these findings and not see a reflection of the systemic racism in the US,” Lesley Curtis, chair of the Department of Population Health Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine, told NPR.

Cue the complaints about critical race theory.

He really is quite something.

I’ll have to try that more often. “Unlike most people who disagree with me, I DO understand everything.”

That Georgia Rep has been telling lies about Covid on Twitter.

Twitter temporarily suspended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) for violating its covid-19 misinformation policy after she falsely claimed the coronavirus was “not dangerous” for some people.

…

Greene tweeted Monday that the novel coronavirus was “not dangerous for non-obese people and those under 65.” More than 600,000 people in the United States have died of covid-19.

And not all of them were over 65 or obese or both.

Why would MGT endanger people by lying that way? I know the obvious reasons (politics, attention, stupidity, ignorance), but they never really seem like enough. It’s like seeing a fire engulfing an apartment block full of people, and running around putting obstacles in the way of the firefighters. Why kill people just for the hell of it?

She also made claims about vaccine-related deaths and side effects, calling the coronavirus vaccines “controversial.”

In another tweet, Greene falsely claimed “defeating obesity” would protect people from covid-19 complications and death.

Why not err on the side of caution? Why not just keep her trap shut?

Greene said in a statement that the suspension was “a Communist-style attack on free speech.”

No it isn’t. Free speech doesn’t cover practicing medicine without a license.

President Biden said last week that social media companies were “killing people” by allowing misinformation about the novel coronavirus and vaccines to spread on their platforms.

…

Biden’s comments came shortly after Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued an advisory about health misinformation online, which he said had caused some Americans to avoid vaccines or masks, leading to “avoidable illnesses and death.” He called on tech companies to invest in addressing misinformation on their platforms.

This is what I’m saying. Playing this game kills people. The payoff doesn’t seem worth it.

Philip Pullman really is very entitled.

I guess “change our tone” in the sense of saying he’s got it all right instead of wrong? But he has got it all wrong. Despite being perfect and a sage and a magus and so on, he has got it all wrong. I know that’s hard to believe, when it’s women saying so, but there it is.

Anti-vaxxer dies of COVID:

On Tuesday, the Cape Cod Times reported that Linda Zuern, a former member of the Bourne, Massachusetts Board of Selectmen and a Trump-supporting figure in the local Republican Party, had died of COVID-19.

Zuern died at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston of severe complications caused by COVID-19, according to the report. She was 70 years old and had not been vaccinated.

“She was a strong woman who believed in speaking the truth and defending our freedoms in America,” Republican State Committeewoman Deborah Dugan told the Cape Cod Times. Dugan was at Zuern’s bedside when she died. “I would describe her to people as a little woman but a mighty warrior.”

What freedoms? Freedom from public health measures? That’s not one of our freedoms – it’s not one of anyone’s freedoms. It’s not a genuine freedom, it’s just anarchic refusal to consider the needs of others. It’s not one of our freedoms to drive down a shopping street at 80 miles an hour, and it’s not one of our freedoms to spread a lethal pandemic.

For months, Zuern, a member of the pro-Trump group the United Cape Patriots, had promoted conspiracy theories about the pandemic on Facebook. She has shared articles accusing the World Health Organization of a coverup of the “Wuhan Virus” and claiming COVID-19 is cover for “globalists” to usher in “U.N. Agenda 2030” — a sustainable development initiative right-wing conspiracy theorists assert is a plot to create a one world government.

Then she found out that COVID-19 is a real illness that destroys the lungs.

nutmeg sums up the point neatly.

Well why stop there? Why not force them to wear no pants at all?

Women’s team fined for not wearing tiniest possible pants.

Norway’s women’s beach handball team have been fined 1,500 euros (£1,295) for choosing to wear shorts rather than bikini bottoms in a match at the European Beach Handball Championships in Bulgaria.

The fine was ‘150 euros per player, for a total of 1,500 euros’ handed out by the European Handball Federation (EHF) because shorts are ‘not according to the athlete uniform regulations defined in the IHF [International Handball Federation] beach handball rules of the game.’

But why are those the athlete uniform regulations? Why are women forced to wear sexually provocative underpants for what is supposed to be an athletic competition? Who made the rule, and how, and why?

Why are the rules different for men?

Shirts without sleeves and shorts are obligatory for men and tops and bikini bottoms are obligatory for women (see IHF Beach Handball rules of the Game – Athlete Uniform Regulation).

Stop right there. Why? Why are the requirements for women sexual? Why are men ordered to wear shorts while women are ordered to wear bikini bottoms?

I’ve been wondering this ever since beach volleyball turned up at the Olympics.

A request was made by the Norwegian Handball Federation (NHF) before the tournament started for their players to wear shorts rather than the ’embarrassing’ bikini bottoms that are regulated, report Inside The Games.

But oh no, that would never do, they have to be embarrassed, so that men in the crowd can get their jollies.

However, they were told that they would be fined for ignoring rules which state bikini bottoms must be ‘not more than 10 centimetres on the sides’.

Norway captain Katinka Haltvik told NRK: ‘So then we are forced to play with panties. It is so embarrassing.’

That’s a bonus.

H/t Sackbut

And then Philip Pullman.

How dare we accuse him of sending mixed messages when he interrupts himself talking about abuse of a woman to say he opposes “transphobia” – which as we know all too well can mean anything and everything and is often just a pretext for bullying women. So that’s how we “dare.”

The new wave of JKR-bullying continues to break over our heads.

They really said that? They really did.

They don’t know how to spell “despicable.”

And speaking of bona fide qualifications – an item I just saw on Facebook.

Yes it does.

Originally a comment by maddog on Lesbians with penises.

it’s denying the reality of the existence of trans-women, in fact all trans-people

Wait, what? Recognizing that women don’t have penises, and that woman/woman sexual orientation is penis-exclusive is “denying reality” now? WHAT f”ing “reality of the existence of trans women” makes them at all relevant to a group that is exclusively women/women related, and has no connection to, interest in, or reason to consider penis-people at all?

Trans-women are women. Full stop.

That’s just flatly not true. By definition, only men can be “trans women.” Trans women are men. The penis is sort of a giveaway about that.

It’s baffling that (LGB Alliance) don’t accept that …

It’s not a bit “baffling.” What’s truly baffling is how these buffoons can say with a straight face — and not be immediately laughed out of the room — that men, mostly fully intact bepenised men, can be any kind of woman at all. It’s a charade, an unbelievable one at that, to pretend that a man is a woman if he says so.

Trans and gender-diverse people … have long been an integral part of the broader community.

I don’t believe that’s true, but even if it is, so what? See that little phrase at the end? “…part of the broader community”? That part right there? The “lesbian” group is a smaller portion of the whole. It is a narrower part of the community. You may be part of the “broader community,” but that doesn’t mean that you are in every narrower subgroup. If there were an event intended for gay men, lesbians would necessarily be excluded, for example. Ever heard of BFOQs, in the labor context? That stands for “bona fide occupational qualifications,” and is a recognized exception to the general rule of equal opportunity in employment without regard to color, creed, sex, race, national origin, religion, and so on. There are some jobs in which, for instance, only a person of the same religion can perform the proper duties of the job. Some jobs may be sex-specific, if there is a genuine reason for that exclusion. The social and political events at issue here are not jobs, but the situation is analogous. There is a bona fide reason the event is sex-specific to women. Being part of a “broader community” is not an entry ticket to every subgroup that makes up the broader community.

Via Charles Pierce in Esquire, a doctor in Arkansas says what it’s like there:

The last day I worked wasn’t too bad. Had several people come in with symptoms or just to be tested. Mostly younger than 40. Of course zero vaccinations, and when I asked why, I don’t get the “cause the internet, cause screw the libs, I think it’s dangerous” excuses. I don’t get any excuses at all. They just shrug their shoulders and say they didn’t need it. It’s just part of their psyche now. Sun rises in the east, Jesus will return to judge the quick and the dead, you just don’t get vaccinated.

They didn’t need it, but now they have symptoms. shrug.

The ones that were negative, when I ask them if they are going to get vaccinated they look at me like I have three heads.

The positive ones sometimes have some regrets, one in particular started crying after we talked about intubation, CPR, and ECMO. The ones I send home often get mad when I tell them there’s not anything I can do for them.

I’ve resisted the temptation to put on their discharge instructions: “You didn’t listen to me about how not to get this, why would you listen now. Ask the internet when to return to the ED.”

When I was in college I did telemarketing for a while. In those jobs they give you a sheet of things to say to overcome objections when people don’t want to buy from you. But how do you overcome an objection when they don’t give you one? They just look at you [and] shrug [their] shoulders. I tried giving them the science. I tried mild anger and looking at everybody over my glasses like their disappointed father. They are just not gonna do it and nothing I say is going to change that so it makes me wonder whether I even need to keep trying.

I’ve gotten updates from lots of people in Missouri and Arkansas. Things are absolutely at their capacity. They’re talking about field hospitals again in Springfield and we are very close to running out of capacity for ECMO in Arkansas and Missouri. Last week a paramedic posted a whiteboard showing that every ICU in Arkansas was on divert. That means they are not accepting any transfers and critically ill patients will stay in the emergency department for the foreseeable future. None of which is safe for anybody.

None of this was inevitable. People who mock the very idea of vaccinations made it happen.

Updating to add Charles Pierce’s conclusion after the doctor’s account:

Goddammit, none of this had to happen. And it certainly doesn’t have to continue to happen. If you’re making a buck out there off telling people tales about the perils of the vaccines, or if you’re an idiot meat puppet from Fox News bothering the White House with stupid questions, just shut up and sit all your asses down. Get used to the fact that you’re going to hell, every damn one of you.

It’s not? It’s not the government’s job to protect people?

I kind of think it is.

The sly way they distort the reporting on this…

Headline: J.K. Rowling Responds to Pipebomb Death Threat, Hits Out at Trans Activists

No she doesn’t “hit out” – she tweets words. See also: the American Booksellers Association claiming to have committed “violence” by including a gender critical book in a promotion.

Ryan Smith writes:

J. K. Rowling has hit out at a Twitter user on Monday, after she was sent a “pipebomb” threat amid a series of attacks over her previous statements about trans women.

She didn’t “hit out” at anyone.

The Harry Potter author shared a screenshot of the offending tweet, which was directed at her on Sunday, as she slammed the efforts of some trans activists to get her “cancelled.”

Always choose the violent metaphor.

On Sunday, Rowling hit back at another Twitter user, who accused the star of ignoring “porn tweeted at children” in her posts.

She didn’t hit back. She hasn’t hit anyone, she hasn’t physically slammed anyone. She also, by the way, hasn’t tweeted any physical threats at anyone, which is more than the pro-magic-gender side can claim.

Graham Linehan calls out the coward celebrities who are ignoring the abuse aimed at JK Rowling:

David O’Doherty? The ‘trans ally’ who gave my wife shit over the phone because he didn’t have the guts to confront me? Let’s see what he’s talking about.

Jokes about Birkenstocks, it turns out.

Aisling Bea what do you think of the pipe bomb threat? You were full of talk of nuance when you wrote this disgraceful, patronising tweet to a survivor of domestic violence.

Jon Ronson, author of ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’, anything to say about this public shaming, certainly more ambitious in scope and significance than what Justine Sacco went through? Not even a trace of journalistic interest in it?

Ronson of all people should be on this, but he isn’t. It’s pathetic.

Glinner concludes with a pair of retweets of an endless catalogue of JKR-abuse.

Now there’s a headline.

Bid to exclude ‘people with penises’ from lesbian events ‘unlawful’

But lesbian events are for lesbians, and “people with penises” are men and men can’t be lesbians because lesbians are same-sex attracted women.

Lesbians will be breaking the law if they exclude biological males who are transgender from social events, after a controversial discrimination ruling set to become a national test case. Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination commissioner Sarah Bolt has ruled lesbian events that exclude trans-women carry a “significant risk” of breaching legislation.

And lesbian events that are forced to include men are guaranteed to be no longer lesbian events.

Men can be trans all they like, knock yourselves out guys, but they’re still men and they’re still not lesbians.

In a decision earlier this month not yet publicised, Ms Bolt refused to grant an exemption to allow the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Alliance to exclude “biological men” from lesbian events.

What a wicked thing to do.

Launceston lesbian Jessica Hoyle, who made the application on the alliance’s behalf, said it aimed to exempt organisers from discrimination complaints if they excluded trans-women.

On account of how they wanted it to be a lesbian event.

“I want to exclude people with penises, because being a lesbian is about same-sex attraction. It’s not about same-gendered attraction … There are many events that cater for the trans community in Tasmania that are all-inclusive.

“This event was going to be just for lesbians who are same-sex attracted.”

That is, just for lesbians.

Transforming Tasmania said the exclusion of trans-women from lesbian events was discriminatory. “Ultimately, it’s denying the reality of the existence of trans-women, in fact all trans-people,” said Transforming Tasmania spokesperson Charlie Burton. “Trans-women are women. Full stop. It’s baffling that (LGB Alliance) don’t accept that … Trans and gender-diverse people … have long been an integral part of the broader community.”

No, trans women are not women full stop. Trans women are men who “feel” they are women, or who “identify as” women, or who call themselves women. They’re not actually literally women. The full stop does not belong in that sentence.