Spot the difference.

H/t maddog

Bam.

A federal judge in Michigan on Wednesday night ordered sanctions to be levied against nine pro-Trump lawyers, including Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood, ruling that a lawsuit laden with conspiracy theories that they filed last year challenging the validity of the presidential election was “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.”

In her decision, Judge Linda V. Parker of the Federal District Court in Detroit ordered the lawyers to be referred to the local legal authorities in their home states for possible suspension or disbarment.

Declaring that the lawsuit should never have been filed, Judge Parker wrote in her 110-page order that it was “one thing to take on the charge of vindicating rights associated with an allegedly fraudulent election,” but another to deceive “a federal court and the American people into believing that rights were infringed.”

I look forward to reading the order.

The Michigan lawsuit, filed in late November, was one of four legal actions, collectively known as the “Kraken” suits, that Ms. Powell filed in courts around the country, claiming that tabulation machines made by Dominion Voting Systems were tampered with by a bizarre set of characters, such as the financier George Soros or Venezuelan intelligence agents. In the suits, she complained without merit that those conspirators began a complicated, covert plot to digitally flip votes from President Donald J. Trump to his opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

In a pseudo-legal move technically known as “making shit up.”

Judge Parker’s order, which said Ms. Powell and her colleagues had “scorned their oath, flouted the rules and attempted to undermine the integrity of the judiciary,” was the latest legal setback for the embattled group of lawyers who emerged from the postelection period as the most die-hard of Mr. Trump’s supporters.

“Embattled.” Try not making shit up and then you might not be so embattled.

H/t Screechy Monkey

And then there are those times when they just blurt it right out.

Shrill sirens – you couldn’t make it up. It’s cool because it labels us as both demonic witch-women who lure men in boats to their deaths and noisy horns that scream in your ear when something bad happens.

See also: Karens.

Originally a comment by Sastra on The same woo-woo bin.

If a particular grandiose claim is supported by science, the likelihood is that it would meet at least some of these criteria:

1.) It would have come out of science.

2.) It would answer more than one question.

3.) It would be testable and falsifiable.

4.) It would have been hotly debated for years.

5.) It would be consistent across disciplines.

6.) It would generate new hypotheses and research.

7.) It would use terms and explanations which are clear.

If the “scientific claim” can be brought to its knees by “define ‘woman,’” it’s not really a scientific claim.

The scientific consensus they talk about here involves DSDs: there are a small fraction of people who are very difficult to classify as either male or female due to malfunctions in the sexual development of the fetus. That’s pretty much it. It’s not new. It’s not groundbreaking. It’s not controversial.

From what I can tell, the only thing new is science popularizers taking these facts and extrapolating some Grand Truth about how fuzzy borders within a category means the category is unreliable and can be ignored in favor of what people know to be true about their authentic inner selves. Which is NOT scientific.

Which party holds the wack belief and which party holds the other kind?

Other way around, I think you’ll find.

Our what?

Who is she? Canada’s Minister for Women and Gender Equality.

So, yeah…our brothers?

I think not.

Updating to add: see Sastra’s comment and Seanna’s for a better understanding.

Why now and not last year?

So why is Florida is experiencing its worst surge now, 18 months into the pandemic, when the vaccines are widely available?

In some ways, what’s happening in Florida is a microcosm of the current surge across America: a middling vaccination rate has collided with a more contagious version of the virus. And it’s doing so in a state where political leaders continue to insist people should act as though the pandemic is over — even as more people are dying every day than at any point in the past year.

It’s the “when in doubt, take the reckless approach” problem.

DeSantis, who has clear presidential aspirations in 2024, has positioned himself and his state’s Covid-19 response against the public health establishment throughout the pandemic and, more recently, the Biden administration.

He’s a rebel tralala – but if there’s one time you don’t want a preening “rebel” in charge of things it’s during a pandemic. Ok it’s also during a famine or a war etc etc etc but anyway a pandemic is pretty high on the list.

The situation has led to a sort of theater of the absurd, with DeSantis fighting local mitigation measures while at the same time promoting new treatments for people who get so sick they need to be hospitalized because of Covid-19.

A theater of the absurd rebel.

Guardian columnist Zoe Williams also dislikes John Cleese, it seems.

[I]t’s hard to find out when John Cleese was last funny. Some people think he had some moderately amusing lines in A Fish Called Wanda (1988). There was a period in the 2010s when he had an idiosyncratic vendetta and went around town saying “Michael Palin’s travel show” and then yawning, which a small niche found rather tickling.

Does that actually matter? He did some brilliant Being Funny before the 2010s, which thanks to technology we can still benefit from. Isn’t that good enough?

It would be fair to say it’s not a recent body of comic work that has recommended Cleese for a Channel 4 show about “cancel culture”…

But it probably is a not-recent body of comic work. I don’t know, maybe the Channel 4 show won’t be any good at all, maybe Cleese will just do some variation on the enraged fogey shtick (which may be all a lot of us do), but after all he did get some practice as Basil Fawlty. I don’t know if it will be interesting or not, funny or not, but neither does Zoe Williams.

Those vibes in full: they are outspoken gentlemen who refuse to be cowed by convention into staying silent on their sub-saloon-bar bullshit. They are fearless crusaders for freedom, so long as by “freedom” we mean the liberty to tell gags about male superiority that would have been too tired for Les Dawson.

Ok but at least he doesn’t tell us what his pronouns are.

Does “with force” mean “with force”?

What views? The usual.

Surrey’s Police and Crime Commissioner has been accused of being transphobic but defended by refuge organisers for women after she criticised LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall.

The campaign group’s vision is that people born male who identify as women should be able to attend women’s prisons and crisis centres, whether or not they have begun to transition.

Attend? One doesn’t “attend” prisons, as if they were meetings of the book group, one is locked up in them, aka imprisoned. That’s part of the problem: there’s no escape. If there’s a man in womanface sharing your cell you can’t get away from him.

Lisa Townsend, who has been the Conservative PCC role for three months, said in an interview for Mail on Sunday that pushing to allow pre-transition trans women in such female-only environments was a “dangerous ideology”.

Pushing to allow any trans women to force themselves on women is a dangerous ideology.

Pride in Surrey said they want to work with the PCC “to educate on the issue of transphobia”, while Surrey councillor George Potter (LD, Guildford East) accused the PCC outright of being transphobic.

But Pride in Surrey also said they wanted to correct the PCC “with force.” Don’t leave that part out. Don’t acquiesce in their bullying.

Marc Jones, chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC), came to her defence, saying: “Some services quite simply can’t function in a gender neutral way”, which Reigate MP Crispin Blunt said was an “evidence-free panicked response”.

How easy is it for Crispin Blunt to say that? This easy:

He has less reason to be afraid of being locked up with men than women have. Much less.

Simon Callow is fed up with the tyranny.

Simon Callow, the actor and veteran gay rights campaigner, has condemned the “strange turn to the tyrannical” taken by Stonewall on self-identification for transgender people.

Callow, who was involved in the anti-government protests that led to the foundation of Stonewall in 1989, said an “extraordinarily unproductive militancy” now surrounded its position. This uncompromising mood risked infringing women’s rights and could put pressure on young gay people to transition, he said, and it was a sign of the times that he felt nervous about the reaction he would stir up, simply for expressing his views.

The uncompromising mood [or rather stance, approach, method] emphatically already does infringe on women’s rights, including by bullying and punishing us for saying so. It’s tightly circular. We’re not allowed to say trans activism is deeply misogynist, and that not-allowing is enforced via intense punishment, which thus demonstrates how very true the thing we’re not allowed to say actually is. Callow says it’s tyranny, and he’s exactly right.

He went on: “They have taken a very strange turn towards the tyrannical, a dangerously prescriptive position on a complex issue. When it impinges on women’s rights, hard-won women’s rights, the right to exclusive spaces for women, away from any threat at all — I think that’s a very serious issue.”

So do we, and it is.

As an aside: the editor who wrote the headline saw fit to word it thus:

Actor Simon Callow attacks Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ group, over trans self-identification

At least for once it’s not “hits out at,” but “attacks” is still a tendentious way of putting it. He thinks they’re wrong and doing bad things, but he’s not hitting them or throwing missiles at them.

FEMINIST DISSENT STANDS IN SOLIDARITY WITH AFGHAN WOMEN AND WITH ALL THOSE FIGHTING FUNDAMENTALISM

Feminist Dissent sees fundamentalist movements as modern political movements of the far right which use religion to exercise authoritarian control, especially over women. The Taliban was never seen by us as simply a form of medievalist Pashtun tribalism, and certainly not as a liberation movement. The dominant views from the ‘anti-imperialist left’, Western ‘peace’ movements, Western governments and counter-terror establishments converge in ways that both stereotype and sanitise the Taliban.

…

The British Chief of Defence Staff Nick Carter’s claim that the Taliban want an ‘inclusive’ Afghanistan builds on the convenient myth that the Taliban are merely ‘tribal’, romantic men of honour who will keep order in the Badlands by controlling international jihadists so that they do not trouble Western capitals. Both US President Biden and UK Prime Minister Johnson share this view. It is a dangerous, racist, and self-serving fantasy.  For the people of the region across the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, the twenty-year war that started in December 2001 is not ending but is being continued by other means.

The Taliban began as a creation of the Pakistani military establishment and could not have succeeded without its backing. The movement’s goal is the subjugation of Afghanistan, the erasure of women from public space, and the destruction of every positive aspect of Afghan culture, both traditional and modern.  As Karima Bennoune, the UN Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights,  has said, “Afghan cultural rights defenders have worked tirelessly and at great risk…to reconstruct and protect this heritage, as well as to create new culture. Afghan cultures are rich, dynamic and syncretic and entirely at odds with the harsh worldview of the Taliban”.

Read on

Via Gita Sahgal

Ah yes certainly, I can’t see any problem with that. Bomber wants recognition of his new idenniny and oh yes a shorter sentence please.

The militia leader convicted of master­minding the bombing of a Minnesota mosque is asking a judge to legally acknowledge her transgender identity.

Emily Claire Hari was previously known as Michael Hari, who was found guilty last year of civil rights and hate crime charges related to the bombing of the Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington in August 2017.

During the trial, prosecutors said Hari was fueled by a hatred of Muslims when he devised a plan to pipe bomb the building during morning prayers. While no one was hurt in the bombing, it spread fear through the community, prosecutors said.

Never mind that, respect Emily’s womany soul.

[Defense attorney Shannon] Elkins said Hari bought military fatigues for her so-called missions but purchased female clothing for a planned trip to Thailand for male-to-female surgery, the Star Tribune reported. Hari was living a double life, Elkins said.

And buying women’s clothing is absolute proof that a man is a woman. The instant that credit card is in the hand of the female clothing store employee, the man is a woman.

Elkins cited these as factors in asking U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank to give Hari no more than the minimum 30-year prison sentence, not the life term prosecutors have requested.

Sure, why not? Obviously if a womany woman did it then a shorter sentence is fair because…um…she has 30 years worth of dishes to wash?

According to her profile this person does standup comedy.

Entire thing? No verbal humor? No ideas, just physical shtick?

No interest?

That time I went to a bookstore event with Michael Palin someone asked him about that debate. (In other clips you can see him on Cleese’s left.) He got quite serious, and said it was one of the very few times he got really angry. Muggeridge was aggressively dishonest, and it pissed him (and Cleese) off.

So, yeah. Not “safer” comedy at all, and not purely physical comedy either. Utterly stupid and ignorant claims.

Updating to add: Ooh she replied to my tweet telling her some facts. Really sharp stuff.

Our Jolyon walks into these things.

Erm…Jolyon Maugham is white and “cis” and not all that young and – the one he carefully didn’t mention – he’s a man. (He didn’t mention it because mentioning it would remind people that women don’t have male privilege.) He’s not as poshly educated as Cleese, I’ll give him that – but then he’s not as clever, either.

To sum up, Jolyon Maugham is sneering at John Cleese for having kinds of privilege that Maugham himself mostly shares. It’s almost as if Maugham thinks he’s Special. Wouldn’t that be a kind of privilege?

But it gets better.

You WHAT?????

Jolyon Maugham is not using his privilege to tell those without it they are wrong? He does it every day!

Oh but wait – I just said – he doesn’t see women as having less privilege than men. I keep forgetting that people men like him think of women as privilege-laden tyrants. So that means he doesn’t see his using his privilege to tell those without it they are wrong as…using his privilege to tell those without it they are wrong. I guess he sees it as using his pure limpid Rightness to tell those with muddy smelly Wrongness they are wrong.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on What genocide is and is not.

Hitler didn’t wipe out 6 million Jews by calling them something else, he wiped them out by murdering them.

Exactly, it’s roughly analogous to arguing that:

Denying the existence of God

≈ denying that there’s such a thing as “God’s chosen people”

≈ denying the existence of that which the Jews are

≈ denying the existence of Jews

≈ envisioning a world in which Jews don’t exist

≈ advocating genocide.

Therefore atheism is just the Holocaust

I have never heard a single Jew make such an argument. If your kind has been murdered by the millions, you don’t have to resort to this kind of language-games and stretching of word meanings beyond the breaking point to explain what the problem is. Zyklon B doesn’t give a crap about your pronouns or how you “identify”. As I have written many times, my peak trans moment came from seeing this kind of genocidal attitudes attributed to gender critical feminists while knowing what the latter had actually said. That’s when I thought “I get it now. When TRAs are talking about feminists promoting ‘hatred’, denying the ‘rights’ of, or even advocating ‘violence’ against trans people, this is what they’re talking about: Women saying that biological sex is real, that biological females are an identifiable group with its own specific issues that are not entirely reducible to those faced by biological males who prefer feminine pronouns, and that we have to be able to address them as such.” That’s when I realized that this was a pseudo social rights movement.

Well this is horrible news.

James Underdown of CFI (the Center for Inquiry):

Tom Flynn, Giant of American Freethought, Has Died at Age 66

The world has lost a towering figure of American freethought, a man who was both on the cutting edge of secular humanist thought, as well as the foremost caretaker of its rich history. The entire Center for Inquiry family is anguished by the sudden and unexpected death of our colleague, teacher, and friend Tom Flynn at age 66.

Tom held numerous leadership roles during his more than thirty years with the Center for Inquiry, most recently as editor of Free Inquiry magazine, director of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum and the Freethought Trail, and former executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism.

But this collection of titles does not nearly convey the plainer truth, which is that Tom Flynn was the beating heart of the Center for Inquiry and indeed the wider freethought movement.

More

Dammit. I liked Tom a lot.

Woman who calls herself “transmasculine” gets all shaky-like when menstrual products say “for women” on the label. (If they do – I have my doubts that anyone who needs menstrual products also needs to be told at the point of sale that they’re for women.) Narcissism forevaaaaaaaaa!

My period has never triggered feelings of gender dysphoria as a trans masculine person, but the way people talk about menstruation and frame it as a “women’s issue” makes me experience feelings of dread and discomfort.

Really? It makes her do that? Or she does it because she’s conditioned herself to think she’s supposed to, by being exposed to 50 million stupid articles and tweets and videos like this. They’re all conditioning each other, aren’t they, by exaggerating the anguish and bitter injustice of being reminded that only women and girls menstruate. They work each other up, like a slumber party watching a horror movie. This isn’t political, it’s emo-spiral.

Many things can trigger dysphoria for trans people, and the way we’re excluded from conversations around basic bodily functions is one of them.

They’re not excluded though, they just decide to exclude themselves by demanding to be treated as Special Magical Unicorns who don’t have the same boring kind of gender you dreary old slobby boomer slags have.

As a sex and relationships reporter, I get hundreds of pitches a week from companies to review their period products. From period panties to tampons to menstrual cups, my inbox is filled with emails about products marketed as “for her” or “feminine care.” 

Job one: immediately stop referring to women’s clothes via diminutives. Adults don’t wear “panties,” we wear underpants. Women aren’t children.

I feel like I want to scream and curl up into a ball, in part due to my own dysphoria, but also because I know gendering periods makes it even harder for trans people to access adequate menstrual care. 

No it doesn’t. Men can buy tampons and pads, as can women who claim to be men or “transmasculine.”

While I don’t have dysphoria about my period itself, it’s hard not to feel triggered when I get my period and have to rely on gendered pink products or information. It’s an added stress that makes it even harder for me to take care of myself.

Listen, chum, lots of us generic women without the “transmasculine” trimmings hate the pinkification of everything marketed to us too, not because We’re Not That Gender but because it’s so fucking insulting. The infantilization of all women is more important than anyone’s “transmasculinity.”

Before I found my current trans-inclusive clinic in New York City, I had experiences with gynecologists who would misgender me, deadname me, and use extremely gendered language around menstruation, making it feel unsafe to bring up any actual concerns. 

“Making it feel unsafe” in your head maybe, but then you’ve been trained to feel that, or say you feel it, haven’t you. With any luck you’ll be embarrassed by all this in a few years.

More from the pyramid:

What is this imagined community that gender-skeptics defend?

Women, for one. Are women “imagined”? No. Women are real. I don’t refer to us as a “community” because I think that word is much overused and also manipulative (so in that sense I kind of understand the “imagined community” thing), but that doesn’t mean the word “women” doesn’t name a real category of people. Do we defend women? Sure. For more see: feminism, passim.

This is the usual warping of the word “existence” – pretending that skepticism about a label=genocide. Hitler didn’t wipe out 6 million Jews by calling them something else, he wiped them out by murdering them. There’s a difference.

It can of course be a form of persecution or oppression to force people to describe themselves the way you choose rather than the way they choose – but that cuts in all directions. Feminists who don’t buy into trans dogma don’t agree that men can be women, but we also don’t agree that we are “cis” women. Feminists see men as men, but trans activists see women as “cis” women, so who is really forcing which to accept a new description for themselves?

To sum up, no, calling men men is not genocide, because of the absence of the “cide” part.

If the whole fad fell apart tomorrow, what would the result be? People would stop calling themselves the other sex. That’s all. That’s not genocide.

Stark truth.

It’s not even quite true that no one was held accountable – Hitler was sentenced to prison and served several months, during which he wrote Mein Kampf. So…

We’re in a race between global hotting and a fascist coup.

The FDA tells us Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19

First, snapshots.

On the left: no, not for you. On the right: yes, for you.

To be clear: 1: horse. 2: person. Horses take medication designed for horses, persons take medication designed for persons. Don’t swap between, don’t mix & match.

The FDA’s job is to carefully evaluate the scientific data on a drug to be sure that it is both safe and effective for a particular use, and then to decide whether or not to approve it. Using any treatment for COVID-19 that’s not approved or authorized by the FDA, unless part of a clinical trial, can cause serious harm. 

The FDA’s job, please note. Not yours (unless you work for the FDA), not Twitter’s, not Tucker Carlson’s, not Trump’s, not your neighbor’s.

There seems to be a growing interest in a drug called ivermectin to treat humans with COVID-19. Ivermectin is often used in the U.S. to treat or prevent parasites in animals.  The FDA has received multiple reports of patients who have required medical support and been hospitalized after self-medicating with ivermectin intended for horses.

FDA has not approved ivermectin for use in treating or preventing COVID-19 in humans. Ivermectin tablets are approved at very specific doses for some parasitic worms, and there are topical (on the skin) formulations for head lice and skin conditions like rosacea. Ivermectin is not an anti-viral (a drug for treating viruses).

Ok. Um…how about kerosene? Would that work? Or…floor polish? Polish up your insides so the virus slides right off? Or maybe a garlic poultice with just a little ivermectin sprinkled on top?