More on the NZ Herald article, which covers a lot of ground.

In Wellington City, a Speak Up For Women billboard has been removed from the CBD today.

In a statement Go Media general manager Simon Teagle said it was removed as soon as the company started fielding calls from offended New Zealanders.

He believed the billboard could be in breach of the Advertising Standards Authority’s codes.

A billboard that gives a dictionary definition of the word “woman” could be in breach of the Advertising Standards Authority’s codes? They must be very strange codes.

“Go Media is an inclusive, locally-owned New Zealand business and we support all communities. While we believe in freedom of speech, we do not condone content that upsets our community.

“We apologise unreservedly for any distress this may have caused anyone, and remedied the situation as soon we could.”

They support all communities, but if women put up a billboard with the definition of women, that “upsets our community.” What community? The community of everybody except women? If they support all communities why don’t they support [the community of] women? Are women the one “community” that doesn’t get to be considered a community? Why are women being singled out for shunning and exclusion this way?

Go Media is also a partner of the Wellington Phoenix [a football club].

Club general manager David Dome tweeted this morning that he has contacted Go Media for its position on the advertisement, which would be reviewed accordingly.

He said the billboard was at “complete odds with the club’s position on diversity and inclusion and specifically LGBTQI+”.

What on earth? Saying a woman is an adult human female is at complete odds with a football club’s position on diversity and inclusion? How is that possible?

Speak Up For Women’s spokeswoman Beth Johnson said in a statement the billboard was up for 24 hours before it was pulled down.

“The same vexatious complainants who have been harassing the women’s group for years have managed to bully a media company into bowing to their demands,” Johnson said.

Speak Up For Women is holding an event at the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington on Thursday.

But from tonight Wellington Mayor Andy Foster and councillors Fleur Fitzsimons and Teri O’Neill have organised for the sails of the Centre to be lit in the colours of the transgender flag.

In other words a kind of visual shouting down – visual and official. The city government is making a big show of bullying women for defending their own rights. So much for their “community.”

“The conversation which is being had around the country has caused angst for the trans community in particular,” Foster said.

“This is a vulnerable part of our community so we are trying to say to them that we’re standing beside them and we support them.”

So women are not vulnerable? Women do not experience angst? Women don’t need councillors and mayors to stand beside them and support them? Women are the all-powerful domineering monsters who can crush men between their thumb and forefinger? Is that it?

The NZ Herald reports on the official bullying of a feminist group:

Lower Hutt’s Mayor has apologised after saying controversial group Speak Up For Women could hold one of their events in a council waste bin.

“Controversial” group aka feminist group.

Also he didn’t really apologize.

Meanwhile, one of the group’s billboards has been taken down from one of Go Media’s central Wellington sites.

That is, misogynist bullies got it taken down.

These developments come on the same day as Wellington City Council will light up the Michael Fowler Centre in the colours of the transgender flag timed for when the group holds an event there.

In other words deliberately timed to spit in the faces of feminist women and women in general.

Recently the High Court ruled one of the group’s events should be allowed to go ahead at Palmerston North City Library, after the council cancelled the booking.

The judge said the group “cannot rationally be described as a hate group”.

The city council canceled an event at the library? That seems very high-handed, and grotesquely so when you know it’s a feminist group that was canceled. The war on women is getting more and more blatant.

Dunedin and Christchurch city councils have previously refused to allow the group to hold meetings in public facilities, but following the court decision a meeting at Auckland’s Town Hall went ahead as planned.

Lower Hutt Mayor Campbell Barry posted on Facebook last week saying: “If this group needs a venue in the Hutt, I’ve got some nice new waste bins they can use?”

Because that’s what women defending women’s rights deserve, is it? Being told by a mayor to hold their meetings in garbage cans?

Today Barry apologised if Speak Up For Women felt offended by his comment.

IF??????????

Is there any ambiguity about whether or not “hold your meeting in a garbage can” is meant to be offensive?

He said the right to meet, speak and debate was important and his comment was in response to some supporters of the group making “derogatory and harmful comments” towards transgender people.

“In terms of my beliefs, I do not support the views of this group and the harm that members within it promulgate.”

Except that they don’t promulgate “harm.”

This is pretty amazing.

Stand Up For Women put up the definition of “woman” billboard and fans of trans ideology promptly bullied the relevant people into removing it.

So, women are now the class enemy, women are the arrogant dominant class, women have all the privilege and power, and it’s men who have to struggle to be heard…by making sure that women are not heard.

Who knew feminism would be killed off not by the right but by the left?

Apparently labor laws and safety laws don’t apply to prisoners.

Temperatures reached 97 degrees on June 21 at the French Robinson Unit prison the day Seth Donnelly collapsed. The Texas Observer reported Seth passed out during his prison job of training attack dogs — running around in a 75-pound ​“fight suit” while the dogs tried to bite him. Seth’s internal body temperature was 106 when he reached the hospital, where doctors eventually took him off life support. He died on June 23, and his preliminary autopsy lists multiorgan failure following severe hyperthermia.

97 degrees. A padded suit weighing 75 pounds. It’s worthy of the tunnels at Camp Dora.

Danielle, who asked for In These Times to withhold her last name to protect her family-run business from social stigma, says she woke up in her cell in Texas at Gatesville Prison one typical early morning in July 2015, drenched in sweat. Without time (or permission) to shower or brush her teeth, she reports she was corralled to the fields in a heavy uniform.

“It didn’t feel safe,” says Danielle, who explains she picked tomatoes and jalapeño peppers without pay. Gatesville’s average high temperature that month was 98 degrees. ​“Texas in July, it’s like sitting on hell’s doorstep,” she says.

A guard who Danielle says she was ​“deathly terrified of” patrolled the ​“state property” (the term guards used for incarcerated people) on a horse. Danielle says she was not provided gloves, which often left her hands exposed to thorns and caustic jalapeño juices.

OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] rules do not apply to state prisons. Twenty-two states have adopted OSHA ​“state plans,” which cover state prisons with standards intended to be at least as effective as federal standards. Eight of the 10 states with the highest incarceration rates have declined to adopt these plans.

“The guards could literally do whatever they wanted to us,” says Danielle, who was incarcerated in Texas from August 2014 to September 2015..

Danielle’s stated working conditions appear antithetical to OSHA’s guidelines. ​“There was a vehicle that would come by and bring some water, but if the vehicle broke down you were out of luck for water that day,” she says. ​“That happened numerous times. Even when we get water it was gone within a few minutes and they won’t refill it for you. There are 50-plus women and the women in the back don’t get any.”

That causes death. It also causes misery of course, but it kills. Extreme heat is lethal, and hydration is essential.

Nearly half of people imprisoned in the U.S. work while incarcerated, a population disproportionately likely to be Black. Penal labor became a more significant part of the American economy following the Civil War; police would conduct sweeps and make arrests of Black men when plantations needed additional labor for planting, cutting and harvesting crops. Today, a majority of incarcerated workers perform ​“institutional maintenance,” which includes tasks like mowing the compound lawn and mopping floors. A relatively small number of others work in ​“correctional industries,” manufacturing things like license plates, sewing American flags and — as in Danielle’s case — harvesting vegetables that are later sold for a profit. All seven states that don’t pay for non-industry labor are in the South, which can reach dangerously hot summer temperatures.

And which are former slave states, and then Jim Crow states. Not a coincidence.

Powell attempted the Sheer Volume defense.

Powell insisted the volume of the suit they filed last November was testament to the extent of research and investigation the attorneys did.

“We filed a massive and detailed complaint in federal court that doesn’t even require us to append affidavits to it,” Powell said. “The very fact we filed 960 pages of affidavits with the complaint shows due diligence on our part. … The only way to test that is in the crucible of a trial or an evidentiary hearing,” she added, noting that the judge had thus far denied such a hearing.

Listen, it’s millions of words of bullshit, surely that counts for something.

“Volume, certainly for this court, doesn’t equate with legitimacy or veracity,” Parker shot back.

There oughta be an apothegm about that – A billion lies are as nothing compared to a single truth, or something like that. Attributed to Calvin Coolidge or Lucille Ball or whatever.

In a motion last December urging punishment of Powell, Wood and others, the city’s legal team wrote: “If sanctions are not deserved in this case, it is hard to imagine a case where they would be.”

“In a case involving the election of the President of the United States, the parties and their attorneys should be held to the highest standards of factual and legal due diligence; instead, they have raised false allegations and pursued unsupportable legal theories,” the city argued. “It is time for this Court to send a message back: lies and frivolous claims will not be tolerated. This abuse of our legal system deserves the strongest possible sanctions.”

It’s so awful it’s funny, but really it’s not funny at all.

[City attorney Herschel Fink said the misstatements in the court filings, like a claim that 139 percent of registered voters in Detroit cast ballots, had grave consequences. The correct turnout number reported by the city is just under 51 percent.

“These lies were put out into the world, and when they were put out into the world they were adopted and received by” influential people such as Trump, Fink said. He said that when Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to pressure him to flip the election to favor Trump, the president brought up the Detroit numbers.

“President Trump explicitly referenced the 139 percent voting statistic in Detroit as though it were fact,” Fink said. “These are the consequences. It’s the consequence of how they abused this system.”

And by the way what is Detroit famous for besides cars? For being a destination city during the Great Migration, and for remaining a majority Black city. It’s not a coincidence that these sleazes chose Detroit for their big lie.

In Trump lawyers news:

A U.S. judge on Monday appeared likely to reprimand Sidney Powell, a former campaign lawyer for Donald Trump, and other attorneys over a lawsuit they filed in Michigan seeking to overturn Democratic President Joe Biden’s election victory.

U.S. District Judge Linda Parker in Detroit suggested the pro-Trump lawyers should have investigated the Republican former president’s voter fraud claims more carefully before suing.

“Should an attorney be sanctioned for his or her failure to withdraw allegations the attorney came to know were untrue?,” Parker said during a court hearing via video conference. “Is that sanctionable behavior?”

You’d hope so.

Parker held the hearing to determine whether Powell, Lin Wood and other pro-Trump lawyers should be disciplined for a lawsuit they filed last November that made baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in the U.S. presidential election in Michigan.

They are not the only lawyers allied with Trump to land in hot water for supporting his false claims that his election defeat was the result of fraud. New York state and Washington, D.C., in recent weeks suspended former New York City Mayor and Trump confidant Rudy Giuliani’s law license after finding he lied in supporting Trump’s claims.

Parker asked Powell and co a lot of disbelieving questions.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen an affidavit that makes so many leaps. This is really fantastical,” Parker said. “So my question to counsel here is: How could any of you as officers of the court present this affidavit?”

How dare Parker question their faith.

In further apocalypse:

For nine straight days, waves of dead fish have washed ashore along downtown St. Petersburg and Coquina Key [Florida], plaguing residents with the intolerable stench. 

City officials say over 100 miles of coastline have been impacted, with the worst areas being along the east and southeast coast of St. Pete — Tierra Verde to Gandy Blvd. 

The city is working to clean up the mess and has collected over 25,000 dead fish in the past 10 days, along with 15,000 dead fish on July 9, alone. The number of dead fish amounts to over 15 tons.

Much of Florida is doomed because of the rising seas. I don’t recommend moving there.

Stephanie McCrummen at the Washington Post reports on

a growing Christian movement that is nondenominational, openly political and has become an engine of former president Donald Trump’s Republican Party.

It includes some of the largest congregations in the nation, housed in the husks of old Baptist churches, former big-box stores and sprawling multimillion-dollar buildings with private security to direct traffic on Sundays. Its most successful leaders are considered apostles and prophets, including some with followings in the hundreds of thousands, publishing empires, TV shows, vast prayer networks, podcasts, spiritual academies, and branding in the form of T-shirts, bumper stickers and even flags.

And this is why we can’t have nice things.

This is the world of Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White and many more lesser-known but influential religious leaders who prophesied that Trump would win the election and helped organize nationwide prayer rallies in the days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, speaking of an imminent “heavenly strike” and “a Christian populist uprising,” leading many who stormed the Capitol to believe they were taking back the country for God.

It’s an incredibly peculiar idea of “god” if you ask me.

What is new is the degree to which Trump elevated a fresh network of [New Apostolic Reformation]-style leaders who in turn elevated him as God’s chosen president, a fusion that has secured the movement as a grass-roots force within the GOP just as the old Christian right is waning. Increasingly, this is the world that the term “evangelical voter” refers to — not white-haired Southern Baptists in wooden pews but the comparatively younger, more diverse, more extreme world of millions drawn to leaders who believe they are igniting a new Great Awakening in America, one whose epicenter is Texas.

Ah yes Texas, home of so much right-wing lunacy.

It’s a bit late for the tut-tutting now.

Boris Johnson and Priti Patel have been accused of hypocrisy over their stance on racism in football, after they condemned the abuse of three black England players but previously refused to criticise fans who booed the team for taking the knee.

…

Sayeeda Warsi, a Conservative peer and former co-chairman, sent a public message to Patel, the home secretary, calling on her and all Conservatives to “think about our role in feeding this culture in our country”.

“If we ‘whistle’ & the ‘dog’ reacts we can’t be shocked if it barks & bites,” she tweeted. “It’s time to stop the culture wars that are feeding division. Dog whistles win votes but destroy nations.”

She added: “As a proud centre-right politician, as a proud part of a diverse vibrant nation that produced a football team that spoke to and represented England in all its modern diverse glory it shames me that in 2021 some in politics are still playing fast & loose with issues of race.”

I wonder if she was expecting Boris Johnson to be a pillar of anti-racism.

Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, was even more explicitly critical, saying Johnson and Patel “gave licence to the racists who booed the England players and are now racially abusing England players”. She said they were “like arsonists complaining about a fire they poured petrol on – total hypocrites”.

Johnson and Patel reject the accusation.

However, both have repeatedly stopped short of criticising fans who booed England players for taking the knee in a stand against racism. Patel has also said taking the knee represents “gesture politics” and whether to boo the England players was a “choice” for fans to make.

Well lots of things are “gesture politics,” aren’t they. Racist abuse of the players is gesture politics, rebuking players who take the knee is gesture politics, rebuking fans who send racist abuse to the players is gesture politics. Gestures are not automatically trivial.

As the players were subjected to a barrage of online abuse, a Tory MP had to apologise for suggesting Rashford should have concentrated on football rather than “playing politics” in an apparent reference to his campaign for free school meals.

Natalie Elphicke, the Tory MP for Dover and Deal, made the comment in a WhatsApp message to fellow MPs, suggesting Rashford should not have spent time on his successful campaign for free school meals for low-income pupils in the school holidays.

In comments first reported by GB News, Elphicke said: “They lost – would it be ungenerous to suggest Rashford should have spent more time perfecting his game and less time playing politics.”

Why yes, it would; thank you for asking. And seeing as how his campaign was successful, it wasn’t really “playing,” was it. Children’s full bellies aren’t a gesture, they’re the real thing.

The joys of sport.

England manager Gareth Southgate said the racist abuse aimed at Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka after the Euro 2020 final defeat by Italy was “unforgivable”.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Football Association also condemned it.

All three players missed penalties in the 3-2 shootout loss and were targeted on social media after the game.

Patriotism innit.

Updating to add:

The Death Party intensifies its push to kill more of us:

The Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Dallas this weekend has been full of the usual moments from the Republican Party’s most outrageous figures trying to be the most performatively provocative. Notable, however, has been the drumbeat of anti-vaccine rhetoric that has pervaded CPAC’s annual gathering—even as the Delta variant of COVID-19 continues to build steam across unvaccinated parts of the country.

Because what, half a million deaths isn’t enough for them?

Fauci is, naturally, horrified.

Fauci was reacting to a talk in which anti-vaxxer Alex Berenson was roundly cheered by a CPAC audience for saying the US government had failed to “sucker” 90 percent of Americans into getting vaccinated.

“It’s horrifying, I mean, the cheering about someone saying that it’s a good thing for people to not try and save their lives,” Fauci told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “If you just unpack that for a second… it’s almost frightening to say ‘Guess what? We don’t want you to do something to save your life! Yay!’ I just don’t get that and I don’t think anybody who is thinking clearly can get that.”

You can omit the “almost” from “it’s almost frightening.” Of course it’s frightening that people are happy to promote death for frivolous political or showbiz gratification.

Others carrying the anti-vaccine torch at CPAC included Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert, who mocked Biden’s efforts to get more people vaccinated and provide economic relief to states where the economy is still struggling to restart after pandemic-related shutdowns. “We’re here to tell the government we don’t want your benefits, we don’t want your welfare,” Boebert declared, strutting across a stage as she spoke. “Don’t come knocking on my door with your Fauci ‘ouchy’—you leave us the hell alone.”

Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine:

Rich Anderson, the chairman of the Virginia Republican Party[,] wrote to the president of the University of Virginia yesterday. Anderson begins by explaining, “I understand the commitment that public servants make to serving with integrity, dignity, respect, and honor in their taxpayer-funded roles.” The letter concerns Donald Trump, though not in a way that follows intuitively from the premise that public servants must act with integrity, dignity, respect, and honor.

Anderson’s letter demands UVA open an ethics investigation into Larry Sabato, the director of the school’s Center for Politics. Sabato’s alleged ethics violation is a series of mean tweets from his personal account, concerning Donald Trump.

“Not an ethics violation, Your Honour.”

“Agreed. Dismissed.”

Anderson pretends that tweets harshly critical of Trump violate the UV Mission Statement’s elevated values.

Exactly how Sabato violated any of these guidelines by pointing out that the former president was a deranged narcissist, Anderson does not say. Indeed, if you’re going to take these mission statement nostrums seriously, a line like “Everything we do must fulfill our goal of instilling citizens with an appreciation for the core values of American freedom, justice, equality, civility, and service” would seem to require the University’s staff to oppose Trump.

On account of how Trump opposes and acts against all those core values, you see.

Of course the legal merits of Anderson’s demand are not the point. It is an exercise in harassment and intimidation. Republicans are flexing their political muscle as a threat to employees of public universities.

Republicans are flexing their cancel muscles.

The occasional Republican pose as defenders of free speech, or mockers of snowflakes, was always a transparent ploy; no abuse by the illiberal left can hold a candle to the illiberalism of a political party pledged to the whims of an authoritarian.

And not just any authoritarian, but one with a florid array of bad qualities and a total lack of the other kind.

Milli Hill’s I will not be silenced is also relevant to that “mind your own fucking business” tweet of Christa Peterson’s. It is our fucking business; of course it is.

[T]oo many women have been silenced, and I don’t want to join them. There are conversations about women’s rights, women’s bodies, and the words we use to talk about women’s issues, which need to be had, but which have been made taboo in our current culture. And this is not healthy. Worse still, women like me have been used as an example to others of what happens to you if you raise questions. And others have seen these public draggings, and decided to keep quiet themselves. This kind of behaviour, in which dissidents are made a public example of in order to ensure compliance to dogma, does not have very good historical precedents. And yet it currently describes itself as ‘the right side of history’.

She’d been having misgivings about language like “assigned at birth” but had kept them to herself, because she didn’t want the monstering that would greet any questions.

However, on 25^th November 2020 I was tagged in comment on an Instagram post about obstetric violence. This is a topic I’ve written extensively about, and that features heavily in my book Give Birth like a Feminist. 25^th November was also International Day to End Violence Against Women, so I’d been reading a lot about violence against women that day and thinking about how obstetric violence sits within that and is often overlooked. There were several slides to this post, but this one jarred for me.

Wait. Notice anything odd about that besides the usual absurdity of “birthing person”?

The words “patriarchy” and “patriarchal” are allowed, but “woman” isn’t.

Why is that? Do they not realize that “patriarchy” is just as sex-specific as “woman” is?

Is it really only women who have to be erased and bullied?

Back to Hill:

My work and thinking around obstetric violence had led me to the view that it is ‘sex based violence’. Please note my use of the word sex here, not gender. Sex as in biological sex, not gender as in the social constructs around roles, clothing, behaviour etc. Like other forms of violence against women, obstetric violence happens to women because they are female. What I saw happening in this slide was a genuine mix up between the absolutely correct idea that the problem here is patriarchy, a system that oppresses and damages women on the basis of their sex, and obfuscating terminology that is unable to name the oppressed people.

It’s ok to name the oppressor but not the oppressed. Weird system.

So, as we know, she responded, and all hell broke loose. She provides a few screenshots of the many venomous attacks.

The situation seemed to be spiralling out of control, but what then made it worse was the organisation Birthrights joined in – and not to defend me. On the 26^th November, right in the eye of the storm, they posted on Instagram, not naming me directly, but stating that they were ‘proud to be an inclusive organisation’, that they would use the terms, ‘women and birthing people’, and that they would, ‘not work with individuals and organisations who do not share these values and will always challenge, either privately or publicly if appropriate, those in the maternity and birth rights movement who speak or act in a discriminatory way.’. It didn’t take long for people to work out who and what they were referring to.

“You will erase women from your language, or you will be hounded out.”

Read the whole thing.

No, that’s not right.

There are a lot of reasons it’s not right, but to take just one central one – that amounts to telling women that “gender” is none of our business, that the social rules and constraints imposed on women are none of our business, that the perceived inferiority and subordinate nature of women is none of our business, that feminism is none of our business. That claim is obviously absurd, and also obviously insulting. She might as well tell workers that unions are none of their business.

It’s especially repellent because she is a graduate student in philosophy. If gender is none of women’s business then everything is none of philosophy’s business – so what is she doing getting a PhD in philosophy?

She specializes in this kind of curt, smart-ass quippery instead of actual thought or argument, and it’s one of the more annoying things about her.

This is RT, Putin’s rag, so take that into account, but I can’t find other news sources reporting on it yet:

London borough apologises for having actor in bare-bottomed monkey costume with mock genitalia encourage kids to read more books

Long but compelling headline, do admit. If that doesn’t encourage kids to read more books I don’t know what will.

Officials in London’s Redbridge borough were left red-faced after a library event designed to promote reading among kids featured a monkey character in a costume that included dangling fake genitalia and exposed buttocks.

The costume and the actor wearing it came from Mandinga Arts, a troupe of street performers based in Clapham South that has “a distinctive style bringing together live music, carnival, street costume, puppetry and dance, drawing on diverse influences from Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa,” according to its website. The well-endowed monkey was part of one of the group’s walkabout acts.

“bringing together live music, carnival, street costume, puppetry and dance“…and dildos and bare bums. Why so shy about the star attraction?

Redbridge Libraries acknowledged the lapse in judgement and apologized for hosting the performance, but shifted the blame onto the charity Vision. It was they, rather than the borough council, who were responsible for organizing the event, the statement said.

The mischievous rainbow-coloured creature was promoting the Summer Reading Challenge, a campaign encouraging literacy and reading during the summer holidays among children aged between four and 11 years.

The mischievous rainbow-coloured creature with the flapping dildo and naked bum. “Mischief” is one word for it I guess.

This is an odd thing that happened.

What do they mean “inappropriate”? It’s mostly about the dildo, but apparently also the bare bum. What they carefully don’t mention is that the event was for children. It wasn’t Kink Hour for Adults, it was a reading promotion event for children. What a dildo has to do with it is anyone’s guess.

Onlookers are not entirely convinced.

I guess libraries identify as kink outreach centres now.

I’m so sick of these commissars.

A childbirth campaigner says she was “cancelled” for suggesting violence in childbirth was committed against women rather than against “birthing people”.

It’s women. The violence is done to women. If we can’t name them we can’t do anything about the violence.

The flare-up began in November when [Milli Hill] was “tagged”, or name-checked, by a stranger in a post on Instagram. The person wrote: “Birthing people are seen as ‘the fragile sex’ who need to be kept under patriarchal authority by doctors.”

Hill replied: “I would challenge the term ‘birthing person’ in this context though … It is women who are seen as the ‘fragile sex’ etc, and obstetric violence [medical interventions performed during childbirth without a woman’s consent] is violence against women.”

Result: instant campaign to pound her into oblivion.

Hill, who has three children, was then contacted by Amy Gibbs, the chief executive of Birthrights, a charity that campaigns for human rights during childbirth, an organisation she has worked alongside for years.

Gibbs wrote: “I was really concerned to see public comments you made today on Instagram about obstetric violence. Particularly the comment that “obstetric violence is violence against women” and challenging/disputing that it could happen to non-binary or trans people who give birth.

“As you know, obstetric violence is violence perpetuated in the maternity context, which means it can happen to birthing people who don’t identify as women … I’m afraid that Birthrights isn’t able to work with people who don’t share our inclusive values.”

Telling women to stop talking about women when talking about obstetric violence.

In response to the criticism, she has decided to close the Positive Birth network, which had 400 groups internationally.

Birthrights said: “Equality and inclusion is core to our ethos, and our services are available to everyone who is pregnant … We regularly review all our partnerships to ensure they reflect our values.’

Another win for kicking women out of childbirth organizations.

So Wayne Couzens’s colleagues in the police called him “The Rapist.” Hawhaw, boys will be boys eh? Nicknames are enough, no need to do anything about him.

The Met Police hired Sarah Everard‘s killer despite him being disturbingly nicknamed ‘The Rapist’ and the claim that he drove around naked in 2015 – three years before he was hired in London, it has emerged.

Wayne Couzens’ ex-colleagues at the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), where the 48-year-old joined in March 2011, reportedly gave him the nickname because he made some female officers feel uncomfortable.

And by “uncomfortable” they mean “afraid.”

The Met is under pressure to investigate how Couzens, who pleaded guilty to murdering 33-year-old Ms Everard after snatching her off the street, was able to continue serving as an officer despite suspicions being raised about his behaviour.

Well they’re busy not prosecuting rape, you see.

Harriet Wistrich, director of the Centre for Women’s Justice, is among those calling for a full public inquiry into ‘police failures and misconduct and the wider culture of misogyny’ following Couzens’ guilty plea.

Ms Everard’s murder sparked protests by women fearing for their own safety earlier this year.

Ms Wistrich said: ‘As protesters made clear, women do not feel safe and it is incumbent on the Government and all criminal justice agencies to now take action over the epidemic of male violence which is the other public health crisis of our day.’

If Couzens has any sense he will immediately identify as a woman.

Janice Turner on the difficulties of being young and female:

The young woman’s burden is always wanting to be liked. Not caring what others, especially men, think about you is the secret bonus of age. But girls crave approval. For my generation the bar was low: be pleasant and pretty. Now the arenas in which perfection must be achieved are manifold: school, career, looks, sexual allure, often of an extreme pornified type. 

It’s kind of a tricky combination, if you ask me.

This week The Crown actress Emma Corrin posted pictures of her body, thin to the verge of skeletal, her breasts bound flat with tape. This was “very new, very cool”, she wrote. “It’s all a journey right.” Immediately famous people like Paloma Faith plus the official Netflix account rushed to say how much they loved these photos and Corrin’s statement that she was now non-binary: “pronouns she/they”.

How does “she/they” work? Is either one ok? Are you expected to alternate? Follow an arcane but undisclosed formula? What?

You could strap me to a ducking stool and I would still deny that breast-binding is progressive. Because I have lived through too many other ways women’s bodies have been scarred by fashion and mental illness. I remember heroin-chic models fainting backstage because designers craved sharper lines. I’ve seen self-harm, through razor blades or surgeons’ knives. I know anorexics — friends and daughters of friends — always the clever, perfectionist girls, attaining control by existing on a single cube of cheese. And breast-binding screws up female organs, can damage your ribs, limits activity and the very oxygen women breathe.

Breast-binding is very like anorexia, when you think about it. Creepily like it.

I’ve seen true androgyny too: young, butch lesbians, Bowie in a dress, loathed by everyone’s dad. If only being “non-binary” was equally cost-free.

Well, it is for men: explore your fabulous side, like Sam Smith, in nail polish and heels. But a gender clinician tells me the non-binary girls she sees, who bind their breasts often as a prequel to surgical amputation, are quiet, subdued, full of angst and discomfort: “They’re just sick of being the awkward ones at family parties. They just want to disappear.”

“The world gets harder and harder,” Hilary Mantel wrote of female saints who starved and self-abased. “There’s no pleasing it. No wonder some girls want out.” Eyes burn into prominent young women, in bodies they so rarely wear with ease. We should not ignore their distress signals, let alone cheer them on.

But the magic words change everything.

What was that about ethics?

Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., charged the Secret Service nearly $10,200 for guest rooms used by his protective detail during Trump’s first month at the club this summer, newly released spending records show.

He could of course charge them nothing, or charge them a nominal rate, but…no.

The Washington Post reported previously that Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club — where he lived from January, when he left the White House, to early May — charged the Secret Service more than $40,000 so that agents could use a room near Trump.

He could have chosen to do it differently, but he didn’t.

Legal experts have said there are no laws to prohibit Trump’s company from charging the Secret Service rent at his properties, either during or after his presidency. The rate is effectively up to him: By law, the Secret Service can pay whatever it must to rent rooms near its protectees for use as command posts and meeting rooms.

But there are also no laws requiring him to extort as much money as he can.

In recent history, The Post could find only one other protected person who had charged the Secret Service rent: Joe Biden. As vice president, Biden charged the Secret Service $2,200 per month to use a cottage on his property in Delaware. In total, Biden received $171,600 between 2011 and 2017.

…

The charges from Trump’s company exceeded Biden’s lifetime total by March 2017, Trump’s third month in office, according to records obtained by The Post. Trump’s company charged the State Department to host summits with foreign leaders, the Secret Service for rooms while protecting Trump and his children, and the Defense Department for aides accompanying the president to Mar-a-Lago and to his Irish golf club.

Every chance he got, in other words.

In all, Trump’s company charged the government more than $2.5 million during his presidency, according to a Post analysis of federal spending records.

Not bad! Of course it’s not all pure profit. Some of that went to pay the cleaning staff.

It is unclear how the Trump Organization set the rates that it charges the Secret Service at Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster. Before The Post revealed the extent of the charges, Trump’s son Eric said in 2019 that the rate was “like 50 bucks” per night.

How are we defining “like” here?

Jordan Libowitz, of the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said that — in light of Trump’s other assets and income — he should consider allowing the Secret Service to stay at his properties free.

Maybe he did consider it.