I had to go digging to find out what happened.

Hannah is Hannah Brown, who wrote a venomous piece in The Scotsman misrepresenting what For Women Scotland said.

For Women Scotland – which claims to campaign ‘for sex-based rights’ in Scotland – posted on Twitter on August 15: “Horrific regimes and movements like the Taliban also know what same-sex attraction is. They don’t check whether it’s “same gender” attraction like Stonewall and BBC. They hang, behead or shoot men for l[o]ving men and women for resisting rape.”

Yes, and? It’s the truth. The Taliban don’t care how people “identify.” The Taliban don’t terrorize and slaughter people because of their identity, they do it because of their actual physical sex. For Women Scotland doesn’t “claim to” campaign for women and girls, it does so, and their point in the tweet is that women and girls are oppressed, raped, dominated, tortured, and murdered by the Taliban on the basis of their sex – what’s between their legs, not what’s between their ears. What is it that Hannah Brown objects to? Heather knows.

Heather Herbert, LGBT+ Labour Scotland trans officer said: “Using the horrific situation in Afghanistan as a way to attack trans people shows how blinkered FWS are.”

It’s not “attacking trans people” to point out that men are not women. Pointing out how absurd and reactionary the trans dogma is, and how useless it is for actual women in desperate situations, is not “attacking” trans people. It’s not “attacking” Christians to be an atheist or to make atheist arguments, and it’s not “attacking” trans people to be an atheist about the trans belief system. Woo is woo, whether it’s about magic gods in the sky or magic gender in the brain.

“Instead of talking about how the safety of women and girls they appear to be cheering the Taliban on.”

The Scotsman needs better copy editors. Two confusion-making errors in these few short paragraphs so far.

Susan Smith, a spokeswoman for the group[,] said: “Having the language to talk about the plight of women, girls and LGB people in Afghanistan is important.

“The human rights catastrophe is happening to people because of their sex or sexual orientation and it should not be problematic to state that.

“That “activists” have used this to attack us is incomprehensible, and we only took the post down as we wanted the focus to stay on women and girls in Afghanistan.

“We made no comparison to our organisation whatsoever and to try and pretend our tweet was an attack on trans people is rank dishonesty.”

It’s also a big part of what’s wrong with the whole “movement” – this dishonest working up of outrage at obviously true factual claims like “men are not women.”

When it counts.

Well? Which is it?

Stop the presses:

British supermodel Lily Cole has revealed that she identifies as “queer” adding that she sees other labels of sexuality as too “rigid”.

Or to put it less excitingly, a model says she calls herself “queer.” Nobody cares, and life goes on.

In a new interview with the Sunday Times Style to discuss her debut book, Who Cares Wins, the mother of one, 33, said the choice of the word queer allows her to be open while protecting her private life.

Yes indeed, and it allows her to be bold while remaining cautious, it allows her to be frank while remaining bashful, it allows her to be trendy while doing nothing at all.

“If I were living in another country today, my queerness would be a crime,” she said.

If she were living in another country today her femaleness would be a crime. In Afghanistan that crime is punished with a life sentence to house arrest.

In other words, how about being less precious and self-absorbed? How about not playing into this delusion that some minute variation in how she sees herself is worth confiding to a reporter? How about looking past the self instead of obsessing about it?

In the interview, Cole, who was first scouted at the age of 14 and appeared on the cover of British Vogue two years later, also discussed the duality of the modelling world. She said the industry both empowers women while imposing impossible beauty standards.

“I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I feel that fashion is one of the only industries where women are more empowered than men — female models are paid more than male models, the consumers are predominantly female, it is a very female-centric industry. And so, in a strange way, I felt very empowered.”

She can skip identifying as queer, she can identify as thick as a plank, instead. No, being a fashion model is not “empowering.” Well paid for some, but maek u powerful, no.

No, he can’t just pop back in, “reinstated.” That’s not how any of this works.

During an event in Dallas on Sunday that was also attended by prominent peddlers of the QAnon conspiracy theory, [Sidney] Powell suggested Trump could be reinstated as president even now, saying that “it should be that he can simply be reinstated, that a new Inauguration Day is set.”

Yes definitely “it should be that” a wannabe dictator can just magically be “reinstated” despite the whole losing the election thing and the inciting a violent insurrection thing.

According to CNN legal analyst Steve Vladeck, “Powell is just making stuff up. There’s no regulation, rule, statute or constitutional provision that comes within a million light-years of what she’s describing. There is no mechanism for ‘reinstating’ a former President. There is no procedure for setting a ‘new Inauguration Day.’ ”

Well to be fair she didn’t say there was, she said it should be that there is. Totally different thing!

No less stupid though.

Meanwhile in Pakistan –

A woman was violently assaulted, thrown into the air and had her clothes ripped from her while filming a TikTok video in Pakistan, police say.

The unidentified woman said she was filming at a park in the city of Lahore when a crowd of up to 400 hundred men attacked her on Saturday.

Video of the incident circulating over social media shows a woman being forcibly picked up and dragged through a mob of hundreds gathered at Minar-e-Pakistan to celebrate Independence Day, an event marking the end of British colonial rule.

Yay, end of colonial rule, what better way to celebrate than to have hundreds of men assault a woman?

What is colonial rule?

A power imbalance. An act of aggression in which one country forces its will on another country. An intrusion. An assault that continues for decades or centuries. An injustice.

The woman, who is a TikToker in Pakistan, said she attempted to escape from the crowd along with six others when around 300 to 400 people “attacked us” and “assaulted us violently” during the struggle.

The 300 to 400 “people” were men. Newsweek shouldn’t have switched to “people.” The incident isn’t random, it’s what men do to women in many cities.

“People were pushing and pulling me to the extent that they tore my clothes. Several people tried to help me but the crowd was too huge and they kept throwing me in the air,” she added.

Well she’s a woman – women are fair game.

Footage of the incident has since garnered hundreds of thousands of views over Twitter and TikTok, with many expressing their horror, frustration and anger at the assault. The attack has invigorated public debate in the country surrounding women’s rights and protection.

A letter to the WSJ from Mark Boslaugh and Michael Mann:

In “Climate Change Brings a Flood of Hyperbole” (op-ed, Aug. 11), Steven Koonin put himself in the unenviable position of playing down climate change precisely while we are experiencing unprecedented heat waves, storms, fires, droughts, and floods that exceed model-based expectations.

Yes but these are some other kind of heat waves, storms, fires, droughts, and floods, the kind that have nothing to do with climate change.

Mr. Koonin claims that regional projections are “meant to scare people.” But the paper he cites for support addresses the “unfolding of what may become catastrophic changes to Earth’s climate” and argues that “being able to anticipate what would otherwise be surprises in extreme weather and climate variations” requires better models. In other words, our current models cannot rule out a catastrophic future.

Model uncertainty is two-edged. If we’d been lucky, we’d be discovering that we overestimated the danger. But all indicators suggest the opposite. Those who dismiss climate risk often appeal to uncertainty, but they have it backward. Climate uncertainty is like not knowing how many shots Dirty Harry fired from his .44-caliber Magnum. Now that it’s pointed at our head, it’s dawning on us that we’ve probably miscalculated. By the time we’re sure, it’s too late. We’ve got to ask ourselves one question: Do we feel lucky? Well, do we?

The trouble is, though, it’s mostly people who will be comparatively lucky who are doing the decision-making. It’s people who are already adults, most of them adults of long standing. They won’t be around for the worst stuff, and they can’t seem to bring themselves to care enough about a future that won’t have them in it to do the right things now. Everybody’s still stuck in short-term thinking. Humans may be incapable of doing anything else when it requires major upheaval. The people alive now don’t want to stop flying all over the planet and driving big SUVs and building a second house in Phoenix or Miami.

The Glinner Update on Owen Jones’s hatred of women:

No Owen, what is gruesome is your obsessive monstering of feminist women who have an analysis of sex class oppression, and who understand the structure of gender and how it harms women far better than you.

What is gruesome is your complete and unrelenting contempt for women’s expertise and knowledge about their own oppression.

I am not an ‘anti-trans obsessive jumping on the Plymouth tragedy.’

I am a feminist thinker who wrote a PhD on male entitlement, and have published and been interviewed on MRA culture, what it tells us about the structure of misogyny, the relation between male entitlement and male violence, and the narcissistic rage that is visited on women when they do not comply with what men demand from them.

We know you only have your repeated ad nauseam one-note narrative about the evil ‘sadistic’ TERFs. We know in your narrative I can only be a swivel-eyed transphobic loon who hates gay people and is in bed with the far right, even though I am, in fact, an anticapitalist bisexual radical feminist.

We know that you are completely and utterly incapable of granting for one moment that the thousands of thousands of women objecting to the demand that their sex class be erased in law and language might have some grasp of their own political situation that eludes you.

Read it all, it’s all that good.

University of Chicago research finds that it’s worse than we thought.

The researchers assessed how consistently respondents answered certain questions that were written differently but belonged to the same category. What they found was a high degree of stability among answers related to insurrectionist sentiments — equating to well over 10 million people.

“That’s a very worrisome finding,” [Robert] Pape said. “This is not just people randomly ticking boxes, but they’re consistently ticking similar boxes, meaning they are adamant about this feeling.”

Much like the Taliban.

Rather than a dying movement, the team found the insurrectionist sentiments were larger and more dangerous than they believed the movement was in March.

“We would have thought that since June is months after March — which is six months after the insurrection in January — that things would have gone the other way,” Pape said. “Keep in mind: Trump has been de-platformed. There have been over 550 arrests to punish and process, through the criminal justice system, people who participated in the January 6 insurrection.

“There were reasons to think that things were cooling off and dying down or might have been cooling off and dying down. That’s not what we see. We see the opposite.”

Also like the Taliban. Not fading away but growing.

Taliban says women can have all the rights Islam allows.

Yes, we know, that’s not even worth reporting. Of course they say that. All the rights Islam allows to women add up to

ZERO.

The Taliban’s Islam at any rate. Of course people can invent their own Islams, but it’s idiotic or cynical to think the Taliban’s Islam is anything but a life sentence for all women. No freedom no education no choice. Women are objects to be owned by men and beaten or killed if they step out of line in any way.

Taliban say they will guarantee women’s rights under the ‘limits of Islam’ following takeover of Afghanistan

Rich and poor alike are free to live under bridges.

During a Tuesday press conference, a Taliban spokesperson pledged that the new government would protect women’s rights “within the limits of Islam,” according to Sky News and other outlets

Which means no rights at all.

So, let’s make the pandemic worse, yes?

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) on Monday issued an executive order blocking local governments from requiring COVID vaccinations for worker, AZ Central reports.

What to do – reduce the spread of a lethal virus? Or increase it? Let’s go with increase.

Ducey’s move follows the Tucson City Council’s sweeping 6-1 vote that would “require that city employees must show proof of at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine by Aug. 24, or face a five-day suspension without pay and possibly higher health-insurance premiums.”

Why would the City Council do that? To reduce the spread of the virus. Apparently that’s a bad thing to do?

Matt Burdick, a Tucson city spokesperson, also pushed back against Ducey’s order.

“It is the surest form of protection against COVID-19,” Burdick said in an email. “However, we recognize that obtaining a vaccine is a personal health decision.”

Yes, but no. Yes, it is literally that, but it’s not only that. It’s personal but it’s not only personal. It’s a personal decision that affects other people. It’s childish to keep pretending not to know that. Personal decisions can affect other people. If you make a personal decision to throw heavy objects around in a crowded room, you’re likely to injure other people.

It’s surprising it’s taken this long.

The Colorado River has been shrinking for years. It’s all been a pretty massive mistake.

CNN goes on:

The federal government on Monday declared a water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time, triggering mandatory water consumption cuts for states in the Southwest, as climate change-fueled drought pushes the level in Lake Mead to unprecedented lows.

States in the Southwest include Arizona, where the population of Phoenix continues to grow at speed, which is ridiculous – criminally ridiculous. It’s too hot for human habitation, so air conditioning is everywhere, and air conditioning uses a lot of power. Also? Water. Phoenix shouldn’t exist, let alone be getting bigger and bigger.

Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the US by volume, has drained at an alarming rate this year. At around 1,067 feet above sea level and 35% full, the Colorado River reservoir is at its lowest since the lake was filled after the Hoover Dam was completed in the 1930s.

Lake Powell, which is also fed by the Colorado River and is the country’s second-largest reservoir, recently sank to a record low and is now 32% full.

This is not sustainable or desirable.

The significance of the reservoirs’ rapid decline cannot be overstated. The Colorado River supplies water to more than 40 million people living across seven US states and Mexico.

Lake Mead and Lake Powell provide a critical supply of drinking water, hydropower and irrigation for many communities across the region including rural farms and tribal nations.

No joke.

Owen Jones pretending not to be a misogynist.

The thing about OJ is that he wants to pretend to be a feminist while still dismissing women’s concerns and protests at being appropriated or pushed aside or both by…guys like him.

Always a charmer.

Oh, cool then. Men slapping women “because they’re being racist” is just fine, and obviously not coercion.

Medical workers protesting…medical precautions.

They were hard to miss on the corner of a busy four-way intersection at the entrance to Winchester Medical Center: a group of about 20 people — many of them nurses, some in scrubs — protesting the hospital’s recent coronavirus vaccination mandate.

Yes, gee, why would a hospital want the staff not to spread a lethal virus?

The nurses’ employer, Valley Health, the parent company of Winchester Medical Center, had given them an ultimatum: Get the shot or face termination. And those standing on the street corner Tuesday had already made up their minds.

Valley Health announced a vaccine mandate for its 6,300 employees at its six locations on July 19, while offering religious and medical exemptions for eligible applicants.

Religious exemptions should be out of the question. That’s a grotesque, insulting reason to allow people to spread a killer virus.

Margaret Foster Riley, a public health sciences and law professor at the University of Virginia, said the unvaccinated health-care workers probably do not have a case that their rights are being violated. The nation has a long history of legal vaccination requirements, especially for health-care workers, she said. What’s different is that entities are requiring shots that are under emergency use authorization and not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

On account of how the virus isn’t going to stand by politely and wait until the FDA approves the shots. It’s just going to go ahead and do what a virus does.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention labeled the vast majority of Virginia counties, including Warren and Frederick, as having “high” virus transmission. For the first time since April, more than 1,000 Virginians are hospitalized with covid-19, and daily new cases are back to February levels.

Inside Winchester Medical Center, other staffers have watched their colleagues’ protestations with unease.

“Being in the health-care profession, it’s bigger than just yourself,” said Sherri Thornton, a nurse in the emergency room. “You’ve dedicated your life and your profession to taking care of people and doing no harm to anyone, and I think you have to protect not only yourself but your patients.”

You’d think.

H/t What a Maroon

On the one hand, real freedom – freedom to get an education, to work, to leave the house, to travel, to be around other people, to be godless. On the other hand, fake freedom – to refuse to wear safety belts in cars, to refuse to heed warnings about building in flood zones or fire zones, to refuse to wear masks during a pandemic.

The Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, will temporarily be allowed to enforce an order banning mask mandates, the state supreme court ruled on Sunday.

So the governor is free to force other people to risk their health by allowing third parties to risk the health of their employees and students or patients or customers by not mandating masks. It seems like a very perverse and frivolous kind of “freedom.”

However, the ultimate fate of mask mandates in Texas is far from clear, as school districts and localities fight to maintain control of public health orders and Covid-19 caseloads driven by Delta variant infections among unvaccinated people surge.

They want to have mandates, and the governor wants to ban mandates. Whose freedom is more important here? Yes, having to wear a mask is an interference with freedom in a sense, but then so is being on a ventilator. Freedom from COVID is a more profound freedom than freedom from wearing a mask.

Abbott has said his order does not ban mask-wearing.

“Anyone who wants to wear a mask can do so, including in schools,” he said in a tweet on Sunday.

Cute, but since wearing a mask protects other people more than the self, that’s not as consoling as it might sound.

Making lists.

For one last day?

From Kabul:

Early on Sunday morning I was heading to university for a class when a group of women came running out from the women’s dormitory. I asked what had happened and one of them told me the police were evacuating them because the Taliban had arrived in Kabul, and they will beat women who do not have a burqa.

We all wanted to get home, but we couldn’t use public transport. The drivers would not let us in their cars because they did not want to take responsibility for transporting a woman. It was even worse for the women from the dormitory, who are from outside Kabul and were scared and confused about where they should go.

Meanwhile, the men standing around were making fun of girls and women, laughing at our terror. “Go and put on your chadari [burqa],” one called out. “It is your last days of being out on the streets,” said another. “I will marry four of you in one day,” said a third.

Haha heehee. So funny.

She and her sisters went home and hid all their diplomas and other evidence of higher education.

All I could see around me were the fearful and scared faces of women and ugly faces of men who hate women, who do not like women to get educated, work and have freedom. Most devastating to me were the ones who looked happy and made fun of women. Instead of standing by our side, they stand with the Taliban and give them even more power.

…

Then today, when I heard that the Taliban had reached Kabul, I felt I was going to be a slave. They can play with my life any way they want.

I also worked as a teacher at an English-language education centre. I cannot bear to think that I can no longer stand in front of the class, teaching them to sing their ABCs. Every time I remember that my beautiful little girl students should stop their education and stay at their home, my tears fall.

Welcome to the 8th century.

A freelance foreign correspondent writes

It was catastrophic for women and girls in the city. Within days all women were ordered back into their homes and told not to come out without a male relative accompanying them. Working women, even those in high ranking positions including judges and magistrates, were ordered to stay home. Women who did venture out were told to wear a burqa: the Islamic fashion of the day was a long blue pleated nylon garment that covered from head to toe and had a small thick woven panel across the eyes.

It was so completely dehumanising, people started referring to women as “burqas” as in: “Look, there’s a couple of burqas over there…” The “morality police” would patrol the streets and markets with batons hitting women who showed any flesh as they walked (toe, ankle, wrist…)

Afghan women suddenly found they had no access to health care. They were not allowed to be seen by a male medic, but all the female medics had been sent home. A grief-stricken pregnant woman whose baby had died in the womb was turned away from the hospital.

Girls were told there would be no more school. There was to be no more sports, no games, no music, no dancing… As a female reporter, interviewing became problematic: Mullah Omah, the head of the Taliban, had decreed that the sound of a woman’s voice should not reach the ears of his men. So, when interviewing them, I had to ask my question to the male photographer with me, who would repeat it to the male translator who would ask it of the Taliban soldier. Most of them were young, barely-educated boys straight out of the madrasas of Pakistan and didn’t have a clue. Some weren’t even ideologically driven: several said they had been Mujahideen and had changed sides because the Taliban was winning in their area or the Taliban paid them more. One marched right up to me, raised his automatic rifle at my head and screamed at me to cover my face. What surprised me most of all was that he did so in perfect English. Clearly, they were not all uneducated. I was lucky: I got to fly home. The Afghan women and girls who risked their lives by just speaking to me, had nowhere to go.

I have often wondered what happened to them. How did the widow with only daughters, who had lost her husband, father, uncles, brothers and every male relative in successive wars manage to get out to buy food to feed her family? What happened to the poor pregnant woman? And the teenage girls who were terrified they were going to be married off to a Taliban soldier?

Sigh. I was interested, I wanted to read this, but then –

Mine is a predictable photo album – a baby transforms across a camera roll from limpid mole to Ian Hislop in leggings, kittens simper beside screengrabs of news stories, pink cake, a very big plum. It was the juxtaposition of three pictures that documented April though, that pricked my fury. A photo taken from our car of one of the anti-vaccine marches that shut down London sat beside a headline that pregnant people were finally being offered the coronavirus vaccine, then a picture of my son’s first birthday party.

Her son gets to be her son, Ian Hislop gets to be Ian Hislop, but pregnant women aren’t allowed to be pregnant women, they have to be concealed behind “pregnant people” just as elsewhere they’re concealed by yards of cloth.

And it’s spreading. A New Yorker Talk of the Town piece a few weeks ago about Sarah Hoover, a former director of the Guggenheim Gallery who gave a lecture there called “Maternal Instincts: An Art Historical Review of Motherhood.”

“I had terrible postpartum depression and anxiety,” she said. “It ended. But it actually gave birth to a whole new me in the end. I wrote about how I opened up all the cracks in the narrative around motherhood for me, and I really want to change it all. I want women – and people who give birth, who are not all women – “

So I don’t care how she finishes her sentence or what the rest of the piece says, because you can’t do both. You can’t pretend you’re doing this for women and then hastily throw a dropcloth over them. I don’t care how she wants to change the narrative, because she just betrayed the whole idea.

Women have been colonized, again.