More on Lytton:

Like those videos from Paradise when it burned to the ground.

An entire British Columbia town has burned up.

The fire started in the late afternoon and by 6 p.m., the mayor had issued an evacuation order for the entire town of Lytton. …

Ninety per cent the small B.C. village has burned in a devastating wildfire, the town’s local member of Parliament says. 

Brad Vis, who represents Mission-Matsqui-Fraser Canyon, says the fire that tore through Lytton and forced the entire community to evacuate Wednesday has led to significant structural damage including in the town’s centre.

…

“We heard that we lost our hospital again, plus the ambulance, and it sounds like the whole town’s burning,” said Terry Wagner, an evacuee, late Wednesday.

Lytton Mayor Jan Polderman ordered an evacuation for the entire village of about 250 people at around 6 p.m. Wednesday. Evacuees were asked to register at the Emergency Social Services building in Merritt, and told they will be provided three days’ worth of supports if needed. 

…

Lytton made headlines this week after breaking the record for highest temperature recorded in Canada three days in a row. The record now stands at 49.6 C, beating the all-time heat record for Las Vegas. 

It’s here.

Does she understand anything?

If it were true that nobody’s body is a threat then rape would not exist. There would be no word for it because there would be nothing for the word to name. If it were true that nobody’s body is a threat then physical violence would not exist.

On this one I can’t even guess what she thinks she’s thinking. It’s not that she doesn’t know that rape exists, but her next step in the reasoning eludes me.

Also, perception of a threat is not contempt. It’s more like the opposite. Perception of a threat is fear, it’s not contempt.

Glinner on the destruction of Green Party Women:

This, from Mumsnet, has been circulating on Twitter today. It concerns drug pusher and abusive male, Kathryn Bristow.

Graham shares a message from a Green Party member:

“I am writing with the latest antics of Kathryn Bristow, who has now declared themselves the sole chair of green party women.

A couple of days ago Kathryn Bristow decided that it was a bad idea for women to be able to interact and speak freely in the internal members-only  Green Party women discussion space. It began with him removing posts on LGBT issues, in order to make it a ‘safe space for all women and non-binary people’.

Women objected, Bristow made threats of legal action. Women continued to object, Bristow made threats of deletion and disciplinary action.

The uppity women continued to object, so Kathryn showed his true colours by locking down the space, deleting all the contributions and comments of women since his last post in March, and declared that going forward the communication would be one way only- from him to the members.

This is a man, remember, silencing all the women in the Green Party women’s party…including the co-chair, who is an actual woman, unlike the man who silenced her.

Read Glinner’s post for all the grotesque details.

Ari Berman (author of the voting rights classic Give Us the Ballot) on the horrific ruling:

Nina Totenberg says the Voting Rights Act is basically dead.

The U.S. Supreme Court for all practical purposes rendered the landmark Voting Rights Act a dead letter on Thursday.

The 6-to-3 vote was along ideological lines, with Justice Samuel Alito writing the decision for the conservative court majority, and the liberals in angry dissent.

At issue in the case were two Arizona laws. One banned the collection of absentee ballots by anyone other than a relative or caregiver, and the other threw out any ballots cast in the wrong precinct. A federal appeals court struck down both provisions, ruling that they had an unequal impact on minority voters, and that there was no evidence of fraud that would have justified their use. But on Thursday the Supreme Court reinstated the state laws, declaring that unequal impact on minorities in this context was relatively minor, that other states have similar laws, and that states don’t have to wait for fraud to occur before enacting laws to prevent it.

It’s no big deal, everybody else does it too, there’s no reason not to. The Supreme Court as teenage rebel.

Just because voting may be “inconvenient for some,” Alito wrote, doesn’t mean that access to voting is unequal.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhh yes it does. That’s exactly what it means. As he knows perfectly well, of course.

Who is better equipped to deal with “inconvenient” voting rules? People with cars, money, nannies, upper level jobs that allow them free time whenever they need it? Or people without cars, without spare cash, without anyone to watch the kids, with zero at-will free time? You do the fucking math.

And “the mere fact that there is some disparity in impact does not necessarily mean that a system is not equally open or that it does not give everyone and equal opportunity to vote. ”

Yes it does. That is exactly what it means.

The right-wing Supreme Court approves voting restrictions.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday made it easier for states to enact voting restrictions, endorsing Republican-backed measures in Arizona that a lower court had decided disproportionately burdened Black, Latino and Native American voters and handing a defeat to Democrats who had challenged the policies.

So, that’s it, that’s the ballgame. We’re fucked. Republicans can now pass all kinds of laws that make it harder for poor people, working people, immigrant people, brown people to vote, thus expanding and consolidating their power from this moment on. We are fucked.

The Arizona ruling clarified the limits of the Voting Rights Act and how courts may analyze claims of voting discrimination.

The “mere fact there is some disparity in impact does not necessarily mean that a system is not equally open or that it does not give everyone an equal opportunity to vote,” Alito said.

The Republican worldview in a nutshell.

The Arizona legal battle concerned a specific provision called Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that bans voting policies or practices that result in racial discrimination. Section 2 has been the main tool used to show that voting curbs discriminate against minorities since the Supreme Court in 2013 gutted another section of the statute that determined which states with a history of racial discrimination needed federal approval to change voting laws.

Davin Rosborough of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project said the decision “adopts a standard for proving violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that is unduly cramped and at odds with the law’s intent of eradicating all voting practices that are racially discriminatory in their effects on voting opportunity, whether blunt or subtle.”

We’re fucked.

Hello hello yes please do walk all over me, it’s what I’m here for, can I do anything else for you?

A retiree in Suffolk has made history as the first transgender woman to star on the front cover of the Women’s Institute magazine.

A man has “made history” as the first man to star on the front cover of the Women’s Institute magazine. It’s extremely history-making for men to appear on the front covers of magazines.

WI member Petra Wenham, 74, has spoken to WI Life – the publication for the group’s members – after she was asked to discuss her work as as a speaker and activist for a Suffolk chapter of the branch, Cake and Revolution.

Never mind about the women of the WI, they’re boring, let’s hear about the men of the WI.

As well as sharing cake and conversations with her friends, Ms Wenham tours other WIs to bust myths and misinformation about transgender people.

The 74-year-old added: “I’ve given my trans awareness talk to six WI groups this year alone. It’s been wonderful to have this opportunity to cut through the negativity a lot of the transgender community face.”

It’s been wonderful to have this opportunity to make the WI focus on men who say they are women.

Melissa Green, General Secretary of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (NFWI), said:“We were delighted to interview Petra in the latest issue of WI Life. The work she does as a speaker and activist is so inspiring, educating other members and the wider community on the issues that trans people face today.

“At a time when the transgender community are experiencing prejudice and exclusion, it is so important that trans voices are heard and amplified in the WI and society.

“We want to make it clear that not only are trans women welcome to join the WI, but they are celebrated and truly enrich our membership and our values as a bold and inclusive organisation for women.”

But it’s not an organisation for women if it includes men. The virtue of being “inclusive” depends on what it is you’re including. If you’re making a women’s organization no longer a women’s organization by “including” men (and then paying them lots of attention and letting them take over the conversation) then you’re no longer being “inclusive” of women.

You can’t do everything. It isn’t possible. You can’t both be an organization of and for women, and be “inclusive” of men.

Another victory in the war on Karens:

Bill Cosby is being released from prison after the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania vacated his 2018 conviction on sexual assault charges and judgment of sentence. Victoria Valentino, one of Cosby’s accusers, told CNN she was “stunned” by the court’s decision.

Valentino said she had recently received a letter stating that Cosby’s parole was preemptively denied due to a lack of remorse and a refusal to participate in programs for abusers.

She said that when she first heard about Cosby’s release she was “shocked.” Valentino said her phone was bombarded with messages from media, loved ones and survivors.

“For this to come out of left field is — it’s a gut punch,” Valentino said. “There’s no other way to describe it.”

Valentino said the decision sends Cosby’s accusers “back to square one.”

Serves them right. They’re Karens.

Andrea Constand and her attorneys said today’s opinion to vacate Bill Cosby’s conviction is disappointing and could discourage others survivors of sexual assault from coming forward.

“Today’s majority decision regarding Bill Cosby is not only disappointing but of concern in that it may discourage those who seek justice for sexual assault in the criminal justice system from reporting or participating in the prosecution of the assailant or may force a victim to choose between filing either a criminal or civil action,” the statement said.

Just because they can’t possibly win and the whole process is humiliating? That’s no reason. Karens.

Laurie Penny tries to rehabilitate herself.

That’s good, isn’t it? She accuses us of bad faith while in the same breath claiming we want to “make the case for excluding minority groups.” Way to have the discussion in good faith. No, Comrade, we don’t want to make the case for excluding minority groups. That’s not accurate or fair.

I tell you what, I don’t have good heuristics for figuring out what the hell Laurie Penny is trying to say.

I do grasp her meaning in the second tweet though, and that one is just wrong. It’s not a general and universal truth that no request that a particular group or person be accommodated is ever a demand that other, potentially conflicting needs be sidelined. Sometimes a request for accommodation is a demand that other, potentially conflicting needs be sidelined. That can happen. It can happen, and it does happen, and it has been happening in all these demands – and they are demands, not requests – that trans women be “validated” and “included” in anything and everything belonging to women.

The rest of the thread is just blither and handwaving. She’s really not very sharp.

If it doesn’t convince anyone the first 500 times, try again.

The dishonesty battles with the stupidity for first prize.

As always, it’s impossible to tell whether it’s anxious adherence to the rules or genuine delusional belief – in fact it’s impossible to tell just as it’s impossible to tell if any given naked man in a women’s changing room genuinely believes he’s a woman or is just taking advantage of the bizarro-world new rules.

Also she’s wrong about the homophobia. It wasn’t about thinking lesbians and gays would be raping people, it was about thinking same-sex love and attraction are weird and ooky. That’s all. It was just irrational squick, picked up from the culture because it had always been that way.

And she doesn’t matter because…………….?

But it’s not “cracking down.” It’s not punishment, it’s not deprivation, it’s not torture, it’s not imprisonment. It’s just barring male people from spaces where women are vulnerable. That’s all; that’s it.

Men’s desire to be “validated” as women should not be seen as more important and pressing than women’s need to be safe from predatory behavior by men. Men who really do think of themselves as women should be able to understand that in a heartbeat. If they don’t, and they refuse even to try, then in what sense are they women? For what reason should we sympathize with their desire to be accepted as women? Why should we prioritize men who put their own desires ahead of our needs? Why are men encouraged to put their wants first while women are ordered to put our needs last? What could be more patriarchal and unjust than that?

Matt Taiibi has a hilarious piece on a new book by Robin DiAngelo.

Nice Racism, the booklike product released this week by the “Vanilla Ice of Antiracism,” Robin DiAngelo, begins with an anecdote from the author’s past.

I just have to interrupt to say how much I love “booklike product.”

She’s in college, gone out to a dinner party with her partner, where she discovers the other couple is, gasp, black. “I was excited and felt an immediate need to let them know I was not racist,” she explains, adding: “I proceeded to spend the evening telling them how racist my family was. I shared every racist joke, story, and comment I could remember my family ever making…”

Ah the origin story. She was a jackass therefore she gets to patronize the rest of us from now until forever.

No shit, the reader thinks. Instead of trying to amp down her racial anxiety out of basic decency, this author fed hers steroids and protein shakes, growing it to brontosaurus size before dressing it in neon diapers and parading it across America for years in a juggernaut of cringe that’s already secured a place as one of the great carnival grifts of all time. Nice Racism, the rare book that’s unreadable and morally disgusting but somehow also important, is the latest stop on the tour.

Another love-object – “the rare book that’s unreadable and morally disgusting but somehow also important.”

Reading DiAngelo is like being strapped to an ice floe in a vast ocean while someone applies metronome hammer-strikes to the the same spot on your temporal bone over and over. You hear ideas repeated ten, twenty, a hundred times, losing track of which story is which. Are we at the workshop where Eva denies she’s a racist because she grew up in Germany, or the one where Bob and Sue deny they’re racist by claiming they think of themselves as individuals, or the one where the owning-class white woman erupts because no one will validate her claim that she’s not racist, because she’s from Canada?

She’s good comedy-fodder, if nothing else.

You’ve probably seen the Wi Spa video.

LA Magazine does not approve of the woman who doesn’t want a naked man in the women’s section with her.

Mineral salt massages and hydro-dermabrasion facials weren’t enough to calm the nerves of some patrons at Wi Spa over the weekend. The tony Koreatown health club became the scene of a showdown over nudity in gendered spaces after a customer confronted spa staff about a trans woman with male genitals being allowed to disrobe in the spa’s female section. The ruckus was caught on camera and quickly went viral on Twitter on Sunday, fueling a furious online debate—with threats of a boycott against the spa—about the rights of trans people to use women’s spaces versus the rights of cisgender females to not be exposed to male anatomy.

What “rights of trans people to use women’s spaces”? There are no such rights. The only people who have the right to use women’s spaces are women. That’s what “women’s spaces” means.

“So, it’s OK for a man to go into the women’s section, show his penis around the other women, young little girls—underage—in your spa? Wi Spa condones that, is that what you’re saying?” the woman filming the video can be heard saying to a masked spa worker. When the employee attempts to answer, saying something about “sexual orientation,” the customer, who seems to deny the existence of trans people, loses it even more. “What orientation?” she nearly shouts. “I see a dick! It lets me know he’s a man. He’s a man. He is a man. He is not no female.” Another customer is shown in video demanding a refund. “This is our first time, and then this shit happens, and we’re not coming back,” she says.

She “seems to deny the existence of trans people” LA Mag says primly. No, she does deny that a man gets to intrude into a women’s space, that’s all.

In a statement to Los Angeles about this weekend’s incident, Wi Spa points to California Civil Code 51 (b), which makes discriminating against trans and other gender non-conforming people in business establishments illegal in the state. “Like many other metropolitan areas, Los Angeles contains a transgender population, some of whom enjoy visiting a spa,” the statement goes on. “Wi Spa strives to meet the needs of all its customers.”

Which of course is just plain impossible if they let naked men intrude on the women’s spaces. California Civil Code 51 (b) is a sour joke and a reversal of women’s rights.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Manhattan district attorney’s office is expected to charge the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer with tax-related crimes on Thursday, people familiar with the matter said, which would mark the first criminal charges against the former president’s company since prosecutors began investigating it three years ago.

Another twig added to the haystack of sleaze that is Trumpworld.

How disgusting it is that this filthy man spent four years telling us what to do.

Word is Trump won’t be charged; Weisselberg has refused to be turned.

This one is about not paying taxes on fringe benefits, which sounds laughably trivial given what we know about Trump, but little acorns, you know.

The tax-related investigation is part of a broader criminal probe into whether the Trump Organization and its officers overvalued and undervalued its assets on loan, tax and insurance documents for financial gain, prosecutors have said. The criminal probe, led by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, and civil probe, by the New York attorney general, have looked at financial dealing around some of the same properties, including Mr. Trump’s Seven Springs estate, in Westchester, N.Y., and the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, the Journal has reported.

Here’s hoping.

How do they know he identifies as a man?

A group of customers at a cafe in the Aegean district of Soma rescued a woman from a male attacker identified only as T.Ç. who broke a glass on her head and battered her, local agencies reported on June 29.

Video footage showed T.Ç. sitting across from his wife at a cafe before getting up, walking over to her side of the table with a glass and breaking it on her head, and attacking her with a knife he picked up off the table. 

The security footage shows customers run to the woman’s rescue and batter the man in an attempt to fend him off of the woman.

It shows a woman getting there first, and being thrown to the floor by the man.

T.Ç. is seen escaping the people around in the security footage as male customers are seen watching the perpetrator batter the customers who tried to stop him. 

One male customer is seen picking up his coffee cup instead of stopping T.Ç.

Stopping violent men is women’s job.

I read Glosswitch’s take on Laurie Penny’s fatuous claims this morning (this morning my time, Hellfire West Coast time) but got too entangled with LP’s nonsense to point it out here. Let this be a lesson to you: if you can read either Laurie Penny or Glosswitch, don’t choose Laurie Penny.

Glosswitch starts with the “I’d advise her not to stare at other people’s genitals without their permission, because it’s rude” tweet. The issue is not penises, she assures us.

The issue – highlighted in another of [the] well-known feminist’s tweets today, in which she told feminists who think biological sex is politically salient “your feminism is bad and you should feel bad” – is making other women feel ashamed of their feelings, their fears, their boundaries, their entire inner lives.

This is not about trans people. It is not about questioning the authenticity of someone’s self-perception. It is not about gender identity, or genitalia, or  “being one’s true self”. It is about the absolute patriarchal basics: power, shame, blame and control. It is about rape culture, domestic abuse, coercive control. It’s about all the things certain feminists claim to want to stop, then go on to reinforce.

Like, you know, men intruding on spaces for women, and ignoring women’s discomfort or fear, and getting their sexual jollies from that discomfort and fear. Those patriarchal basics.

When you recommend shaming a young woman for any potential discomfort  – when you insinuate that it is somehow voyeuristic, rude, obsessive not to want to be in close proximity to the naked male bodies of strangers – you are doing what abusive men have always done to women and girls: shaming them into feeling their distress is their fault.

I bet you anything Laurie Penny had no idea she was doing that when she did it. You can kind of see what she thought she was doing – being funny, being clever, turning things around so that she comes out funny and clever and the woman talking about her teenage daughter comes out timid and “sex-negative” and boring as well as transphobic. She thought she was being hip. It didn’t occur to her that she was being just another “Stop fighting, bitch, or I’ll break your fucking jaw.”

If only women felt nothing – or, failing that, if only they could resolve never to acknowledge or express their own pain – then we might see an end to all the struggles. Come on, girls. Just give in.

Don’t cry; your tears are manipulative, deceptive, the weaponisation of toxic femininity against people more vulnerable than you. Don’t speak; don’t be a Karen complaining to the manager, exploiting your experience of trauma to prop up carceral norms. Don’t acknowledge distress at the things that are done to and taken from your body; it’s all just penetration, just gestation, just meat, just nothing at all.

It’s just a guy getting naked next to you, smirking at you, watching you flinch.

I see women absorbing these lessons, believing there might be virtue, some ill-defined liberation, in following these heartless rules, never putting themselves first, but never putting other women first, either. Vying to be the best at not feeling anything, condemning those who foolishly slip up. It is so cruel, and so rooted in active dislike for women as people.

It’s all that good. Read the whole thing.

The same failure throughout.

No, what’s utterly disingenuous is to ignore the (surely blindingly obvious) fact that no one knows who is a guy who identifies as a woman getting changed in a changing room and who is a flasher. No one knows who is which and no one knows how to find out. If you were a flasher wouldn’t you be in those changing rooms like a shot, unable to believe your luck?

But we don’t know whether the man changing his clothes is a sex criminal or not. We can’t tell. It’s not that he automatically is, it’s that we have no way of knowing.

She can’t really be this stupid can she?

But, no, we really don’t know that. How could we?

But even if we assume that’s true (and crystal clear, and easy to understand, and universally acknowledged), how does anyone know who is which?

This is surely a very basic question, and it seems to be one that no trans “ally” will answer. It sure as hell seems that Laurie Penny will never answer it.

Just to clarify, nobody can tell who is which.

It’s not? What did she say?

Well, ok, she didn’t say “she’s rude for staring,” she said “I’d advise her not to stare at other people’s genitals without their permission, because it’s rude.” It’s not the identical wording, true, but the meaning? The meaning is the same. I think Laurie Penny is the one who is being “silly” here.

Putative feminist puts her putative feminism to work standing up for men again.

If your claim to feminism includes telling feminist women not to focus on women but instead to focus on men who claim to be women, your feminism is moronic and you should feel like a damn fool.

But instead, putative feminist feels confident and clever enough to keep right on telling feminist women to focus on men who claim to be women.

Ahhhh that’s nice isn’t it? It’s not the man’s fault for getting naked in a women’s changing room, it’s the teenage girl’s fault for perceiving that a man is next to her and naked. The man has every right to get his dick out, the girl has no right to notice that he’s done so. He’s not intruding and perving, she is.

But how does anyone know who is which?

The determined stupidity is hard to believe. The determined transfer of feminism from women to men who call themselves women is enraging.