An exchange:

So let’s talk about Lucy Bannerman’s article:

Stonewall has been accused of using a workplace equality scheme to “coerce” publicly-funded organisations and companies to lobby for changes to the law.

The missing agent again. Accused by whom? I guess that’s a newspaper convention, because the lede is supposed to be very stripped-down and grabby, so if the “by whom” is complicated it gets put off until later. Anway –

Documents show how the charity seeks to control what NHS trusts, government departments and local councils say on their social media accounts, demanding public support for its controversial views on gender identity, in return for points on its Top 100 Employers index.

I’m still wondering how Stonewall managed to corner the market on this. Why can’t NHS trusts and the rest just tell them to fuck off?

The Times can disclose that the charity is using the index to force organisations to lobby on its behalf, rewarding them with higher rankings if they bring their own policies in line with Stonewall’s agenda, and dropping them from the Top 100 if they do not.

Which is probably how any such arrangement works – if you flatter us we will flatter you back; if you don’t, we’ll leave you and find someone who will. The question is why everyone needs to be flattered by Stonewall. Are there any other subordinated groups that have this kind of lock on public bodies? Is there a feminist group that gets to make demands this way?

It reminds me of the lock the Muslim Council of Britain used to have on the BBC and other news media; I wonder if it was this explicit.

Simon Fanshawe, one of the original founders of Stonewall, told The Times: “[The index] started out as a way of helping employers ensure their lesbian and gay staff were well looked after, so for example, that they got compassionate leave if their partner was ill or died. It was a kind of kitemark.

“But what it has turned into now sounds more like coercion — a way of coercing employers in their language and structure, instead of encouraging them to embrace the different needs of their LGBT staff.”

So basically all about the propaganda.

More later. I need to grab a walk before it gets too hot.

So…they don’t look at the engineering reports until after the building has collapsed?

A structural engineering report provided to the Champlain Towers condominium association in 2018 found widespread issues that required extensive repairs “in the near future.”

That’s the one that just pancaked.

Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett told NPR’s Weekend Edition that the engineer report was likely not read until years later. “I’m under the impression that it is something that nobody had seen until yesterday when we started looking back into the records to try to understand if there was anything in the record that would indicate why this building fell down,” he said.

What??

I could be wrong but I thought the whole point of such reports was to see if there is anything wrong, i.e. anything that needs fixing. I didn’t think the point was just to see if there is anything wrong and if there is ignore it.

The whole point of the Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret, why didn’t you tell the world eh?

A social justice movement like any other.

No, it really isn’t. We already have a powerful tool to address the oppression of women: feminism. We don’t need a hipster bro to come along and tell us how awesome gender theory is. If he wants to help he could just tell his fellow hipster bros to shut up and let feminists talk.

MSF mourns three colleagues brutally murdered in Ethiopia

Staff at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) are today in mourning after receiving confirmation of the death of three of our colleagues who were working in Tigray region, Ethiopia.

Maria Hernandez, our emergency coordinator; Yohannes Halefom Reda, our assistant coordinator; and Tedros Gebremariam Gebremichael, our driver, were travelling yesterday afternoon when we lost contact with them. This morning, their vehicle was found empty and a few metres away, their lifeless bodies.

No words can truly convey all our sadness, shock and outrage against this horrific attack. Nor can words soothe the loss and suffering of their families and loved ones, to whom we relay our deepest sympathy and condolences.

We condemn this attack on our colleagues in the strongest possible terms and will be relentless in understanding what happened. Maria, Yohannes and Tedros were in Tigray providing assistance to people, and it is unthinkable that they paid for this work with their lives.

They’re there to help.

Glinner points out that the “heehee look at us threatening violence” cover of Trans Studies Quarterly – this one –

– is just the latest in a long series. He includes 4 that we’ve all seen many times. There are many many more. Remember these at the San Francisco public library?

Hur hur. Isn’t it interesting that they do this and we don’t yet we’re constantly accused of violence and oppression?

Pliny gives the intro:

One mitigation. It still stinks but at least Manumua isn’t missing her chance.

What’s a tripartite invitation?

I’m relieved. The maddening unfairness of it was haunting me.

Andrew Sullivan is crowing.

So if an army of accountants added up all the numbers and could tell us exactly how many billions of dollars were withheld from former slaves and their descendants by a century of deeply racist laws that for instance made it illegal for those descendants to refuse a job, no matter how shit the pay and dangerous the conditions – would Sullivan still call it “racist” to try to pay back some little fraction of that massive sum?

Not to mention all the wages not paid for the three centuries before the Civil War.

To call it racist to pay back a tiny tiny piece of that stolen money is either clueless or evil.

The Post has details:

Black and other minority farmers were dealt a new legal blow on Wednesday when a Florida federal court issued a preliminary injunction halting a key part of the Biden administration’s federal stimulus relief package that forgave agricultural debts to farmers of color.

But but but there are white farmers who need help too!

Yes, but farmers of color have an actual quantifiable debt owed to them. Generations of stolen labor made it all but impossible for descendants of enslaved people to get off the bottom rung of the ladder.

Howard wrote that in crafting this debt program benefiting farmers based on race that “Congress also must heed its obligation to do away with governmentally imposed discrimination based on race.”

Before paying back the billions in stolen wages.

It isn’t a favor or a gift or a sentimental feel-good stunt, it’s a debt. It’s a debt that built up over four centuries. It’s a bit late to say oh but we mustn’t discriminate.

Some unpleasant news for Sir.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office has informed Donald J. Trump’s lawyers that it is considering criminal charges against his family business, the Trump Organization, in connection with fringe benefits the company awarded a top executive, according to several people with knowledge of the matter.

If the case moves ahead, the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., could announce charges against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, as soon as next week, the people said.

An indictment of the Trump Organization could mark the first criminal charges to emerge from Mr. Vance’s long-running investigation into Mr. Trump and his business dealings, and raises the startling prospect of a former president having to defend the company he founded and has run for decades.

Well the startling bit was that Trump was ever president even for a second, so the startlement of his having to talk to the DA is pretty tepid.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers met on Thursday with senior prosecutors in the district attorney’s office in hopes of persuading them to abandon any plan to charge the company, according to several people familiar with the meeting. Such meetings are routine in white-collar criminal investigations, and it is unclear whether the prosecutors have made a final decision on whether to charge the Trump Organization, which has long denied wrongdoing.

Interesting that such meetings are routine in white-collar criminal investigations but, I venture to guess, in less posh criminal investigations. Almost suggests that there’s more than one standard.

Right-wingers don’t like it when left-wingers are critical of the military.

When it’s Fox News on the other hand…

Fox News host Tucker Carlson has attacked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, calling him “a pig” and “stupid” for defending teaching cadets and service personnel differing viewpoints, including aspects of critical race theory.

Huh. Imagine if some mouthy feminist had said that.

The theory—which “maps the nature and workings of ‘institutional racism,'” according to Kendall Thomas, a law professor at Columbia University—was little known outside academic circles a few years ago, but is now at the centre of a culture war. Republicans in more than 20 states have proposed or passed legislation to ban the theory being taught in schools.

Or rather not “the theory” in the sense of mapping the nature and workings of institutional racism, but rather in the sense of any discussion of race that we don’t like. The latter is a good deal broader than the former.

On Wednesday, Gen. Milley told the House Armed Services Committee that it was important for members of the U.S. military to be “open-minded” and “widely read.”

“I want to understand white rage. And I’m white, and I want to understand it,” the general said. “What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out,” Gen. Milley said, referring to the Capitol riots of January 6.

Well Tucker Carlson isn’t going to put up with that.

On his Thursday night show on Fox, he said: “The race hate—and that’s what it is—has oozed from universities and it has infected the entire country, including at the highest levels.

“Mark Milley is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Carlson added. “He didn’t get that job because he’s brilliant or because he’s brave. Or because people who know him respect him. He is not, and they definitely don’t. Milley got the job because he is obsequious. He knows who to suck up to, and he’s more than happy to do it. Feed him a script and he will read it.”

Says Tucker Carlson of Fox News. I’m sure he has no idea whom to suck up to.

The Justice Department is suing Georgia.

The Justice Department will file a federal lawsuit Friday against the state of Georgia for its efforts to enact new voting restrictions that federal authorities allege discriminate against Black Americans, according to people familiar with the matter.

Which would have been illegal under the 1964 Voting Rights Act, had it not been for the disastrous Supreme Court ruling in Holder v Shelby that killed the preclearance part of the Act. They said oh that’s all over now, and RBG said it will come right back if you take the protections away, and guess what that’s exactly what happened.

The legal challenge takes aim at Georgia’s Election Integrity Act, which was passed in March by the Republican-led state legislature and signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp (R). The law imposes new limits on the use of absentee ballots, makes it a crime for outside groups to provide food and water to voters waiting at polling stations, and hands greater control over election administration to the state legislature.

It makes voting more difficult, and more subject to partisan interference. That’s not how voting is supposed to work.

Hayley Krischer at Salon December 2014:

So who is Charles Clymer? Clymer, who self-identifies as a Feminist Leader, has a Women for Equality Facebook page (which now seems mostly defunct) where he’s been alleged to verbally attack women as well as accused of deleting women’s comments who disagree with him. In an article for the Huffington Post last year, Darlena Cunha reported that a former moderator of his page, Zoe Katherine, disagreed with him and then was threatened with being kicked out of the group. “If we did it privately we were guilt-tripped, or simply ignored,” Katherine explained.

Who needs male “feminist leaders” anyway? Who asked him? Imagine Andrew Sullivan self-identifying as a Black Power leader; it would make just as much sense.

Twitter July 2021:

He’ll be rooting for

I bet the footnotes are a hoot.

Another residential school, another unmarked mass grave cemetery.

Leaders of Indigenous groups in Canada said Thursday investigators have found more than 600 unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school for Indigenous children — a discovery that follows last month’s report of 215 bodies found at another school.

The bodies were discovered at the Marieval Indian Residential School, which operated from 1899 to 1997 where the Cowessess First Nation is now located, about 85 miles (135 kilometers) east of Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan.

A search with ground-penetrating radar resulted in 751 ’’hits,″ indicating that at least 600 bodies were buried in the area, said Chief Cadmus Delorme of the Cowessess. The radar operators have said their results could have a margin of error of 10%. “We want to make sure when we tell our story that we’re not trying to make numbers sound bigger than they are,” Delorme said. “I like to say over 600, just to be assured.” He said the search continues and the radar hits will be assessed by a technical team and the numbers will be verified in coming weeks.

Delorme said that the graves were marked at one time, but that the Roman Catholic Church that operated the school had removed the markers.

And why did they do that? Covering their tracks? Sowing contempt? What?

Florence Sparvier, 80, said she attended the Marieval Indian Residential School.

“The nuns were very mean to us,” she said. “We had to learn how to be Roman Catholic. We couldn’t say our own little blessings.”

Nuns at the school were “condemning about our people” and the pain inflicted continues generations later, Sparvier said.

“We learned how to not like who we were,” she said. “That has gone on and it’s still going on.″

It was the whole point – to try to make the children into Catholic Canadians instead of First Nation people. It’s colonialism in the most literal sense.

Ah yes the old “crypto” ploy. They’re hiding so we can’t detect them but we know they’re there! We totally know. We know for certain. Even though they’re hiding.

Ooohhh deeeep.

Yeah don’t gender animals. That would be very wrong.

Anyone would think there were tumbrils rolling down the streets, or gulags swallowing the condemned.

Not only would one think of tumbrils and gulags, one would also think that the people filling them were feminist women. Forget Robespierre, forget Stalin, forget Hitler, the really dangerous people are feminist women who persist in thinking that only women are women and that thus men are not women.

Why does the wellbeing of women not “greatly concern” the vice-chancellor of the Open University? Why does women’s “feeling of being abandoned” not matter?

Rhetorical question. We know why. Women don’t matter.

NPR on critical race theory:

“Folks, we’re in a cultural warfare today,” Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., said at a news conference alongside six other members of the all-Republican House Freedom Caucus. “Critical race theory asserts that people with white skin are inherently racist, not because of their actions, words or what they actually believe in their heart — but by virtue of the color of their skin.”

No, it doesn’t. That’s not what it is. That’s not what it is. I’m not saying there’s no one who thinks that or says that, I’m saying it’s not what Critical Race Theory is.

Andrew Hartman, a history professor at Illinois State University, described the battle over critical race theory as typical of the culture wars, where “the issue itself is not always the thing driving the controversy.”

“I’m not really sure that the conservatives right now know what it is or know its history,” said Hartman, author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars.

He said critical race theory posits that racism is endemic to American society through history and that, consequently, Americans have to think about institutions like the justice system or schools through the perspective of race and racism.

It’s so tempting to say “duhhhhhh” like a child. Of course the justice system and the schools are not untouched by endemic racism, how could they be?

However, he said, “conservatives, since the 1960s, have increasingly defined American society as a colorblind society, in the sense that maybe there were some problems in the past but American society corrected itself and now we have these laws and institutions that are meritocratic and anybody, regardless of race, can achieve the American dream.”

Which is unthinking, uninformed, naïve, unreasonable.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., has introduced the Combating Racist Training in the Military Act, a bill that would prohibit the armed forces and academics at the Defense Department from promoting “anti-American and racist theories,” which, according to the bill’s text, includes critical race theory.

So, anything that doesn’t stop at the I have a dream speech and the instant move to total meritocracy and color-blindness. Brilliant.

Matt Gaetz wants us to think the US military is too woke.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, responded sharply to questions from Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., on Wednesday about the examination of critical race theory in the U.S. military.

“I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding — having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?” Milley said.

He continued brusquely: “And I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military, our general officers, our commissioned, noncommissioned officers of being, quote, ‘woke’ or something else, because we’re studying some theories that are out there.”

Gaetz shook his head while Milley talked. Gaetz did! Pinhead Gates shook his pin head.

Until recently, critical race theory was anything but a household phrase. Rather, it was used to describe an approach to studying institutional racism, as NPR’s Barbara Sprunt has reported. But it has become a culture war issue, and the phrase has been stretched well beyond its initial meaning, as conservatives in particular have used the phrase to raise concerns about race in venues including state legislatures and local school boards.

Or rather, conservatives in particular have used the phrase to try to discredit any systematic inquiry into the history of racism.

Gaetz wasn’t the only member who asked about the military’s approach to addressing race. Rep. Michael Waltz, R-Fla., cited a letter he received from West Point’s superintendent, Lt. Gen. Darryl Williams, which states that one course at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point teaches about critical race theory (Waltz’s office provided a copy of this letter to NPR). Waltz also referenced a seminar at West Point where an instructor reportedly taught about “understanding whiteness and white rage.”

In his response to Gaetz, Milley referenced Waltz’s concerns as well, saying that such education could be useful in understanding the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6.

“I want to understand white rage, and I’m white, and I want to understand it,” he said. “So what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out.”

Gaetz on the other hand is on the side of the insurrectionists.