Trump “issued a statement” – i.e. blurted out a bunch of stupid plus treasonous.

As President, I had a great and very productive meeting in Helsinki, Finland, with President Putin of Russia. Despite the belated Fake News portrayal of the meeting, the United States won much, including the respect of President Putin and Russia. Because of the phony Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, made-up and paid for by the Democrats and Crooked Hillary Clinton, the United States was put at a disadvantage—a disadvantage that was nevertheless overcome by me. As to who do I trust, they asked, Russia or our “Intelligence” from the Obama era – meaning people like Comey, McCabe, the two lovers, Brennan, Clapper, and numerous other sleezebags – or Russia, the answer, after all that has been found out and written, should be obvious. Our government has rarely had such lowlifes as these working for it. Good luck to Biden in dealing with President Putin—don’t fall asleep during the meeting, and please give him my warmest regards!

He hasn’t become more intelligent in the past four months.

From 2018:

If you’ve been taking the New York City subway lately, you may have noticed that some stops are a little more colorful than usual, as rainbow flyers celebrating Pride month have cropped up in stations across the city. The posters are formatted and designed like official MTA announcements, with statements like “No hatred or prejudice allowed at this station at any time.” But the gag is, it’s not the MTA that’s putting them up — it’s a New York resident.

Pride Train is a guerrilla anti-bigotry campaign spearheaded by Thomas Shim, a global creative director at the advertising agency Y&R New York, and his friends. The group formed last year and has since expanded, adding volunteers and contributors to queer New York’s most public spaces for the second year in a row.

Me and my friends Ezequiel and Jack started this project last year a week or two before Pride month. It seemed to us we could be very complacent because we’re in a blue state. Then we started talking about hate crimes, and all these smaller, microscale-level hate crimes happening all around NYC — some of them happening in subway stations. We wanted to do something about LGBTQ rights in general, and subway stations are the most public places in NYC.

They started with a rainbow flag sticker to put on trains, then got inspired to do imitation transit posters.

So you were aware of how vulnerable LGBTQ+ people are when it comes to public transportation?

Yes, it entered into our process. It’s the most public space, but it’s the darkest place in NYC. Things happen there. It affects us every day — not just LGBTQ people, but also women and people of color being attacked both physically and verbally. Two of the three people behind this project are people of color, so it’s a double whammy. You’re constantly watching your back, and I feel more unsafe than ever. We’ve become a target and it’s scary.

They almost had it for a second! They mentioned women! But then it slipped away…as it always does.

How do you identify?

We have a lot of people working on this project. The three of us who started it, we are a mix of gays and non-gays. I’m Asian American. Last year was two people of color and one white person, and this year it’s the same. But we have a bunch of volunteers, people who contribute and come up with new ideas for our social media channels. This year at our kick-off meeting we had about 15 people, but there are 20+ people across NYC helping out.

A lot of people…no telling if any of them are women. What are women, again?

Anyway, assuming this story is true, the posters aren’t official transit posters.

Originally a comment by iknklast on Prolonged drought aka desert.

States like Arizona, Utah, and Nevada are among the highest per capita water users in the US. People move to states without much water, then use water like there is a huge supply. The states with the lowest per capita usage are mostly in New England, where there is a better supply of water. I don’t have too much sympathy with people who move to the desert and then consume water they are usually stealing from somewhere else. And there is a water fountain in Phoenix that shoots water up to 560 feet (though the average is 300 feet). Most of that will evaporate in the desert air.

Also, Lake Mead should not have been built. The lake is evaporating more than 600,000 acre-feet every year. The Colorado River has so many dams that it no longer reaches the mouth for several months each year.

None of this is acceptable. Deserts are inappropriate places for intensive development. I realize some people like it hot, and don’t want winter cold, but if there isn’t enough water to sustain the lifestyle you require, you need to live somewhere else.

Why live in the desert if you want to have a lawn from suburban Chicago?

And may of the lawns are based on eastern US ideas of a lawn, which were carried over here from England. So we are trying to build lawns in a desert where rain is scarce modeled on lawns from a country with regular rainfall.

If the human species goes extinct, we may be the first species to be extincted by its own stupidity.

Again – infuriating.

Why put it that way? Why not put it the more obvious way: this is a victory to treat women as having rights themselves? Why put all the emphasis on trans people and what they want and by doing that, imply that women are 1. the enemy and 2. vicious bullies? WHY DO THAT?

Why the hemming, the apologizing, the anxious propitiation, the quaking sensitivity, along with the blank indifference to women?

But trans people’s rights are absolutely protected…

Who said anything else? Why say that? Why assume that feminist women are trying to take away trans people’s rights? WHY DO THAT?

You know they face harassment and bullying from school onwards…

SO DO WOMEN. So do women, and women are half of everyone, so why are we ignoring the bullying of women in favor of wringing our hands over the bullying of men who say they are women? (That’s what both Radio 4 and Falkner mean by “trans people,” of course – we all know trans men are a distant afterthought.) Why don’t women’s rights matter any more? Even to women? Why has the trans bullying been so very effective?

Uh oh.

[Water] Levels in Lake Mead – the largest US reservoir by volume – fell to historic lows on Thursday, as the region continues to face the effects of a devastating prolonged drought.

Stationed on the main stem of the Colorado River in the Mojave [desert] along the Arizona-Nevada border, Lake Mead was formed with the construction of the Hoover dam, which generates electricity for areas in Arizona, California and Nevada. It provides water for urban, rural and tribal lands across the south-west.

It’s approaching its lowest level ever and it will get lower over the summer.

In normal years, the dam produces enough electricity for 8 million people, but the water shortage will slow energy output while adding additional pressure on the increasingly water-starved systems across the west.

And this part of the west is desert. It’s already desert and now it’s a desert in a drought. The problem is, millions of people live there. I’m not sure we thought this through.

Roughly 75% of the American west is currently mired in “severe” drought, according to the US Drought Monitor, but the region has been strained by drought conditions for decades. The climate crisis has amplified effects of the dryness, as rising temperatures obliterated the already sparse snowpack and baked even more moisture out of the landscape.

And [arms flailing in the effort to get the point across] this was already desert country. Why anybody thought it would be a good idea to fill it up with people is beyond me.

Suzanne Moore on that ruling:

What a huge amount of time, money and, for Maya Forstater, unimaginable anxiety it has taken to establish that she should not be sacked for believing simply that biology is real.

For knowing what we all knew until 5 minutes ago, when we received strict orders to stop believing it.

At a time when the scales are falling from people’s eyes about just how campaigners such as Stonewall operate, Fortstater’s win is cheering for all of us. I was never sacked for my gender critical beliefs but I was certainly made to feel that my workplace had become a hostile environment. How many people are labouring under the same pressure?

Approximately way too many.

For it is mostly women who are losing jobs and being abused if they do not accept extreme trans ideology. This week, after a two month “probe” by Abertay University, a Scottish law student called Lisa Keogh was finally cleared of “wrongdoing“ after saying that “women have vaginas”. Her classmates reported this as an offensive comment. Marion Millar, another gender-critical feminist, was recently arrested and charged by police in Scotland for her tweets.

And a judge forced Maria MacLachlan to call the man who punched her at Speakers’ Corner “she.”

The road back is long and twisty.

Death threats.

Metro Vancouver says yeah!

Our “pronouns” will be was/were.

Much progressive.

Updating to add screenshot:

Well…

Assuming “1940s Germany” is meant to suggest Germany 1940-45 as opposed to Germany 1945-50, I have to say well but what about the fact that Germany 1940-45 was engaged in genocide as well as global total war with casualties in the millions? What about that part? I’m not seeing that happen to trans people, or anything resembling it, or anything that looks as if it could possibly if left alone over a long time end up resembling that.

To put it more crisply, I’m not seeing the persecution.

Not seeing you as you see yourself is not persecution. It’s the universal human condition, and it’s not persecution, it’s just how things are. We all look different from the inside as opposed to the outside. That’s just how “inside” and “outside” work.

People who see this tweet will think of Willoughby as the person who composed this tweet. That’s not everybody else’s fault, it’s Willoughby’s.

H/t Dave Ricks

Maybe it’s nature’s desperate last gasp effort to get us to stop destroying the planet – convince enough of us that we don’t know the difference between female and male and surely the birth rate will plummet.

Holding on to it like an exposed lie, you mean.

Sarcasm makes the point better.

The Guardian does a better job than the BBC of giving Maya space comparable to the space it gives a dissenter.

Forstater said of the judgment: “It doesn’t mean the freedom to harass others. That was never what my case was about. Gender-critical beliefs and gender identity beliefs are both protected under the Equality Act and so, too, is lack of belief. No one can be forced to profess a belief that they do not hold, like trans women are women, trans men are men, and [be] punished if they refuse. The judgment means that organisations now need to consider whether their policies, encouraged by trans rights organisations, discriminate against people with gender-critical views.”

Louise Rea, a solicitor at the law firm Bates Wells, which advised the CGD, called the decision “concerning” and “a much narrower interpretation of the previously understood position that a belief which conflicts with the fundamental rights of others will not be protected.

“The EAT’s decision sets the threshold for exclusion so high that it will leave marginalised groups more vulnerable to discrimination and harassment and place employers in an impossible position. Our clients are considering their next steps.”

That’s at least more balanced.

I think Louise Rea’s claim is very odd. What is this “belief which conflicts with the fundamental rights of others” she mentions? How can a belief that men are not women “conflict with the fundamental rights of others”? What is the fundamental right, or what are the rights if there are more than one, that conflict[s] with the belief that men are not women? I can see that it conflicts with the demand that people believe the men are women if they say they are, but that’s not a fundamental right.

We’re clear on this, yes? There is no such thing as a fundamental right to require people to believe a man is a woman.

It’s not a right at all, not even a less than fundamental one. I don’t know how people have managed to convince themselves that it is, apart from the power of endless repetition. It may be a kindness, a generosity, a social nicety – but it’s not a right.

If anything it’s the other way around. It’s perhaps a right of sorts to be free to recognize who is which, because if we can’t, we swiftly run into problems. We already know we have a legal right to separate spaces, which is exactly the right the trans activists are trying to take away. They can’t both be rights – the right to recognize who is a man, and the right to force us to pretend not to recognize who is a man.

So no, I really don’t see how our “belief” that men are men conflicts with any fundamental rights of others.

Even the god damn chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission is doing it.

In other words…Maya’s beliefs are evil but she has the right to hold them.

Thanks a lot.

Leaves an opening for the misogynist trans women.

The way so many trans activists campaign against women’s rights and freedoms?

Also the TUC. The TUC ffs! As if there were no women in trade unions!

Also including WOMEN – but the TUC implies that women are the enemy here. Not the bosses, women.

Any resources on misogyny and sexism at work? Anything at all? Hello?

Glosswitch says it.

Take a bow, BBC.

Nailed it.

Just look at the TUC doing exactly the thing Glosswitch said – repositioning feminists as aggressors. The past half century might as well not have happened as far as feminism is concerned.

What, all of them? My bathroom is TINY.

But more seriously – oh fuck off. Ok not so much seriously as angrily. Bathrooms/toilets/restrooms are separated by sex because women don’t want to take their knickers down in the presence of men. It’s not safe. If David Paisely doesn’t know this at his age there is something badly amiss with the inside of his head.

Besides, I don’t say I “love” LGBT+ people. Of course I don’t. I don’t know them all, so how could I say that? Rights and equality have nothing to do with “love.” Rights and equality are general, not personal; they’re universal, not particular. Love is to do with people who know each other.

The BBC is very grudging. Of course it is.

In the initial tribunal employment judge James Tayler concluded that Ms Forstater was “absolutist” in her view and said she was not entitled to ignore the rights of a transgender person and the “enormous pain that can be caused by misgendering”.

The usual shit – accusing us of planning or trying or wanting to ignore the rights of trans people.

Also, “misgendering” is a novel word and concept, and one with some sinister implications.

Ms Forstater said she was “delighted to have been vindicated” but [her former employer] CGD said the decision was a “step backwards for inclusivity and equality for all”.

Amanda Glassman, executive vice president of CGD, said: “The decision is disappointing and surprising because we believe Judge Tayler got it right when he found this type of offensive speech causes harm to trans people, and therefore could not be protected under the Equality Act.

“Today’s decision is a step backwards for inclusivity and equality for all.”

In a video statement, Ms Forstater said: “I’m proud of the role I’ve played in clarifying the law and encouraging more people to speak up”.

Notice how much more space the BBC gave the other party to make their case than it gave to Maya.

Then the analysis, by Dominic Casciani:

Where does this leave employers? Equality and employment law require them to recognise and uphold the rights of all in the workplace.

Ms Forstater’s speech and beliefs are protected – but so are the rights of trans people. And if speech crosses the line from an honestly held belief to bullying, attacks and intimidation, then the scales very obviously tip in favour of protecting the victim.

As if Maya were planning or hoping or campaigning to bully and attack and intimidate people.

I wonder if Mr Casciani is aware that women are sometimes subject to bullying, attacks and intimidation. I wonder if he’s aware that we’re sometimes subject to bullying, attacks and intimidation by trans people and their self-appointed allies.

And when I say “sometimes” I mean constantly.

Lui Asquith, director of legal and policy at Mermaids, a charity that supports transgender, non-binary and gender-diverse children and young people, said: “This is not the win anti-trans campaigners will suggest in the coming days.

“We, as trans people, are protected by equality law and this decision in the Maya Forstater case does not give anyone the right to unlawfully harass, intimidate, abuse or discriminate against us because we are trans.”

Again – nobody is planning to unlawfully harass, intimidate, abuse or discriminate against you, and by the way could you stop doing it to us?

The BBC: institutional capture.

Well THAT’S a massive relief.

Gender critical beliefs are protected under the equality act.

The previous judgement was overturned.

We have to tackle institutional capture.

It went from a day to a month to now a whole fucking season?

What is the 2 in LGBTQ2? Last I saw it was + but now it’s 2?

Anyway…this is a government thing. Not some hopped-up “gender fluid” loony but a government Something, complete with Twitter account that tells people to be respectful or else.

Women have never had a month, let alone a season. All women do is create all human beings, so they don’t matter enough to have more than one day.