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.

Speaking of ethics…

It’s a clip of Fox News hacks telling people to refuse to get the vaccination – in other words telling people to keep spreading a killer virus and to get it themselves, in other words killing people. For money and fame and whatever other frivolous rewards they get from this activity, what they’re doing is making a pandemic worse than it would be without their propaganda. They’re knowingly causing disease and death.

We live in a strange world.

They’re doing this again! I guess because it worked out so well last time?

White House officials have helped craft an agreement under which purchases of Hunter Biden’s artwork — which could be listed at prices as high as $500,000 — will be kept confidential from even the artist himself, in an attempt to avoid ethical issues that could arise as a presidential family member tries to sell a product with a highly subjective value.

For fuck’s sake! Could it be any more blatant? Hunter Biden is not an artist any more than he was a legitimate qualified board member of Burisma. He exploited his daddy’s name to make the big bucks in that laughable “job” with Burisma and now he’s doing it all over again to sell his “art.” It’s corrupt when the disgusting Trumps do it and it’s corrupt when Hunter Biden does it. What is wrong with them?

Under an arrangement negotiated in recent months, a New York gallery owner is planning to set prices for the art and will withhold all records, including potential bidders and final buyers. The owner, Georges Bergès, has also agreed to reject any offer that he deems suspicious or that comes in over the asking price, according to people familiar with the agreement.

Oh shut up. Trying to manage the particulars is absurd: don’t do it at all.

What other beginning amateur “artist” gets to sell art for 500k a pop?

Biden’s art sale, expected to take place this fall, comes with potential challenges. Not only has Biden previously been accused of trading in on his father’s name, but his latest vocation is in a field where works do not have a tangible fixed value and where concerns have arisen about secretive buyers and undisclosed sums.

Plus the whole “his latest vocation” thing kind of reeks. He’s not 22, he’s 51. What conceivable reason is there to think his art is any good or worth anything at all? It looks like jumping up and down in front of an outraged world shouting “I’m doing it because I can nyah nyah nyah!”

Officials close to President Biden, who have helped craft the agreement along with Hunter Biden’s attorney, have attempted to do so in a way that allows the president’s son to pursue a new career while also adhering to the elder Biden’s pledge to reverse his predecessor’s ethical laxity, especially regarding family members.

Bullshit. Absolute flagrant bullshit. Hunter B isn’t “pursuing a new career” he is cashing in. What other 51-year-old gets to “pursue a new career” in art and sell the brand new works for inflated prices? Hunter might as well sell his underpants for 500k a pair.

But the arrangement is drawing detractors, including ethics experts as well as art critics who suggest that Hunter Biden’s art would never be priced so high if he had a different last name. Bergès has said that prices for the paintings would range from $75,000 to $500,000.

Ya think???

“The whole thing is a really bad idea,” said Richard Painter, who was chief ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007. “The initial reaction a lot of people are going to have is that he’s capitalizing on being the son of a president and wants people to give him a lot of money. I mean, those are awfully high prices.”

The initial reaction, and the interim reaction, and the final reaction. We’re going to have that reaction because that is what’s happening.

Hunter Biden, through his attorney Chris Clark, did not respond to an interview request for this article. When asked about the artwork — including terms of sale and potential ethics concerns — Clark referred questions to the White House.

To the White House. Which is supposed to have nothing to do with any of this, because Hunter Biden is simply selling his own art, nothing to do with Daddy at all. Fucking hell this is broken.

Andrew Bates, the deputy White House press secretary, suggested that the buyers’ confidentiality would ensure the process is ethical. “The president has established the highest ethical standards of any administration in American history, and his family’s commitment to rigorous processes like this is a prime example,” Bates said.

No. It is not.

But the officials who helped craft the agreement said that if buyers were publicly disclosed it would restrict interest, because the identities of most art purchasers are not automatically made public.

Oh it would “restrict interest” – so the officials are working for Hunter Biden. Interesting.

In Hunter Biden’s case, if a buyer’s identity does become public, White House officials probably would be warned against giving that person any preferential treatment, and could be discouraged from working with them at all, according to a person familiar with the arrangement.

And they think that’s good enough? Is this a joke?

Marc Straus, who for the past decade has owned a gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, said that among high-end art dealers, “nobody would ever start at these prices” for someone who has no professional training and has never sold art on the commercial market.

“There has to be a résumé that reasonably supports when you get that high,” Straus said. “To me, it’s pure ‘how good is it and what’s this artist’s potential, what’s the résumé?’ On that basis, it would be an entirely different price. But you give it a name like Hunter Biden, maybe they’ll get the price.”

He added, “My take was [the paintings] weren’t bad at all. But there’s a yawning gap between not bad and something fabulous.”

Others are not as kind.

Scott Indrisek, a former editor in chief of Modern Painters magazine and a former deputy editor at Artsy, said: “I would call it very much a hotel art aesthetic. It’s the most anonymous art I can imagine. It’s somewhere between a screen saver and if you just Googled ‘midcentury abstraction’ and mashed up whatever came up.”

Indrisek added, “If he wanted to be judged on his work alone, he’d show them under the name Hunter Wilson or something.”

What I’m saying. He might as well be selling the contents of his wastebasket.

Wayne Couzens has admitted murdering Sarah Everard. You’ll never guess what his secret hobbies were.

…underneath the veneer of respectability was a sexual deviant who, fuelled by extreme pornography, was driven to ever more depraved actions to slake his desires.

Extreme porn isn’t all that deviant though; it’s not rare enough to be deviant. It seems that a lot of men like watching women get beaten and tortured.

Despite being an armed officer tasked with protecting politicians, dignitaries and VIPs, Couzens admitted regularly cavorting with prostitutes and was also suspected of taking dangerous body-building steroids.

Cavorting? I doubt they spent the time skipping and jumping around.

…privately Couzens is suspected of having a dangerous addiction to extreme pornography.

“Extreme” doesn’t mean extra extra sexy, it means violent.

So anyway, a woman’s life is taken away because a man is addicted to violent porn. Whatevs.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of How Democracies Die tell us the biggest threat is not another insurrection but a steal.

The looming danger is not that the mob will return; it’s that mainstream Republicans will “legally” overturn an election.

They’re energetically at work on it now, like for instance all that voter suppression in Texas we were just reading about.

Last year, for the first time in U.S. history, a sitting president refused to accept defeat and attempted to overturn election results. Rather than oppose this attempted coup, leading Republicans either cooperated with it or enabled it by refusing to publicly acknowledge Trump’s defeat. In the run-up to January 6, most top GOP officials refused to denounce extremist groups that were spreading conspiracy theories, calling for armed insurrection and assassinations, and ultimately implicated in the Capitol assault. Few Republicans broke with Trump after his incitement of the insurrection, and those who did were censured by their state parties.

This is very very very bad. The Republicans are one of the two “respectable” parties, the majority parties, the as if official parties. They’re half of what they’re is – and they’re doing their best to become the only party.

From November 2020 to January 2021, then, a significant portion of the Republican Party refused to unambiguously accept electoral defeat, eschew violence, or break with extremist groups—the three principles that define prodemocracy parties. Because of that behavior, as well as its behavior over the past six months, we are convinced that the Republican Party leadership is willing to overturn an election. Moreover, we are concerned that it will be able to do so—legally.

You know…between global warming and the pandemic and far-right parties grabbing power in country after country, things are not going swimmingly for the human project right now. I kind of think we’ve messed up.

Democracy’s primary assailants today are not generals or armed revolutionaries, but rather politicians—Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—who eviscerate democracy’s substance behind a carefully crafted veneer of legality and constitutionality.

…Election officials can legally throw out large numbers of ballots on the basis of the most minor technicalities (e.g., the oval on the ballot is not entirely penciled in, or the mail-in ballot form contains a typo or spelling mistake). Large-scale ballot disqualification accords with the letter of the law, but it is inherently antidemocratic, for it denies suffrage to many voters. Crucially, if hardball criteria are applied unevenly, such that many ballots are disqualified in one party’s stronghold but not in other areas, they can turn an election.

Do we think they will if they can? In a heartbeat, and institutions will help them.

Competition’s effects are being undermined in the U.S. today by what political scientists call countermajoritarian institutions. We believe that the U.S. Constitution, in its current form, is enabling the radicalization of the Republican Party and exacerbating America’s democratic crisis. The Constitution’s key countermajoritarian features, such as the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate, have long been biased toward sparsely populated territories. But given that Democrats are increasingly the party of densely populated areas and Republicans dominate less populated areas, this long-standing rural bias now allows the Republican Party to win the presidency, control Congress, and pack the Supreme Court without winning electoral majorities.

They go on to say we should reform all that, which is true, but what are the odds. So that’s cheery.

Somebody seems to have Marxism confused with theocracy. They’re not quite the same thing.

The game’s afoot.

Steerpike tells us:

It’s not just the boardroom where such clashes are being played out. Mr S hears word that the editorial floors of the Guardian and its Sunday sister the Observer have become riven with tensions over the perennial problem of trans rights. WhatsApp groups are ablaze with talk that Observer commentator Sonia Sodha could become the next feminist hounded out of the group, following Suzanne Moore’s purging in November.

Sodha has incurred the displeasure of the Guardian’s vocal trans-rights faction for daring to suggest that women have a right to free speech and should not be threatened for having opinions. She now faces public attacks on Twitter from Guardian contributors, attacks that go unchallenged by executives at Guardian Media Group, which publishes both papers and has largely merged the two titles’ staff.

Well she’s a woman you see. It doesn’t do to challenge people who are attacking women. Women don’t matter plus they can be terfs.

Last month, the Observer published a leader about feminism and trans rights, in the wake of the Maya Forstater and Jess de Wahls cases. Forstater won an employment tribunal ruling that her ‘gender critical’ view that transwomen remain biologically male was legitimate and not hateful. The Observer argued that women who hold such views should be free to express them without harassment or abuse…

You might think an argument that women are entitled to speak would be uncontroversial, not least at the right-on Guardian. But the leader poked the wasps’ nest of trans rights advocates around the paper, who were left buzzing with fury.

Among them was Guardian columnist Owen Jones, who tweeted to denounce the Guardian’s sister-paper as ‘on the wrong side of history’ and criticising the leader for coming ‘during Pride month and on the weekend of Trans Pride’. The desperation of some executives to keep Jones, who is already making lucrative sums from his Patreon account, from walking out is thought to be a factor in the apparent absence of any public rebuke from his editors.

Imagine being desperate to hang on to Owen Jones.

The journalists are still chilled by the fate of Moore, who left the paper after being denounced by more than 300 staff members in a letter to Guardian management after writing a column also defending women’s right to raise concerns about trans rights policies. 

Editor-in-Chief Editor Kath Viner failed to stand up for Moore during that row, and is said to live in fear of the paper’s woke readers and staffers. Some of her colleagues are wondering if she will again stand by while another feminist colleague faces attempts to bully her out of a job.

Any bets?

Originally a comment by Sastra on Gendered language at the abortion clinic.

James Randi used to do an experiment where college students who had previously given their birth dates were each presented with a paper written by a “master astrologer” describing what the stars said about them, specifically. After they finished their personalized readings, they were each asked to rank how accurate they were on a 10 point (?) scale. There were lots of 8s and 9s, and even some 10s. On the whole, they were all impressed, and gave the astrologer high marks, too. Then they were asked to pass the papers to the student in the next desk.

It was the same reading, of course, with the sentences mixed up so they’d appear to be different if anyone glanced over. What they thought surprisingly unique about them was also “unique” about everyone else.

Enbees strike me as little different than the students who ranked the Super Special Just About You astrology reading a 9 or 10. It’s just that they’re holding tight to that paper because it’s totally, totally THEM.

What next? Bus drives are Nazis if they don’t let you throw bottles at people on the bus? Servers in restaurants are Nazis if they don’t let you push over all the tables? Bouncers are Nazis if they eject you from the bar for throwing a punch? Dog walkers are Nazis if they don’t let you kick their dogs?

Fox News pushing boundaries again:

Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren on Thursday joined a growing number of right-wing pundits and politicians comparing covid-19 restrictions to Nazism.

To Nazism. Because of what? Are there concentration camps? Is there forced labor? Are there extermination camps? I’m not seeing the Nazism. I’m not seeing the Fascism and I’m sure as hell not seeing the Nazism.

Being told “No” is not the same as Nazism.

Lahren took issue with some flight attendants’ enforcement of federal mask mandates on airplanes during a segment on the show “Outnumbered.”

“There are so many good flight attendants out there, but there are some flight attendants out there that take their job as the mask police to extremes, becoming almost Nazis of the air,” Lahren, a host on the Fox Nation subscription service, said. “And it’s ridiculous.”

No that’s not what’s ridiculous.

Lahren’s remarks come as some conservative politicians have drawn fire for comparing the enforcement of coronavirus policies to Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust. On Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) called the people aiding President Biden’s push to encourage Americans to get vaccinated “medical brown shirts.”

Yes, because sound medical advice is exactly like street violence in aid of a future Nazi dictator.

Greene’s comments came weeks after she visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and apologized for previously comparing face-mask policies to the Nazi practice of labeling Jews with Star of David badges, The Washington Post’s Felicia Sonmez reported this week.

Actually the street violence seems to be coming from the other direction.

“If you talked with some flight attendants, they would certainly say this is the worst we’ve ever seen it,” Nelson said, less than a month after a passenger allegedly knocked out a flight attendant’s teeth. “It’s pervasive. There is constant conflict on board.”

Who are the brown shirts?

Time to grow up now, people.

The headline:

Why Emma Corrin is using a chest binder

Oh I bet I know the answer to that one – because, like many others, she’s found a new way to be special and attention-worthy.

Who is she? An actor. She played narcissistic PrinCess DiAna in The Crown. Typecasting, it seems. So a different woman, poshly named Charlie Gowans-Eglinton, instructs us on how meaningful all this is.

Your response to the above may be largely generational. In the middle of the millennial age bracket at 33, I didn’t know about non-binary pronouns at school or even at university…But it’s a very small adjustment for me, personally, to make, isn’t it? Just swapping one word for another. I don’t see the problem — any problem — with it. Do you?

Yes, of course. I see the problem of people making demands for special language to refer to Special Them. It’s not “just swapping one word for another,” it’s making the effort to contradict your own perceptions in order to avoid making a “mistake” that isn’t in fact a mistake. It’s also ratifying and flattering an exercise in narcissism and greed for attention.

It’s not even good for the people demanding it. This stupid nonsense isn’t going to flourish forever, especially not when more towns and cities burst into flames and burn to the ground in a matter of hours. We have serious shit to pay attention to, and some self-absorbed goon’s demand for reality-denying pronouns is not serious. It doesn’t matter. It’s trivial. It’s tiresome adolescent attention-seeking.

I’m a straight, white, cisgender woman and people’s assumptions of my sexuality, race and gender are always right. I have never been misgendered to my face, though people often assume from my name that I’m male when talking to me over email (they’re usually more respectful when they do so).

I find myself reflected everywhere: in books and songs, on TV, at the cinema. There are women who look and feel and identify as I do everywhere: broad reflections of me wherever I look for them. So I can’t imagine what it must be like when there are no yous visible in our culture, or how much it must mean to find out that this talented, award-winning actor is like you in some way.

Well lucky lucky you but not all women are as lucky or as smug as you are. There are some women and girls in the world who are oppressed as women and girls – kept out of school, ostracized when menstruating, married off at age 12, beaten, kidnapped, murdered. Women are not the dominant or privileged sex. Don’t wave some vanity-drunk actor in our faces as an emblem of pronoun oppression. Get a clue.