I pointed out yesterday that calling a man who threatened to kill Rosie Duffield and JK Rowling a “troll” is offensively trivializing. I see I’m not the only one who thinks so.
I hadn't realised this news had reached the press. I think @RosieDuffield1 will agree with me that using the word 'troll' to describe men who make explicit death threats against women minimises both the offence and the effect on the recipients.https://t.co/HjrYP26Oyp
Donald Trump has made his contempt for the court clear throughout his criminal trial in Manhattan, and now a judge has made it official. Juan Merchan ruled today that the former president had violated a gag order designed to protect the integrity of the trial and fined him $9,000.
Might as well fine him 25 cents. 9k is lunch money to him.
Merchan found that nine violations alleged by prosecutors were clear violations, but deemed a tenth too ambiguous to warrant punishment. He declined to levy the most serious punishment available to him—namely, tossing Trump in jail—but also had scathing words for Trump’s excuses for violating the order.
Would a less notorious defendant be tossed in jail? If so, is there any non-shameful reason not to toss Trump there?
Some mysterious force is preventing me from posting this directly via Nina’s tweet but haha I can do it via this one so nyah, Mysterious Force.
It’s brilliant indeed.
This Video is Not Mine It is the brilliant creation of Nina Paley @ninapaley, capturing what is at the heart of the conflict in Palestine/Israel, war in general, human nature.
Could that be because “many international medical bodies” lost their goddam minds?
The report cites a systematic review of evidence, commissioned as part of the Cass Review, which found “a lack of high-quality research” that puberty blockers can help young people with gender dysphoria.
While experts in the field say more studies should be done, Canadian doctors who spoke to CBC News disagree with the finding that there isn’t enough evidence puberty blockers can help.
How about the evidence that puberty blockers can harm?
It’s so interesting that so many medical professionals seem determined to err on the side of action, when action is interfering with children’s puberties. You’d think more would want to err on the side of caution.
“There actually is a lot of evidence, just not in the form of randomized clinical trials,” said Dr. Jake Donaldson, a family physician in Calgary who treats transgender patients, including prescribing puberty blockers and hormone therapy in some cases.
“That would be kind of like saying for a pregnant woman, since we lacked randomized clinical trials for the care of people in pregnancy, we’re not going to provide care for you.… It’s completely unethical.”
Except it’s not kind of like that. Not even slightly. Pregnancy is not comparable to wanting to change sex. Pregnancy is not comparable to thinking one is the opposite sex. Pregnancy is a very real, very researched, very well understood physical state. Gender dysphoria is a very contested, barely researched, very confused and confusing mental or psychological state. The two are not comparable at all. The idiocy of saying they are hints at how we got here.
The CBC then goes on and on and on in its defense of transing teenagers. It’s shockingly reckless or worse.
A troll who threatened to kill JK Rowling “with a big hammer” has been warned he faces jail.
Glenn Mullen, 31, sent audio messages in Scottish Gaelic to the Harry Potter author on X/Twitter in January 2023. He said: “I’m going to kill JK Rowling with a big hammer. JK Rowling is very horrible and I hate her so much.”
In a message to Labour MP Rosie Duffield, also opposed to trans reforms, he said: “I’m going to kill Rosie Duffield with a big gun. I hate her so much.”
Mullen, of Manchester, admitted two charges of sending a communication conveying a threatening message.
But the Sun calls him “a troll” so surely that means it was just a joke.
In an emotional speech on Monday, Yousaf said it had been an “honor” to lead the SNP in government. But his time in power was rocky and his short tenure has harmed his party’s standing even further after a brutal year for the group.
…
[H]e never enjoyed the levels of popularity with voters that Sturgeon once did, and frequently found himself caught between the liberal tendencies of his Green allies and parts of his party on one side, and the more socially conservative members of the SNP on the other.
An especially controversial expansion of Scotland’s hate crime legislation, which expanded protections for transgender people, was hailed by LGBTQ+ groups but attacked by critics as a move that would stifle free speech.
Because hate crime is one thing and knowing that men are not women is another. Quite quite quite another. For that reason I’m happy to see him go.
This is a huge deal. Exemplary damages are very rare in the employment tribunal. Theyre used to signal extreme disapproval of egregious behaviour, in this case by Social Work England, the regulator. Whoever gave SWE legal advice that didn't consist of "you've massively screwed… https://t.co/AfUwjL6Wol
This is a huge deal. Exemplary damages are very rare in the employment tribunal. Theyre used to signal extreme disapproval of egregious behaviour, in this case by Social Work England, the regulator. Whoever gave SWE legal advice that didn’t consist of “you’ve massively screwed up, apologise immediately, offer a decent settlement and undertake to get proper training in belief discrimination” really doesn’t deserve to get further work. They’re a very costly liability to clients.
“But it didn’t take me long to realise that it was a common cause – that the fascists are after anyone who is different, any minority. But you need those experiences to discover that solidarity.”
But Billy, you don’t find solidarity with absolutely every “different” minority, do you? You don’t accept them all. Murders, arsonists, and rapists are all “different,” and all (thankfully) minorities. So are fascists themselves. I daresay that some of them would claim to be unjustly persecuted. Do you find common cause with them? How is it that you choose the “worthy” minorities whose struggles you support?
…Bragg suggested he was embarrassed to have come to the issue fairly late. His instincts went back to old ties of solidarity against discrimination.
Couldn’t stand the thought of being outdone by a “luxury communist,” could you?
Well, your instincts led you astray. You cashed in your solidarity chips before doing your research and due diligence. You just gauged the way the wind was blowing at that moment and went with it, as powerless to resist as a dandelion fluff, going willy nilly, wherever it took you. And here you are, a full blown misogynyist, attempting to cloak your contempt for women with a threadbare, self righteous “solidarity” with abusive autogynophiles and their allies. Congratulations Billy, you found your people! Not only that, you’re spokesman too! Nice gig, eh?
I haven’t seen evidence for Bragg’s assertion that his most prominent opponents are “saying that trans people don’t exist”.
Trans people don’t exist in exactly the same way that invisible people, astrologers, and psychics don’t exist. The people certainly exist, but they are mistaken in the claims they make about themselves. At this point, I would say that like invisibility, astrology, and pychic powers, “transness” itself does not exist. Humans can’t change sex. Nobody is born in the “wrong” body. Certainly many people have serious psychological discomfort with the nature of their bodies and their sexual orientation, but none of this has anything to do with any sort of structure or entity like a “gender identity.” Replace the phrase “gender identity” with terms like “unclean spirit” or “demon” and you’ve lost nothing of value; they are all equally meaningless.
“My problem with people like Rowling, like Julie Bindel, is really who they are lined up with,”
What about you, Billy? There’s a nearly infinite list of things that you know or believe that “line up” exactly with the knowledge and beliefs of “fascists.” What colour is the sky? How much is two plus two? What’s the name of the tall, splotchy, spindly-legged, long-necked animal that lives on the savannahs of Africa? Does agreeing with “fascists” on the answers to any of these questions make you a fascist? Then why should Rowling’s and Bindel’s belief in the reality of sex make them fascists?
“[Rowling and Bindel] are people who I agree with about women’s rights.”
A social worker who was suspended over her gender critical views has been awarded almost £58,000 in damages from Westminster city council and Social Work England.
In what lawyers described as an unprecedented move by a court to award exemplary damages against a regulator, an employment tribunal called for both the council and the watchdog to train their staff in the principles of freedom of speech.
The people who rabidly defend trans ideology are peculiarly horrible to people who disobey their orders.
Both respondents must also pay aggravated damages.
Aggravated damages are awarded when a party has behaved in a "high-handed, malicious, insulting or oppressive manner" in committing the act of discrimination.
We’re all familiar with that type of “considerable animosity.” People who were friends yesterday spitting poison at you because you can’t believe six impossible things before breakfast.
Social Work England, in its failure to apologise to Ms Meade after the liability judgment, had "demonstrated an unwillingness to accept that its actions were unacceptable".
Isn’t it gratifying to see that someone finally gets it??
The full implications of the judgment will take some time to emerge, but it is likely to be be seismic for the social work profession. Its timing hot on the heels of the Cass Review could hardly be better.
Last year a report by the think tank Policy Exchange said NHS trusts were compromising women’s rights by providing same-sex intimate care based not on their biological sex but their self-declared gender identity.
I’m not sure this is the original wording but if “sex” and “gender” are supposed to be different (as genderists are wont to tell us – when it suits them) “same-sex intimate care” could never have been based on “their self-declared gender identity.” It was only the opportunistic conflation of the two that permitted them to do this. The deliberate, ideologically driven suppression of the basic fact that humans can’t change sex is what let them foist this on us in the first place. Just as Ophelia noted about the politicization of climate change on the “And what about toast, and earthworms?” thread, the fact that sex is binary and immutable is not political. It was made political by those who found it an obstacle to their agenda, which was to violate women’s boundaries. Biology was deemed to be “transphobic”, and women who stated the facts were forced on the defensive as institution after institution (bewilderingly) fell into line defending the new “gender-based” definition of “woman” required to normalize the unprecedented invasion of women’s spaces, positions, and resources.
Suddenly, it was to be understood that any supposedly “feminist” organization claiming to speak for, or act on behalf of “all women” were, by the inclusion of that one unnecessary word “all”, now including men in their remit, thereby vitiating their original purpose. “All” didn’t mean they were expanding their mission with regards to race or class, but expanding it with regards to sex itself, but used both race and class as pretext and shield against those women who dared to complain about officially sanctioned male intrusion into previously female single sex facilities. This was (and continues to be) the point behind the invention of “Karen,” the deployment of baseless accusations of racism, classism, White Colonialism, etc. to hide the smuggling of men past justified and prudential safeguarding and gatekeeping that had previously been used to help to bar men from women’s spaces. Under the lie of TWAW, this was deemed “exclusionary” and “discriminatory,” as if any kind of exclusion and discrimination, including that which, up until recently, had kept women safe by keeping men out were now bad things. Without the convenient replacement or conflation of “sex” with “gender identity”, this would not have been possible.
Under this po-faced empty-headedness, “inclusivity” (that is, including men) became more important than protecting women. Those charged with protecting women betrayed them at the drop of a hat, and had the nerve to declare themselves to be Just, and Pure, and Good, speaking from the lofty moral height of the Right Side of History. “Validation” became more important than women’s safety, and women paid the price in prisons, hospitals, shelters, sports, and more. This smug, self-apotheosizing required a corresponding degree of vituperative demonization. It was considered “transphobic” and bigoted (not to mention unpardonably rude) and unkind) to so much as mention the women who were stigmatized, traumatized, injured, or killed in the process. These victims were ignored, swept away, and considered an acceptable price to pay for the needs of the men (and their noisy allies) who had become their real clients.
Long after the inevitable mounting of the numbers of female victims of these heartlessly brutal policies, injury and victimization that feminists had accurately foretold and warned against, women’s concerns were presented by trans advocates as purely hypothetical, shameful, hysterical scaremongering, motivated by nothing but the hateful desire to hurt trans folk. Women, it seems, had no legitimate interest in keeping men out of women’s spaces. But of course, it was never reported this way. This is where the bullshit term “transwomen,” the TWAW mantra, and the unevidenced claims of powerlessness and marginalization (belied by the remarkable speed with which they were able to amass the tremendous amount of political capital they were able to bring to bear in the fulfillment of their unprecedented demands) did so much damage, hiding the fact of male intrusion of women’s spaces, and the characterization of any resistance to this violation as a move by a small, powerful group of bigoted women against “other” women, who were in fact not women of any kind at all, but men.
He smiles. “One thing was I had never met an out gay man until then. I’m sure I had met gay men in Barking but none of them were out. And then on stage Tom Robinson starting up with (Sing If You’re) Glad to Be Gay and all around me these blokes started kissing each other. I thought: ‘Fucking hell, what’s this?’ But it didn’t take me long to realise that it was a common cause – that the fascists are after anyone who is different, any minority. But you need those experiences to discover that solidarity.”
It’s a memory of that moment, I think, that has prompted his partisan anger on the issue of trans rights, his opposition to feminists such as JK Rowling, who argue for biological women’s right to their own protected spaces.
Right, because women are not a minority and not different. We’re just those same old boring annoying mommies who tell you to pick your clothes up off the floor and those same old frustrating annoying bitches who won’t open their legs on command.
Speaking to the self-styled “luxury communist” Ash Sarkar earlier this year, Bragg suggested he was embarrassed to have come to the issue fairly late. His instincts went back to old ties of solidarity against discrimination.
But not solidarity against discrimination against women. Oh god no. Women are horrible, and women are not discriminated against.
My own strongest feeling, I tell him – I reported on the cultish-seeming evangelism of the Mermaids group lobbying for the untested certainties of hormone treatment way back in 2016 – was that if ever there was an issue that social media is ill-equipped to debate, it is this one. I haven’t seen evidence for Bragg’s assertion that his most prominent opponents are “saying that trans people don’t exist”. Surely it is more the case that we are talking about different complex views in a genuine conflict of rights.
No. It’s not a genuine conflict of rights. It’s a genuine conflict between women’s rights and the notional, invented, unworkable, bogus “rights” of men to force everyone to call them women and let them steal everything that belongs to women.
“My problem with people like Rowling, like Julie Bindel, is really who they are lined up with,” he says. “[Rowling and Bindel] are people who I agree with about women’s rights. I agree with them about abortion. But we don’t agree on this.”
Because he’s a bro and he all too obviously does not give one tiny shit about women.
This comment by @billybragg perfectly sums up what left wing women have taken from left wing men over the last few years. The problem isn’t whether Julie Bindel and I are correct on the issues, but that certain right-wingers agree with us.
If you’ve spent any time at all on the left of politics, you’re familiar with the progressive male class warrior, usually middle-class himself, whose interest in women’s issues begins and ends with sex work, stripping and abortions. He might claim to be a feminist ally and mutter vaguely about ‘equality’ if the need arises, but when a genuine assault on women’s rights erupted under his nose, he cut left wing women adrift without a second thought. He expected us to be so blindly tribal that we’d surrender single sex spaces, jettison the very language we use to describe ourselves, give up fair sport, agree rapists should be locked up in women’s prisons and that lesbians are bigots for not wanting to sleep with the penis-ed, because (horrors!) some people on the right thought these things were wrong, too.
Over the last few years, a huge number of PMCWs have become men’s rights activists in all but name, and it’s been profoundly depressing, if not entirely unexpected, to see how enjoyable they’ve found it. Even while attacking women for finding themselves on the same side as right-wingers, the PMCWs stampeded to join the team that was threatening women with rape and violence, harassing women’s conferences, attempting to block access to gender critical events and physically assaulting female demonstrators. PMCWs are everywhere online, lecturing women reliant on state-run services for not welcoming the male-bodied into communal changing rooms and rape crisis shelters, presuming to police women’s language and tone, turning a blind eye to all statistics on male sexual violence that might contradict the ‘you’re all scaremongering bigots’ narrative and demonstrating that their deepest empathy will always be reserved for those who were born with a penis. The truth is that the left has fucked up monumentally on gender identity ideology and until it owns the mistake, it will continue to hand the right valid talking points. As more and more PMCWs realise this, they’ll take shameless refuge in accusations that we, the women criticising the injustice and insanity of gender identity ideology, were enabling the far-right. The fact is that they’ve done exactly that, by refusing to accept that there was anything wrong with a movement that was causing serious harm to troubled young people, trampling all over women’s rights and seeking to remove single-sex services for the most vulnerable.
The sense of betrayal women on the left feel towards men like Bragg will take a long time to disappear, if it ever does. I think we all take some grim satisfaction, though, in the fact that evidence of the PMCWs’ misogyny and complicity is a matter of public record, because the panicky back-pedalling and whitewashing that’s just begun is quite something to behold.
So you’re saying trans ideology is a religion. We agree! It’s a religion, not a politics, and sure as hell not a progressive or egalitarian or liberationist movement.
Rallies have taken place acrossAustralia in response to a wave of recent violence against women. Demonstrators want gender-based violence to be declared a national emergency and stricter laws put in place to stop it. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the issue was a national crisis. In Australia, a woman has been killed on average every four days so far this year.
…
Speaking at a march in the capital Canberra attended by thousands of protesters, Mr Albanese admitted the government at all levels needed to do better.
“We need to change culture, the attitudes, the legal system and the approach by all governments,” he said. “We need to make sure that this isn’t up to women, it’s up to men to change men’s behaviour as well,” he added.
And that very much includes the men who call themselves women, and who keep trying to position themselves as “most vulnerable” to male violence.
The NHS is to crack down on transgender ideology in hospitals, with terms like “chestfeeding” set to be banned.
Victoria Atkins, the Health Secretary, will this week announce a series of changes to the NHS constitution which sets out patients’ rights. Referring to “people who have ovaries” rather than “women” will also be prohibited under plans to ensure hospitals use clear language based on biological sex.
Last year a report by the think tank Policy Exchange said NHS trusts were compromising women’s rights by providing same-sex intimate care based not on their biological sex but their self-declared gender identity.
You’d think they could have figured that out for themselves.
There has been fierce debate around attempts to reduce the use of the word “woman” in discussions on subjects including pregnancy and childbirth, and any move to do so has provoked ire from some feminists.
From all feminists. Anyone who doesn’t feel ire about that massive insult is not a feminist.
I’ve seen this a lot, the condensing of all ostensibly progressive causes into a great, faceless ideological black hole. The logical endpoint of the moral-bidding-war meltdown that is “wokeness” is that it becomes a singularity: to those inside, it’s a realm of infinte virtue. To everyone else it looks literally pointless. “Woke,” both the word and the movement, always had not-so-subtle transcendental, spiritual connotations: a shade adjacent to nirvana.
The city-funded community centre at the heart of Toronto’s gay village provides a great example. About 20 years ago they put up a mural on the side of the building which loomed over the heart of the neighbourhood. It depicted a middle-aged leatherman, shirtless but clad in fetish gear — black German police-style visor cap, leather harness, chaps, black boots, etc. — next to a teenage girl straining to crush her breasts into a binder. The message was clear: adult men’s fetishes and distressed teen girls’ trans identities are to be the community’s new areas of activist focus.
And sure enough, that was exactly what we saw the community centre focus on in the ensuing years.
Credit where it’s due: they do pick apt murals. Just a couple years ago the leatherman-with-trans “boy” mural was replaced with a new one, just as prescient as the first was in capturing the cultural mood inside the building: now it’s a raised fist — a universal symbol of righteous protest — filled in like a quilt with patches that depict the “progress” flag, various shades of the colour brown (skin tones, one presumes), animal hide prints (animal rights?), blue waves (the environment), and miscellaneus patterns whose symbolism I can’t decipher. That tracks with the direction “wokeness” is going: an incoherent melding of anything anyone claims to be a virtuous cause into one big nondescript fist of self-righteousness.
I’ll bet that the people who work inside that community centre think they’re at the epicentre of all virtue, that their noble mission has naturally expanded from serving gays in the time of rampant AIDS and gay bashing, to LGBT outreach, to LGBTQ+ propaganda, to 2SLGBTQQIA++ hysteria, and now at last they’ve arrived at righteousness in its true, pure form, having transcended individual causes.
I know for a fact that the gay people who live and work in the neighbourhood have little or no use for the community centre’s services anymore. I am one such gay person, and I wouldn’t darken their bloody doorstep. This “community centre” offers nothing to me but insults and condescension.
It was the third argument before the Court in three months related to Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his loss of the 2020 Presidential election. This one (Trump v. U.S.) was about his claim that Smith’s prosecution of him for election interference (U.S. v. Trump) must be dismissed because a former President is immune from criminal liability for any official acts he undertook in office.
In what way is it an “official act” for a president to interfere in an election? Especially to interfere in an election in which he is one of the candidates? What’s “official” about that?
Michael Dreeben, arguing for the government, said, “The Framers knew too well the dangers of a king who could do no wrong.” To that point, Justice Elena Kagan asked Sauer whether a President who “ordered the military to stage a coup” would be immune from prosecution. After an uncomfortable beat of silence, he answered, “I think it would depend on the circumstances whether it was an official act.” When Kagan flatly asked, “Is it an official act?” he said that “it could well be,” but that it would depend on the specific facts and context.
So is it just a kind of magic, like the magic that creates “royalty” and all that goes with it?
Why would we want to have a pseudo-royal as president?
The conservative Justices’ perspective is clear: holding accountable the person who is President is far less important than protecting the functioning of the Presidency. Kavanaugh even railed against past independent-counsel investigations, saying “President Reagan’s Administration, President Bush’s Administration, President Clinton’s Administration were really hampered.” (Kavanaugh himself presumably did some of the hampering as part of Independent Counsel Ken Starr’s team that investigated Clinton.)
So where does all of this leave woke itself, or the broader push for social, racial and environmental justice that has been growing roughly ever since the death of Michael Brown in 2014 sparked the Black Lives Matter movement? What happens now to the idea of being more open to sometimes uncomfortable challenge from minority perspectives that were previously suppressed: of saving the planet; uncovering forgotten histories; inclusivity at work; “be kind”? That isn’t dead. If anything, it’s quietly going mainstream.
Wut?
Social justice is not the same thing as “environmental justice” and climate change isn’t fundamentally political. What to do about it is politicized (but shouldn’t be), but the change itself is not responsive to whether we shout “fascist!” or “wokerati!” at it.
For what else do you call it when the 60-year-old head of MI6 declares his pronouns on the social media channel X, or retired GPs and priests are getting arrested on climate protests?
What else do I call what? Those are two radically different things, so there’s no point in calling the pairing of them anything. What else do you call it when Oklahoma plays tennis, or goats tell you their pronouns? What else do you call it when random item 1 or random item 2? Eh?? Eh??! I want an answer!
When Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Donald Trump’s lawyer, “If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person, and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?”, he replied, “It would depend on the hypothetical, but we can see that would well be an official act.”
Based on that one line of questioning, Trump’s argument should be going down in flames 9-0. A democracy cannot survive when its supreme leader can arbitrarily decide that it’s in the nation’s best interest to rub out his opponents, and then leave it to some future court to decide whether it was an official act, because he’ll get away with it as long as there aren’t 67 votes in the Senate to impeach. And given that it will have been established that the president can put out a contract on political foes, how many senators are going to vote to impeach?
But the justices did not laugh this argument out of court. Quite the contrary: At least five of the justices seemed to buy into the Trump team’s arguments that the power of the office of the president must be protected from malicious and politicized litigation. They were uninterested in the actual case at hand or its consequences. Elie Mystal, justice correspondent at The Nation, perhaps captured my response to the Supreme Court’s arguments best: “I am in shock that a lawyer stood in the U.S. Supreme Court and said that a president could assassinate his political opponent and it would be immune as ‘an official act.’ I am in despair that several Justices seemed to think this answer made perfect sense.”
At a minimum, it appears the court will send all of the federal cases back down to lower courts to reconsider whether Trump’s crimes were “official acts.” It’s also likely that their new definition of “official acts” is likely to be far broader than anyone should be comfortable with, or at least broad enough to give Trump a pass. This delay all but guarantees that Trump will not stand trial for anything besides the current hush-money case before the 2024 election.
This is catastrophic in so many ways. The first is that it increases the already high chances that the United States ends up with a dictator who will attempt to rapidly disassemble democracy in pursuit of becoming President for Life. It simultaneously increases the chances that yes, he will go ahead and violate the civil and human rights of political opponents and classes of people he calls Communists, Marxists, and fascists.
And so on.
We’re doomed. We have at best eight or nine months before we slide into the pit.
[T]his week, [Alito] told us, in essence, that in his view democracy depends on allowing presidents to commit federal crimes, because if ex-presidents were to be prosecuted for such things, the United States would become a banana republic. That’s a Supreme Court justice saying that. And while Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and even Clarence Thomas didn’t go that far Thursday, it was obvious that the court’s conservatives are maneuvering to make sure that the insurrection trial doesn’t see the light of day before the election—in other words, that a sitting president who very clearly wanted Congress to overturn a constitutionally certified election result (about this there is zero dispute) should pay no price for those actions.
When I wrote seven years ago that we rested our hope on conservative judges who will choose our institutions over Trump, trust me, I wasn’t saying I was confident that they would. I was terrified that that day would eventually come. It came yesterday. The conservative jurists chose Trump. It will stand as one of the blackest days in Supreme Court history.
