No it isn’t.

No, all the people who give birth are women, no matter how they “identify.” Pretending otherwise is not “making room” but deleting, denying, concealing. What you – and, much more important, what all women – lose by doing that is the ability to talk coherently about the issues that affect women. That’s a very big thing to lose.

It’s asking too much, though.

Democratic plans to include a gradual raise to $15 in Joe Biden’s $1.9tn coronavirus stimulus bill were effectively ended on Thursday when the Senate parliamentarian ruled it should not be part of the package.

…

Biden campaigned on a pledge to increase the minimum wage to $15. Low-wage workers and unions have campaigned for a rise since 2012, and its inclusion in the coronavirus stimulus bill had been seen as a major victory.

While the proposal faced universal opposition by Republican senators and skepticism from some Democrats, Senator Bernie Sanders and others were confident that it could be pushed through with a simple majority in the Senate, where the Democrats hold a slim majority.

Why skepticism from some Democrats? Why skepticism over paying workers halfway decently?

Other progressive Democrats have proposed a less drastic solution [than removing the parliamentarian] – overruling her.

“The Senate parliamentarian issues an advisory opinion,” congresswoman Pramila Jayapal said in a tweet. “The VP can overrule them – as has been done before. We should do EVERYTHING we can to keep our promise, deliver a $15 minimum wage, and give 27 million workers a raise.”

Total workers in the US are around 155 million, so 27 million is not a tiny fraction.

I hate this about the US. Hate it. It’s contemptible and awful.

In Europe, many people scoff at the US as a country of low-wage McJobs with paltry benefits – often no paid sick days, no paid vacation and no health insurance. In Denmark, a McDonald’s hamburger flipper averages $22 an hour (with six weeks’ paid vacation), while in the US, fast-food jobs pay half that on average.

Plus no health insurance.

You might wonder: how can the United States, the world’s wealthiest nation, be a low-wage economy? Of the 37 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the unofficial club of rich and near-rich nations, the US has the third-highest percentage of low-wage workers, with nearly one in four workers defined as low-wage. Only Latvia and Romania are worse. (That study defines low-wage as earning less than two-thirds of a nation’s median wage.) In another study, Brookings found that 53 million Americans hold low-wage jobs, with a median pay of $10.22 an hour and median annual earnings of $17,950.

Yet we’re a rich country. There’s no excuse.

The US also has the lowest minimum wage among the G7 industrial nations in terms of purchasing power. America’s $7.25-an-hour federal minimum is 38% lower than Germany’s and 30% lower than Britain’s, Canada’s and France’s. This helps explain why the US has among the worst income inequality of the 37 OECD nations – only Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica and Bulgaria have greater inequality. And the US has the third highest poverty rate; only Hungary and Costa Rica are worse.

Yet we’re richer as a country than any of those.

Corporations, along with their Republican allies, overwhelmingly oppose a $15 minimum; in doing so, however, they ignore the will of the vast majority of Americans. According to a Pew poll, Americans favor a $15 minimum by 67% to 33%. While low-wage workers would be most vulnerable to any job losses caused by a higher minimum, lower-income Americans shows even greater support for a $15 minimum. Pew found that 74% of Americans making under $40,000 a year support a $15 minimum wage, as do 56% of Republicans making under $40,000. Last November, Floridians – even as their state went for Trump – voted 61% to 39% in favor of raising their state’s minimum to $15, joining eight other states that have approved a $15 minimum.

Despite such strong public backing for a $15 minimum, it looks doubtful that even one Republican senator – even though the Republican party now describes itself as the party of workers – will vote for a $15 minimum.

Well you see it’s like this – the Republican definition of “worker” is “racist white man with guns and MAGA cap.” It’s got nothing to do with wages or unions or benefits.

Hur hur, why would she be scared? Why would she tell us about being scared? Hur hur.

I wonder if it’s at all possible that one reason she was scared is because people like Trump and Cruz and tabloid tv like Fox News have been making her a target ever since she was elected.

Insult and injury.

I don’t know how it’s possible that anyone needs this explained, but women don’t want webinars on domestic violence that are chaired by men.

Well this changes everything!

They do?????????? Gee, they’ve been awfully quiet about it.

Anyway thank god we have huge corporations that make horrible cookies explaining the world to us.

Originally a comment by Papito on No persuasive evidence.

This is a rough read, but I find it depressingly unsurprising. Privilege knows no bounds. A woman making, at the end of her career, half as much per year as it costs to attend the college is abused and threatened. Why? Because some oppression trumps other oppression. What ever happened to “intersectionality?” If someone is attending Smith College, they ipso facto have privilege vis-a-vis the security, dining, and facilities workers. Colleges can be positively feudal.

“It’s troubling that people are more offended by being called racist than by the actual racism in our society,” he said. “Allegations of being racist, even getting direct mailers in their mailbox, is not on par with the consequences of actual racism.”

This seems similar to the kind of borrowing of oppression that white, middle class trans identifying males do. Because some poor trans people of color are prostitutes, and suffer violent crime at the rate of prostitutes, all trans people are the most oppressed ever, including those white, middle class trans-identifying males (who are actually more likely to be the perpetrators of violent crime, rather than its victims).

Having to speak to the security guard in the building you’re not supposed to be in on campus is not remotely the same as having some cowboy press his knee into your jugular in Kenosha. It is appropriation of someone else’s oppression, and does so much more to trivialize racism than it does to fight it.

Meanwhile, the real suffering of poor workers who have been violently threatened and have suffered professional and medical difficulties are brushed off as mere, inconsequential allegations of being racist. I’m sure the Rev. Rahsan Hall is doing good work in other cases, but in this case he’s bullying poor people from a position of great power. “It’s troubling that people are more offended by being called racist than by the actual racism in our society,” he says. Well, I think it’s troubling that the Rev. Rahsan Hall is more offended by a student being checked up on when she eats in a place she’s not allowed to be than by a woman who was sent to the hospital by the ensuing bullying attacks. Where is the Rev. Rahsan Hall’s compassion?

“It is safe to say race is discussed far more often than class at Smith,” said Prof. Marc Lendler, who teaches American government at the college. “It’s a feature of elite academic institutions that faculty and students don’t recognize what it means to be elite.”

Where my son goes to college, there’s a young female student who readily punches male students in the face when she feels offended. Because she’s Black, she knows she can get away with it. My son has helped the other students understand that they need to drop everything and rush to report the incident, because she will make up a story involving racism and sex, and if that gets told first, they could get thrown out of college. But the idea that any member of the staff would ever hold her accountable is absurd.

It’s clear the same has happened with Ms. Kanoute. Conduct that threatens or endangers a person? Discriminatory harassment? Dishonesty? Disruption? Cyber-Bullying? Unauthorized entry or use? All of these misbehaviors are to be reported to, and adjudicated by the Academic Honor Board. Ms. Kanoute has clearly gone for the grand slam of infractions, and the Academic Honor Board cowers in silence. Some animals are more equal than others.

“Proud” that what? That people are pretending men can get pregnant and push out children and breastfeed them? How is that something to be proud of? How is it “as society progresses”? What’s progress about pretending both sexes make children in their bodies?

How is it moving forward to pretend that men can gestate children?

The rest of that story. (I got too exasperated to do it all in one bite.)

Anti-bias training began in earnest in the fall. Ms. Blair and other cafeteria and grounds workers found themselves being asked by consultants hired by Smith about their childhood and family assumptions about race, which many viewed as psychologically intrusive. Ms. Blair recalled growing silent and wanting to crawl inside herself.

The faculty are not required to undergo such training.

Ah so it’s only the peons who have to be brainwashed reeducated trained.

The janitor who called campus security quietly returned to work after three months of paid leave and declined to be interviewed. The other janitor, Mr. Patenaude, who was not working at the time of the incident, left his job at Smith not long after Ms. Kanoute posted his photograph on social media, accusing him of “racist cowardly acts.”

“I was accused of being the racist,” Mr. Patenaude said. “To be honest, that just knocked me out. I’m a 58-year-old male, we’re supposed to be tough. But I suffered anxiety because of things in my past and this brought it to a whole ’nother level.”

He recalled going through one training session after another in race and intersectionality at Smith. He said it left workers cynical. “I don’t know if I believe in white privilege,” he said. “I believe in money privilege.”

There are a lot of kinds of privilege. White is one, but it’s certainly not the only one.

As for Ms. Blair, the cafeteria worker, stress exacerbated her lupus and she checked into the hospital last year. Then George Floyd, a Black man, died at the hands of the Minneapolis police last spring, and protests fired up across the nation and in Northampton, and angry notes and accusations of racism were again left in her mailbox and by visitors on Smith College’s official Facebook page.

This past autumn the university furloughed her and other workers, citing the coronavirus and the empty dorms. Ms. Blair applied for an hourly job with a local restaurant. The manager set up a Zoom interview, she said, and asked her: “‘Aren’t you the one involved in that incident?’”

“I was pissed,” she said. “I told her I didn’t do anything wrong, nothing. And she said, ‘Well, we’re all set.’”

She did nothing wrong, she lost her job, she can’t get another. What branch of privilege is that?

Another battlefront in the Woke Wars:

In midsummer of 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a Black student at Smith College, recounted a distressing American tale: She was eating lunch in a dorm lounge when a janitor and a campus police officer walked over and asked her what she was doing there.

Kanoute was upset and angry, and posted about it on Facebook.

The college’s president, Kathleen McCartney, offered profuse apologies and put the janitor on paid leave. “This painful incident reminds us of the ongoing legacy of racism and bias,” the president wrote, “in which people of color are targeted while simply going about the business of their ordinary lives.”

The Times, the Post, and CNN picked up the story, and the ACLU took her case. But there’s a catch.

Less attention was paid three months later when a law firm hired by Smith College to investigate the episode found no persuasive evidence of bias. Ms. Kanoute was determined to have eaten in a deserted dorm that had been closed for the summer; the janitor had been encouraged to notify security if he saw unauthorized people there. The officer, like all campus police, was unarmed.

So it wasn’t “a dorm lounge,” it was a lounge in a closed dorm. The appeal of that is obvious: peace and quiet. On the other hand there is the risk of people asking you what you’re doing in a dorm that’s closed for the summer. Being asked that is a lot more unnerving if you’re not white, but that doesn’t mean asking is automatically racist.

But they did not offer any public apology or amends to the workers whose lives were gravely disrupted by the student’s accusation.

This is a tale of how race, class and power collided at the elite 145-year-old liberal arts college, where tuition, room and board top $78,000 a year and where the employees who keep the school running often come from working-class enclaves beyond the school’s elegant wrought iron gates.

In other words where the employees who keep the school running are working-class. It’s well known that class has become a very distant runner-up in conflicts over social justice aka identity politics.

The atmosphere at Smith is gaining attention nationally, in part because a recently resigned employee of the school, Jodi Shaw, has attracted a fervent YouTube following by decrying what she sees as the college’s insistence that its white employees, through anti-bias training, accept the theory of structural racism.

I read Jodi Shaw’s much-circulated article on the subject a few days ago, with a lot of ambivalence. It’s complicated. I think I’m not as sure as she is that it’s possible for white people to have zero unconscious racial bias in the US, given the facts of the matter. On the other hand would I relish being forced to undergo “training” as a condition of continued employment? Oh hell no. I don’t trust the people in charge of “training” of that kind to say anything of value.

The “incident” that started all this began with Kanoute getting some lunch in a cafeteria that was closed to students.

Student workers were not supposed to use the Tyler cafeteria, which was reserved for a summer camp program for young children. Jackie Blair, a veteran cafeteria employee, mentioned that to Ms. Kanoute when she saw her getting lunch there and then decided to drop it. Staff members dance carefully around rule enforcement for fear students will lodge complaints.

“We used to joke, don’t let a rich student report you, because if you do, you’re gone,” said Mark Patenaude, a janitor.

Haha, not really a joke. Class meets race. But of course other times class meets race and fills race full of bullets.

Ms. Kanoute took her food and then walked through a set of French doors, crossed a foyer and reclined in the shadowed lounge of a dormitory closed for the summer…

It was closed but she was able to walk in. Maybe there was a sign? Or maybe not.

A janitor, who was in his 60s and poor of sight, was emptying garbage cans when he noticed someone in that closed lounge. All involved with the summer camp were required to have state background checks and campus police had advised staff it was wisest to call security rather than confront strangers on their own.

So he called security. He didn’t say anything about race.

A well-known older campus security officer drove over to the dorm. He recognized Ms. Kanoute as a student and they had a brief and polite conversation, which she recorded. He apologized for bothering her and she spoke to him of her discomfort: “Stuff like this happens way too often, where people just feel, like, threatened.”

But she was in a closed dorm…but it’s not at all clear if she knew that or not.

So anyway she wrote the Facebook post and everyone flipped out.

The president had had her own encounters with social justice “mistakes” and getting shouted at, so she erred on the side of…letting race trump class, I guess.

The school’s workers felt scapegoated.

“It is safe to say race is discussed far more often than class at Smith,” said Prof. Marc Lendler, who teaches American government at the college. “It’s a feature of elite academic institutions that faculty and students don’t recognize what it means to be elite.”

They’ll accuse themselves of structural racism in a heartbeat, but class? What’s that?

The repercussions spread. Three weeks after the incident at Tyler House, Ms. Blair, the cafeteria worker, received an email from a reporter at The Boston Globe asking her to comment on why she called security on Ms. Kanoute for “eating while Black.” That puzzled her; what did she have to do with this?

The food services director called the next morning. “Jackie,” he said, “you’re on Facebook.” She found that Ms. Kanoute had posted her photograph, name and email, along with that of Mr. Patenaude, a 21-year Smith employee and janitor.

“This is the racist person,” Ms. Kanoute wrote of Ms. Blair, adding that Mr. Patenaude too was guilty. (He in fact worked an early shift that day and had already gone home at the time of the incident.) Ms. Kanoute also lashed the Smith administration. “They’re essentially enabling racist, cowardly acts.”

Ms. Blair has lupus, a disease of the immune system, and stress triggers episodes. She felt faint. “Oh my God, I didn’t do this,” she told a friend. “I exchanged a hello with that student and now I’m a racist.”

Here’s where it gets much less complicated. You don’t bully janitors and cafeteria workers. Punching down, remember? REMEMBER THAT?

I worked with a dorm food service worker when I was a student. I got a gig working some afternoons at the tiny snack bar/coffee shop in the dorm, with a real employee as my supervisor. I liked her – she was sharp, funny, sensible. I was always annoyed by students who would just say “Gimme a coke” and she shrugged it off. That’s probably class too – I expected basic manners and she didn’t. Food service workers should be able to expect basic politeness, let alone not being publicly ratted out for things they didn’t do.

Ms. Blair was born and raised and lives in Northampton with her husband, a mechanic, and makes about $40,000 a year. Within days of being accused by Ms. Kanoute, she said, she found notes in her mailbox and taped to her car window. “RACIST” read one. People called her at home. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” a caller said. “You don’t deserve to live,” said another.

Smith College put out a short statement noting that Ms. Blair had not placed the phone call to security but did not absolve her of broader responsibility. Ms. McCartney called her and briefly apologized. That apology was not made public.

Not cool.

Smith officials pressured Ms. Blair to go into mediation with Ms. Kanoute. “A core tenet of restorative justice,” Ms. McCartney wrote, “is to provide people with the opportunity for willing apology, forgiveness and reconciliation.”

Ms. Blair declined. “Why would I do this? This student called me a racist and I did nothing,” she said.

On Oct. 28, 2018, Ms. McCartney released a 35-page report from a law firm with a specialty in discrimination investigations. The report cleared Ms. Blair altogether and found no sufficient evidence of discrimination by anyone else involved, including the janitor who called campus police.

…

Ms. McCartney offered no public apology to the employees after the report was released. “We were gobsmacked — four people’s lives wrecked, two were employees of more than 35 years and no apology,” said Tracey Putnam Culver, a Smith graduate who recently retired from the college’s facilities management department. “How do you rationalize that?”

Rahsaan Hall, racial justice director for the A.C.L.U. of Massachusetts and Ms. Kanoute’s lawyer, cautioned against drawing too much from the investigative report, as subconscious bias is difficult to prove. Nor was he particularly sympathetic to the accused workers.

So much for the civil liberties of the food service workers and the janitor and the security guard.

“It’s troubling that people are more offended by being called racist than by the actual racism in our society,” he said. “Allegations of being racist, even getting direct mailers in their mailbox, is not on par with the consequences of actual racism.”

So then let’s just pick people at random for public accusations of racism, yeah?

This guy is very hostile to women.

It is of course in no way “a logical consequence” of Allison Bailey’s view that humans can’t change sex that “a lot of people die.” All people die, and Allison Bailey’s entirely familiar and everyday view that men are not women isn’t going to hasten that (also familiar and everyday and biological reality-based) fact.

Note the radical change from “the logical consequence [of her advocacy and views] is that a lot of people die” and “helping to cause the possible deaths of trans people.” The first claim is that Allison’s advocacy and views will necessarily and certainly result in the death of a lot of people, while the second claim is that they help cause possible deaths. The second claim walks back the first at three points: help cause, possible, and the omission of “a lot of” before “people.” Is Kaveney too stupid even to notice the difference? Or too sly to acknowledge it? I don’t know, but he’s a piece of work either way.

So male, that aggression coupled with righteous certainty. Forget about the clothes and makeup and wig, Roz, and focus on the entitlement and misogyny.

Now some people find this hurts their ears, but it makes me laugh too hard to notice. The girl is only fair but the dog is BRILLIANT.

First it’s the pretend-police, now it’s the NHS.

Why not try fucking right off.

To elaborate a little, because there is no such thing as “cisgender people” and because all this noise about “misgendering” and “your pronouns” is just a way to force us to pay more and more and more attention to a tiny set of people who want all the attention in the universe and beyond. That’s why not.

If there’s anything movie stars should not be doing, it’s giving medical advice on Covid. Naturally that’s exactly what Gwyneth Paltrow is doing.

Paltrow recently wrote on her blog that contracting Covid-19 had left her with “some long-tail fatigue and brain fog”.

She said a “functional medicine practitioner” had recommended an “intuitive fasting” healing regime.

But NHS England’s Prof Stephen Powis said some of her methods were “really not the solutions we’d recommend”.

As part of her recovery, the Hollywood-star-turned-lifestyle-guru said she was on a mainly “keto[genic] and plant-based” diet, with no sugar or alcohol. She fasts until 11:00 every day and takes infrared saunas.

A “lifestyle guru” shouldn’t be guruing on medical subjects, especially this one.

Prof Powis, who is national medical director for NHS England, said “serious science” should be applied.

…

“In the last few days I see Gwyneth Paltrow is unfortunately suffering from the effects of Covid. We wish her well, but some of the solutions she’s recommending are really not the solutions we’d recommend in the NHS. “We need to take long Covid seriously and apply serious science. All influencers who use social media have a duty of responsibility and a duty of care around that.”

Because long Covid isn’t a “lifestyle” and Paltrow is not medically trained. This isn’t complicated.

Wtf? The BBC reports:

Amnesty International has stripped the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny of his “prisoner of conscience” status after it says it was “bombarded” with complaints highlighting xenophobic comments that he has made in the past and not renounced.

A spokesman for the human rights organisation in Moscow told the BBC that he believed the wave of requests to “de-list” Navalny was part of an “orchestrated campaign” to discredit Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic and “impede” Amnesty’s calls for his release from custody.

But on review, Amnesty International concluded that comments made by Navalny some 15 years ago, including a video which appears to compare immigrants to cockroaches, amounted to “hate speech” which was incompatible with the label “prisoner of conscience”.

So that whole being poisoned almost to death by Putin thing doesn’t count any more?

“We had too many requests; we couldn’t ignore them,” spokesman Alexander Artemev told the BBC, explaining that the team initially discounted Navalny’s previous statements – which he has not repeated – as “not relevant” in the light of his current, political persecution.

Amnesty’s offices worldwide, including that of the secretary general, were then hit with complaints from “so-called concerned citizens”, Mr Artemev says, in an apparently co-ordinated move.

Some of the calls to revoke Navalny’s prisoner of conscience status quoted a Twitter thread by Katya Kazbek, a freelance columnist published by the pro-Kremlin channel RT amongst others. She reposted Navalny’s controversial videos after his arrest in January, describing him as an “avowed racist” and accusing supporters of “whitewashing” his nationalism.

That seems like quite a good reason to ignore the complaints, rather than to act on them and say you couldn’t ignore them.

Oh boy, a game. The NY Times has a what dialect are you game, not paywalled. I got New York, which is dead-on in a way, since I grew up in Princeton, but I thought some of my answers were probably because my parents were from Iowa and Missouri, and some might have been because I’ve lived in Seattle since Charles I became king…but nope.

To be more precise, I got New York, Yonkers, and Baltimore. Yonkers??? I’ve never even been there apart from passing through, and the same goes for Baltimore. Plus Yonkers has a dialect different from New York? A bit puzzling but no matter, it’s interesting.

Now the UK police are not just shouting at us about the “rights” of trans women, they’re also threatening us if we talk back.

The police are doing this.

The police are telling women we have to let men who say they are women into our sports, and they are reporting us if we say that’s an injustice.

The police are taunting women over the loss of their rights and then punishing us when we talk back.

The police are doing this.

But…it’s the Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Bill. It’s a bill about maternity. What can it possibly have to do with men who call themselves women? Men can call themselves women until they run out of breath but it will never make them able to get pregnant. Why is a man talking about a maternity bill in terms of “defamation” of trans women?

Naomi Wolf has been reckless with other people’s lives before. Back in 2014 she was peddling conspiracy theories about the ISIS beheadings of journalists and others.

Author and former Democratic political consultant Naomi Wolf published a series of Facebook posts on Saturday in which she questioned the veracity of the ISIS videos showing the murders and beheadings of two Americans and two Britons, strongly implying that the videos had been staged by the US government and that the victims and their parents were actors.

Wolf published a separate Facebook post, also on Saturday, suggesting that the US was sending troops to West Africa not to assist with Ebola treatment but to bring Ebola back to the US to justify a military takeover of American society. She also suggested that the Scottish independence referendum, in which Scots voted to remain in the United Kingdom, had been faked.

Lots of people peddle conspiracy theories, but it’s worse and more dangerous when people with some claims to intellectual respectability do it.

despite Wolf’s turn into conspiracy theory, she is still more widely known for her earlier and much-respected work on feminism, as well as her political consulting for the 1996 Bill Clinton and 2000 Al Gore presidential campaigns on reaching female voters. I was taught parts of Wolf’s 1990 book “The Beauty Myth” in school and admit that, until researching her more recent views more fully for this post, still mostly associated her with this and other well-respected work. In other words, I was carrying the assumption that Wolf is a respected and authoritative figure to be taken seriously. I can only assume that I was not alone in this.

I would replace the word “authoritative” with “reliable,” but I agree with the basic point. You don’t expect people who can write respected books to spout dopey (but dangerous) conspiracy theories. You expect people like Trump to do that, not people who can write books.

Her initial posts on ISIS repeatedly stated that confirmation of the authenticity of their beheading videos “has not happened yet.” Wolf said that the media was ignoring “journalistic red flags” in that the sole source of the videos had been “SITE, which is run by an anti-Muslim activist with half a million dollars in US funding in 2004.” (In fact, the videos were widely distributed on open-source jihadist online outlets. Maryland-based nonprofit SITE monitors extremist social media.) She also detailed an alleged incident, which I was not able to confirm, of a website “based in Doha, address registered at a private intelligence firm in the UK” that she said had spread news of a Canadian journalist, who turned out not to exist, taken hostage in Syria.

This culminated in a now-deleted post, reproduced below, suggesting that the ISIS beheading videos had been staged, as had the initial abductions of the two American journalists and two British aid workers killed on camera. She hints that she believes this was done by the US military.

Now she’s sowing doubt about vaccination on Twitter and Fox News.

I don’t know what gets into people, I really don’t.

Naomi Wolf is giving us the benefit of her multi-disciplinary expertise again.

No it isn’t. We know people have immune systems, but immune systems can’t knock out a novel virus all by themselves.

Ah yes, the sinister conspiracy to slow and stop a lethal pandemic by vaccinating people. Bill Gates should be building luxury golf resorts instead!