“Sophie LaBelle” of Assigned Male Comics has a new one out:
That Genitalia Board in the first panel is enough to give you nightmares, but aside from that…
No it isn’t. Nobody is required to “date” (i.e. fuck) trans people. Nobody is required to do it and nobody is required to be silent about refusing to do it. “Sophie” is way too narcissistic and entitled to be an appealing “date” object.
Sorry about the image this conjures up…
The reputation of Rudy Giuliani could be set for a further blow with the release of highly embarrassing footage in Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow-up to Borat.
If you care about spoilers now is the time to exit.
In the film, released on Friday, the former New York mayor and current personal attorney to Donald Trump is seen reaching into his trousers and apparently touching his genitals while reclining on a bed in the presence of the actor playing Borat’s daughter, who is posing as a TV journalist.
Following an obsequious interview for a fake conservative news programme, the pair retreat at her suggestion for a drink to the bedroom of a hotel suite, which is rigged with concealed cameras.
If the cops did that it would be entrapment. It seems morally dubious, but then…it’s Giuliani.
After she removes his microphone, Giuliani, 76, can be seen lying back on the bed, fiddling with his untucked shirt and reaching into his trousers. They are then interrupted by Borat who runs in and says: “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.”
Good punchline.
Oh lord he’s done it again – tried to impress us with blank sheets of paper. Remember those action shots at Walter Reed of Trump signing the middle of a blank sheet of paper? And those boxes stacked on a table at the beginning of his “administration” that were supposed to convey how open he was being with his financial records? Except that the boxes were just boxes? He hasn’t learned.
Oopsie, they shouldn’t have let her open it.
Juliet Jacques at Newsweek assures us that no male person would ever pretend to be trans just to win at his chosen sport:
As a transsexual woman and fervent soccer player (and fan), the idea that someone would transition just to succeed in women’s sports because they couldn’t do so in men’s sports is absurd.
Not as any kind of writer though. Writers understand that you have to keep your subjects and verbs straight throughout the whole sentence. There should have been an “I find” before “the idea,” and the “is” before the last word should be gone. Then the whole thing should be re-worked because that second clause is too clumsy.
ANYway – like hell it’s absurd. Is it simply obvious that “Rachel” McKinnon is what he says he is? “Laurel” Hubbard? Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood?
It may be true that some male athletes who identify as women really are serious about it and not at all consciously cheating; it may be true that all of them are (though not likely); the point however is that it’s not self-evident that they all are, and that even if they are serious about how they identify, it’s still not fair to female people. Both of those are true. We don’t know that zero males who claim to be trans do it in order to win, and it’s not fair to female athletes in any case. The unfairness of keeping male-bodied people out of female sports is trivial compared to the unfairness of ruining female sports for females. I think male-bodied people should just recognize that and back off.
It does female athletes a massive disservice, assuming the inherent inferiority of any cis woman to any trans woman or cis man.
Because he really cares about that. Give me a break. Anyway yes, humans are sexually dimorphic and males do have a long list of physical advantages. It would be nice if it were otherwise, but it isn’t.
[T]he particular issue of transgender athletes has occupied sports leagues for only about 40 years, ever since the U.S. Tennis Association barred transsexual player Renée Richards from the U.S. Open in 1976, citing a hitherto unprecedented woman-at-birth policy. They borrowed this terminology from second-wave feminist circles, which were then embroiled in fierce debates about whether to allow transsexual women into women-only spaces, and about how to border and police the category of “woman.”
Mmyes, how dare women say that men are not women, that’s so police-like, so border patrol-like. Bitches. Karens.
From the voter intimidation file:
Voters in Alaska and Florida reported receiving emails on Tuesday that threatened “vote for Trump or else!” — messages that have prompted investigations in both states. “You are currently registered as a Democrat and we know this because we have gained access into the entire voting infrastructure,” said one of the emails obtained by Alaska Public Media. “You will vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you. Change your party affiliation to Republican to let us know you received our message and will comply.”
It sounds so…Mississippi 1964.
The sender claimed to have the voter’s email, phone number and home address. Some of the emails were purportedly sent by the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group with ties to white nationalism that has clashed with law enforcement during recent protests. But cybersecurity experts say the origin of the messages is unclear, suggesting some of the emails appear to have originated from an Estonian server. The Proud Boys chairman has denied the group was involved.
…
The Alachua County, Fla., Sheriff’s Office wrote in a Facebook post on Tuesday that it is aware of the emails being circulated and is investigating.
“The email appears to be a scam and we will be initiating an investigation into the source of the email along with assistance from our partners on the federal level,” the sheriff’s office said.
TJ Pyche, a spokesman for the Alachua County Supervisor of Elections, told NPR that election officials are in contact with the FBI. Pyche said hundreds, if not thousands, of voters in the county received the emails and that voters in other Florida counties also received them.
…
Nina Jankowicz, an expert on disinformation at the Wilson Center, said the reports are concerning.
“It fits into a pattern of voter intimidation we’ve been seeing coming from both foreign and domestic actors who have been pushing narratives about voter safety at the polls, both related to COVID-19 as well as potential violent incidents,” she told NPR.
It also fits into a pattern of citizen intimidation we’ve been seeing coming from Trump for the past five years.
It may be “simple,” in a sense, but as for showing you’re “inclusive” of trans and non-binary people…even if it’s true that “using pronouns” and “asking about pronouns” is a way of doing that, what about the fact that it’s also a way of showing you’re not “inclusive” of everyone else? What about the fact that it’s alienating to most people to force them to pretend that they chose their own sex? What about the fact that most people just do not believe the goofy fairy tale that physical sex is unreal and easy to switch while magic switchable GeNder is real and absolute and mandatory? What about the fact that most women just do not want to step back and let men do all the talking about what it is to be a woman? What about colonization? What about appropriation? What about punching down? What about respecting truth and reality?
But who cares that Woman’s Hour bigged up the claim that Fair Play For Women, Woman’s Place UK, and Filia are “transphobic”? Why does it matter? Fair Play For Women explains:
Trump is having a meltdown about an interview.
Oooh he looks very sulky.
A joint statement by Women’s Place UK, Filia, and Fair Play for Women:
Today, 20th Oct, BBC Woman’s Hour hosted an excellent discussion on the politicization of Mumsnet with feminist scholar Sarah Pedersen (at approx 25mins). The discussion looked at the growth of the popular Mumsnet feminist discussion boards and their role in promoting a nascent women’s movement advocating women’s rights, in particular informing discussion on GRA reform.
Woman’s Place UK (WPUK), Fair Play for Women (FPFW) and FiLiA were highlighted as groups popular with and representative of women’s rights issues. At this point Jane Garvey, the BBC presenter felt it necessary to interject “We have to be clear, which are groups that some people have described, in some circumstances, as transphobic”.
Which kind of boils down to saying that trans activism is more important than feminism, and women should just sit down and defer to trans women instead of continuing to advocate for women’s rights. Otherwise she wouldn’t have said it. The BBC doesn’t interject into discussions of anti-racism the fact that racists consider anti-racism an evil and seditious thing, does it? Why did Garvey find it necessary to accuse three feminist groups of “transphobia”? Because that particular accusation is at the top of the list; it trumps all others. Sexism and misogyny on the other hand are at the bottom of the list. The trouble with women is that they might be terfs, and you just never know. Better not to risk it.
FiLiA, FPFW and WPUK are not transphobic. It is not acceptable for a BBC journalist to repeat libellous comment about us as if it is fair comment or a balancing of the discussion. There is simply no basis in fact for this comment to be made. It is the repetition of misogynist slander to which too many women are subjected.
It reminds me of the way the BBC used to talk about Salman Rushdie – it always “balanced” every damn discussion by bringing in the MCB to see what they thought.
These comments are seriously prejudicial to the reputations of women involved with these organisations, some of whom have previously been invited on the programme.
We urge BBC Woman’s Hour to correct this inaccurate reporting and we would like to thank Sarah Pedersen for her excellent and informative analysis of the feminist phenomenon that is Mumsnet.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the BBC to correct it.
The Guardian collects the ways Trump has trashed the environment.
“I want crystal clean water and air.”
That’s what Donald Trump said in the first chaotic presidential debate with Joe Biden.
It drives me crazy that he keeps putting it that way, because it shows how completely he doesn’t even get it. He hears “the environment” and he pictures a god damn glass of water. Water can be muddy and murky and be exactly right for its local environment. Environmental issues are not solely about what Donald Trump can safely put in his mouth; he can’t drink ocean water but humans sure as hell depend on that undrinkable water, as does much of the rest of life on the planet.
Experts agree that the climate crisis’s most destructive manifestations, on display in a particularly difficult year for the US, barely scratch the surface of the catastrophes to come. Yet the president appears unmoved by the enormous wildfires, devastating hurricanes, widespread water problems and persistent air pollution that disproportionately blights black and Latino communities. His administration has scrapped climate regulations, rolled back clean water rules and loosened pollution standards. Protections for public land and threatened species have been shrunk while new oil pipelines and coal mining have been encouraged.
Then they provide a very useful list.
I saw this
So I looked it up. What is ACAS? Google says:
The Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service is a Crown non-departmental public body of the Government of the United Kingdom. Its purpose is to improve organisations and working life through the promotion and facilitation of strong industrial relations practice.
Under Workplace Problems they have Discrimination, bullying and harassment, and under that they have Sexual harassment, and sure enough under that they have the anyones.
What sexual harassment is
Sexual harassment is unwanted behaviour of a sexual nature.
It can happen to men, women and people of any gender or sexual orientation. It can be carried out by anyone of the same sex, opposite sex or anyone of any gender identity.
Now…wait a minute. Back up. It isn’t that simple. They’re leaving out the whole power imbalance aspect. The larger category, to repeat, is Discrimination, bullying and harassment, and what do all of those involve? A power imbalance. That’s how these things work. The peasants can’t bully the lord, the workers can’t discriminate against the owner, the women can’t sexually harass the men.
Ok there are exceptions, as MenAtWork says. A rich and powerful woman boss can sexually harass a subordinate, and people are weird so no doubt there are such cases, but there is also a fundamental power imbalance between women and men, and women are the ones with less power. ACAS could say there are exceptions, and make it clear that men can report sexual harassment too, without occluding the pattern altogether.
The law on harassment
Harassment includes bullying because of certain ‘protected characteristics’ and is against the law.
Sex is one of the protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010.
The full list is:
So that has to mean “sex” as in “female sex.” It can’t mean both sexes, because that would be incoherent.
So why is their advice on sexual harassment written as if it’s a toss-up which sex is generally the one being harassed?
The marketing of “surrogacy”…
No, the “essence” of “a surrogate” is not providing a family or helping have a baby. The essence of surrogacy is using a woman’s body to gestate a baby for other people, as if women are factories for the manufacture of babies.
The company doing this advertising is in the “surrogacy” – business; it does indeed broker the rental of women for gestation purposes.
Well, no………………
It’s true enough that nothing about a girl’s body makes her more or less of a girl…but the point here is to claim that nothing about a boy’s body makes him less of a girl [if he identifies as a girl]. That’s just dumb. Why do people fall over like ninepins at all this dumb? Girls have lots of different types of body, true, but they don’t have boys’ bodies, because if they have those then they’re boys, not girls. Freckles, cheekbones, tall, short – none of those determine what sex you are, but that doesn’t mean that nothing about your body determines what sex you are.
Enough with the dumb already!
I was saying how energized and high Trump gets from his rallies. This one from today is a good example.
The content is grotesque but leaving that aside for the moment – look at how juiced he is. Look at how much more fluent and confident and actory he is. It’s all disgusting but it’s skilled, in its way – which his non-rally performances just are not. Press conferences, speeches, announcements – he’s more like a gas station inflatable doll, luring in the crowds by lurching back and forth in the breeze and gesticulating.
It’s creepy. It’s creepy that he’s so tuned in to crowd-love. It’s creepy that crowd-love can change his speech patterns and energy levels and timing that much. It’s creepy that he needs it that badly.
Really?
I could see it if Alison Phipps were a novelist…although I would still disagree, because extended criticism of a bad novel can be both entertaining and enlightening. But Alison Phipps isn’t a novelist, she’s a “Professor of Gender Studies” – i.e. an academic. Academics don’t usually think, or at least don’t usually say, that if you can’t say something nice you should be brief and then change the subject. Academics do a lot of extensive analysis of each other’s work, and they don’t observe any rule that I’ve ever heard of mandating brevity in disagreement.
Why spend so much time and energy? Because bad ideas can have bad consequences, and they can also be interesting routes to better ideas, and they can be instructive about what not to write/do/say, and they often have implications for how people think, how they reason, how they explain the world, and so on. Saying what’s bad about a bad idea is important work, and it’s a major part of academics’ work, and yes sometimes that’s even to the tune of several thousand words.
Sometimes I think “Gender Studies” have not been very good for the thinking skills of its adepts.
Sometimes when you hire your Medical Experts on the basis of their Fox News commentary as opposed to their medical expertise you get…well you get Scott Atlas.
As summer faded into autumn and the novel coronavirus continued to ravage the nation unabated, Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist whose commentary on Fox News led President Trump to recruit him to the White House, consolidated his power over the government’s pandemic response.
Atlas shot down attempts to expand testing. He openly feuded with other doctors on the coronavirus task force and succeeded in largely sidelining them. He advanced fringe theories, such as that social distancing and mask-wearing were meaningless and would not have changed the course of the virus in several hard-hit areas. And he advocated allowing infections to spread naturally among most of the population while protecting the most vulnerable and those in nursing homes until the United States reaches herd immunity, which experts say would cause excess deaths, according to three current and former senior administration officials.
Trump might as well have shoved Fauci aside in order to put Cookie Monster in charge of the coronavirus task force.
Atlas also cultivated Trump’s affection with his public assertions that the pandemic is nearly over, despite death and infection counts showing otherwise, and his willingness to tell the public that a vaccine could be developed before the Nov. 3 election, despite clear indications of a slower timetable.
It’s 100% about Trump’s affection and 0% about relevant expertise.
Discord on the coronavirus task force has worsened since the arrival in late summer of Atlas, whom colleagues said they regard as ill-informed, manipulative and at times dishonest. As the White House coronavirus response coordinator, Deborah Birx is tasked with collecting and analyzing infection data and compiling charts detailing upticks and other trends. But Atlas routinely has challenged Birx’s analysis and those of other doctors, including Anthony S. Fauci, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn, with what the other doctors considered junk science, according to three senior administration officials.
Might as well call it Fox News science.
Birx tried to get Pence to dump Atlas but instead the bozo from Indiana told them to work it out themselves.
The result has been a U.S. response increasingly plagued by distrust, infighting and lethargy, just as experts predict coronavirus cases could surge this winter and deaths could reach 400,000 by year’s end.
It turns out competence matters!
On Saturday, Atlas wrote on Twitter that masks do not work, prompting the social media site to remove the tweet for violating its safety rules for spreading misinformation. Several medical and public health experts flagged the tweet as dangerous misinformation coming from a primary adviser to the president.
“Masks work? NO,” Atlas wrote in the tweet, followed by other misrepresentations about the science behind masks. He linked to an article from the American Institute for Economic Research — a libertarian think tank behind the Barrington effort — that argued against masks and dismissed the threat of the virus as overblown.
Fauci and Birx have been trying to get the administration to do more testing as winter approaches, but Atlas says no no and throws it all out the window.
Trump and Atlas will be responsible for a lot of deaths before they’re thrown out.
This “Huh huh Hunter Biden’s laptop” story is too dubious even for Fox News.
Mediaite has learned that Fox News was first approached by Rudy Giuliani to report on a tranche of files alleged to have come from Hunter Biden’s unclaimed laptop left at a Delaware computer repair shop, but that the news division chose not to run the story unless or until the sourcing and veracity of the emails could be properly vetted.
With the general election just three weeks away, Giuliani ultimately brought the story to the New York Post, which shares the same owner, Rupert Murdoch.
And an even worse reputation.
But even New York Post reporters didn’t want their names on the story.
On Sunday night, the New York Times reported that the New York Post had a difficult time finding a reporter to put their byline on the story amidst internal concerns about its dubious sourcing. The Times reported that the staff writer who mostly wrote the story, Bruce Golding, refused put his name on the report because he doubted its credibility. Post editors then “pressed staff members to add their bylines to the story — and at least one aside from Mr. Golding refused,” according to the Times report, which cited two unnamed Post journalists.
Normally reporters want their bylines on a story…
Concerns that Giuliani has been targeted by Russian intelligence to launder election misinformation about Biden raised more concerns about the reporting. According to the Washington Post, the U.S. intelligence community made that assessment last year, and went so far as to warn the president that Giuliani could be an unwitting conduit of false or manipulated claims, with the goal of sowing dissension and chaos in the 2020 election.
Questions of Giuliani’s credibility are well-founded. President Trump’s personal attorney has admitted that he is looking to dig up any negative information that could benefit his client.
And by “information” he doesn’t mean “true information” but just…stuff.
While Fox’s news division appears to have applied basic journalistic standards in declining to run such an explosive story without verification, much of the network’s opinion programming has covered the story and even had Giuliani on air to tout it, using the Post’s reporting as its shield while blaming the rest of the media for not covering it. Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum also had Giuliani on to discuss the story the day after it broke.
That’s cute. The news people won’t touch it but the opinion people are all over it, so…win-win.
A member of Republican leadership in the US Senate has likened his relationship with Donald Trump to a marriage, and said that he was “maybe like a lot of women who get married and think they’re going to change their spouse, and that doesn’t usually work out very well”.
Not very flattering to men…
Trump spent some of the weekend in a public fight with Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska. Sasse criticised Trump in a call with constituents, lamenting among other things his treatment of women and the way he “kisses dictators’ butts” and “flirts with white supremacists”.
You know, little things like that.
Trump fired back with insults, forcing Republican National Committee chair, Ronna McDaniel, on to the defensive on the Sunday talkshows.
Or she could just admit the truth, but whatever.
Blasting back at Sasse, Trump showed he never forgets a slight. The Nebraska senator, the president tweeted, “seems to be heading down the same inglorious path as former senator Liddle’ Bob Corker”, who became “totally unelectable” because of his criticism “and decided to drop out of politics and gracefully ‘RETIRE’”.
Two weeks…
Trump is in Las Vegas, where he should stay until he is imprisoned.
Trump joined a campaign staff call from his hotel in Las Vegas, where he is staying before his two campaign rallies in Arizona later today.
The president tried to instill confidence in his campaign staff, insisting he would win the election, despite the recent disappointing polls.
He insists a lot of things. Insistence doesn’t make it true.
He relieved his frustrations by trashing Fauci.
“People are tired of coronavirus,” the president said, according to reporters who listened in on the call. “People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots.”
We’re tired of coronavirus – you don’t say! Here I thought we were loving it, with all the deaths and miserable protracted illnesses and restrictions and deprivations. And yes how very sensible to get angry at the medical experts who advise us on how to reduce the spread of the virus, and how sensible and reasonable and fair to call them idiots, especially when you yourself are…not conspicuously intelligent or thoughtful.
He said Fauci had been around too long. (You know someone else we could say that about? Of course you do.)
The president also claimed (without evidence) that the US death toll would have been as high as 800,000 if he had followed Fauci’s advice.“Fauci is a disaster,” Trump said.
Without evidence and without anything else. No reasons, no explanation, no chain of reasoning, no argument – just a stupid assertion, as always. His name should be Stupid J. Assertion.
Yesterday this happened:
Thousands have attended rallies across France in support of Samuel Paty, the teacher beheaded after showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to his pupils.
People in the Place de la République in Paris carried the slogan “Je suis enseignant” (I am a teacher), with PM Jean Castex saying: “We are France!”
The Place de la République in Paris filled with people rallying in support of Mr Paty, 47. Mr Castex and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo joined them.
The square was the scene of a huge demonstration in which 1.5 million people showed solidarity with Charlie Hebdo following the deadly attack of January 2015.
Nathalie, a teacher from Chelles who was at the Paris rally, told Le Monde she was there because she had “realised you can die of teaching”.
In Lille, people carried banners and placards with the simple words “I am Samuel”.
Thousands of people also gathered in Place Bellecour in Lyon to pay their respects, with another large turnout in Nantes.
Demonstrations are also being held in Toulouse, Strasbourg, Marseille, Bordeaux and elsewhere.
More bad PR for Mo.
