It’s the old “feminism is just victimhood” trope.

Uh huh. It’s that simple. Just be full and capable and awesome and there will be no arbitrary unjust obstacles! Or maybe there will, but that means you get to overcome them and be better than everyone else. Yay we’re better than everyone else! Unjust obstacles are a good thing because we get to look so much more capable by overcoming them.

So…there are unjust obstacles, but they are thrown in front of trans people only. Women just sail through one open door after another, the bitches.

Let them eat…grouse? Truffles? Caviar? Foie gras? Saffron-infused fish and chips?

Commons leader Jacob Rees-Mogg has accused Unicef of “playing politics” after the charity launched a campaign to help feed children in the UK.

The Tory MP said the charity was meant to look after people in the poorest countries and should be “ashamed”.

It comes after Unicef said it would pledge £25,000 to a south London charity to help supply breakfast boxes over the Christmas holidays.

Unicef said every child deserves to “thrive” no matter where they are born.

Surely even Jacob Rees-Mogg can grasp that living in a rich country is compatible with being personally very poor. If you live in a rich country with crap social services and an enormous disparity in wealth and incomes, there are going to be some poor people in that country. If you live in the United States, to pick an example entirely at random, there are going to be many millions of poor people. I hope Rees-Mogg understands that the fact that he is rich doesn’t mean everyone else is rich, or even prosperous enough to have plenty to eat.

Mr Rees-Mogg was responding to a question from Labour MP Zarah Sultana in the House of Commons.

“For the first time ever, Unicef, the UN agency responsible for providing humanitarian aid to children, is having to feed working-class kids in the UK,” she said. “But while children go hungry, a wealthy few enjoy obscene riches.”

She asked if Mr Rees-Mogg would “give government time to discuss the need to make him and his super-rich chums pay their fair share so that we can end the grotesque inequality that scars our society”.

Certainly not, peasant.

Responding, Mr Rees-Mogg said Unicef “should be ashamed of itself”.

“I think it is a real scandal that Unicef should be playing politics in this way when it is meant to be looking after people in the poorest, the most deprived, countries of the world where people are starving, where there are famines and where there are civil wars, and they make cheap political points of this kind, giving, l think, £25,000 to one council,” he said.

“It is a political stunt of the lowest order.”

I keep thinking “imagine trying this bullshit with race – imagine white guys saying they ‘identify as’ black and trying to bully black people into agreeing.” Now we can see an actual example in the wild.

Trump longs and craves and pines and yearns to see a special counsel investigate something something something Hunter Biden, but it’s a little tricky in the last weeks of a lame duck presidency.

President Donald Trump is pushing extensively for the appointment of special counsels to separately investigate his baseless allegations of voter fraud and allegations surrounding Hunter Biden, the son of the President-elect, according to people familiar with the matter.

I wonder if it ever occurs to him that an investigation of his baseless allegations would simply underline the fact that they’re baseless. “Please please please investigate my fake claims! You’re sure to find something even though my claims are fake!!”

Justice Department rules say a special counsel must be named by the attorney general, though Trump has quizzed his team whether he could name one himself, according to one person familiar with the matter.

Sir no sir.

If the incoming acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, refuses to appoint the special counsels at Trump’s request, the President could fire him, the people said.

Score!

Next step:

Uhhh….

But Trump administration lawyers likely can navigate past those requirements by appointing someone to act like a special counsel even if the requirements aren’t all in place, as Barr did in giving special counsel powers to John Durham, the Connecticut US attorney reinvestigating the Russia investigation.

“Navigate past those requirements” is an interesting way to put it. “Ignore the rules” would be a slightly less interesting way.

Beware “wellness.” It’s always bullshit and sometimes it’s worse than that.

From 2018 but “wellness” promoters who tell us to poison ourselves haven’t gone away yet.

Yes, whilst this “pudding” is free from gluten and the milk we’ve drunk for centuries, any health benefits would be heavily offset by the terrible diarrhea you would likely get from lycorine, found in the deadly Narcissus flowers sat prettily atop the glass. You might briefly feel good because you’ve avoided sticky toffee pudding, but before long the convulsions could set in.

“Remember, as a general rule: If you are not 100 percent sure something is edible, just don’t eat it,” Botanist James Wong explained.

“If it’s a staple eaten for centuries, which you don’t have a diagnosed medical intolerance or allergy to, it’s probably safe.”

At higher quantities, lycorine can be lethal if ingested. The plant’s toxicity has been known for centuries, and has been used in various suicide attempts over the years.

Ok. How about scrambled jade eggs? Are they safe?

I missed this news item from DC a couple of years ago:

The Cuba Libre restaurant in Penn Quarter has agreed to institute civil rights training for employees and pay a $7,000 fine following an incident in June in which two staff members attempted to prevent a transgender woman from using the ladies bathroom.

D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine announced today that his office had reached a settlement with the Washington location of the chain following an investigation that found Cuba Libre DC violated the city’s Human Rights Act by discriminating against Charlotte Clymer’s gender identity and failing to educate its employees on customers’ rights.

Customers’ rights? Or customers who are trans women’s rights. Clearly women’s rights are not on anyone’s mind here.

The restaurant agreed to:

• Create and maintain written compliance policies regarding gender identity rights.
• Implement and maintain a training program regarding customers’ rights.
• Post signage that states all individuals are allowed to use bathrooms corresponding to their gender identities.
• Report any complaints regarding the Human Rights Act to the attorney general’s office for the next two years.
• Pay a $7,000 penalty to the city.

No mention of women’s rights to use “bathrooms corresponding to their” sex.

Days after Clymer’s story of the discrimination she suffered at Cuba Libre made headlines, Gutin issued a public apology and pledged to make a contribution to an LGBTQ support group, Casa Ruby.

According to city’s investigation referenced in the settlement, Cuba Libre has fired the employees involved, already instituted many of the changes it has agreed to make, and entered into a separate settlement with Clymer that included a charitable donation to a non-profit.

Two employees who tried to protect women from a man (the former Charles Clymer at that) in their toilet were fired.

The Great Man quotes himself.

He hasn’t though. Or maybe he has, in the sense that he was even worse before. I don’t know, I didn’t know of him before. But in the sense of actually becoming thoughtful and not arrogant? No. No, there he has failed utterly.

In fact, amusingly, the very act of tweeting this vain “Look how awesome I am” self-quotation demonstrates that failure. His habit of blocking anyone who disagrees with him no matter how politely just underlines it.

Updating to add because I forgot where it was before:

Grace Lavery in action just a few hours ago.

Grace Lavery’s graceful response?

“Grace” Lavery gets a pile of crap published at Foreign Policy. Why FP is that gullible is beyond me. It’s about the Tavistock ruling (so that makes it suitable for FP because it’s in Another Country?).

In effect, the courts intervened in the transition-related care of children experiencing gender dysphoria, putting those children and their families in the position of having to seek care abroad.

But calling it “care” assumes the very thing that is at issue – that puberty blockers are a legitimate treatment for a genuine medical condition that needs treatment. That’s a very shaky assumption, and for Keira Bell, for instance, it turned out to be entirely wrong. Lavery is cheating by treating it as obvious and universally agreed that puberty blockers are a “treatment.”

The decision is an unprecedented juridical attack on the LGBT community in the U.K., in which the British state has asserted a right to enforce unwanted puberty—and to arrest transitions that are already in progress—on the slimmest of pretexts.

Another cheat. It’s not an “attack” at all, but whatever it is, it is not on “the LGBT community.” L G and B people don’t want puberty blockers, and it’s stacking the deck to try to portray the ruling as a form of homopobia.

We’re used to this kind of deceptive garbage in blog posts and tweets, but Foreign Policy ought to be able to see it and reject it.

It also reflects a disturbing escalation of anti-transgender policy across the United Kingdom.

But it isn’t “anti-transgender,” it’s anti-harmful medical interventions on children.

A formerly highly marginal ideology, the so-called gender critical position, has captured British institutions.

Which twin has the ideology here? The gender critical position is not an ideology so much as it’s a rejection of an ideology – the trans ideology that inculcates such dogmatic truths as “puberty blockers are essential treatment” and “protecting adolescents from dangerous medical interference is transphobic.” The foundational claim that people can have the body of one sex and the mind of another is an ideological claim of a fantastical nature.

The court’s decision was lauded not just by the British right-wing press like the Spectator but, more strikingly, by center-left media like the Observer, which applauded the decision, suggesting that it will “ensure that children will now receive the protection to which they are legally entitled.”

Yes, and what does that tell us? Perhaps that there may be some truth to the notion that children need protection from people who would permanently mess up their bodies (including their brains).

Hey kids, let’s have martial law!

Virginia state senator Amanda Chase [has thrown] her support behind President Donald Trump‘s refusal to concede to former Vice President Joe Biden, going so far as to say that the commander in chief should declare martial law and let the military oversee another election.

Is that fascist enough yet?

While some of Trump’s closest allies have acknowledged Biden’s victory, the president himself has not indicated he has plans to give up the fight to stay in power.

Chase, who is looking to garner the Republican nomination for governor, also refuses to accept the results, writing in a Tuesday Facebook post that Biden “is not my president and never will be.” She praised Trump for having a “backbone” and advocated for him to declare martial law, a recommendation made by General Michael Flynn, who[m] Trump pardoned on November 25.

We live in strange times.

H/t What a Maroon

The locusts might return for a second round.

New swarms of desert locusts are threatening the livelihoods of millions of people in the Horn of Africa and Yemen despite a year of control efforts, the United Nations has warned.

The UN says there have been good breeding conditions in eastern Ethiopia and Somalia, with Kenya also at risk.

And breeding underway on both sides of the Red Sea poses a new threat to Eritrea, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

This is after the worst locust invasion in 70 years.

Between January and August this year East Africa saw billions of the insects destroying crops across the region. “We lost so much of our pastures and vegetation because of the locusts and as a result we are still losing a good number of our livestock,” said Gonjoba Guyo, a pastoralist in North Horr sub-country in northern Kenya.

“I have lost 14 goats, four cows and two camels because of the locust outbreak and now there is lots of fear that we may face similar or worse consequences.”

There was massive rainfall in November which created a fabulous breeding ground for more locusts.

If I believed in a god I would wonder what the hell it’s thinking.

Trump lost but the Republican party remains the Republican party.

Today, to be an aspiring Republican politician in good standing, one must espouse a set of core beliefs that are either entirely baseless or provably untrue: the climate crisis isn’t real; gun safety laws don’t reduce gun violence; masks don’t reduce the spread of Covid-19. To many observers, embracing a conspiracy theory about corrupted voting machines or late-night “ballot dumps” would represent a break with reality. But for much of the Republican elite, that’s not a problem. They broke with reality long ago.

The Republican establishment is also increasingly willing to disenfranchise eligible voters if it helps them win. Between 2008 and 2016, America lost 10% of its polling places, with cuts falling hardest on minority communities. Ever-broader voter purges have kicked millions of eligible, registered voters off red-state voting rolls.

Republican gerrymandering has created bizarrely shaped districts that put goons like Jim Jordan in Congress.

These examples barely scrape the surface of the war on voting that Republican politicians, not just Trump, have waged in recent years. The president’s wild attempt to steal an election is a first in American history. But it didn’t come from nowhere. Trump simply absorbed his party establishment’s prevailing view – that it is acceptable to win elections through whatever means possible, including by throwing out large numbers of votes on technicalities, hoping conservative judges put ideology over country, or stoking fears about nonexistent fraud – and took that approach to its logical conclusion.

…

It’s commendable that a handful of Republicans stood up to a president and met the low bar he presented. But it’s not enough. Those who have admirably protected the American experiment from Trump must help America save it from the McConnell-era Republican party. That doesn’t mean Republicans need to change their minds about taxes, regulations, guns, or a host of other a host of other issues that divide the parties. But they do have to agree that democracy is the best way to settle our disagreements – and that those who don’t believe in democracy doesn’t deserve our votes, no matter how much we may support their other positions.

It’s pretty clear that’s not going to happen though.

About all this gender stereotyping…

“Harmful” gender stereotyping has helped fuel the UK mental health crisis afflicting the younger generation, an influential report has warned, adding that it is at the root of problems with body image and eating disorders, record male suicide rates as well as violence against women and girls.

And maybe the hot new fashion for claiming to be the other sex?

Stereotyped assumptions also “significantly limit” youngsters’ career choices, in turn contributing to the gender pay gap, according to the findings of an influential commission set up by the leading gender equality campaigning charity the Fawcett Society.

Warning that stereotyping persists in parenting, education and the commercial sector – notably toys, books and fashion – the commission is calling on the government to “take meaningful steps” to better support teachers and parents and challenge simplistic “pink and blue” labelling in the corporate sector.

Maybe, just maybe, people could manage to choose whatever toys and books and clothes they fancy without having to claim to be not the sex they were born.

Sam Smethers, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, said: “Gender stereotyping is everywhere and causes serious, long-lasting harm – that’s the clear message from the research for the commission. From “boys will be boys” attitudes in nursery or school, to jobs for boys and jobs for girls views among some parents, these stereotypes are deeply embedded and they last a lifetime. We need to end the ‘princessification’ of girls and the toxification of boys.”

If there were less of that there would be less of a felt need to swap. If there were a lot less there would be a lot less.

Maybe – this is very utopian but hear me out – just maybe if there were less gender stereotyping there would no longer be a tv franchise titled “Real Housewives.”

Trump’s neighbors would really rather not.

Next-door neighbors of Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Fla., that he has called his Winter White House, have a message for the outgoing commander in chief: We don’t want you to be our neighbor.

Mister Rogers would have said the same.

That message was formally delivered Tuesday morning in a demand letter delivered to the town of Palm Beach and also addressed to the U.S. Secret Service asserting that Trump lost his legal right to live at Mar-a-Lago because of an agreement he signed in the early 1990s when he converted the storied estate from his private residence to a private club.

Yes but everybody knows that Trump’s signing an agreement means precisely nothing. If he feels like breaking it he’ll break it unless someone stops him.

In the demand letter, obtained by The Washington Post, an attorney for the Mar-a-Lago neighbors says the town should notify Trump that he cannot use Mar-a-Lago as his residence. Making that move would “avoid an embarrassing situation” if the outgoing president moves to the club and later has to be ordered to leave, according to the letter sent on behalf of the neighbors, the DeMoss family, which runs an international missionary foundation.

Missionaries. Now that’s poetic justice. Maybe they could spend all their time trying to convert Trump.

For years, various neighbors have raised concerns about disruptions, such as clogged traffic and blocked streets, caused by the president’s frequent trips to the club. Even before he was president, Trump created ill will in the town by refusing to comply with even basic local requirements, such as adhering to height limits for a massive flagpole he installed, and frequently attempting to get out of the promises he had made when he converted Mar-a-Lago into a private club.

What I’m saying. Promises and signing things mean nothing to Trump.

The 1993 Palm Beach agreement isn’t the only document that raises questions about whether Trump can legally live at Mar-a-Lago. He also signed a document deeding development rights for Mar-a-Lago to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Washington-based, privately funded nonprofit organization that works to save historic sites around the country. As part of the National Trust deal, Trump agreed to “forever” relinquish his rights to develop Mar-a-Lago or to use it for “any purpose other than club use.”

Yes but by “forever” he meant “until I feel like it.”

She really doesn’t care.

Lawyers should not be making decisions on trans issues! Except when they should!

It’s been two weeks since three High Court judges in London ruled that trans children would not be able to consent to the reversible treatment of puberty blockers, a landmark decision that sent waves of anxiety through the trans community.

It’s not reversible, and it’s not treatment. That’s the issue. Lying about the issue in the first paragraph does not bode well.

It also caused shock at the Good Law Project, a non-profit campaign group launched in 2019 with the objective of using legal scrutiny to challenge abuses of power and injustices.

“None of the lawyers that I had spoken to thought that the case had a snowflake’s chance…and no one expected it to win,” says Jolyon Maugham QC, the Good Law Project’s founder. “Because these questions that the court has decided around…are not questions in relation to which judges have any expertise, right? The notion that a treatment should be denied by judges…just seemed like madness.”

But it’s not madness for Jolyon Maugham, a lawyer, to campaign for puberty blockers?

And, to repeat, it’s not a treatment. That’s the whole point. It’s a very harmful intervention in normal puberty, purported to reduce misery from a socially-created “condition” of having a brain that doesn’t match the body. It’s experimental quack medicine that leaves teenagers infertile and with fragile bones. That’s not “treatment,” it’s quackery.

Maugham is a prominent lawyer, prolific tweeter, and sometimes unfortunate over-sharer. He acknowledges that trans rights is a slightly unusual cause to fight for as a member of what he calls “his tribe”.

“I’ve moved a long way in my conceptualisation of what privilege really means, and quite how extraordinarily stupid and thoughtless and arrogant my tribe can be,” he says over a Zoom call. “[They] always think they know better and never fucking listen.”

Says Jolyon Maugham who…always thinks he knows better and never fucking listens, especially to women.

Maugham is referring to the prevalence of transphobia amongst an affluent and loud minority of middle class women and men, something the High Court’s ruling effectively institutionalised in England and Wales.

Jolyon Maugham is middle class and loud*, and extra-loud when he’s talking to women.

“You effectively find yourself in a world where a child and a parent, both of whom want that child to have access to puberty blockers, have to go and ask some judge for permission,” says Maugham. “So if you’re a parent, the court is saying to you, some judge knows better than you what is in the interest of your child. That’s an astonishingly morally offensive and logically nonsensical position for the law to find itself in.”

Just as it’s astonishingly morally offensive and logically nonsensical for judges to overrule Jehovah’s Witness parents who refuse to get medical treatment for their critically ill children? Parents don’t always make the right choice for their children, sadly, so yes, sometimes the state has to step in to protect those children. I suspect Jolyon Maugham knows that perfectly well in other contexts.

“What’s pretty troubling to me is that those charities which I understand to be really worried about this stuff aren’t coming out and speaking,” Maugham tells me, “and they’re not coming out and speaking because they’re afraid of what a small influential vocal group of feminists will say about that stance.”

What small influential vocal group of feminists is that? I don’t know of any such group that has made people too afraid to speak.

*Updating to add: and very very affluent, much more affluent than any radical feminists I know of.

Update 2: Jolly’s digs:

Kayleigh McEnany is still helping Trump get his lies out there.

Asked about the electoral college vote, McEnany said: “The president is still involved in ongoing litigation related to the election. Yesterday’s vote was one step in the constitutional process so I will leave that to him.”

…

Asked whether Trump would support the Senate taking up Biden’s cabinet nominees before he is sworn in on 20 January, McEnany called the scenario a “hypothetical” and said Trump has taken all steps to ensure a “smooth transition or a continuation of power.”

There is no “or.” Transition is the only option. The dish is baked and done.

Mitch McConnell has finally, weeks after the election was declared, admitted that Biden was elected. Big of him.

The Republican leader had for weeks declined to acknowledge Biden as the winner of the presidential election.

Declaring that the Electoral College “had spoken,” McConnell congratulated Biden in a speech delivered from the Senate floor on Tuesday morning.

Trump on the other hand is still committing treason in full public view.

The president re-tweeted a conservative lawyer who suggested Trump jail Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, and secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, after they certified Biden’s victory in the state.

So that’s Trump agreeing that he should jail state officials for doing their jobs.

The officials, both Republicans, resisted pressure and verbal attacks from Trump, who demanded they reject the result of their state’s election even though multiple recounts that affirmed Biden’s victory in Georgia.

Trump has been pressuring the justice department for years to prosecute his political foes, including his Democratic opponent, Biden, and his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Often, these brazen directives are treated as the rantings of a leader railing against his fate, rather than an extraordinary attempt by a democratically-elected president to exert his authority over the criminal justice system.

And not just to exert his authority over the criminal justice system but to use it to commit crimes against public officials. It’s a crime to imprison people simply because you don’t like what they’re doing.

So I had to go looking for what Burchill said.

It seems to have started here.

Maybe it was “ya SOW” that did it. It is a lot ruder than “ya donkey,” which to me just suggests ya fool, twit, twerp, clown. “SOW” is both sexist (ironically) and a pork-related taunt, which has been a popular category in religio-cultural battles since forever – it works for taunting Jews as well as Muslims.

I think it’s worth Twitter putting her on the naughty stool for a bit. Worth a publisher dropping her book? Hardly. It’s not as if she’s not already famous for being abrasive.

Next round:

Why did Burchill want to talk about something that happened 15 centuries ago?

It does matter that Mohammed married a child, because the fact (or legend if it’s a legend) is seen as justification for men who see him as The Prophet to do the same. That is worth talking about. It’s not a reason to call a woman a sow, but it is worth talking about.

It’s complicated, because of issues around immigration and racism and persecution and all the rest of it, and complicated subjects aren’t helped with shouts of “ya SOW,” but it still has to be discussable.

1. (leyla sanai []

Another clash – another book “canceled” – another taboo violated – another uproar roaring.

The Guardian reports, with startlingly squeamish ineptitude:

The journalist Julie Burchill has had a book contract cancelled after her publisher said she “crossed a line” with her Islamophobic comments on Twitter.

Notice the lack of quotation marks on “Islamophobic,” and notice also the use of the word “Islamophobic,” which is a notoriously and obviously ambiguous and trouble-making and slyly theocratic word. What is the Guardian saying? Did Burchill’s tweets express hatred of Islam? Or was it hatred of Muslims? The Guardian of course never says.

Burchill’s publisher, the Hachette imprint Little, Brown, said it had decided not to publish Welcome to the Woke Trials because she had used indefensible language when communicating with the journalist Ash Sarkar.

What was the indefensible language?

Sarkar said Burchill “quite openly subjected [her] to Islamophobia”.

Yes but what does “Islamophobia” mean? And what was the language?

Believe it or not, the Guardian never does say. It writes a whole story on this but never tells us what Burchill said – so we are left to imagine an ugly racist outburst.

Little, Brown said Burchill’s comments on Islam were “not defensible from a moral or intellectual standpoint” and they “crossed a line with regard to race and religion”. It added that her book had become “inextricably linked with those views”.

Ok but what were these comments? If you’re going to heap all this ordure on Burchill you could at least give us the relevant information.

“We will no longer be publishing Julie Burchill’s book,” the statement said. “This is not a decision we have taken lightly. We believe passionately in freedom of speech at Little, Brown and we have always published authors with controversial or challenging perspectives – and we will continue to do so.”

Except when we don’t.

The book had been billed as being “part-memoir and part-indictment” of what happened to Burchill after she wrote an article for the Observer in 2013, which was removed after criticism that it contained transphobic language. At the time, the paper apologised for the offence caused in what it described as a “highly charged debate”.

We’re not told what that language was, either.