Listen, if you don’t believe that people can change sex, you can’t work for the police. It’s just that simple.

In emails seen by this newspaper, Norfolk ­Constabulary told a woman inquiring about a role in the force that the job “would not be ­suitable” for her ­because of her “gender critical” views.

After the candidate made clear that she did not think a person could ­physically transition to the opposite sex, another force in the South East said her views did not constitute “the behaviours expected” and an application “would be not successful”.

Belief that gender is as changeable as nationality or political party is mandatory now. You might be able to get a job cleaning toilets, but don’t bank on it.

The revelation came after a serving police officer of 16 years anonymously emailed internal recruitment teams at 26 forces that were advertising for ­future constables.

The female officer asked if her “gender critical” views would be “a barrier to my application?”

“I must point out that I am gender critical, which means that whilst I am firmly against abuse and discrimination to trans people, I do not believe you can change your biological sex,” she wrote.

She heard back from 14 forces, two of which told her the “Nope not you” thing.

After Norfolk Police advised that her views would “not be something we could ­uphold within the constabulary”, the woman challenged the response.

“My views on this topic do not mean I would act with intolerance or abuse, just as an atheist would be no less likely to be able to be respectful towards a person of religion,” she wrote. “If there were serving officers with these views (as I know that there are), would their ­employment be under threat?

A recruitment adviser invited her to hand over “details and any evidence” of officers who may share her views so they could be “investigated”.

And punished and fired and sent into exile.

Chief Constable Ian Hopkins, the ­National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for diversity and equality said: “The entire police service is bound by and must ­adhere to the Equality Act and the ­police Code of Ethics.”

The Equality Act says people are not allowed to believe that sex can’t be changed?

Trump tells us how he’ll steal the election.

Asshole.

Boats. There are boats.

This happened last week:

At KNKX, we value high-quality, factual information in our news programming and we aim to present an array of voices that reflect our region.

KNKX is an NPR station in Tacoma. It used to belong to Pacific Lutheran University but then

On November 12, 2015, Pacific Lutheran University announced its intention to sell the station to the University of Washington, owner of KUOW.^[4] The planned sale to UW triggered “public outcry” from KPLU’s listener base, who feared KPLU’s unique programming would be sacrificed if it became a sister station to KUOW. On November 23, the KPLU advisory board voted unanimously to oppose the sale.^[5] The board sought to negotiate with a community-based non-profit group, Friends of 88.5, to raise $7,000,000 to buy the radio station and its network of translators and rebroadcasters from the university, keeping it independent.

And they succeeded, which was kind of exciting. I preferred it to KUOW until I quit listening to NPR altogether. But now they’ve done this –

We turn to our regular commentators for their expertise and points-of-view when it comes to sports, food and the weather. But if a commentator, even on his own independent platform, delivers rhetoric that is offensive and inaccurate, we cannot support it.

By which they mean they immediately fire the commentator, and of course they are the ones who determine what is offensive.

This is the case today with Cliff Mass. His post on his personal blog compares recent events in Seattle to Kristallnacht, the 1938 pogrom carried out by Nazi Germany, and draws distorted, offensive parallels between protesters and Nazi Brownshirts. We abhor the comparison and find it sensationalized and misleading — it does not reflect who we are and what we stand for at KNKX.

The segment Weather with Cliff Mass will no longer air on KNKX.

Here’s the thing: Cliff Mass is really good at the commentator bit. He has an excellent radio voice, resonant without being pompous, and he explains what’s going on up in the air, and he’s interesting and gemütlich. And he says it’s KNKX who distorted.

Last week I wrote a blog post–Seattle, A City in Fear Can Be Restored–criticizing violent individuals who have brought repeated destruction to downtown Seattle and attacked and injured numerous people (including reporters and dozens of police officers).  I also criticized the irresponsible and reckless actions of members of the Seattle City Council, who allowed the violence to continue, tried to cripple and defund the Seattle Police Department, and who have persecuted Chief Carmen Best.

It’s tricky about protests, at least I find it tricky. It’s hard to know if reported violence is genuine protesters getting worked up and out of control, or just people taking advantage of protests to smash stuff and grab some goodies – or some of both. If I’d written about the protests (I didn’t, because of that tricky aspect – I didn’t know enough about what happened and didn’t feel confident about the reporting) I don’t think I would have compared them to Kristallnacht, but I also don’t think doing so is a reason to fire someone, especially someone so good at the job in question.

The next day I received a call from KNKX station manager Joey Cohn and program manager Matt Martinez, saying that I was being ejected from the station because of my blog post.  They were not open to discussion on the matter; I was off the air and my weather segment, one of the most popular segments on the station, was discontinued immediately.

That seems ridiculous to me. Ridiculous, unjust, destructive, stupid.

Their reason for my expulsion, provided in a statement released by the station, was both false and misleading.  For example, it stated that my blog “draws distorted, offensive parallels between protesters and Nazi Brownshirts.”  

This is totally false. I NEVER suggested that peaceful protestors are like brownshirts, I was ONLY talking about violent individuals. 

Criticizing violent protesters shouldn’t be a firing offense even if you disagree – which now that I type it looks so absurdly obvious I feel silly for having to type it.

Just to be completely clear I am a strong supporter of peaceful protests and assemblies.  It is an essential aspect of our democracy and protected in the U.S. Constitution.  Peaceful protests have played a critical role in many positive social movements, such as woman suffrage, ending the Vietnam war, and in promoting civil rights.  I have participated in peaceful protests myself.  But violence—destroying business and hurting people—is a different story.   It is not only illegal, and destructive, but it undermines civil society and democracy, and usually hurts the least advantaged among us the most.  That is what I was speaking out against.

It also undermines the protests themselves, and harms the cause for which they’re protesting. Violent protests aren’t good trouble, they’re the bad kind.

I made it clear to both Joey Cohn and Matt Martinez on the call that my remarks were limited to violent individuals and they still chose to send out the deceptive statement.  For the leadership of a major media group to do so is extraordinarily concerning and disappointing.

A major news media group. They’re a local NPR station.

I don’t know that I agree with Cliff Mass about everything; I probably don’t; but that’s not supposed to be the criterion, is it?

So I signed a petition.

Is your Pride event inclusive of furries? Well IS it?

Is that what the + means? Furries? What the survey calls “kink and fetish”?

I’m not seeing the connection, myself. I mean yeah, I get that it can all be filed under “not what Mr and Mrs Normal get up to in bed,” but I would think a lot of lesbians and gay men don’t particularly want to be filed that way, on account of how it’s not all there is to it.

Trump is doing his bit to cripple the election again today.

Followed by retweets of DEMOCRAT FRAUD claims by the Communications Director of the Republican party.

“Oh you don’t want us to remove mail boxes just before an election in which people will have to vote by mail?”

The US Postal Service will stop taking letter collection boxes off streets in Western states following accusations the removals would further limit some voters ability to send back mail-in ballots.

“Accusations.” Yes, obstacles are obstacles – who knew?! If you remove mail boxes that means people in the area from which a box was removed will have farther to go to mail their ballots. That is called an obstacle. Ob-stuh-kl. It’s an impediment, a hindrance, an added difficulty.

The change came after CNN and others reported on Friday that the US Postal Service has started reducing post office operating hours across several states and removing letter collection boxes, according to union officials.

I didn’t know about the reduced hours.

In a statement Friday night, Rod Spurgeon — a USPS spokesperson for the service’s the Western region — told CNN that the service will stop the removal of letter collection boxes in 16 states and parts of two others until after the election.

That means, according to Spurgeon, the USPS will stop collecting the letter collection boxes only in: Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Iowa, Alaska, Nebraska and small parts of Wisconsin and Missouri.

Ok what about the other 34 states? The USPS isn’t saying.

Officials say that in the last week the USPS has removed letter collection boxes in at least four states: New York, Oregon, Montana and Indiana. The USPS has also begun notifying postal workers in at least three states — West Virginia, Florida and Missouri — that they will start to reduce their retail operating hours, according to union officials.

…

The USPS has received intense scrutiny in recent weeks as many Americans are expected to vote by mail this presidential election due to the coronavirus pandemic. Despite assuring the public earlier this month that it would be able to handle the added volume of mail-in ballots, the postal service sent letters to multiple states warning them that slowdowns in delivery could cause ballots to show up late and not be counted.

Trump has frequently attacked the postal service, and Louis DeJoy, the newly installed postmaster general, has made sweeping changes to the public service, such as rolling back overtime, leading to service slowdowns. Union officials have consistently warned that new cost-cutting measures put into effect by DeJoy and USPS leadership could have a negative effect on the service’s ability to deliver election-related mail on time.

Could have a negative effect? You mean, would obviously kneecap.

Not bad.

Originally a comment by Papito on Unironically.

Unfortunately, most self-ID’ed NBs are deep in trans country, at this point, and thus utterly unaware of how much trans ideology actually is reinforcing the NB’s social discomfort by shoring up traditional gender roles in the first place. [Freemage]

This is a great insight. NBs wouldn’t exist without the trans cult, but it seems helpful to contemplate the exact relationship. Are NBs a product of the trans cult as a sub-variety of trans people, or are they (unknowingly) implicitly rejecting the trans cult – which, while proclaiming the erasure of binaries, is one of the most binary parts of society?

I feel for kids growing up these days. Gender stereotypes are pushed so much more heavily than they were when I was a kid. Growing up in the age of “free to be…” I would never have imagined things would get worse instead. And guest makes a good point as well: kids actually get out and see other people much, much less than they used to, so their visual contact with other humans is likely to be heavily mediated by television or video games, which present more fixed and stereotypical gender roles than actual humans do.

Look at the insanely exaggerated gender characteristics presented by video game characters. They go beyond what the comic books did; Superman and Wonder Woman are realistically proportioned humans in comparison. Video game men, unencumbered by the constraints of human anatomy, present as armored hulks bulging with anatomically implausible muscles and dripping with straps, bullets, and weapons, while video game women are proportioned like Barbie dolls, in skin-tight suits or miniskirts. Thank goodness for recoilless space rifles or they could never shoot with their knees knocking together.

What if NB really just means “neither of the above” to a kid deeply inculcated in this exaggerated gender binary? The trans cult tells kids they have to be in one of two exclusive boxes and can jump from one to the other, but the boxes are fixed. NB is the trans cult’s way of recouping the dissenters: if they don’t want to be in the boxes they can be categorized as NB, but still get to belong to the cult.

Maybe kids who want to break up the trans cult can hide themselves as a fifth column by identifying as NBs. If NB gets so big as a category that basically everybody is NB, then what happens? They can’t call NBs cis, right?

The Trump campaign is actually sending out mailings shouting “Kamala is HARRIBLE!!!” just like Trump.

Childish enough?

He should up the stakes and fold the tent and go the fuck home.

So pathetic.

I think loads of people are intimidated by this new generation of people that are…somehow makin up these genders.

Oh no no no honey. Not intimidated. Bored and irritated.

People hear the words non-binary and they’re like “well that doesn’t exist, that’s not a thing” – even in the LGBT community there are people who don’t think that we are real and there’s people who think that we are attention-seekers.

Well let’s tease this apart. Yes, I am like “that doesn’t exist, that’s not a thing.” That’s because it doesn’t, and it isn’t. It’s just words. On the other hand I certainly don’t think that people who call themselves non-binary are not real – it’s the word they use to describe themselves that I think names a non-reality. People can call themselves angels, gods, flying horses; they go on being real people but what they say about themselves is fictional. And finally – yes, I think people who call themselves non-binary are attention-seekers. I think they’re declaring themselves more important than mere “binary” people.

But hey, you might grow out of it.

Ya that’s not good.

Now, this happened in my neighborhood years ago – suddenly there were a lot fewer mailboxes and one had to hike to drop something in the mail. I had to hike last week to drop my vote in the mail. I was very annoyed by it at the time, and still am, but back then it wasn’t part of a vote suppression move. Now is not a good time to be removing mail boxes, even if these were on some kind of long-term schedule for removal.

Also –

Not good.

People who love feet is it?

The what conspiracy theory?

CNN explains:

QAnon is a virtual cult that celebrates President Trump and casts Democratic politicians and other elites as evil child abusers. Aspects of the cult are downright delusional. Last year an FBI office warned that Q adherents are a domestic terrorism threat.

Plus it’s been gaining in popularity. Thousands of closed Facebook groups, with millions of members.

Numerous Republican congressional candidates “have embraced” QAnon, as CNN’s Veronica Stracqualursi reported earlier this week.

At the top of the list is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is all but certain to win her House race in Georgia this fall. Trump praised Greene for winning her primary. As Stracqualursi wrote, candidates like Greene are “espousing and promoting QAnon theories and phrases as they seek political office on a major party ticket.”

It’s a cult and a story.

There are storytelling components to this virtual cult, as Adrienne LaFrance explained so thoroughly in this article for The Atlantic.

“QAnon is emblematic of modern America’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories, and its enthusiasm for them,” she wrote. “But it is also already much more than a loose collection of conspiracy-minded chat-room inhabitants. It is a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values. And we are likely closer to the beginning of its story than the end. The group harnesses paranoia to fervent hope and a deep sense of belonging. The way it breathes life into an ancient preoccupation with end-times is also radically new. To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion.”

It sounds a little bit like the trans madness – not the content, but the mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values.

How we do political persuasion now.

That’s it! That’s all it takes. Just say these four words, and tell everyone else to say them too. Paradise on earth will ensue!

So, Don, do you regret all the lying? Well do you?

SV Dáte had waited five long years to ask Donald Trump one question: “Mr President, after three and a half years [of Trump’s presidency], do you regret at all, all the lying you’ve done to the American people?”

Confronted with Dáte’s question at Thursday’s White House briefing, Trump responded with a question of his own. “All the what?” he said.

Dáte: “All the lying, all the dishonesties.”

Trump: “That who has done?”

“You have done,” said Dáte, who is the Huffington Post’s White House correspondent.

It’s hilarious – best straight man ever. “That who has done?” “YOU. You, bro, we’re talking about you, you’re the one who has done all the lying, you, you, you, you.” “The what?” “THE LYING. The lying, the dishonesty, the untruth, the mendacity, the falsehood-purveying, THE LYING.” “Uh…you there, you ask your question, yes go ahead, go ahead, ASK A QUESTION, ANY QUESTION.”

Curtain.

The Guardian on the A-levels mess:

Pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds have been worst hit by the controversial standardisation process used to award A-level grades in England this year, while pupils at private schools benefited the most.

What are A-levels? They’re national exams in the UK that function like a turnstile for admission to higher education. They were canceled this year because of the virus, so instead teacher evaluations were used, but with the Authorities applying a “controversial standardisation process” to the evaluations with the result that a lot of students were downgraded, which amounts to saying “Soz no higher ed for you, off to the factory you go.” There’s a lot of anger.

Private schools increased the proportion of students achieving top grades – A* and A – twice as much as pupils at comprehensives, official data showed.

Gee, what a funny coincidence.

According to detailed analysis published by exam regulator Ofqual, the pattern in England has been similar to but less dramatic than in Scotland, where pupils and schools in disadvantaged areas were marked down the most harshly by the statistical model used to replace exams.

Pupils in lower socioeconomic backgrounds were most likely to have the grades proposed by their teachers overruled, while those in wealthier areas were less likely to be downgraded, according to the analysis.

I don’t know, maybe they have stats that indicate pupils in lower socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to mess up in those final months, but then maybe that should tell them something about the finality of that turnstile.

For students from disadvantaged backgrounds on the cusp of attending higher education, more than one in 10 of those assessed as receiving C grades by their teachers had their final result lowered by at least one grade, compared with 8% for those from non-disadvantaged backgrounds.

Which translates to a lot of students abruptly shut out of higher education without having had the chance to try. It’s a gruesome situation.

Headteachers and pupils reacted with anger and disappointment, while the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, said “something has obviously gone horribly wrong with this year’s exam results” and suggested a Scotland-style U-turn – accepting all teachers’ recommended grades – should not be ruled out.

Thursday’s results confirm that 39% of teacher recommendations in England were downgraded.

“Parents, teachers and young people are rightly upset, frustrated and angry about this injustice. The system has fundamentally failed them. The government needs to urgently rethink,” Starmer said.

If you’re going to slam the door in people’s faces at least give them the chance to say their piece first.

Oh fabulous, we get to have the birther thing all over again.

Axios has more:

Trump campaign senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis on Thursday shared a Newsweek op-ed that baselessly claims Sen. Kamala Harris may be ineligible for the vice presidency because both of her parents were not naturalized citizens at her birth.

Harris was born in Oakland, Calif. She is an American citizen and is eligible for the office. Critics, including many Republicans, denounced the piece as a new attempt at “birtherism” — the conspiracy theory that President Obama was not actually born in the U.S. — targeting the first woman of color on a presidential ticket.

Not that it looks the slightest bit racist to keep saying black Americans are not citizens.

The op-ed, penned by conservative law professor John Eastman and published Wednesday, argues that Harris might not be considered a natural-born citizen because a clause in the 14th Amendment — “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof [the U.S.]” — could preclude her given her parents’ citizenship.

Eastman’s view on birthright citizenship and presidential eligibility is not accepted by constitutional law scholars.

But hey let’s just throw it out there anyway because this kind of thing is such fun.

Ellis doubled down on her retweet, telling ABC News’ Will Steakin that she believes Harris’ citizenship is “an open question, and one I think Harris should answer so the American people know for sure she is eligible.”

Right because that’s how it worked for Obama, he produced his birth certificate because Trump was doing such a bang-up job of promoting the Not Borrn Heer bullshit and Trump went right on promoting the Not Borrn Heer bullshit just the same.

Trump is cheering himself up by talking sexist shit about women.

In an interview with Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo, Trump referred to Harris as “sort of a mad woman”, criticizing her questioning of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his heated confirmation hearing in September 2018. “She was the angriest of the group and they were all angry,” he said of the Democrats.

Earlier this morning, Trump tweeted that the media has given Harris a “free pass”, saying there was “nobody meaner or more condescending” to Biden during the primaries.

Trump’s tirade on Fox Business also including US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, saying that she “is not even a smart person” and that she “goes out and yaps”. Trump also described House speaker Nancy Pelosi as “stone-cold crazy”.

About that “Whiteness” chart again…

One thing to note is that it was compiled by Judith Katz in 1990, and it’s copyrighted by a “consulting group.”

JudithH.Katz © 1990. The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The thing that’s so bizarre and stupid about it is that it’s not about “whiteness” at all, it’s just about a grab bag of tastes, habits, practices, beliefs, ideas, ideologies, fashions and the like, few if any of which are genuinely specific and exclusive to white people. It mixes up class, hierarchy, status, consumerism, and some just plain randomness.

For instance –

Rugged Individualism

Self-reliance

Individual is primary unit

Independence and autonomy highly valued and rewarded

Individuals assumed to be in control of their environment – “You get what you deserve”

But that’s not a racial list. It’s a mix of philosophical and political and sociological, but not racial. And pretty much the whole list is like that – a giant category error, or string of category errors.

The idea seems to be that majoritarian habits and ways of thinking=white habits and ways of thinking…which in a majority-white country is sort of tautological, and not interesting.

Some items on the list are conservative shibboleths, and some are just “you don’t say.” Under religion, “Christianity is the norm” – in other words Christianity is the majority religion in the US. You don’t say! That doesn’t make it white. Also hello? There’s quite a deep tradition of African-American Christianity; do we have to call that part of “whiteness”?

In short it’s just so damn silly, along with all its other faults, that I wonder why anybody ever paid any attention to it.

Trump and co are openly moving to steal the election. This is a violation of several laws.

The head of the Iowa Postal Workers Union alleged Tuesday that mail sorting machines are “being removed” from Post Offices in her state due to new policies imposed by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major GOP donor to President Donald Trump whose operational changes have resulted in dramatic mail slowdowns across the nation.

Mail sorting machines are being removed. What will that do? Sabotage voting by mail, of course.

Asked by NPR‘s Noel King whether she has felt the impact of DeJoy’s changes, Iowa Postal Workers Union President Kimberly Karol—a 30-year Postal Service veteran—answered in the affirmative, saying “mail is beginning to pile up in our offices, and we’re seeing equipment being removed.”

Karol went on to specify that “equipment that we use to process mail for delivery”—including sorting machines—is being removed from Postal Service facilities in Iowa as DeJoy rushes ahead with policies that, according to critics, are sabotaging the Postal Service’s day-to-day operations less than 90 days before an election that could hinge on mail-in ballots.

Observers reacted with alarm to Karol’s comments, viewing them as further confirmation that DeJoy is deliberately attempting to damage the Postal Service with the goal of helping Trump win reelection in November.

Ya think? What else would removal of sorting machines be?

Karol’s remarks come as members of Congress and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans are demanding DeJoy’s immediate resignation or removal in the wake of his displacement of nearly two dozen top Postal Service officials late last week—a major leadership overhaul that critics dubbed a “Friday Night Massacre.”

According to internal Postal Service memos obtained by Reuters, DeJoy—a former logistics executive with tens of millions invested in USPS competitors—was aware his operational changes would lead to mail delays. As Reuters reported:

The reorganization, introduced in July, has resulted in thousands of delayed letters in southern Maine, as delivery drivers follow a new directive to leave on time, even if the mail has not been loaded.

Delays have also been reported in at least 18 other states, according to media reports.

“One aspect of these changes that may be difficult for employees is that—temporarily—we may see mail left behind or mail on the workroom floor or docks,” says one memo, dated July 10. The plan hopes to eliminate 64 million working hours nationally to reduce personnel costs, according to another memo.

And to steal the election and to destroy the Postal Service so that the for-profit outfits can make more profit.

In a statement over the weekend, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) warned that Dejoy’s “nefarious collective efforts will suppress millions of mail-in ballots and threaten the voting rights of millions of Americans, setting the stage for breach of our Constitution.”

“It is imperative that we remove him from his post,” said DeFazio, “and immediately replace him with an experienced leader who is committed to sustaining a critical service for all Americans.”

Do it.