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:

• age
• disability
• gender reassignment
• pregnancy and maternity
• race
• religion or belief
• sex
• sexual orientation

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.

The Republicans are restless.

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:

Allons enfants:

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.

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Blaming the beheaded.

Remember a few years ago when the in meme was the paradox of tolerance?

The paradox of tolerance is that pure tolerance doesn’t produce a tolerant society because there comes a point at which tolerating the intolerant means that the intolerant dominate the more reasonable people.

The solution to the paradox is that tolerance isn’t an absolute virtue. There is a line beyond which you don’t tolerate any longer. That line, according to the original argument, was drawn at the use of violence for political ends. You don’t tolerate terrorism.

Unfortunately, this same argument was used to endorse violence against bigots.

The problem is that violence is habit forming, and the habit generally expands beyond the initial target. It is difficult to deny that there is a misogyny problem on the left right now, and a part of that I think is the Nazi puncher movement. It didn’t take long at all for the Karens and “Terfs” to become the new Nazis.

Learning from this, we can conclude that it is thus very important to be very hesitant at the use of violence, and yet, the base argument the paradox is founded on is sound.

We saw this in the days of unmoderated comment threads; this is why so few news vendors even allow comments anymore because they can descend into such utter toxicity so easily due to a small number of highly intolerant, basically shitty people, who crowd out the decent majority.

It is all about where you draw the line, where you decide that freedom of speech dies. Personally, I draw it at the endorsement of violence for the aforementioned reasons.

For example, Dana Nawzar Jaf:

I fully condemn French police’s brutal senseless murder of the Muslim suspect last night. Macron and his security apparatus should explain to the public what was the need for the use of the disproportionate force against someone suspected of a knife crime. France is in crisis.

Bullying Muslim children in the name of teaching them free speech has to stop. Showing caricatures to Muslims kids disrespecting Prophet Muhammed is child abuse. Macron’s ass will be on fire if a teacher promoted Holocaust denial in front of Jewish kids to ‘promote free speech’.

Is this in the realms of tolerable intolerance?

#NotallMuslims, but the ones who are pushing this shit matter. #Notallmen, does not excuse those men who abuse women, and does not solve the problem of those men who do. What I am talking about here isn’t all Muslims, it is the specific Muslims who push this line.

And this man is mainstream enough to have written for the New Statesman, at least according to the Daily Mail.

Of course he claims this article is full of lies, yet his tweets speak for themselves.

Caricatures of Mohammed do not constitute calls for violence, can the same really be said for Jaf’s tweets? I’m not sure. I don’t think equating showing children caricatures in a lesson about free speech to child abuse after the teacher who did that was beheaded, can be said to be anything less than an active endorsement of the beheading.

There is a deep hypocrisy within the Islamist mind, whereby we are supposed to tolerate those who endorse the killings of cartoonists, teachers, authors, artists, and people who happen to work near the former offices of any of the prior individuals, and yet not tolerate the drawing of pictures of a certain long dead Middle Eastern pedophilic warlord.

We are supposed to place respect for the feelings of people who are fundamentally not respectable (and again, that’s #NotallMuslims, but certainly is those who agree with Jaf), ahead of the value we place on human lives. Is this a tolerable state of affairs?

If we are going to talk about freedom of speech, and whose speech should be banned, I do not think it is the speech of the cartoonist, but rather the speech of groups like 5 Pillars, of individuals like Jaf. If we are to restrict freedoms, we should restrict the freedoms of those who have demonstrated that they cannot handle living in a free society.

This is not a joke, repeat, not a joke.

The White House issued a proclamation a couple of days ago because it’s “National Character Counts Week.” Thank fuck we have the president to remind us and inspire us.

Personal responsibility, integrity, and the other values which define our unique American spirit underpin our system of self-government…In looking to these examples of honor and virtue…From small acts of kindness to supreme selfless sacrifice…Individuals of integrity and principle lift us all to greater heights…selfless giving of time and assistance to people in need…social and cultural awareness, intellectual curiosity, and a sense of responsibility…how far decency and compassion can go in helping others…we recommit to being more kind, loving, understanding, and virtuous.

Signed, Donald Trump. Not a joke.

Source is Jake Tapper:

Lara Trump mocks Biden for stuttering and then claims to be very concerned that it’s an indication of “cognitive decline.”

Lara TRUMP says that. Lara Trump says that in an effort to boost the campaign of the stupidest most ignorant sack of wind who has ever held that job.

Originally a comment by Papito on Blaming the beheaded.

Freedom of speech isn’t worth civil war.

I simply cannot get past the way in which this statement holds an implicit threat. Another, ruder way to say the same thing is:

You better shut up, or we’ll keep killing you.

Isn’t it already a war? One could say that Samuel Paty was killed as a defender of the French nation and its values. This is the country where the first universal declaration of the rights of man was written, and among those rights the following:

Article XI – The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely, except to respond to the abuse of this liberty, in the cases determined by the law.

This right is not just enumerated among other rights, it is a foundational right of the French state. To act against this right, as the murderer did, is, as the education minister said, “an attack on the French nation as a whole.” To justify action against this right is also to act against the French nation as a whole. To die defending this right is to die a martyr to the nation. Samuel Paty should be buried with state honors.

There may appear to be no civil war in France now, but this was an act of war. When one side is fighting a murderous war and the other is not, but only responding with police arrests and stern speeches, one calls it asymmetric warfare. In this case, France is already in an asymmetric civil war, with combatants like Abdoulakh A and the multiple villains involved in Charlie Hebdo attacks.

Roshan M Salih is also a combatant in this war, in the propaganda division. France should revoke his permission to visit, as he has declared himself an enemy of the laws and values of the French nation. Of course, France should welcome people of all religions to live peacefully in France, but if one cannot respect the laws and values of France, why should they be welcomed?

France must recognize that it is already in a state of war, whether it likes it or not, and stirring speeches will not end this war.

Robert Reich compares different ideas of freedom:

Trump and many Republicans insist that whether to wear a mask or to go to work during a pandemic should be personal choices. Yet what a woman does with her own body, or whether same-sex couples can marry, should be decided by government.

Trump and most Republicans are not very good at thinking about (or noticing) the ways individual acts can affect other people and/or the world we have to live in. In the abstract, absolute freedom sounds appealing, but in the reality, we live among people and most of what we do affects others. It’s about degrees and kinds as opposed to freedom v not-freedom. Flouting public health measures during a pandemic doesn’t take a whole lot of careful thought before you can figure out how it harms anyone.

What’s public, what’s private and where should government intervene? The question suffuses the impending election and much else in modern American life.

It is nonsensical to argue, as do Trump and his allies, that government cannot mandate masks or close businesses during a pandemic but can prevent women from having abortions and same-sex couples from marrying.

Trump doesn’t really give a shit about either abortions or same-sex marriage, he just likes sticking it to the liberals and being the meanest Republican who ever republicanned.

During wartime, we expect government to intrude on our daily lives for the common good: drafting us into armies, converting our workplaces and businesses, demanding we sacrifice normal pleasures and conveniences. During a pandemic as grave as this one we should expect no less intrusion, in order that we not expose others to the risk of contracting the virus.

But we have no right to impose on others our moral or religious views about when life begins or the nature and meaning of marriage. The common good requires instead that we honor such profoundly personal decisions.

The when life begins question is tricky, because ordinarily you could say that’s a scientific or philosophical question, or both, or some of each. The reason you can’t leave it at that in the case of pregnancy and abortion is the troublesome fact that the question takes place inside the body of a person, a woman. All the way inside it. The pregnancy, the process of becoming, is internal to one particular woman. It’s personal to her first of all. Even if you think the fetus has rights, even if you think the fetus has a soul, even if you think the fetus is not just alive but a person, you still have no right to dismiss the fact that the fetus is inside a woman. Her wants have to matter.

Ooh ooh I know this one.

I know this one! Yes of course people are frustrated over the restrictions but you know what’s even more restricting and frustrating? A bad case of the virus! Even more so? Being dead! Also frustrating is accidentally infecting your beloved friend or spouse or parent or sibling or child. It’s all terribly frustrating! Spreading the virus won’t help. Trump is spreading the virus like crazy, and it’s not helping.