More on Alabama v unions:

On May 13, Gov. Kay Ivey announced to a meeting of the Huntsville/Madison County Chamber of Commerce that she had signed SB231. The new law punishes businesses that choose to voluntarily recognize unions by forbidding them from receiving any grants, loans, or tax credits from state and local governments.

Must not accept unions voluntarily. Must resist, kicking and screaming, until the bitter end. Those with more money and power must always be on top.

In her speech, Ivey also made it clear that she views the United Auto Workers as an outside intruder threatening one of Alabama’s “crown jewels” — the auto industry.

“Huntsville, Tuscaloosa, they’re not Detroit,” she said, referring to the ongoing union election at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Tuscaloosa County.

Meaning they’re not pro-union, not pro-worker, not [whisper] where all the N-words went the minute they could get away.

Mercedes employee Jeremy Kimbrell has repeatedly said that the ongoing unionization drive is led by Mercedes employees, an assertion which has been supported by recent coverage of the campaign. In an interview with labor journalist Alex Press, he joked that “Mercedes is our best organizer,” not any out-of-state UAW staff members.

Oh those pesky out-of-state organizers. They’re probably all Jews ya know.

In a statement released on Tuesday, Bren Riley, the president of the Alabama chapter of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, or AFL-CIO, said: “It’s funny to me that Governor Ivey and the sponsors of this bill try to paint unions as the outsider.”

Riley pointed out how the “cookie-cutter” bill was promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a national conservative organization that is based in Virginia. Almost identical bills were passed in both Georgia and Tennessee before Ivey signed SB235.

Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama…what do they all have in common, I wonder. Could it possibly be a history of not paying workers anything at all?

H/t Sackbut

The Independent is pruriently concerned about why an actor continues to play a character created by that notorious monster JK Rowling.

Tom Burke has shared his feelings about starring in Strike, the hit BBC adaptation of the detective novels written by JK Rowling. The 42-year-old actor has portrayed the one-legged private eye, Cormoran Strike, since 2017 and is returning to the role for its sixth season, which began shooting in February.

Speaking in an interview with The Independent, Burke discussed his thoughts on being linked to one of the most polarising figures of the day, Rowling, who has been met with a strong backlash in recent years over her outspoken stance on trans women.

HINT HINT. Been met with a strong backlash, get it? GET IT??? We’re saying she’s a moral monster so how dare you act in a series based on her novels?? SPEAK UP OR WE’LL LABEL YOU A TWANZFOBE.

Rowling, who first faced a backlash from several key cast members when she shared controversial remarks about the trans community in 2020, has seen her relationship with stars deteriorate amid increasingly toxic debate.

The community. The community, I tell you! She’s not a community! How dare she say something about the community when she’s not a community?!!

And in conclusion:

Elsewhere in the interview, Burke talked about his new film, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, his roles in the movies Mank and The Souvenir, and being the non-stereotypical leading man.

Blah blah blah but we obviously don’t care about all that, the important thing is why hasn’t he declared war on Rowling yet?

Do scabs identify as scabs?

The United Auto Workers on Friday accused Mercedes of interfering in a union election at two Alabama factories by intimidating and coercing workers into voting no.

A week after Mercedes workers voted against joining the union, the labor group filed an objection with the National Labor Relations Board seeking a new vote. The union accused the company of engaging in a “relentless antiunion campaign marked with unlawful discipline, unlawful captive audience meetings, and a general goal of coercing and intimidating employees.”

As companies tend to do when they can get away with it.

The company’s spokespeople of course said it was nothing but helpful and polite.

Employees at Mercedes battery and assembly plants near Tuscaloosa voted 56% against the union. The result handed the union a setback in its efforts to unionize workers at auto plants in the Deep South. The defeat in Alabama came a month after the UAW scored a breakthrough victory at Volkswagen’s 4,300-worker assembly factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The Deep South has been ferociously anti-union since forever.

The union filing said that four pro-union employees were fired, and the company allowed anti-union employees to “solicit support during work hours but forbade pro-union employees from soliciting support during work hours.” The company also required workers to attend anti-union captive-audience meetings and displayed anti-union propaganda while prohibiting the distribution of union materials and paraphernalia in non-work areas, according to the objection.

The union said the company, or its representatives, polled workers about union support, suggested voting in the union would be futile, targeted union supporters with drug tests and “engaged in conduct which deliberately sought to exacerbate racial feelings by irrelevant and inflammatory appeals to racial prejudice.”

Straight out of the Deep South Anti-union Playbook.

A spokeswoman for the National Labor Relations Board confirmed an objection had been filed. Kayla Blado, a spokeswoman for the NLRB, said the regional director will review the objections and could order a hearing. If it is determined that the employer’s conduct affected the election, a new election could be ordered, she said.

Fingers crossed.

Stupid and malicious in one delightful package.

A couple of hours later:

Pointing out that some women’s rights benefit men is not the same as saying those rights are bad or not worth having or extremely unfeminist.

It’s such a basic distinction. Can he really be this stupid? Is it an act? Is he a double agent?

Sigh.

No it isn’t. Legally it is, yes, but in this case it’s because the law is deeply fucked up. For a woman facing a naked man in her changing room it is not “a different situation.”

Male host at 3:15: “Someone who is self-certified as being a woman, you say that person cannot go into a women’s prison, is that what you said?”

Jardine, eyes turned up to the ceiling in irritation: “I said, someone who has transitioned, who has a certificate -“

Male host: “What does that mean?” Jardine: “Can you let me finish please?” Male host yields. Jardine continues: “Someone who has transitioned, who is, who is a woman legally, has been um certified as a woman not by me but by those who are certifying can go into a women’s prison -“

Female host tries to ask what that means and there’s a torrent of talking over each other again.

Anyway, tragically, we know what that means. It means what it appears to mean. As long as the People Who Are Certifying have done their Certifying, then a man gets to pretend to be a woman and thrust himself into places that are reserved for women as much as he likes and the women can’t do a god damn thing about it. The fact that it’s ludicrous to claim that “certifying” can transform men into women is beside the point, aka shut up, bitches.

Heads men win, tails women lose.

NHS chiefs are facing landmark legal action after 26 female hospital nurses protested about being forced to share a women’s changing room with a transgender colleague who is biologically male.

The women complained that the transgender nurse – who has not had gender reassignment surgery – had taken a ‘keen interest’ in female staff when they were getting undressed. They say they have found the situation ‘intimidating and upsetting’.

In a formal complaint, the nurses say they were stunned after the ‘sexually active’ trans nurse admitted to trying for a baby with a female partner and [that he] had stopped taking female hormones. But a human resources manager at the hospital trust allegedly said that the female nurses need to ‘be more inclusive’, ‘broaden their mindset’ and ‘be educated and attend training’.

The female nurses have to be so much more inclusive that they’re perfectly happy to have a gruesome piggy entitled man openly watch them take their clothes off. They have to broaden their mindset to the point that they don’t mind having this sadistic dude in their changing room.

Six of the nurses are taking legal action at an employment tribunal against the NHS trust in the North East for alleged sexual harassment and sexual discrimination in what is thought to be the first case of its kind. One of the nurses told The Mail on Sunday: ‘We don’t feel safe because we strip down to our underwear and [the individual] doesn’t just stay by his locker. ‘He walks around the changing room in his boxer shorts.’

…

In March, 26 nurses wrote to management saying that the transgender nurse ‘has made no secret’ of the fact that ‘he has stopped taking female hormones and is trying to inseminate his female partner’. They added: ‘We do not consider it appropriate to have a sexually active biological male sharing our changing facilities.’

They did not receive a written response but say there was an ‘impromptu meeting’ at which an HR manager told the ward manager the female nurses ‘need to compromise’. The HR manager told them to ‘be more inclusive’, ‘broaden their mindset’ and ‘be educated and attend training’, according to a second complaint letter sent by the nurses in April.

They have to smile, shut up, spread their legs, and let him do whatever he wants.

The Libbatarians don’t love him.

Donald Trump, the former US president, has suffered the rare humiliation of getting booed and heckled during a raucous speech to the Libertarian National Convention.

Trump’s rocky ride at a Washington hotel on Saturday night, including cries of “Bullshit!” and “Fuck you!”, underlined the challenge that the Republican presidential nominee faces to broaden his appeal both left and right on the political spectrum.

The clips are fun to watch. He doesn’t enjoy being booed and yelled at.

“The fact is we should not be fighting each other,” Trump pleaded. “If Joe Biden gets back in, there will be no more liberty for anyone in our country. Combine with us in a partnership – we’re asking that of the libertarians. We must work together. Combine with us. You have to combine with us.” The appeal went down like a lead balloon as delegates booed, jeered and shouted insults. It was a stunning rebuke for a man who has become accustomed to cult-like rallies where his every word is cheered to the echo.

It’s good to see him humiliated just for once.

The ex-president claimed that much of his record was libertarian, citing examples such as tax cuts, slashing bureaucratic red tape, cancelling and defunding federal diversity, equity and inclusion programmes. He promised to appoint Libertarians to a taskforce to “rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner who has been unjustly persecuted” by Joe Biden’s administration.

Trump said: “As everyone knows, it will be my great honour to pardon the peaceful January 6 protesters or, as I often call them, the hostages. They’re hostages. There has never been a group of people treated so harshly or unfairly in our country’s history. This abuse will be rectified and it will be rectified very quickly.”

Yeah right. Enslaved people were treated like royalty in comparison. Indigenous people were pampered in comparison. Women were treated as equals from the outset.

Hadley Freeman lets rip:

On Wednesday, at a US Senate judiciary hearing, [Ted] Cruz questioned Judge Sarah Netburn, whom President Biden has nominated to the US District Court. Netburn has a long record of dealing with complex cases but Cruz focused on one in particular: her recommendation in 2022 that the serial rapist William McClain be transferred to a women’s prison.

In 2015, when McClain was 51, after he was released from jail for raping two children and before being reincarcerated for sharing violent child pornography, he chose to identify as a woman. And off he went to a women’s prison, with Netburn’s blessing. When the Bureau of Prisons suggested this could be traumatising and dangerous to the female prisoners, the judge dismissed that concern as “overblown”.

I have to wonder exactly why that concern was “overblown.”

“The other women in that prison … do they have the right not to have a 6ft 2in man who is a repeat, serial rapist put in as their cellmate?” thundered Cruz.

“I considered the facts presented to me and I reached a decision based on the law,” replied Netburn in a “computer says no” monotone. Given she referred to the convicted rapist as “she” during the hearing, her grasp on facts is perhaps a little shaky. 

How a female judge can do this to female prisoners and still sleep at night is beyond me.

Biden also expanded Title IX — the civil rights law prohibiting sex discrimination in schools — to include gender identity, after the Trump administration had restricted it to referring to biological sex. Yet his team have been tentative about how this would work with school sports, and as a result, there are endless clips online of American boys with long hair body-slamming girls in basketball games and stealing gold medals in girls’ running races.

And smirking while they do it.

Gender ideologues try to dismiss feminists — who argue there are major biological differences between men and women — by describing them as “right-wing”. It is true most politicians on the right tend to understand the existence of biological sex. They also probably accept the existence of gravity. That so many on the left would — still! — rather jettison women’s rights than state the well-established obvious reflects badly only on them, and it has left a lot of women politically homeless, stuck between anti-abortion homophobes on one side and biology-denying, rapist-pandering cultists on the other.

Utterly and completely homeless.

Yet again.

Ya uh huh.

Shakespeare’s plays were written by a woman and the clues are there in Romeo and Juliet and Othello, according to US author Jodi Picoult.

…

She believes there is plenty of evidence that Shakespeare did not write the works – most damningly, she says, a man who did not secure education for his daughters could not possibly have written “proto-feminist” characters.

Secure education for his daughters how? Send them to Oxford?

Moreover, Picoult says Shakespeare’s contemporaries knew that he was not the real author.

On the contrary, they knew that he was. Ben Jonson had always felt rivalrous toward him, and scornful of his lack of erudition or classical education…until he read the Folio and realized how wrong he’d been.

“I think that, back then, people in theatre knew that William Shakespeare was a catch-all name for a lot of different types of authors. I think they expected it to be a joke that everyone would get. And we’ve all lost the punchline over 400 years,” she told an audience at the Hay Festival as she launched the novel, By Any Other Name.

Huh. Well I think he was really the child of Cleopatra and J. Edgar Hoover, and we’ve all laughed that off over 400 years.

English people are resistant to the theory, she added. “Shakespeare has gone beyond being a playwright – sometimes I think he’s a religion. And if you talk to people who are religious and you push hard enough, eventually the answer is, ‘Because that’s what it is!’ There is this blind faith in Shakespeare.”

There’s a reason for the status of Shakespeare. What is that reason? It’s because he was good at what he did. Really really extraordinarily good. Unusually good. Better than even very clever people routinely are. He was out of the ordinary that way. People noticed. It’s not blind faith; the evidence is right there for anyone to see.

“When he died, he was not buried in Westminster Abbey, although a lot of playwrights you don’t even know were buried in Westminster Abbey. And when he died, no other playwrights of the time seemed to mourn him publicly or talk about his legacy.

Wrong. As I said: Ben Jonson.

Also, we wouldn’t know about the mourning or the talk, because it wasn’t recorded. Very few things were recorded. It’s not clever sleuthing to decide that people weren’t saying X when we have so few records of people saying anything. There were no obits in the Times or the Guardian, no discussions on the BBC, no 500 page biographies in every Waterstones, but that doesn’t mean nobody talked about his legacy. They just didn’t tell us about it, because they didn’t have the technology or the habits that go with the technology.

The Daily Mail takes a cold hard look at the career of Mridul Wadhwa…while still, very unfortunately, using the deceptive pronouns. I realize that use is compelled in some way, but it needs to stop. It weakens any reporting on the subject that does it.

It was a post which was expressly advertised as being for women only but, three years ago this month, a biological male was installed in it. It required a compassionate figure to lead a charity providing a ‘safe space’ to help rape victims get through the worst experience of their lives.

The successful candidate was bullish and strident. Mridul Wadhwa labelled rape victims bigots and transphobes if they doubted whether a man identifying as a woman should run a centre helping women recover from male violence.

As for any members of staff who harboured such notions, Ms Wadhwa is on record as saying: ‘Fire them.’

All this was known within months of the 46-year-old taking up the post of CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC). What was not fully understood until much more recently was the wrathful extremes to which she would go to rid her workplace of those who did not share her views on gender politics.

A damning employment tribunal judgment this week made that crystal clear. Here was a biological male working in a women-only space who, according to the tribunal, was on a mission to ‘cleanse the organisation of those who did not follow her beliefs’.

We knew he was bad but he was worse than we knew.

Yet the eight-day hearing earlier this year presented a chilling reality. A government-funded charity was doling out doctrine where it once offered comfort.

Simply, people were being asked to accept that politics – Ms Wadhwa’s politics – took precedence over a woman’s rape ordeal.

A man’s fantasies about himself matter more than a woman’s needs after being raped.

An exceptionally shameless lie:

Federal prosecutors on Friday asked the judge in Florida overseeing the classified documents case against Donald Trump to bar the former president from public statements that “pose a significant, imminent and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents” participating in the prosecution.

The request was made to the federal district judge in the case, Aileen Cannon. It follows a distorted claim by Trump earlier this week that the FBI agents who searched his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, in August 2022 were “authorized to shoot me” and were “locked and loaded ready to take me out and put my family in danger”.

Not distorted so much as flagrantly untrue.

Trump was referring to the disclosure in a court document that the FBI, during the search, had followed a standard use-of-force policy that prohibits the use of deadly force except when the officer conducting the search has a reasonable belief that the “subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person”.

Trump and his family were not at Mar-a-Lago when the FBI searched the premises. Prosecutors said that the search had been planned that way, so that the Trumps would be out of state, and it was coordinated in advance with the US secret service, which guards former and sitting presidents. No force was used in the raid.

Trump wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the state. The FBI planned it that way.

It’s an absolute brazen lie to say they were ready to “take him out.”

The Times on that thing Literary Alliance Scotland had on its website for weeks but now says is “inappropriate” and they don’t know how it got there:

A briefing document on providing safety for trans people published by the Literary Alliance Scotland (LAS) said that “Terfs” — trans-exclusionary radical feminists, a derogatory term for women considered hostile to trans people — were joining forces with “fascists”.

It said this was a “societal issue” and urged bookshop owners not to “stay out of it”. It added: “This rise in transphobia signals a danger to all LGBTQ+ people, to reproductive rights, etc.”

Good old “etc” yeah? That can mean anything you like. Very professional, very literary.

The alliance, formed in 2015, is Scotland’s largest literary network with a membership “committed to advancing the interests of literature and languages at home and abroad”, according to its website. It says it is a “trusted, strong, collective voice” that brings together writers, publishers, educators, librarians, literature organisations and national cultural bodies.

But not women who know that men are not women.

The guidance was written for LAS by Eris Young, a “queer, transgender writer of speculative fiction and non-fiction”. It was removed from the LAS website on Friday after details emerged online.

Wait what? They’re a literary alliance but they can’t manage to write their own “guidance”? They have to outsource it to an idiot? They then fail to notice how vituperative and misogynist it is?

Young asked: “How do organisations promote safety for trans people in their spaces?” In a section titled “for bookshops”, it said: “Don’t sell Terf books/platform Terf authors. Don’t expect trans booksellers to sell them. Trans people who see Terf books or ‘gender criticism’ in a bookshop will understand that the bookshop doesn’t want them there.”

That’s embarrassing. It’s also stupid and dishonest and malevolent, but for this Scotland Literary Alliance thingy it’s acutely embarrassing. It’s childish stupid sloganeering, not writing, and certainly a million miles from “Literary.”

The guidance adds: “Terfs are actively joining forces with fascists. For example, see BRAVE books, which seeks to ‘Bring Real American Values that Endure into the hearts and minds of children and their families’.”

Pssst. This is Scotland.

Other sections gave guidance for literary festival organisers and suggested that organisers “allocate resources and opportunities to trans writers in proportion to the attacks they are facing”.

Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn, co-authors of The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, a book about grassroots women’s rights movements, said: “We are shocked and saddened at the tone and substance of the guidance issued by the LAS. It is akin to a heresy hunt and the assertion that women are joining forces with fascists is defamatory. The alliance should withdraw the guidance immediately and apologise unreservedly.”

It should do more than that. An apology is the bare minimum.

Magi Gibson on Literary Alliance of Scotland and the blacklisting of feminist women:

Let’s start with this piece, which seems not so much guidance or advice, but an uncompromising imperative. (Screenshot from the guidance document)

This is extremely worrying. How can an organisation purportedly committed to inclusion and diversity endorse a call which not only uses a derogatory term about women, and is essentially a call to blacklist certain books from bookshops, and to no-platform certain authors?

By imitating all the other organizations and institutions that do so.

The truth is that this guidance sanctions the blacklisting of books of any woman who has written or expressed a view on the reality of biological sex.

This is not a healthy state of affairs, and certainly not one that Literature Alliance Scotland, an organisation funded to ‘encourage awareness of contemporary literature… in all sectors of society’ should have any involvement with.

Literature Alliance Scotland is now claiming it was all a mistake, but that is frankly not very credible.

We just want to square the circle, that’s all.

I want to see it easier and more humane for how trans people can access a gender recognition certificate, but I also want to make sure we’re protecting single sex spaces based on biological sex

Well you CAN’T, because those two items cancel each other. The whole nonsensical idea of a “gender recognition certificate” renders women’s rights an absurdity. If men can get “certificates” that say they are women then women can’t have women-specific rights. You can’t do both.

Oh really?

A rape crisis centre that gleefully taunts women:

From Woman’s Place UK a couple of years ago:

For the International Women’s Day episode of BBC Woman’s Hour, Emma Barnett interviewed Anneliese Dodds, the Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities, and asked her for a clear definition of ‘what a woman is’.

And didn’t get one. Of course.

Anneliese Dodds: Well, I have to say that there are different definitions legally around what a woman actually is. I mean, you look at the definition within the Equality Act, and I think it just says someone who is adult and female, I think, but then doesn’t see how you define either of those things. I mean, obviously, that’s then you’ve got the biological definition, legal definition…

Emma Barnett: With respect, I didn’t ask for that. What’s the Labour definition?

Anneliese Dodds: Oh, I think with respect, Emma, I think it does depend what the context is surely. I mean surely that is important here. You know, there are people who have decided that they have to make that transition. You know, I’ve spoken with many of them. It’s been a very difficult process for many of those people. And you know, understandably because they live as a woman, you know, they want to be defined as a woman. That’s what the gender recognition act…again a Labour…is brought into place.

And on it goes, waffle waffle waffle.

The BBC solemnly informs us that a teenager is going to “become a saint.”

Carlo Acutis died in 2006, at the age of 15, meaning he would be the first millennial – a person born in the early 1980s to late 1990s – to be canonised. It follows Pope Francis attributing a second miracle to him. It involved the healing of [a] university student in Florence who had bleeding on the brain after suffering head trauma.

So why did Carlo Acutis die? If he can heal a university student in Florence why can’t he cure himself?

Carlo Acutis had been beatified – the first step towards sainthood – in 2020, after he was attributed with his first miracle – healing a Brazilian child of a congenital disease affecting his pancreas.

Two! He’s a two-miracles guy! So why couldn’t he heal himself, if only so that he could heal more people? Seems only sensible.

The second miracle was approved by the Pope following a meeting with the Vatican’s saint-making department.

Ah yes the saint-making department, right next door to the water into wine department and across from the covering up priestly child abuse department.

Miracles are typically investigated and assessed over a period of several months, with a person being eligible for sainthood after they have two to their name.

Oh good. Good good. That’s very reassuring. No rushing into things here, it’s all very deliberate and careful. I’m impressed.

H/t Acolyte of Sagan

Yeah. Same.