More video of men preventing women from talking.

At the Seattle Public Library last night:

Men shouting so that women can’t speak. New boss same as the old boss.

“Happy Brexit Day”

Aka we hate you and think we now have licence to persecute and shame you.

BBC Norfolk:

“Happy Brexit Day” notices telling residents “we do not tolerate” people speaking languages other than English have been posted at a block of flats.

Who’s we, one wonders. Whatever damn fool wrote that notice is not the “we” of everyone living in that block of flats.

A resident of Winchester Tower in Norwich first spotted them at 06:00 GMT on Friday, as first reported in the Eastern Daily Press.

The man, who does not want to be named, has reported the signs – which he said were on every floor – to the police.

Full text:

As we finally have our great country back we feel there is one rule that needs to be made clear to Winchester Tower residents.

We do not tolerate people speaking other languages than English in the flats.

We are now our own country again and the Queens English is the spoken tongue here.

If you do want to speak whatever is the mother tongue of the country you came from then we suggest you return to that place and return your flat to the council so they can let British people live here and we can return to what was normality before you infected this once great island.

Its a simple choice obey the rule of the majority or leave.

You won’t have long till our government will implement rules that will put British first. So, best evolve or leave.

God save the Queen, her government and all true patriots.

I think “we can return to what was normality before you infected this once great island” is a particularly striking detail.

Originally a comment by Papito on “Morality” sounds better than “submit or else.”

I was idly contemplating these themes this morning as I walked down to the greengrocer for limes. I passed by the house of one of my daughter’s friends, whose parents had pulled her out of her very progressive school for a more traditional school that didn’t impress me very much, with the goal of later attending a school my son found utterly dehumanizing. I like the girl, and her parents as well, but why they would make such a choice didn’t really compute for me until I remembered that they are practicing Catholics (as opposed to cultural Catholics or recovering Catholics, no offense intended please). The doctrine of Catholicism (and most other varieties of Christianity) differs very much from the ethos of humanism in that it’s a zero-sum game. The roles of people, and the possible outcomes of people, have already been determined. What is a sin, and how one may be forgiven for it, is already written. In a sense, the only free will people have is to either comply or not comply with the rules laid down by God. For humanists, or secularists, the game is open-ended: we create the world, and what the world may become is yet undetermined. We have the freedom to determine who we will become and what that will mean. Education is, for the progressive, about the student creating herself, and possibly becoming something entirely new. For the traditional, it is about the student being trained to comply with a limited set of rules and roles. Freedom means something entirely different in the two cases.

To bring this back to Barr, we can understand how this man can violate every ethical guideline for his professional behavior, and yet believe that he is the one standing for morality, if we consider that he is constitutionally unable to understand human freedom. For a man like him, any deviation from his set of assumed strictures on human behavior must be considered sinful. There can be nothing new that is not of the devil. He seeks the ultimate end of Republicanism in an imperial presidency so that sinful people will not be allowed to determine their future collectively, but will instead be forced to return to the past. Domination and punishment are good for the souls of children and countries alike.

CNN is harsher than the Post.

The Department of Justice revealed in a court filing late Friday that it has two dozen emails related to the President Donald Trump’s involvement in the withholding of millions in security assistance to Ukraine — a disclosure that came just hours after the Senate voted against subpoenaing additional documents and witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trial, paving the way for his acquittal.

The filing, released near midnight Friday, marks the first official acknowledgment from the Trump administration that emails about the President’s thinking related to the aid exist, and that he was directly involved in asking about and deciding on the aid as early as June. The administration is still blocking those emails from the public and has successfully kept them from Congress.

The first official acknowledgement, and it comes after the vote to cover it all up. The 49 to 51 vote, with all but two Republicans voting to hide the criminal self-serving traitorous actions of the lying self-serving criminal Donald Trump. The Republicans have decided to be the party of selfish greedy criminals, which seems a tad cynical.

Oh is that so.

Hours after the Senate voted against seeking new evidence in the impeachment case against President Trump, the administration acknowledged in a midnight court filing Friday the existence of two dozen emails that reveal the president’s thinking about withholding military aid to Ukraine.

Was there a “neener neener” attached?

The Department of Justice filed a response to a lawsuit seeking access to unredacted copies of those communications. Heather Walsh, a lawyer for the Office of Management and Budget, wrote to the court that 24 of those emails were protected under “presidential privilege.”

“Specifically, the documents in this category are emails that reflect communications by either the President, the Vice President, or the President’s immediate advisors regarding Presidential decision-making about the scope, duration, and purpose of the hold on military assistance to Ukraine,” Walsh wrote.

Yes, but in the case of this president, that doesn’t mean normal decision-making and discussion of same. That’s the problem. In the case of this president it’s about abuse of power, extortion, treating an ally like an enemy and an enemy like an ally, and similar batshit-crazy criminal goings-on. We can’t just fall back in awe and reverence because it’s Communications By The President.

Heavily blacked out versions of the emails were released in two batches in December in response to a lawsuit filed by the Center for Public Integrity. The filing Friday asked the court to deny the organization’s request for unredacted copies.

“Please continue to hide this material, because Mister Trump doesn’t want to be exposed as a criminal and a traitor.”

More from #WomensLib2020:

That’s Pragna in that photo on the right.

There was a Women’s Party UK event today at University College London aka UCL.

There were also people protesting the event – not godbothering fanatics who think their god ordained that women should be subordinate and submissive, but genderbothering fanatics who think women should shut up and let men who say they are women do all the talking.

It seems only yesterday that women were allowed to meet and talk and organize around women’s rights and women’s concerns without others on the left protesting this suspicious activity.

Sweet summer child there on the right – no, trans lib is not women’s lib. It’s really not. Trans lib is women’s silencing.

Originally a comment by iknklast on “Militant secularists” again.

What values exactly, is there some secularist tome I can refer to

Barr probably knows, but assumes his audience doesn’t, or that they agree with him, that the only value they are really concerned about is the value of freedom to make up your own mind about god. The freedom to send your children to school without being converted to a believe they find unacceptable.

Barr believes that what secularists want is like what Christians want – to send their children to school to have their beliefs reinforced, and to convert all the other little kids to their beliefs. Some secularists probably want this, but on the whole, we want our kids taught to think, how to read, how to write and do math, and in general become educated, not brainwashed.

There is a lot of projection in this. The Evangelical Christians want unencumbered access to other people’s kids. They assume that is what the secularists want. They are afraid someone is coming for their kids because they are ‘coming for’ other people’s kids.

In short, the only value at stake here is belief in the god that Barr believes in. That is for so many Christians the true morality. Believing in God, worshiping God, submitting to God, becoming a “servant” to God. And making everyone else do the same.

But if they use the words “moral” and “values”, it sounds better than “submit or else”. They never actually have to specify those morals because everyone else will fill in what they think morality is. And they can see that morality in Trump because he is willing to force everyone to submit. That’s the only moral they really care about; all the rest are window dressing designed for control. Control people’s sex and diet, and you have them in your control. Mostly.

I hate quoting National Review…

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said earlier this week that she would only nominate a Secretary of Education who was pre-screened by a “young transgender person” in order to ensure that her pick would be “committed to creating a welcoming environment, a safe environment, and a full educational curriculum for everyone.”

Wellllll…except for women of course. But that’s ok, women are such a tiny minority compared to transgender persons.

Speaking Sunday at a townhall in Iowa, Warren responded to a question about how to address a lack of LGBTQ history and sexual education in public schools.

That’s a bad question in the first place. L and G are not the same as T, and most of their issues are different, and some of their rights are in tensions. Some of us think lesbians get to decide for themselves who their sex/romance partners will be, but some transgender persons think lesbians must have sex/romance with men who identify as lesbians. That’s a conflict.

“It starts with a Secretary of Education who has a lot to do with where we spend our money, with what gets advanced in our public schools, with what the standards are,” she replied.

The Massachusetts Democrat went on to explain that any candidate for the position first had to be a former public-school teacher, and then had to go through an interview conducted by a young transgender person Warren had met on the campaign trail who was worried about the lack of a “welcoming community” in public schools.

No. We don’t want to put schoolchildren in charge of Cabinet hiring, not even a small fraction of Cabinet Hiring. We’ve seen more than enough of that kind of thing from Don the Disgusting and we don’t want new instances of it.

Warren has released several plans highlighting her agenda to promote transgender talking points. A recent plan detailing how to restore “Integrity and Competence to Government after Trump” included a commitment to have at least half of Warren’s Cabinet be filled by “women and non-binary people.”

Again – no. “Non-binary people” can just mean men who call themselves non-binary so they can get that job in Warren’s Cabinet. No, a man who calls himself non-binary is not the same kind of thing as a woman, and hiring one doesn’t up the stats on hiring women. No.

In October, Warren released her criminal justice reform platform, which included an end to the “Trump Administration’s dangerous policy” of jailing prisoners based on their biological sex…

What’s genuinely dangerous is jailing men who say they are women alongside actual women.

No to all of this.

Of course he has.

US President Donald Trump has lifted restrictions on the deployment of anti-personnel landmines by American forces.

Trump never met a form of violence (against other people of course) he didn’t like. So landmines linger on for decades after the war or insurgency or invasion is over, killing and maiming generations of children, farmers, and other people rash enough to walk in places where there are unexploded mines buried out of sight, so what? It won’t be Donald Trump they blow up so who cares?

The decision reverses a 2014 Obama administration ban on the use of such weapons, which applied everywhere in the world except for in the defence of South Korea.

Of course it does, because Obama is smarter and better than Trump, and Trump can’t be doing with that.

Thousands of people are injured and killed by landmines every year.

…

The US is not a signatory to the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, which restricts the development or use of anti-personnel land mines.

There are a lot of treaties and international agreements we’re not a signatory to. We’re a rogue nation, and we’re going downhill fast.

“The Department of Defense has determined that restrictions imposed on American forces by the Obama administration’s policy could place them at a severe disadvantage during a conflict against our adversaries,” a White House statement said, adding: “The president is unwilling to accept this risk to our troops.”

But he’s perfectly willing to accept the risk to the people who will be killed or injured by landmines long after the “conflict against our adversaries” is over.

Rachel Stohl, an arms control expert at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington, called the decision “inexplicable”.

“I have no idea if it’s posturing or a reality that the US is claiming back the right to use landmines,” she told the BBC. “It’s inexplicable given all we know about these deadly weapons and the amount of money the United States has spent demining around the world,” she added.

Ms Stohl said the decision put lives at risk and was another example of the Trump administration “defining its own rules and ignoring global standards of behaviour”.

It is explicable though. The explanation is that Trump hates Obama and loves violence that’s not directed at him.

This is a very bad and stupid piece of writing.

Earlier this month, the Seattle Public Library decided that it will allow a group of trans-exclusionary “radical feminists” (TERFs) to hold an event centered on rejecting the rights and identities of transgender people.

The first sentence, and already so bad. It wasn’t earlier this month, for a start, but more to the point, the library did not decide it will allow a group of trans-exclusionary “radical feminists” to hold an event centered on rejecting the rights and identities of transgender people. The library accepted a booking from a feminist group to discuss and defend the rights of women in the context of ever-broader demands from men who identify as women.

Following widespread objections and calls from the trans community to cancel the event, the library has responded with by-now predictable talking points about the value of, and need to protect, intellectual freedom, a response that self-professed defenders of free speech have praised.

Notice how casually the author takes it for granted that “the trans community” should be able to shut down a feminist event on demand. Notice the clumsy sarcasm about the value of intellectual freedom and the contempt for its defenders.

This conversation isn’t new — we’ve been having some version of it for years.

Not all that many years though. This fad for people to Identify As the sex they’re not and then bully everyone in sight on the strength of their new Idenninny has not been around all that long.

For TERFs, leaning on dogmatic conceptualizations of free speech has been a convenient way to push bigoted, pseudoscientific claims about gender. TERF ideology most basically characterizes trans women as men-pretending-to-be-women, allegedly to “invade” women-only spaces, assault women or otherwise exercise misogyny. These arguments rely on cherry-picked biology and function as dog whistles to stoke prejudice and trans panic. And, unsurprisingly, mainstream TERFs and free speech dogmatists are apparently all hanging out together.

The shocking thing? This person, Sam Sumpter, is a graduate student in philosophy.

Bet you haven’t seen anything this wack before!

I don’t think it’s wrong, sinful, for a girl baby to have a sleeper on.

BUT.

Of course there’s a but.

It’s not sinful if she’s just, like, a month.

But hey once she knows those things are PANTS –

That’s whOle other kettle of fish, my friend. Whole other.

Men wrap each leg. Women DO NOT. Are we clear? This is a rule straight from God, so don’t be getting it wrong, or you know what will happen.

If Ivanka Trump invited me to a feminist event she was hosting at the White House would I feel flattered and hop right along? Hell no. I’m not the only one.

The Washington Post is now reporting that eight anti-trafficking organizations have decided not to attend an Ivanka-planned White House event on Friday ostensibly dedicated to combatting human trafficking, citing the administration’s inhumane policies. The event is centered around a new federal law that designates trafficking as a felony offense.

“We have such a chasm between rhetoric and reality. I don’t think any of us have the desire to be a part of a photo op,” said Martina Vandenberg of the Human Trafficking Legal Center, one of the organizations set to boycott the occasion.

Saying no isn’t necessarily a boycott, it can be just saying no.

The Post further reports that several of the groups focused specifically on the Trump administration’s stance on T visas, which are designed to allow trafficking victims entry into the United States.

“During that time, they are unable to work and unable to get medical care. We are talking about years where people are just stuck,” one victim explained of the lengthened process.

Once again, we see the Trump administration pretending to be an ally to a marginalized and abused demographic when a closer look reveals them to be an enemy. This president wants to use human trafficking as an excuse to impose his draconian immigration laws by saying his wall and stricter treatment of migrants will prevent trafficking when the reality is that most trafficking victims enter the country with valid papers. By twisting the reality of the problem to suit his own xenophobic agenda, Trump is doing grave damage to victims.

And Princess Dress-up Doll is just the decoration on that shit cake.

China is making gigantic efforts to fight the Coronavirus. Laurie Garrett says the US won’t be able to match China’s efforts should the need arise.

For the United States, the answers are especially worrying because the government has intentionally rendered itself incapable. In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion. If the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it is – not just for the public but for the government itself, which largely finds itself in the dark.

Obama built up a structure for dealing with epidemics during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 and then afterwards.

To bring order and harmony to the chaos, rein in the agency egos, and create a coherent multiagency response overseas and on the homefront, Obama anointed a former vice presidential staffer, Ronald Klain, as a sort of “epidemic czar” inside the White House, clearly stipulated the roles and budgets of various agencies, and placed incident commanders in charge in each Ebola-hit country and inside the United States. The orchestra may have still had its off-key instruments, but it played the same tune.

Building on the Ebola experience, the Obama administration set up a permanent epidemic monitoring and command group inside the White House National Security Council (NSC) and another in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—both of which followed the scientific and public health leads of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the diplomatic advice of the State Department.

So naturally Trump smashed it all.

In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency. The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton pressured Ziemer’s DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10. Meanwhile, throughout 2018, the U.S. Agency for International Development and its director, Mark Green, came repeatedly under fire from both the White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And though Congress has so far managed to block Trump administration plans to cut the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by 40 percent, the disease-fighting cadres have steadily eroded as retiring officers go unreplaced.

But, fortunately, it’s only about epidemics, not anything really important.

Barr says the militant atheists are gonna eat your religious freedom.

Attorney General William Barr warned New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan of “an organized, militant secular effort” to suppress religion in “the marketplace of ideas” in an interview Wednesday.

“The problem today is not that religious people are trying to impose their views on non-religious people,” Barr told Dolan on his SiriusXM radio show Conversation with Cardinal Dolan. “It’s the opposite — it’s that militant secularists are trying to impose their values on religious people, and they’re not accommodating the freedom of religion of people of faith.”

“Freedom” is another one of those words that get deployed as silencers when in fact it matters what kind of freedom you’re talking about. “Religious freedom” can mean “freedom” to keep children out of school, to keep women out of universities, to beat children with sticks, to preach racism – it can mean a lot of bad things, many of them illegal. If William Barr is arguing for that kind of religious freedom he should stop talking.

Citing Democrats’ efforts to coerce religious employers to violate their conscience rights as well as their ongoing effort to expand abortion access, Barr has used his platform as attorney general to speak out about what he sees as encroachments on religious liberty.

Sure enough; this is what I’m saying. We don’t think people have a “religious right” to, for instance, refuse to provide an offered good or service to lesbians or gays on the grounds that god hates fags. We don’t think “conscience” means shunning or persecuting people because you don’t like their romantic and sexual choices.

He drew a torrent of criticism in October over a speech at Notre Dame Law School in which he said religiously convicted Americans face “social, educational, and professional ostracism.”

Diddums.

“We believe in the separation of church and state,” Barr stated [yesterday]. “But what permits a limited government and minimal command and control of the population — and allows people to have freedom of choice in their lives — and trust in the people is the fact that they are a people that are capable of disciplining themselves according to moral values.”

But moral values are not religious values. Many religious values are highly immoral, as I’ve been hinting.

The projection defense:

It is Donald Trump’s habitual practice to accuse political opponents of misconduct he excels at, from self-dealing to the use of nasty language to telling lies.

At the impeachment trial Trump’s legal team has invented a twist on the projection tactic, taking the charges against the president and seeking to turn them back on the impeachment managers, using the precise language of the prosecution.

No you’re the corrupt lying cheating sacks of shit!

Thus Trump’s lawyers have accused the House of Representatives of abusing its power by pursuing impeachment and of obstructing justice by running the impeachment process in a way the White House objects to.

Which is just stupid, but no doubt it will work all the same, because we’re stuck in Stupidworld.

In one provocative example, lawyers for Trump have taken on the Senate floor to accusing House managers of engaging in “election interference” by advancing a process that could take Trump’s name off the ballot in 2020.

Just as a woman who struggles free from a man raping her is committing assault.

From last week: Trump and his goons changed the definition of domestic violence so that there will be less of it to do anything about.

The Trump administration quietly changed the definition of both domestic violence and sexual assault back in April but the move has only just surfaced.

The change could have significant repercussions for millions of victims of gender-based violence.

That is, victims of violence against women. The “gender” in question is female.

The Trump Justice Department’s definition only considers physical harm that constitutes a felony or misdemeanour to be domestic violence – meaning other forms of domestic violence such as psychological abuse, coercive control and manipulation no longer fall under the department’s definition. 

Lisa Page, anyone? DoJ employee hounded out by non-criminal psychological abuse from the president of the United States?

Holly Taylor-Dunn, a senior lecturer at the University of Worcester who has been working in the field of domestic and sexual violence for 17 years, said she was shocked by the move.

The academic, who has worked in frontline roles in the domestic violence sector and used to be a domestic abuse officer for the police, argued the Trump administration’s decision turned the clock back 50 years. 

“I was massively surprised and really shocked,” she said. “It is quite scary how quietly it has happened. It is a massive step backwards. We have literally gone back to the 70s. We have worked so hard since the 60s and 70s to get domestic abuse and sexual violence understood as being about more than physical violence. Changing the definition to take it back to being about physical harm completely undermines what domestic abuse is about”.

Dominance doesn’t necessarily ever raise a finger; it doesn’t have to. If you’re visibly carrying a gun, you don’t have to wave it around all the time; just the visible presence is quite enough to intimidate.

Suzanne Jacob, of UK domestic violence charity Safe Lives, said: “These changes are a huge step backwards that will have very real consequences for victims and survivors of domestic abuse in the States.

“Wherever you live, if you’ve experienced domestic abuse or listened to those who have, you know all too well that physical violence is never the whole picture – and many survivors tell us that the emotional and psychological abuse takes much longer to recover from.”

There is also the fact that dominance aka psychological abuse can be a step toward physical violence.

Some 43.5 million women have experienced “psychological aggression” from an intimate partner in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than half of women murdered each year in the US are killed by an intimate partner.

The two are not separated as if by a gulf.

Khadija Khan writes:

A recent independent review into child grooming and abuse in Manchester in the mid-2000s has revealed horrific details of how the victims were denied protection, and turned away by British police officers and social workers. The victims had been deliberately hooked on drugs, groomed, and sexually abused for years by grooming gangs predominantly comprised of Pakistani men, while the authorities involved looked the other way. These revelations of institutionalized criminal negligence were soon followed by denials, accusations, regrets, and excuses.

Apparently, the neglect of the sexual exploitation of women and girls at least partly arose to avoid creating racial tensions in the area. Some still believe that discussion of paedophile gangs of Asian men grooming and sexually abusing white working-class girls should be avoided, because it could stir up racial hatred and disrupt British society.

This is where the magic word “intersectionality” really comes into play, isn’t it. Let’s look the other way when it comes to this thing because it might be bad for The Muslim Community if we paid attention. Let’s look the other way when it comes to this thing because it might be bad for The Trans Community if we paid attention.

I can’t help noticing a commonality. In both cases it’s women who have to give way, women who are considered less important than this other Community we want to protect. Also in both cases it’s men who are doing bad things to women so they’re the ones shielded by the intersectional decision to look away from what they’re doing.

It’s all made trickier by the fact that it’s not wrong to worry about racism or hostility to Muslims, just as it’s not wrong to worry about abuse of trans people.

The Manchester report is no different from earlier child abuse scandals in Rotherham and Telford, or over 20 other UK communities in which grooming gangs operated with impunity. According to the review, the girls were subjected to ‘the most profound abuse and exploitation.’ They were groomed and sexually abused by South Asian men of all ages, who would drug them, rape them and pass them around at sex parties like meat on a platter.

Given these horrific and inhuman revelations,  it is shocking that some people find discussion of the perpetrators’ backgrounds more disturbing than the scandalous nature of the abuse itself. The review revealed that Greater Manchester Police’s concern about ‘sensitive’ community issues was a reason why the perpetrators were not held accountable for their crimes.

The sensitive community issues matter, but so do those girls.

It is imperative to note that British authorities feared offending vocal, self-appointed Muslim leaders who represent a highly conservative cultural and religious viewpoint, and who do not welcome any kind of scrutiny or criticism from outside – or even within – the community. 

That, on the other hand, matters a whole lot less than concern about hostility directed at South Asians in general. Conservative theocratic men are pretty much the last people the cops should be protecting at the expense of girls abused by their fellow conservative theocratic men.

It is safe to say that the cover-up of the sexual exploitation of vulnerable women and girls was done to protect the sensibilities of a highly conservative section of Muslim communities, which view any criticisms as a direct attack on Islam and their culture.

Protecting multicultural sensitivities cannot justify the criminal cover-up of a scandal that has affected British women and girls for over a decade.  Progressive voices, and especially dissenters within Muslim communities, face harsh criticism from the liberal fringe as well as from hard-line Muslims. Muslim reformers calling out deep rooted misogyny in their communities are constantly slandered, and accused of fuelling tensions between communities.

Wrong turn at the intersection.