They are BOYS’ socks, dammit. They are masculine socks. They are woven from the finest grass-fed testosterone. They are in BOY COLORS.

They are in STRONG COLORS. Not a pastel among them. Those are MANLY colors. Girls can’t wear colors like that, they can’t carry the weight.

Besides, they have dinosaurs on them. Duh. Girls can’t wear dinosaur socks! What rock do you live under? Girls can wear flower socks, birdy socks, baby bunny socks – not dinosaur socks. Only boys can wear dinosaur socks, because boys can stand up to dinosaurs but girls get squashed by them.

Girls’ socks:

Boys’ socks:

I hope we’ve got all that clear now.

Trump has sent an idiotic “letter” to Speaker Pelosi, to underline how stupid and uncomprehending he really is.

Over six pages, on White House letterhead, the president piles adjectives like cords of wood, fires rhetorical fusillades in all directions and invokes the judgement of the American people, the nation’s founding fathers and history itself.

As if we hadn’t been judging him all along. He’s given us bales of evidence, and we’ve made our judgement: he’s a disaster in almost every category one can think of. (Possible exceptions: he’s probably not a literal pollutant; he hasn’t so far burned down the White House.)

Here are five choice lines from a president whose capacity for the extraordinary and unprecedented is ever-expanding.

“You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!”

Heh, yes, that’s a good one. Here is this very ugly word, and you have cheapened it! He forgot what he was saying four words in, and apparently nobody around him feels safe enough to fix it.

“Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers, you are offending Americans of faith by continually saying ‘I pray for the president’, when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in the negative sense.”

And my rattle. You broke my rattle!!!

“You are turning a policy disagreement between two branches of government into an impeachable offence – it is no more legitimate than the Executive Branch charging members of Congress with crimes for lawful exercise of legislative power.”

Obviously someone else wrote that bit, but it’s still bullshit. It’s in no sense national “policy” to try to bribe and extort vulnerable allies to do the president personal favors related to the next election. Nope. That is not anyone’s policy, it’s just straight-up Mafia behavior but from the seat of government.

“I write this letter to you for the purpose of history and to put my thoughts on a permanent and indelible record. One hundred years from now, when people look back at this affair, I want them to understand it, and learn from it, so that it can never happen to another president again.”

He wants to put his thoughts on an indelible record. What thoughts? He doesn’t have any thoughts. He has reactions, rages, eruptions – thoughts don’t come into it.

Of course he does.

The Trump administration has said it does not consider the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 to be a genocide, contradicting a unanimous vote by the US Senate.

That is, Trump has, and his pathetic slaves are echoing him.

The historic vote last week incensed Turkey, which has always denied that the killings amounted to a genocide.

Turkey’s foreign ministry on Friday summoned the US ambassador to express its anger over the vote, accusing the US of “politicising history”.

Because saying it was a genocide is political while saying it wasn’t is totally not political.

There is general agreement that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died when the Ottoman Turks deported them en masse from eastern Anatolia to the Syrian desert and elsewhere in 1915-16. They were killed or died from starvation or disease.

Hmmm I think I detect a possible additional reason Trump says it wasn’t genocide, additional to his perverse desire to suck up to Erdoğan. Something to do with not wanting brutal deportations under life-threatening conditions to be called by harsh names.

Mr Trump gave a warm welcome to Mr Erdogan in Washington DC last month, despite a recent invasion by Turkey of north-east Syria that targeted the Kurds – formerly US allies in the region. The invasion infuriated many US politicians and military officials and led to calls on the president to impose sanctions on Turkey.

During a meeting in Washington last month, Mr Trump said he was a “big fan” of Mr Erdogan, ignoring widespread criticism over the Turkish president’s poor human rights record.

Bad. Bad human rights record. Not “poor,” bad. Don’t euphemize.

I’m not seeing the source of the puzzlement.

In other words, some women are not having children. And?

Having children is like almost everything else (the exceptions being things like breathing, drinking, eating): some people like it and some don’t; some people want to and some don’t. Isn’t that fairly easy to understand?

Until extremely recently this fact (if I’m right that it’s a fact) was largely concealed by the immense pressure there was on women to marry combined with the near-total absence of birth control. Most women had children because most women married (whether they wanted to or not) and marriage brought procreation with it, whatever either parent or both parents wanted.

But why is it tragic? Why can’t it just be how some people decided to live?

Also it seems a little odd to ignore the looming climate change issue.

It was all a mistake about the proletariat and the means of production and all that. It turns out it’s trans people who are the true proletariat and cis people who live off their exploited labor.

Transition is work. Transition is the labour that continually gives birth to gender, that produces liveably gendered lives under intolerable conditions. And the workplace of gender, like any workplace, cannot be borne except through self-abnegation, exhaustion, lies, glimpses of satisfaction strung out along the working week, alienation, and endless work.

I’m not clear on where we go to buy the gender that they produce with the labour of transition, but I’m deeply sympathetic about the endless work. (Most of that work is shouting at women on Twitter, I guess?)

We teach ourselves techniques of dress from online tutorials and whispered conversations. We write dissertation-length posts on support forums detailing self-medication hormone regimes. We order multiple binders and gaffs from exploitative internet retailers and submit the return labels before anyone notices. We labour for hours before the mirror to bring to the inclusive workplace a gender which can be named, respected, spoken with pronouns, paraded in front of diversity working groups.

Hm. I thought there already was a gender or two in the workplace. Is the idea that trans genders were needed for the sake of keeping diversity working groups occupied? But isn’t that a tiny bit…circular?

We teach doctors our medical pathways and pretend to be attentive when they repeat our knowledge back to us. We tweet messages in support of the liberal recognition schemes cooked up by our middle-managers to ensure our compliant participation in the workplace, the household, the nuclear family. We perform reason and tolerance, we absorb the hate and shame of our antagonists, we are the dump for all the sexual anxiety and gender horror of a society sickened by its own creations. We are sex workers. (Decrim now!) We make your entertainment, your food, your computers, your care packages, your websites, your education system, your knowledge, your play, your city.

Really? As such? That is, trans people alone make our entertainment, our food, our computers, our care packages, our websites, our education system, our knowledge, our play, our city?

Interesting if true, because I thought it was trans people as part of the larger body known as people, as opposed to trans people only. If the point is that it’s trans people as part of the larger body known as people, then…ok? And? What new thing have we learned here?

Marked by capitalism as those with too much gender and too little, we work a second shift, a third shift, a fourth, to acquire the resources necessary to produce our genders, to produce genders survivable under capitalism, at least for another year. And further, as those whom capitalism has produced through its cisheteropatriarchal division of sex classes and gendered labour, whom capitalism has spat out as the uncosted externality of gender, we labour to produce the very gender on which capitalism depends. You live in our work.

So…there’s an invisible army of trans people laboring (underground is it?) to produce gender, which the rest of us simply put on and wear unthinkingly, heedless of the millions of tormented peasants toiling away at their…lathes? Drills? Coal faces?…to produce that which we wear in all our arrogance and cissitude.

Our care work is unpaid. Our medical expertise is unpaid. Our gender production is unpaid. Our advocacy is unpaid. Our training is unpaid. Our support work is unpaid. Our teaching is unpaid. Our writing is unpaid.

Well…lots of things are unpaid. Lots of activities are unpaid, because lots of activities are not transactional in the first place, and because some potentially payable activities aren’t performed well enough to be paid. I would put the “medical expertise” of random trans activists in the latter category.

Everywhere there are trans people, there are people communally producing transitions. In trans communities, we teach each other the skills of dress, voice, deportment, body modification and self-imagining which are essential to liveable trans lives.

Ohhhh, that’s what the labour is. Not toiling underground at a workbench but telling each other how to Talk Like a Gurl. What’s the going rate for that? $500 an hour?

There’s miles and miles more of it. There’s a list of Acknowledgements at the end, one paragraph of which especially caught my attention:

I learned the term “sur-thrivance” from a group exhibition by Indigenous artists, Two-Spirit Sur-Thrivance and the Art of Interrupting Narratives, at the gallery Never Apart in unceded Kahnawake Mohawk Territory on the island of Tiohtiake.

Mmhmm. Always appropriate something from someone indigenous; that’ll fetch’em or I don’t know Arkansas.

I did an errand this afternoon and then did some urban exploring after – not real exploring, but walking around places I don’t get to every day, so close enough. I walked along the canal in Fremont then under the beautiful Fremont Bridge.

A minute after I crossed under it the bell rang that means it’s about to go up, so I stopped to watch because it’s always fun to watch a bridge go up from below, especially a deep blue one with orange trim. Then I got to watch the Rachel Carson chug through.

Then I walked on a hundred yards or so to under the Aurora Bridge to look up at the engineering marvel.

Exploring is good, even (or perhaps especially) on a grey winter afternoon.

Take his wisdom to heart.

Originally a comment by iknklast on Another scourge of White Feminism.

I definitely understand the “not wanting to start from zero” argument, because I face it so much myself in discussing global warming. I really don’t want to have to present the basics of the evidence over and over to people who have made up their mind. But I have to. The problem is, that takes time from actually doing what needs to be done, so it feels like we never progress.

I feel the same way about women’s issues. Even in groups of women, I sometimes have to start from zero to say, yes, there are women out there who do not make what their male counterparts make, who have few freedoms accorded them, etc etc etc. Can we please get on with the important issues of fixing things? The answer to that is no, because you always have to start at zero and by the time you get your interlocutor up to speed, assuming you ever do, the day is over. The next day, you have to start at zero again.

If there were ever a thing doing solid work for the oppressors, it’s ignorance. They count on it. Keep us busy starting at zero, and what little time is left we put out brush fires, etc. Nothing major will get accomplished, the world keeps spinning with the same rhythms as always, and the white male Christian component of the population remains largely in charge.

Perhaps what we need are designated “zeroists” who are in charge of starting at zero, while everyone else can pitch in and get the work done. These “zeroists” are who we refer questions to, and they will be trained and expert in starting at zero, and the constant nagging person who doesn’t know much and doesn’t accept that they don’t know much will no longer get so much in everyone else’s way.

So Rudy the Gee has artlessly admitted – to The New Yorker, so not at all conspicuously or anything – that yes he needed to get Marie Yovanovitch out of the way of his cunning plan.

Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney to President Trump, has admitted that he saw former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch as an obstacle in his plan to find dirt on his client’s potential rival—former Vice President Joe Biden—in advance of the 2020 election, he said in an interview with The New Yorker. “I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way,” Giuliani is reported to have said, telling the magazine that he compiled a dossier on the former VP and his son Hunter and Yovanovitch herself. “She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody.”

Oh well then. That makes it all okay.

There’s a certain piquant humor in seeing former New York mayor confessing his guilt in…The New Yorker.

Double back-flip with walnuts:

The chief executive of Hallmark Cards has apologised for its decision to withdraw television advertisements featuring same-sex couples.

The company’s cable network pulled the ads for wedding registry and planning site Zola under pressure from the conservative group One Million Moms.

The decision drew criticism on social media and calls for a boycott.

Hallmark said it would reinstate the adverts and attempt to re-establish its partnership with Zola.

Ok well next time just skip the part about doing what conservative groups tell you to do, especially ones that call themselves “moms” instead of “mothers” as if we were all six. No but seriously, just ignore people who whine about same-sex marriage. We’re past that.

The original decision to withdraw the adverts drew criticism from a number of high-profile gay figures, including Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres.

…

Saturday Night Live performed a skit which mocked Hallmark’s decision, concluding with the line: “This is Emily Cringle for Hallmark, reminding you to stay straight out there.”

Nobody wants to be a skit on SNL, not even Hallmark.

The original decision to withdraw the advert was prompted by complaints from a conservative activist group.

One Million Moms is an online project of the American Family Association, which is a long-time opponent of gay rights.

One Million Moms said it had personally spoken to Bill Abbott, who’s the chief executive of Hallmark’s parent company Crown Family Networks.

Moms and Bill and Crown Family – it’s all so cozy.

I guess those million “moms” are feeling pretty spanky and go to your roomy today.

Another one of those “being a man who identifies as a woman is such an excellent screen for misogyny” types:

That’s longstanding Pharyngula commenter abbeycadabra, who joined the populous but thin roster at Freethought Blogs a few days ago. That photo on the blog is captioned:

Abbey St. Brendan is five or six kinds of artist, maybe one kind of successful at it, a long-time FtB reader and grizzled veteran of the deadly TERF wars.

The opening of Cadabra’s hello world post:

Hi folks! I reckon most of you who might look at this post at least have seen my handle around, probably complaining bitterly at someone who is being a dicknostril, especially about trans issues. The plan here is to show off mostly the not so angry sides of my personality – which I would like to think is most of it, but hey, who knows.

I’m grateful to the existing Beloved Ruling Class here on FtB for accepting my application. I’ve been here for a long time – I’ve read Natalie Reed, Zinnia Jones, Crommunist, and Ed Brayton here; I’ve seen the dark moments when a bloggers were expelled for racism or plagiarism; I was here for Ophelia Benson’s grand final flounce and the sad passing of Caine – and have a lot of respect for the bloggers here. I’m honored they’re willing to take a chance on including me among them.

I’m so proud to loom that large in someone’s resumé.

See also a footnote on an essay on how kindness is compatible with being venomous to people you see as evil:

* In Holms’s case I’m really not sure what he expected to accomplish by doing this to directly pick a fight with a blog owner (not for the first time); perhaps he imagines himself a martyred crusader for White Feminism.

Ahhhhhhhh yes, White Feminism. Pasty white dude in lacy top is accusing people of White Feminism. Pasty white dude has found the only way to include himself among The Marginalized and women among The Oppressors.

H/t Holms for the source.

Apparently this Louis Staples guy went on shit-tweeting about Helen Lewis for hours after his first barrage, and then – uh oh – must have had a tap on the shoulder from a higher up at the Independent (where he is a columnist).

Do we believe he’s sincere? No.

He plans to reflect on “this.” How much reflection does it take? How much does it take to grasp the complicated and subtle point that you don’t spend six hours shit-tweeting lies about people, and that a man doing that to a woman is not a great look?

Want to know why the trans “movement” got so popular so fast? This is why. It gives men who fancy themselves progressive cover to vomit misogyny all over women while keeping their woke credentials.

That whole piece about Casablanca by Meredith Hindley is interesting.

With few Americans knowing Casablanca was a city in French Morocco — let alone how to find it on a map — the studio banked on audiences’ love of wartime intrigue, along with the star power of Bogart and castmates Claude Rains and Paul Henreid, to sell the film.

But on November 8, reports began to trickle in that the Americans and British had launched Operation TORCH with the goal of seizing Algeria and French Morocco from Vichy France. The assault was a new phase in the war against Nazi Germany, one designed to help the Soviets, who fought a bloody battle against the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Over the next few days, headlines and radio reports buzzed about the fighting in and around Casablanca, as the U.S. Navy battled the French fleet and 33,000 American soldiers stormed Moroccan beaches under the command of Major General George S. Patton, Jr.

Warner Brothers could hardly believe its luck — it had a movie in the can about a city that had just become the site of a major Allied victory. The studio couldn’t buy that kind of publicity. Rather than premiering the film in 1943, Warner Brothers hastily arranged a screening in New York on November 26, 1942, two weeks after the French surrendered Casablanca to the Americans.

…

If audience members didn’t become verklempt watching Victor lead the patrons of Rick’s Café Américain in a stirring rendition of “La Marseillaise,” they received another opportunity when the lights came up. Before the premiere, members of the Free French had marched down Fifth Avenue, and at the end of the movie, they assembled on stage and belted out the revolutionary anthem in front of a flag emblazoned with the Cross of Lorraine. “The occasion took the tone of a patriotic rally rather than the premiere of a timely motion picture,” noted the Hollywood Reporter. Sentiments about Vichy France ran deep — even in New York.

Or especially in New York.

Have just learned, chatting on Twitter, that a friend has never seen Casablanca. The tragedy of it!

Nearly all the bit players in that scene are refugees from the Nazis.

Casablanca made its debut two-and-half years after Germany marched into France, triggering a massive refugee exodus. As the Nazis advanced, the population of France fled south, hoping to avoid being swallowed up by Hitler’s burgeoning empire. Hungarians, Poles, Russians, Austrians, and Spanish Republicans who had fled their homelands to seek sanctuary in France before the war, once again found themselves on the run. Thousands would end up in Casablanca.

In July of 1940, more than two hundred ships arrived off the coast of Casablanca, the largest port in Africa on the Atlantic coast. The captains stocked only enough supplies to transport their passengers from Marseille, Bordeaux, or Oran. They didn’t plan on baking under the scorching North African sun for weeks as they waited to disembark their passengers. Both refugees and sailors suffered from dehydration and illness as water and food ran out. Once the refugees made it ashore, they had to find housing and navigate the French Protectorate of Morocco’s bureaucracy.

To deal with refugee influx, the Protectorate established an internment camp at Aïn Chok, an area approximately five miles southeast of the city center. George Kelber, a passenger on the SS Chateau Yquem, was shunted into its makeshift quarters along with seven hundred other recently arrived refugees. “People are getting exhausted, many of them are ill, and hygienic conditions are far from being satisfactory,” he wrote. “All these people have suffered a lot since four weeks and many of them are morally and physically broken.”

The film Casablanca is crowded with refugees. There’s Carl, the affable German-speaking waiter, and Sascha, the Russian bartender. A Dutch banker boasts of having run “the second largest banking house in Amsterdam.” Annina, a Bulgarian bride with doe eyes, resigns herself to selling her virtue to obtain the exit visas she and her husband need.

No one should be going to sleep tonight never having seen Casablanca.

From the Venomous Thugs on Twitter files:

Updating to add a few later tweets:

His venomous unprovoked attack was on Helen Lewis. He probably didn’t expect that the result would be fellow journalists and editors saying how brilliant she is and how zero she deserves this venomous unprovoked misogynist attack. Dude has now apologized and set about deleting his shitty tweets, all too late.

End of update.

The Independent should fire him, but leaving that aside – what I’m interested in is the (all too typical) loose analogy that, if you think about it for .5 second, is complete bullshit. “Imagine a “left wing” magazine publishing this sort of thing [meaning: the sort of thing he doesn’t like] about any other minority – you can’t.” Oreally? Any other minority? What about rapists? Political campaigners who tell brazen lies by the truckload? Executives of tobacco companies? Daily Mail reporters? Scabs? Owners of oil tankers that spill oil all over wetlands? Dirty cops? Corrupt heads of state? Torturers? KKKers? The staff of Breitbart? The Proud Boys?

You get the idea. He doesn’t mean minority, he means oppressed minority, or marginalized, or [insert preferred adjective here], but he’s too aroused by his bullying spree to notice he’s talking sloppy meaningless jargon.

Also of course there’s the whole “guy wanting to see intelligent women he disagrees with punished” phenomenon, which is like the leitmotif of our era.

If you’re going to make a case for something, try using a little care in the way you make it. For instance:

I was going to argue with the column, so as a preliminary step I read it, which is just as well because I found I don’t disagree with it all that much. If particular person X asks to be called “them” I’m not going to go to war over it. The issue is when you try to generalize that into a Big Rule that applies everywhere – as Clarke did in that tweet. It’s laughably easy to think of exceptions to Clarke’s Big Rule, so it won’t work as a Big Rule.

And this is part of the issue between feminists and ideologues of All Things Trans. Sure, we may be willing to call friends or family or colleagues what they ask to be called, but that doesn’t translate to agreeing to that for everyone on the planet no matter what the specifics. What we’re willing to do to be “polite” or kind or sympathetic toward particular nearby individuals is not necessarily what we’re willing to do universally as a matter of political and social justice.

Graham Linehan explained some of this.

We (women) could probably afford to “be nice” too if it were purely local and the people requesting it were not belligerent misogynists, but it isn’t and they are, so we can’t.

Originally a comment by latsot on Hands.

Of course he has posted a passive-voice notpology about how mistakes were passively made when she was passively “touched” on the “back” in an incident involving a hand, which might or might not be connected to his arm, as opposed to her being deliberately slapped on the arse by his hand, which is what happened. And happened because he thought she was his to use. And because he thought he’d get away with it, because you can grab them by the pussy.

Of course the part of the not-pology about how he is a loving husband and father is not in the passive voice. That part is very clear about how it’s him doing the loving and fathering. “Children were fathered” but “arses weren’t deliberately slapped, by [him]”, apparently.

Of course his lawyers are saying that he didn’t intend to commit an illegal act despite the fact that he committed an illegal act which he fully intended to do. And of course, no mention is made of whether what he did was wrong, just whether or not he intended to do something illegal, which he did.

Of course a lot of people have surfaced to tut at his being “doxxed”, as it is being framed. In a different universe where I wasn’t me I still wouldn’t have had even a tiny speck of sympathy about the doxxing, even if he had come forward without being caught to admit what he had done and apologise in a genuine fashion. Which he didn’t. He waited until someone tracked him down (he was wearing a number and it was on TV) and then communicated his ‘apology’ via his lawyers.

Name and shame.

Life lesson: if you’re running in an event and you spot a reporter doing a live bit, and you’re a man and the reporter’s a woman, don’t take the opportunity to slap her bum on the way, because the thing is, since she is a reporter doing a live bit, you will be on camera. 

A Georgia man who was videotaped slapping a female reporter’s bottom on live TV was arrested on Friday on a misdemeanor charge of sexual battery.

A Savannah police spokeswoman, Bianca Johnson, confirmed that Thomas Callaway, 43, of Statesboro was charged in connection with the incident that occurred while WSAV-TV reporter Alex Bozarjian was broadcasting live as runners streamed past her on a prominent bridge in the coastal city.

Bozarjian tweeted the footage last weekend. You can see her shock when it happens, right there on camera. Remember, bum-slappers: not on camera!

Video from Bozarjian’s live broadcast last Saturday posted online showed one of the passing runners appearing to swat her from behind. The video shows the stunned woman stop talking for a moment and stare. The clip had been viewed more than 11 million times on Twitter by Friday.

The video also shows the guy who did it as he approaches, so his face is there for all to see. Learn a lesson from this, bum-slappers.

Who is Thomas Callaway? He’s a “youth minister.” Of course he is.

They cannot be serious.

Using someone’s preferred pronoun is a simple way to show respect…so the driver should say “Where do them want to go?”

Ask the passenger what their pronoun is. Do not assume someone’s pronoun because of their appearance or name on the app. If you do not want to ask, you can ask what they prefer to be called –

So if you do not want to ask, ask. Mkay.

Introduce yourself and share your pronouns.

What planet are these people on? A taxi trip isn’t a long-term relationship, it’s a transaction in which A drives B to point C for $X.xx. That’s it. The pronouns involved are I/we, and you. The end. Third person pronouns don’t come into it. Even if the precious passenger with the lemonade hair and the lemur-skin boots does have a bespoke pronoun, there is not going to be any occasion to use it for that transaction.

And even if there were…again, it’s a short-lived relationship, and it really doesn’t need to be anxiously hand-clutchingly inclooosiv in that way. It doesn’t. Even if the driver does use a “wrong” pronoun for some weird reason…it doesn’t matter. Passenger can deal with it.

These poor pathetic narcissistic dweebs must be horribly jealous of us older dweebs who lived in the distant past when we had to struggle to get basic respect for women and black people. They must feel left out of a giant party, and the only way they can think of to have their own party is to run around screeching about their pronouns.

But that’s ok. Trump is destroying everything, the Tories will destroy whatever’s left, the Arctic is melting, Australia is on fire – but please please please do tell us more about your Special Pronouns.