Tanith Lloyd posted a letter to a friend who thinks trans women are women a couple of days ago.

I recently sent you an article by a lesbian who has been documenting homophobia within trans activism. You, my otherwise compassionate, patient and warm friend, replied with “sorry, not interested”. You told me that you didn’t want to read an article which referred to transwomen as ‘male’. You said that transwomen suffer from an “accident at birth” — transwomen are women born in the wrong body.

Seeing my principled friend (with a first-class undergraduate and a masters degree) actively adopt such a bizarre, anti-materialist and anti-scientific position really worries me. How can ‘you’ be ‘born into’ a body? You are a body. The ‘born in the wrong body’ idea goes beyond poststructuralist ideas about gender onto quasi-religious terrain. How can anyone have an innate, pre-experience knowledge of what it means to be the other sex? What does that even entail? Being male or female refers to your reproductive sex. To argue otherwise is akin to arguing for gendered souls.

It is, in short, dualism, and let’s not go there.

It’s reminiscent (as I think I’ve mentioned before) of those excitable people a couple of decades ago who talked about immortality via uploading our minds into computers. Wtf? That’s not immortality, it’s a nightmare.

Being ‘trans’ is no longer characterised by the material state of having surgically changed your body, but is now characterised by an immaterial, subjective sense of self. Is Danielle Muscato a woman? How about Stonewall activist, Alex Drummond? Again, where do you draw the line? Is it based on ‘passing’? Do women have to look a certain way? What about Jess Bradley, NUS trans spokesperson, who has been suspended from their position for allegedly flashing ‘her’ erect penis in public? Is this a female crime? Are we as a society prepared to accept that it is now possible for a woman to flash her erect penis in public? To extend this further: are we to now accept the possibility of a woman raping another woman with her penis? If nothing else, this is a huge assault on female solidarity and trust.

All the more so because of the relentless and out of control abuse of women who don’t fall into line with the dogma.

I’ve been seeing tweets about this since Sunday but couldn’t find any reliable sources reporting it, until now:

"Israa would be the first woman to face the death penalty simply for peacefully participating in protests in Saudi Arabia."

The women's rights defender Israa al-Ghomgham and four other activists face execution, according to reports. https://t.co/rxX4NZO0Rj pic.twitter.com/N3p75o4XSn

— BBC World Service (@bbcworldservice) August 22, 2018

The story:

Reports suggest that the women’s rights defender Israa al-Ghomgham and four other activists face execution. They’re currently on trial in front of a terrorism tribunal on charges including “taking part in protests”.

Saudi Arabia’s powerful young Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman, has enacted some high profile social and economic reforms in recent years. But they’ve been accompanied by a crackdown on dissent with dozens of clerics, intellectuals and activists arrested in the past year, including women who had campaigned for the right to drive.

Execution. For social protest. Never let anyone tell you Saudi Arabia is a friend or ally.

This is monstrous even for them.

For 34 days, investigators searched for 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts. Yesterday, an illegal alien, now charged with first-degree murder, led police to the cornfield where her body was found.

The Tibbetts family has been permanently separated. They are not alone. pic.twitter.com/BBskwHEJoU

— The White House 45 Archived (@WhiteHouse45) August 22, 2018

Vox comments:

This isn’t just an off-the-cuff Trump tweet; it’s from the official White House account and features official-looking video. It’s deliberate political messaging, meant to turn a case that had attracted nationwide attention for weeks into an opportunity to reiterate Trump’s very favorite rhetorical theme: that many immigrants, specifically unauthorized immigrants, are criminals who want to kill you.

The man arrested for Tibbetts’s murder is Cristhian Bahena Rivera, a 24-year-old farmworker. Authorities have told reporters that Rivera is an unauthorized immigrant from Mexico, and that he was able to work on an Iowa farm because he presented a stolen ID.

So Trump’s thugs howled with joy and rushed to capitalize on the news.

Some of Tibbetts’s relatives have urged the public not to focus on Rivera’s immigration status. Tibbetts’s aunt posted on Facebook that “Evil comes in EVERY color”; her cousin attacked conservative activist Candace Owens on Twitter for “generaliz(ing) a whole population based on some bad individuals.”

But the fact that Tibbetts (a photogenic young white woman whose disappearance was already a national story) was allegedly killed by an unauthorized immigrant is exactly what made the White House’s interest in the story inevitable.

Because one potential murdering unauthorized immigrant means all unauthorized immigrants are suspect, is that it? Well ok then: guess who the Nazis were. Germans! Guess who Trump’s grandfather was. A German immigrant! Let’s deport him to Germany right this second.

Most recently, in late June — as the Trump administration’s policy of family separation at the US-Mexico border was dominating the headlines — the White House convened a gathering of such relatives who had been “permanently separated” from their families, implying that the separation of thousands of families (many of them seeking asylum) was justified because it was an effort to save American families from seeing their loved ones killed.

It’s almost a cliché at this point for the White House to answer every criticism of its immigration policy, from its handling of DACA to its separation of families, with the fact that some unauthorized immigrants have killed some Americans. The use of Mollie Tibbetts as another excuse to hammer on this theme, despite the wishes of some family members, may seem callous.

But really it’s calculatingly disgusting beyond anyone’s ability to describe.

This is how shameless they are. The clip of Trump on AF1 saying to reporters he knew nothing about the payments to Stormy Daniels and they should ask Michael Cohen – that clip is available for anyone to see. The clip of Trump telling Fox News today that he made the payments himself is also available for anyone to see. That means he lied.

But here is Sarah Sanders, who calls herself “Christian” on her personal Twitter, lying to our faces. (It’s not that I think Christian is incompatible with lying, it’s that people like Sanders do and that’s why they call themselves that.)

Trump is ON TAPE in April saying he knew nothing about the payment to Stormy Daniels. Today, he is ON TAPE saying he knew about the payment.

Sarah Sanders was just asked if that shows that Trump lies to the American people. She says it is a "ridiculous accusation." pic.twitter.com/Os1p32NluF

— Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) August 22, 2018

Another one of these Shut Up, Bitch items:

The news outlet Stuff reported on August 19 that “A company has pulled posters commemorating women’s suffrage after pressure from LBTGI youth groups who say the feminist blogger behind the poster campaign holds transgender exclusionary beliefs.” The feminist artist and writer concerned is Renée Gerlich.

The feminist blogger “holds beliefs” that some trans activists don’t like and therefore she must be entirely silenced in every medium and venue.

A non-political small business was engaged by Gerlich to put up some posters she had produced. In New Zealand cities, a large proportion of public and private billboard space available for publicity posters is owned or used by this company, called Phantom Billstickers. According to a promotional article in Ponsonby News, the company was founded in 1982 “mainly to give musicians, the arts and creative people in New Zealand a voice.”

When the posters appeared, Phantom Billstickers was inundated with ‘complaints’…

…so no more posters for her.

Some of the censored posters are reproduced here. They consist of portraits of leaders of the worldwide fight for women’s suffrage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Emmeline Pankhurst in the United Kingdom, Sojourner Truth, Sarah Grimké and Susan B Anthony in the United States, and Mary Ann Müller in New Zealand, together with handwritten quotes from their speeches and writings. Across the bottom of each poster is a statement from the artist: “Suffragists fought for the female sex. Stop re-writing history.” A related series of posters does a similar thing with contemporary feminists.

Here’s one:

The post goes on:

The Phantom Billstickers’ director also appeared to acknowledge that there was absolutely nothing in the content of these posters that could possibly be considered objectionable, or that could justify the censorship in any way, when he said, “The core issue was not the posters themselves, but Gerlich’s blog.”

It’s worth taking a minute to consider the implications of that statement (which evidently reflects the attitude of the censors.)  Artwork is to be censored, not because of the content of the artwork itself, but because of something the artist has said in another forum, at another time. In other words, it is not just the artwork that is being banned, but the artist herself.

That is indeed how this works. Feminists labeled “transphobic” are to be banished entirely, regardless of how distant their subject matter may be from trans issues. Women who want to talk in public have two choices: agree with and repeat every claim made by trans activists, no matter how batshit crazy, or be banished from every outlet the activists can bully into complying. There’s no middle ground where you can decide to bracket trans issues and talk about other things; you are a Forbidden Person.

To find a historical precedent for this sweep of censorial powers it is necessary to go back to the personal ‘banning orders’ imposed on individuals in Apartheid-era South Africa, or the Soviet Union in the depths of the Stalinist counter-revolution. Or, perhaps more appropriately given its deeply misogynist character, to the witch-trials of dead centuries. Today’s self-appointed liberal censors, who use the slur TERF against women in much the same way that the accusation of ‘witch’ was used in the past, will be satisfied with nothing less than a confession of witchcraft.

And in fact, Gerlich has been targeted by continuous pile-on campaigns to silence her for the past two years. She was hounded out of her job, banned from the 2016 Wellington Zinefest, and had a petition signed by 120 people calling for her to be barred from access to the media and academic research. Comments threatening violence have been left on her blog, such as “I hope you get hit by a truck, bitch.”

Very left wing, much progressive.

A guy called Don Franks did a radio interview with Gerlich.

When Franks started promoting the upcoming interview, he received a strong warning from the station’s Community Liaison and programme development officer, Esther Taylor. “Renée Gerlich has a history of publishing transphobic and anti-sex worker comments on public forums, and targeting people in these communities,” Taylor said. “Freedom of speech, the ability to express different views, and the facilitation of discussion are fundamental cornerstones of Access Radio. However, we are wary that some of Renée Gerlich’s  views could be seen as an attack on minority groups or as hate speech… We will not broadcast parts of the interview which are deemed transphobic or anti-sex worker.”

I’m betting the “anti-sex worker” claim is a complete lie, even accepting the premises about what constitutes “anti” and “phobic.” It’s customary to treat the two as inextricably linked, with no need to show examples of both.

H/t Lady Mondegreen in Miscellany Room.

Stewart at Gnu Atheism:

The Daily Dot tells us, with great indignation, that trans activists are getting Twitter suspensions or bans merely for threatening women they dislike. What is the world coming to when people aren’t free to threaten women on social media?

Trans Twitter has witnessed a spike in transgender users having their accounts suspended or banned on Twitter, and people are searching for answers. Given the apparently related manner in which these suspensions are happening, the community suspects a targeted effort against them. But who?

Some think it has to do with the word “TERF” while others think it takes more than that.

One trans Twitter user, who wished to remain anonymous, shared her evidence with the Daily Dot for TERF itself not being the sole key to this censorship. “Anecdotally I’ve been using TERF constantly without consequence, and so have many others,” she said. She pointed to the Twitter account Your Fave Hates TERFs as further evidence that just using the acronym is not enough to have action taken against you.

Yet the combination of TERF and any keyword that could be considered violent seems to be all it takes to get Twitter’s algorithms to designate a tweet as abusive.

Ohhhh…mere violence. Gee, how dare they.

That and a big push from mass organized reporting. “A tweet that said ‘kick TERFs out of your spaces’ is actionable because of the word kick. They’re mass reporting tweets like that,” she said. Another blatant example of this is the following tweets, which were labeled “abusive”:

We are shown some tweets that talk about giving TERFs some punch and mixing the punch “real good” and giving them straws to make sure they do not choke.

Rather than an explicit policy change, it seems to be TERFs abusing an automated system that sees words like “kick” and “punch,” but not the words that give them context, and certainly not the societal context that informs how trans people talk about TERFs.

Ahhhhhhhh yes the “societal context” that makes it perfectly all right for “activists” to talk publicly about punching kicking stabbing killing feminist women who object to being shoved out of their own spaces, political movements, realities, histories, experiences, everything, to make way for men who are determined to take them over.

Talk about reversing victim and offender.

Discussions of the harm TERFs do to the trans community, or even light-hearted jokes at their expense, might be enough to get someone removed from the platform altogether.

Oh yes those lighthearted jokes about punching stabbing killing women. If only women had a sense of humor, knowutImean?

Tasneem Khalil reports:

*Appeal for urgent medical attention for Dr Shahidul Alam*

Dhaka, Wednesday 22 August 2018.

Today, as Eid-ul-Azha is being celebrated across the country, we went to Keraniganj Central Jail in the morning to meet Dr Shahidul Alam. He has been imprisoned there for 10 days now, since 12 August, when he was taken there after being produced before the magistrate, and following 6 days in remand in the custody of the Detective Branch of the Police.

Dr Alam informed us that he is suffering from breathing difficulties, has pain in the jaw and gums and is facing eyesight problems. Shahidul did not have any such health-related complaints before he was taken into police custody on the night of 5th August 2018. We appeal to the government and more specifically, the jail authorities to ensure immediate medical attention for Dr Shahidul Alam by transfer to a hospital.

Rahnuma Ahmed
(Shahidul Alam’s wife, anthropologist)

Saydia Gulrukh
(Shahidul Alam’s colleague, journalist)

The CREW guys and another lawyer explain some things about the Manfort convictions.

The conviction conclusively and publicly demonstrates what many of us have said since the start of the investigation: This is no “witch hunt.” It instead is one of the most successful special counsel investigations in history. Coming alongside the guilty plea by Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, implicating the president in campaign finance violations, it was a very bad day for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Manafort’s conviction cannot be diminished by arguing, as Mr. Trump and his coterie are fond of doing, that the misconduct was unrelated to the Trump campaign or Russian “collusion.” On the contrary, the trial evidence included Mr. Manafort’s close ties to pro-Russia forces and his desperate financial straits as he “volunteered” his time for the next president. The trial revealed how willing Mr. Manafort was to corruptly leverage his position of influence over Mr. Trump during the campaign for his own personal benefit. He offered briefings to a pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch and dangled a position in the Trump administration in front of a banker who provided him a loan for which he would not otherwise have qualified.

That in particular is useful – I’ve been unclear on what use Manafort made of his internship with the Trump campaign.

Mr. Manafort’s conviction should also send chills down the spines of other potential defendants, possibly including the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. and his informal adviser Roger Stone. As far as we know, they have been excluded from the hundreds of witnesses the special counsel has interviewed. That fact, and the public evidence about their conduct, signals that they may be facing Mr. Mueller’s scrutiny.

Oh really. Interesting.

The conviction is also bad news for the president because it increases the pressure on Mr. Manafort to cooperate with investigators. He has a second trial coming shortly in Washington, D.C., which could add even more time to what will likely be a substantial sentence — and Mr. Mueller reportedly has much more evidence to present to jurors in that trial than he did in the trial that just concluded.

Nor can Mr. Manafort simply wait for a presidential pardon. Mr. Trump hinted at one in his inappropriate tweets while the jury was deliberating, and has otherwise signaled his readiness to use his pardon pen. But should Mr. Trump pardon him, Mr. Manafort should expect state attorneys general to pick up under applicable state laws the threads of corruption and tax fraud that Mr. Mueller has already woven together. Unlike the federal crimes for which he has been convicted, state crimes cannot be wiped away with a presidential pardon. The risk of state charges maintains the pressure on Mr. Manafort to cooperate — especially after Tuesday’s conviction revealed what jurors think of his questionable business practices and other activities.

Bad day for Trump; good day – at last!! – for us.

Uh oh.

The oldest and thickest sea ice in the Arctic has started to break up, opening waters north of Greenland that are normally frozen, even in summer.

This phenomenon – which has never been recorded before – has occurred twice this year due to warm winds and a climate-change driven heatwave in the northern hemisphere.

One meteorologist described the loss of ice as “scary”. Others said it could force scientists to revise their theories about which part of the Arctic will withstand warming the longest.

In other words it’s happening much faster than the most pessimistic predictions.

The sea off the north coast of Greenland is normally so frozen that it was referred to, until recently, as “the last ice area” because it was assumed that this would be the final northern holdout against the melting effects of a hotter planet.

Oops.

As well as reducing ice cover, the ocean intrusion raises concerns of feedbacks, which could tip the Earth towards a hothouse state.

Freakish Arctic temperatures have alarmed climate scientists since the beginning of the year. During the sunless winter, a heatwave raised concerns that the polar vortex may be eroding.

This includes the Gulf Stream, which is at its weakest level in 1,600 years due to melting Greenland ice and ocean warming. With lower circulation of water and air, weather systems tend to linger longer.

A dormant hot front has been blamed for record temperatures in Laplandand forest fires in Siberia, much of Scandinavia and elsewhere in the Arctic circle.

As they say…scary.

H/t Acolyte of Sagan in Miscellany Room

Bill Donohue, president and sole member of what he hilariously calls “The Catholic League,” has written a “they do it too!!!” piece to explain why it’s no big deal for priests to rape children and the church to cover it up.

No one is calling for an investigation of Hollywood perverts, even though over 400 Hollywood executives and employees have been named for sexual misconduct in the past year-and-a-half. That’s over 100 more than the number of Pennsylvania priests implicated in sexual abuse over the past 70 years.

But many people are calling for investigations of Hollywood rapists, plus some investigations are already in print, like those of Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker and Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey in the Times.

But also, a central point: Hollywood is in the entertainment business; it doesn’t pretend to be a holy moral arbiter for all of humanity. The Catholic church, on the other hand, does.

It’s back-to-school time, and that means more kids will be sexually molested. Fortunately for the public school teachers, they will be protected by their union chiefs. More important, no one will call for a grand jury investigation. As for the victims, if they don’t file notice of a claim within 90 days, they are out of luck, and nobody will do anything about it.

They do it too, they do it too!!! Cardinal Timothy Dolan made the same point during a previous explosion of coverage of rapist priests.

The Catholic church is a moral sewer.

Meanwhile, in Indonesia:

An Indonesian court has sentenced a Buddhist woman to 18 months in prison for blasphemy after she was accused of insulting Islam.

Meiliana, a 44-year-old ethnic Chinese woman, had complained the Muslim call to prayer, which is repeated five times a day, was being played too loudly at the mosque near her house in North Sumatra.

She burst into tears as the presiding judge, Wahyu Prasetyo Wibowo announced her sentence on Tuesday and she was taken from the court in handcuffs.

Damn I hate religion sometimes. This is one of those times. People shouldn’t be persecuted by any “call to prayer” in the first place, much less one that’s electronically amplified, much less five times a day every day starting at dawn.

In July 2016, mobs burned and ransacked at least 14 Buddhist temples throughout Tanjung Balai, a port town on Sumatra, following reports of Meiliana’s complaint about a mosque’s noisy loudspeakers.

Her lawyer, Ranto Sibarani, said they would appeal the verdict.

“We will appeal the verdict because the judges could not prove that our client has committed blasphemy,” he told The Jakarta Post.

Another reason to hate religion. Muslims persecuting Buddhists in Indonesia, Buddhists persecuting Muslims in Burma.

Responding to the sentencing, Usman Hamid, Amnesty International Indonesia’s executive director, said: “Making a complaint about noise is not a criminal offence. This ludicrous decision is a flagrant violation of freedom of expression.

“Sentencing someone to 18 months in prison for something so trivial is a stark illustration of the increasingly arbitrary and repressive application of the blasphemy law in the country.”

It’s also a flagrant violation of people’s right to sleep, work, read, think, talk without amplified yammerings about religion disturbing them five times a day every day. A pox on religion.

Well well well. How about that.

A jury has found former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort guilty on tax and bank fraud charges — a major if not complete victory for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as he continues to investigate the president’s associates.

The jury convicted Manafort on eight of the 18 counts against him and said it was deadlocked on the other 10. U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis declared a mistrial on those charges.

What do you know.

President Trump reacted to the verdict by denouncing Mueller’s investigation.

“It doesn’t involve me … it’s a very sad thing,” the president said after arriving in West Virginia for a political rally, adding that the Manafort case “has nothing to do with” Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Sad.

Manafort’s possible prison sentence wasn’t immediately clear, but legal experts said he likely faces more than a decade in prison under federal sentencing guidelines.

The verdict comes as President Trump has stepped up his criticism of Mueller’s investigation, publicly criticizing it on a weekly basis. As the Manafort trial began, Trump called for the probe to be shut down immediately.

Weekly? Is that all? Not alternate daily?

The 18 charges in the Manafort trial centered around Manafort’s personal finances, and had little to do with the special counsel’s mandate of probing Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether any Trump associates conspired with those efforts.

But the trial was the first to emerge from Mueller’s probe, and as such it marked a significant public test of his work.

The jury deliberated for four days before announcing its verdict.

…

Manafort faces a second trial in September in Washington D.C., on charges he failed to register as a lobbyist for the Ukraine government, and conspired to tamper with witnesses in that case. Manafort has been in jail since June as a result of the witness tampering charges.

What he did in Ukraine is truly awful.