Why is Jonathan “India” Willoughby unaffectionately called Botox Chuckie?

Oh right.

Sing it!

Alllllllll the attention.

Originally a comment by Eava on All rotten.

Hunter Biden gets his share of blame for this, parlaying Daddy’s job into a fat salary for him.

This is what children of famous people do, opportunities find them.

George W. Bush had Saudi investors bail out failing businesses. He was majority owner of the Texas rangers and almost became the commissione of baseball. Jenna Bush is a talk show host with multiple book deals. Chelsea Clinton gets book deals. Andrew Cuomo got positions in the Clinton Administration. At the same time, these are people who are highly educated and steeped in the business/political world. Hunter wasn’t a strung out junkie when he was on the Burisma board.

He was a Georgetown undergrad and Yale law school graduate. He had high level jobs in the finance sector, worked at the Department of Commerece during the Clinton Administration and the George Bush appointed him to a five year term on the Board of Directors of Amtrak. When Joe became VP he stepped down.

Biden was on the board of directors of World Food Program USA, a 501(c)(3) charity based in Washington, D.C., that supports the work of the UN World Food Programme from 2011 to 2017; he served as board chairman from 2011 to 2015.

Before he joined the Burisma board, Biden was hired to help Burisma with corporate governance best practices, while still an attorney with Boies Schiller Flexner, something he was more than qualified to do. Him joining the Board after that isn’t surprising.

The whole conspiracy theory that Burisma had him on the Board to get Biden and the US to fire the prosecutor allegedly investigating Burisma has been debunked repeatedly. The prosecutor was corrupt and wasn’t investigating the company. Keeping the corrupt prosecutor in place would have been in the company’s interest.

One of his partners in his investment firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, was John Kerry’s step-son. RSP was an investor in a Chinese private equity fund. No one is going after John Kerry, who was Secretary of State for part of the time RSP was invested in the Chinese fund.

Hunter did nothing wrong, and nothing but what the vast majority of well connected people do. The fact that Russia is feeding stupid US politicians lies isn’t Hunter’s fault. Hunter wasn’t the one working in his father’s administration selling information to the Saudis in exchange for a $2 billion investment once he left office, for a fund in an area he has no expertise.

And Russian interference absolutely changed the outcome of the election, on multiple levels. They ran a propaganda operation to turn off Democrats from voting or to vote 3rd party. Given the narrow margin by which Trump won several states, which was smaller than the 3rd party vote, it had the desired effect. It was especially targeted to Black voters, which partially explains Clinton’s loss in Michigan, the votes they expected to come in from Detroit never materialized. Paul Manafort turned over detailed voter data to a Russian operative so Russia could precisely target people with specifically crafted propaganda.

Originally a comment by Eric MacDonald on No exception for extrauterine children.

On what basis can anyone say that “Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God.” Of course, we should simply dismiss the idea since there is no God. But if we take it in terms of the beliefs expressed in Genesis, we have to ask what does speaking about the image of God even mean? We have no idea. But it is implausible to think that reference is being made to fertilised eggs, since no one knew of them at the time, so it couldn’t have been part of the meaning of ‘image of God’. The implication is that it refers either to physiognomy or mental characteristics. We are in the image of God in respect of our ability to know good and evil, for example, for it is in that section of the story that the idea of the image of God arises. Or we are in the image of God in that we have a physical structure that may have been thought to reproduce God’s image.

What is more striking is an American state making laws grounded on religious beliefs. This simply determines what people must believe, since religious interpretations bind people to the beliefs of those defining them. Yet I thought that no religious test was required for citizenship in the US.

Besides, religious beliefs are open to hermeneutical variety and resulting confusion. There is no way we can pin down definitive religious beliefs, unless we have an ecclesial structure that provides the means for defining dogma. Is the Alabama Supreme Court going to start defining Christian (or any other) religious dogma which will be binding on Alabamans?

What a peculiar country the US is. It began with 13 colonies that were seeking religious freedom, and yet the country itself is overburdened with fundamentalists of various stripes who want to define what everyone must believe. I’m glad I live in Canada!

Trump helps the prosecution again:

Special counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump in June for hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. During a Fox News town hall on Tuesday night, host Laura Ingraham asked Trump why he hadn’t simply returned the material when the government asked him to do so.

“First of all, I didn’t have to hand them over,” Trump said bluntly. “But second of all, I would have done that. We were talking, and then all of a sudden they raided Mar-a-Lago.”

Of course, he did “have to.” He’s just brazenly lying in his usual way when he says he didn’t. He may in some sense “believe” he had the right to take them, but he has no right to believe that, because he’s been told otherwise a billion times. His “belief” is just the stubborn toddleresque “I can if I want to” bratty enitlement that is his entire worldview.

The former president faces 41 criminal counts for willful retention of national defense information, making false statements, and conspiracy to obstruct justice, among other things. He has repeatedly insisted that he had every right to keep the documents. He does not.

And, epistemically, he doesn’t even have the right to believe he has the right. (There is no supreme court of epistemic justice though, so he’ll continue to get away with that one until he shuts up for good.

Hm. It seems Russia has been faking stories about Hunter Biden and the Republicans have been lapping them up and now they can’t any more. What a normal and healthy situation.

Representative Jim Jordan seems to be struggling with the realization that Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden appears to be founded on a bed of lies peddled by the Russian government.

On Wednesday, the Ohio Republican got caught up in his own words, insisting that the inquiry still had merit, despite the Justice Department indictment against its primary witness, Alexander Smirnov…

On Tuesday, the Justice Department revealed that Smirnov admitted to prosecutors that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved” in developing the Hunter Biden narrative.

Well good, that’s excellent. We want Putin’s Russia deciding what we can have.

On Thursday, special counsel David Weiss announced the indictment of Smirnov on one count of making a false statement and one count of creating a false record, related to what he told the FBI in 2020 about alleged corruption by the Biden family and its connection to Ukrainian-owned Burisma Holdings.

Hunter Biden gets his share of blame for this, parlaying Daddy’s job into a fat salary for him. The Bidens aren’t as bad as the Trump’s but they’re not good, either. It seems we don’t get to have good people.

Frozen objects in test tubes are children, according to the Alabama Supreme Court. Not potential children, future children, the makings of children, but children.

Referencing antiabortion language in the state constitution, the judges’ majority opinion said that an 1872 statute allowing parents to sue over the wrongful death of a minor child applies to “unborn children,” with no exception for “extrauterine children.”

“Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory,” Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote in a concurring opinion.

But. But. But “God” isn’t real, “God” is an idea invented by humans. We don’t even know what “the image of God” would look like, because there are no photos. You might as well say embryos in test tubes have the image of Jane Eyre or Bugs Bunny or Yosemite Sam. “God” is just a name, with nothing to stick it to. And what does it mean to “efface” someone’s “glory”?

If only we could lock the god-botherers and the gender-botherers in a room and let them argue with each other from here to eternity. So many problems solved.

Gannett refuses to publish Doonesbury.

NPR chatted with Masha Gessen about comparing Gaza to Nazi ghettoes back in December.

Prominent Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen received a prestigious award for political thought over the weekend, in a ceremony that almost didn’t happen due to backlash over their recent writings on Israel-Gaza.

Israel’s air-and-ground assault on Gaza has killed more than 20,000 people in the 10 weeks since the Hamas-led attack on Israel killed some 1,200 people and took more than 240 others hostage.

Why did Israel commit this air-and-ground assault on Gaza? Because that’s where Hamas is. It didn’t do it as part of a broader campaign to kill all Muslims or all Arabs. It can still be a war crime, but comparable to Hitler’s genocide it is not.

Gessen, who is Jewish and whose family lost loved ones in the Holocaust, has been criticized for a New Yorker essay published earlier this month in which they likened the Gaza Strip to the WWII-era ghettos that Nazis developed to segregate and control Jewish people in occupied Europe.

Gessen of course is also the damn fool who blew up her own reputation for serious journalism by “coming out” as a they/them.

Gessen notes there are key differences between the two: The Nazi claim that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from disease “had no basis in reality,” while Israel’s stance that the isolation of Gaza is necessary to protect against Palestinian terrorist attacks “stems from actual and repeated acts of violence.”

“Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate — and now, mortally endanger — an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own,” they contend.

Well, that’s misleading, because “entire population” refers to very different things there. The entire population of Gaza is a tiny fraction of the entire population of European Jews circa 1940. Also, “in the name of protecting its own” has very different meanings in Gaza today versus all of Europe circa 1940.

LF: And you also make a comparison that caused backlash, saying Gaza right now is like a Nazi era Jewish ghetto and that right now the ghetto is being liquidated. But you must have known writing it would get this type of backlash. Why did you make that comparison?

MG: Well, the comparison is very much the centerpiece of the article. And I think that we have a moral and one could also argue, legal obligation to compare the Holocaust and the atrocities committed during the Second World War to the present. If we take the promise of never again, seriously, we once again have to constantly be asking ourselves, are we laying the foundations for the mass murder of millions of people? Are we employing or is part of the world employing the same kinds of tactics that were employed by the Nazis? I think there’s every reason to say that that is exactly what’s happening.

You know, the Nazis weren’t the last occasion of mass murder of large numbers of people. Remember the Balkans? Remember Rwanda? The Rohingya? Uighurs? Cambodia? Partition? We keep doing this. Bad analogies don’t help anything.

The Times of Israel in December:

The Russian-American writer Masha Gessen received a German literary prize Saturday in a ceremony that was delayed and scaled down in reaction to an article she penned comparing Gaza to Nazi German ghettos. The comparison in a recent New Yorker article was viewed as controversial in Germany, where government authorities strongly support Israel, in part as a form of compensation for the Holocaust and the murder of 6 million Jews.

Gessen, who was born Jewish in the Soviet Union, is critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

One can be critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians without claiming it’s comparable to the Holocaust.

In Gessen’s article, titled “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” the author explores German Holocaust memory, arguing that Germany today stifles free and open debate on Israel. Gessen also is critical of Israel’s relationship with Palestinians, writing that Gaza is “like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.”

Apart from the very significant differences.

The Böll Foundation, affiliated with Germany’s Green party, called the comparison made by the author between Israel and Nazi Germany “unacceptable.” A jury decided in the summer to award Gessen, an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the foundation said it wasn’t canceling the award itself.

Gessen was originally due to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought on Friday in the city hall of Bremen, in northwest Germany, but the sponsoring organization, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and the Senate of the city of Bremen withdrew from the ceremony.

It took place instead in a different location Saturday with about 50 guests crowded into a small event room and with police security, the German news agency dpa reported.

The slaughter of civilians in Gaza is horrible. It’s also not comparable to the Holocaust. The differences should be too glaring to ignore.

Parental advice-giver found guilty of horrific child abuse. Of course.

Ruby Franke, a mother of six who gave online parenting advice via a popular YouTube channel, was sentenced to four prison terms of between one and 15 years each, on aggravated child abuse charges on Tuesday.

Franke, 42, who had 2.3 million followers on her now-deleted 8 Passengers video channel, was arrested in the southern Utah city of Ivins last August after her malnourished 12-year-old son, with open wounds and bound with duct tape, climbed out of a window at the home of Jodi Hildebrandt, owner of a self-improvement counseling business, to ask for food and water from a neighbor.

So her parenting advice is to hand your children over to a sadist to be starved stabbed and duct taped?

I’d love to know all about Hildebrandt’s wisdom on self-improvement.

One of Franke’s daughters was later found in a similar malnourished condition in Hildebrandt’s home…

Franke and Hildebrandt, who collaborated on parenting and relationship advice videos posted on Hildebrandt’s life coaching service ConneXions, pleaded guilty to second-degree aggravated child abuse in December. Hildebrandt was also sentenced to to the same prison terms as Franke on Tuesday.

Life coaching! Please, share the life coaching! We all need to improve.

In Solicitors Behaving Badly news…

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) yesterday upheld allegations that a solicitor published antisemitic and offensive posts on social media and also abused Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) staff.

The conduct of Farrukh Najeeb Husain was reported to the regulator by leading law firm Bevan Brittan, where he was working as a self-employed consultant to deliver on a particular client mandate in spring 2021. Some of the key tweets were directed at Simon Myerson KC, a Jewish barrister, and Hugo Rifkind, a Jewish journalist at The Times.

And they are eye-watering.

In its rule 12 statement – setting out its case to the tribunal – the SRA alleged that, as well as being “plainly inappropriate, offensive, pejorative, puerile and derogatory”, some of the tweets aimed at Mr Myerson could be considered to be antisemitic as well. Mr Husain frequently used the word ‘Zionist’ as a synonym or substitute for ‘Jew’, it said, while he used words used by the Nazis, such as ‘Untermensch’ and ‘Lebensraum’.

“The use of these terms associated with Nazism would have upsetting associations for Jews (not just Zionists) and were of course terms or principles/policies used towards Jews (not just Zionists) by the Nazis when perpetrating the Holocaust,” the SRA said. “If the respondent was seeking to make a comparison to seek to demonstrate that Israel was treating Palestinians in the same way that the Nazis had historically treated Jews, it is reasonable to infer that the use of comparisons so closely associated with historic antisemitic violence was deliberate in order to offend the recipients (including Mr Myerson KC) not only as Zionists (as claimed to be by the respondent) but also as Jews.”

Especially given the absence of trains taking Palestinians to extermination camps.

Among the comments aimed at Mr Rifkind were that he was “a Zionist pig supporting theft of Palestine for his Eastern European kin” with other tweets referring to Israel as “ShitRael” and asking if he was “just mentally retarded as a racist?”

That’s why I say breathtaking.

The CAA said that, during cross-examination, Mr Husain described Mr Myerson as “a fascist” and also attacked Mr Silverman. The SRA accused Mr Husain of publishing tweets on other subjects that made “offensive or pejorative comments relating to others’ race and religion, making sexually explicit comments, using language intended to shock”.

Further, Mr Husain sent the SRA’s investigating officer “offensive emails when he was displeased with the course of the SRA’s investigation”, such as one saying: “You are a Zionist apologist and fascist like ur organisation – look forward to the McCarthyite show trial.” He suggested that the officer was “a Sikh Punjabi” who was “angry about comments made on twitter by me about the Sikh national hero Ranjit Singh as a rapist of Muslim women”.

Lordeee. It sounds as if he’s out of work; maybe he can get Trump to hire him as a speechwriter.

Trump finally mentions Navalny, but…..

Well, you know. Not the normal way.

Seventy-two hours following the death of Alexei Navalny, Donald Trump made his first comments on the death of the Russian opposition leader Monday but stopped short of condemning anyone or offering sympathy.

Instead, the former president related his own legal woes to the death of Navalny, who died in prison on Friday at the age of 47. Trump on Friday was ordered to pay a $354.8 million penalty payment as part of civil fraud trial decision.

Apart from the callous self-serving, there’s the fact that Trump isn’t 47, Trump really is a criminal and a bad person, Trump isn’t dead.

“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Monday. “It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction. Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024.”

He might as well have said “The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of” ice cream or baseball or mosquitos or Rembrandt. He wasn’t thinking about Navalny at all.

Steve Scott’s interview with “Emily” Bridges wasn’t his first rodeo. He was pouring on the sympathy and flattery all the way back in June 2022.

Online abuse has become a way of life for Emily Bridges: “It is very difficult to read everything people are saying about you, and it hurts, it hurts.”

Maybe – and this is just a suggestion – if you weren’t cheating women in their own sport people wouldn’t be saying things about you that you find “difficult.” Maybe the people wouldn’t be hurty if you weren’t so cheaty.

Bridges has become one of the most talked about athletes in Britain and the discussions about her are seldom nuanced. She sits at the centre of a polarising issue that sport in general is struggling to reconcile.

Why do the discussions about him – HIM, not her – have to be nuanced? His cheating isn’t nuanced.

He makes an odd admission toward the end of the piece.

For Bridges, though, how much of it is about medals and winning, compared to inclusion?

“The whole appeal of cycling as a sport for me, and sport in general, is about the struggle.

“I want to fight to get the best out of myself, to get the best performance that I can do. It’s not about the winning for me. Obviously, I like winning, I want to win, but it’s secondary to being allowed to compete – being given the opportunity to get the most out of myself, on an equal playing field, against people who have an equal performance to me.”

If that’s true, he should still be competing against men.

Man disagrees with woman by saying he doesn’t consider her sexually appetizing. How very original.

There’s also video.

Bridges at 0.30 says “if it was safe for me to compete” but doesn’t go on to explain how it’s not safe for him to compete. Of course it’s safe for him to compete against other men, apart from the risks all competitive cyclists take on. The claim that it’s unsafe for him in particular is just more of the maddening reversal all male trans “activists” go in for – pretending they’re vulnerable, they’re at risk, they’re unsafe, they might face physical violence.

Then he says “I can’t compete” and Scott says, rather unsympathetically, “But you can compete in an open category.” This flummoxes the lad a bit. He pauses, then asks with a girlish tilt of the head, “Can I?” Flirtatious pause, then “Would it be safe for me to compete in an open category”? Then there’s a jump cut, so we don’t know how Scott replied. Why would it be unsafe for the oily manipulative sly Bridges to compete in an open category? Is he suggesting an angry woman would violently attack him? And win the fight?

Then he says it’s not fair to make a trans woman compete in the open category, “and it’s not safe, either.” He doesn’t explain why. He of course never explains why he thinks it is fair to let men compete in the women’s category.

Scott asks him if in elite sport fairness is non-negotiable. Bridges, slightly flustered, claims he understands why fairness is important. Scott asks him if he thinks his human rights have been violated and Bridges says “Yeah, I think they have.” No follow-up. Violated how? What human right is there for a man to pretend to be a woman and compete in women’s sports? What is the wording?

Bridges says it’s part of a bigger picture of “banning trans people from public life.” By that of course he means not letting men invade women’s toilets and the like.

To finish up we get a clip of brave “Emily” riding down an empty road among t’moors and an assurance that he will continue his heroic struggle. Of course he will.

Not only does Steve Scott at ITV News write a fawning piece about “Emily” Bridges and his tragic failure to continue cheating women in cycling races, but also ITV News turns off comments on the Twitter link to said piece.

ITV News doesn’t turn off comments lightly…in fact it apparently never does except when the subject is an entitled man trying to cheat women in sports.

Yes why is that? Why is that??

Oh good, more whining from a man about not being able to compete in women’s sports.

Emily Bridges once dreamt of racing for Olympic glory in Paris this summer. But after British Cycling barred transgender women [aka MEN] from competing in the female category last year, she has all but given up on elite sport.

Diddums. After British Cycling barred men who pretend to be women from competing in the female category, Bridges gave up. That’s good news.

Bridges said the policy amounts to a ban from elite cycling.  

“A ban is a ban. You can say you can compete in the open category, but we’re women – we should be able to race in the women’s category,” she said.

They’re not women. They’re men who try to look like women, which doesn’t make them women. I could try to look like a dolphin, but it wouldn’t make me a dolphin.

British Cycling had given her the option to compete in the ‘open’ category alongside other transgender women, transgender men, and athletes born biologically male. But Bridges said she would not feel safe competing alongside men and does not like transgender women having to ‘out’ themselves to compete in the category.

Diddums. Again. Journalists should stop taking this entitled whining seriously. They should also stop calling men “she” and “her” – it just further entrenches the tedious destructive lie.

Beyond sport, Bridges is unequivocal about the impact about the wider impact excluding transgender athletes is having. She believes calls to restrict the participation of transgender athletes reinforces the idea that trans women are not women and that they are a threat.

It’s not “an idea”; it’s the reality.

Don’t mention the War.

For quite a while now, it has felt a bit like mainstream feminism has been dialled back 10 years. It’s not just the over-the-top obsession with the Barbie movie – there seems to have been a more generalized dumbing-down in the media when it comes to women’s issues. In 2021 and 2022, it felt like intersectional feminism was everywhere and nuanced discussions about how gender intersects with other forms of oppression, such as classism and racism, had moved from academic circles into the mainstream. It felt like there was a huge push – to paraphrase Rafia Zakaria, the author of Against White Feminism – to “put the fangs back in feminism”. Now, however, mainstream feminism seems to have lost its fangs and put on some sparkly lipstick instead.

Really? In 2021 and 2022? There was a huge push to put the fangs back in feminism? Along with the huge push to put the men back in feminism, which kind of nullified the fangs.

While liberal feminism (which is also often termed white feminism or corporate feminism or lean-in feminism) did fall out of favour for a bit, it feels like it’s trying very hard to make a comeback.

…

Beyond the trending headlines, substantive work is happening. Things are moving forward. “There are so many different types of feminism and gender-conscious activism that operate well outside mainstream media narratives … and social media trends,” Koa Beck, the author of White Feminism, told me over email. “I don’t advise looking to white feminism to articulate, support, or celebrate these stories in a substantive way.”

Do you advise looking to male feminism to do so?

Perhaps the ultimate takeaway from this is that, in the end, everything is cyclical. There is progress, then there is pushback. “White feminism is a concept, a story, a brand, and an ideology that many powerful entities have invested in, both literally and figuratively,” Beck says. “So there are going to be efforts by influential people, powerful companies, and profitable institutions to ‘get back’ to white feminist ideals of individualization, self-empowerment (in the trademark sense of the word), and lots and lots of spending. Like with all big change, there is cultural and political resistance. You can set your watch by it.”

The end. It’s quite a long piece yet it says not one word about the way trans ideology and bullying have undermined feminism and replaced feminist women with misogynist men.

Just imagine: a lesbian is planning a lesbian club and she’s not including men. So eccentric.

A feminist campaigner is to open Britain’s first lesbian members bar that will only allow biological women to join.

Well duh. It’s a lesbian members bar, so obviously it’s not for men.

(The men can always try the Garrick.)

The bar, named the L Community, is due to open in London later this year and will operate as a private members club so that it can bar trans women from signing up.

The bar has been set up by Jenny Watson, who in September last year was at the centre of a transphobia row after she insisted only “adult human females” could attend the lesbian speed-dating events she had organised, and urged men to stay away.

Women must never ever ever say no to men.

The bar will continue to provide speed-dating sessions, as well as open mic shows, live music performances and a book club. Ms Watson rejected the suggestion that her bar policy was transphobic and said she was instead trying to create a women-only space.

But women are subversive, so if there are no men present, they might bring all of society down. It’s a risk.