How dare she.
Women and girls are whipped, beaten up, imprisoned, killed for not wearing that loathsome snuffer. What is the purpose of it? To keep men from getting erections because a woman has hair on her head. How about forcing men to wear iron underpants instead of forcing women to wrap blankets around their heads?
And so we arrive at full circle: contempt for and mockery of lesbians by The Most Oppressed of Them All.
I’m gobsmacked by that, I must say. The new contempt for lesbians just like the old contempt for lesbians. Don’t worry: just be sure to mock and dismiss women and you’ll always be on the right track.
That Tweet is providing cover.
Dawkins is now a human shield!
Bloomberg on the cruise ship question:
When Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas embarks on its first official voyage on Jan. 27, the journey is sure to make waves. The world’s largest cruise ship, the Icon is over 1,000 feet long (360 meters) and weighs in around 250,000 gross registered tons. It boasts 20 different decks; 40 restaurants, bars and lounges; seven pools; six waterslides and a 55-foot waterfall. Royal Caribbean says its boat will usher in “a new era of vacations.”
Maybe so. But the Icon is also a doubling down on a negative aspect of cruising’s current era: greenhouse gas emissions.
In 2022, Bryan Comer, director of the Marine Program at the International Council on Clean Transportation examined the carbon footprint of cruising as compared to a hotel stay plus air travel — since cruises are effectively floating hotels. His analysis found that a person taking a US cruise for 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) on the most efficient cruise line would be responsible for roughly 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms) of CO2, compared with 518 pounds (235 kilograms) for a round-trip flight and a stay in a four-star hotel. In other words: Taking a cruise generates “about double the amount of total greenhouse gas emissions” as flying, Comer says.
Also, Bloomberg goes on to say, people usually fly to get to the cruise ship.
People are also going on cruises in bigger numbers than ever.
Cruise ships’ climate impact isn’t limited to emissions that trap heat in the atmosphere. The enormous vessels also spew a soot-like substance known as black carbon, which absorbs sunlight and traps heat on the ground. In the Arctic, which is playing host to a growing number of cruises, black carbon can settle on snow and ice, speeding up the rate at which glaciers melt. Bartolini Cavicchi says that while cruise ships account for around 1% of the global fleet, they’re responsible for 6% of black carbon emissions.
Well maybe once Alaska is covered in soot people won’t want to take cruises there any more.
Just kidding. By that time people will be killing each other for a loaf of bread.
But liquid natural gas! Better!
LNG-powered ships do emit 25% less CO2 than those running on conventional marine fuels, but one 2023 investigation by environmental activists found that cruise ships running on LNG often leak some of it directly into the atmosphere as methane, a greenhouse gas that in the short term is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. For three out of four engine types, the investigation determined that LNG was worse for the climate in the short term than conventional fuels.
Ok ok ok but long term it will be great. Somehow.
Joan Smith on Keir Starmer’s buddy relationship with the People of Gender:
[G]ender-critical women’s organisations and even some of his own MPs struggle to get a meeting with Sir Keir Starmer.
Not so trans activists, for whom Starmer apparently has all the time in the world. This week he welcomed members of the lobby group LGBT+ Labour to a reception at Westminster and offered them everything the most dedicated trans activist could want, short of self-ID. Starmer was accompanied by a raft of frontbenchers including his deputy, Angela Rayner, and the Shadow Women and Equalities Minister, Anneliese Dodds.
“Together we’ll ban conversion therapy, strengthen hate crime laws and tackle health inequalities,” Dodds posted excitedly on X.
But the “conversion therapy” she means isn’t conversion therapy, and by “health inequalities” she probably means the tragic unfairness of not being able to swap sex as easily as you can swap hats. Meanwhile, what about women? The people who are subject to rape which goes uninvestigated, unprosecuted, unconvicted, unpunished? Any inequalities there?
It must be galling for Labour MPs such as Rosie Duffield, who has been relentlessly targeted by LGBT+ Labour, to see the party’s leading figures palling up to its members. Starmer has not spoken to Duffield for more than two years, leaving her to cope unsupported with endless smears and demands that she should lose the Labour whip. He is evidently more comfortable with the widely-ridiculed MP for Jarrow, Kate Osborne, who was at the reception despite having boasted on X about her delusion that some women have a penis.
It’s galling for Rosie and for all of us – galling, infuriating, frustrating. It feels as if 50 years of progress have been torched.
Trump loses another fight. Loser.
Donald Trump’s attempt to bring a case in the UK against a former MI6 officer who compiled a salacious dossier linking him to Russia has failed. The former president had been seeking to use data protection laws to sue the company run by Christopher Steele but the High Court has thrown out the case.
Mr Steele compiled the dossier which contained unproven allegations about bribing officials and sex parties. It was leaked to the media just before Mr Trump was sworn in as president.
It was BuzzFeed that leaked it, not Steele.
Trump filed the case too late. He says that’s because he was too busy being president. Too busy tweeting is more like it.
Dawkins is prodding the gender ideologues.
The way the non-binary faithful obsess about intersexes, and about individuals who can’t produce gametes, amounts to a pathetic clutching at straws while they drown in postmodern effluent. Yes, some fish change from sperm-producing male to egg-producing female (or vice versa). That very statement relies on the gametic definition of male & female. Ditto hermaphroditic worms & snails who can produce both male & female gametes.
In any case, the existence of intersexes is irrelevant to transexualist claims, since trans people don’t claim to be intersexes. Also, as if it matters, humans are not worms, snails, or fish.
The rare tetra-amelia syndrome (babies born without limbs) does not negate the statement that Homo sapiens is a bipedal species. The rare four-winged bithorax mutation does not negate the statement that Drosophila is a Dipteran (two winged) fly. Similarly, the occasional individual who can’t produce gametes doesn’t negate the generalisation that mammals come in only two sexes, male and female, defined by games size.
Sex is binary as a matter of biological fact. “Gender” is a different matter and I leave that to others to define.
It’s interesting that there aren’t equivalents for “gender” in other physical categories of human. There aren’t claims that species is physical while [???] is social or cultural. I suppose it’s only a matter of time.
Meanwhile of course the People of Gender are lining up to tell Dawkins how wrong he is.
(Remember Dear Muslima? I lined up to tell Dawkins how wrong he was that time, but then Dear Muslima was not, repeat not, a matter of science, or even about science or a scientific claim.) (Also, the origin of Dear Muslima was a post of PZ’s that was about an incident that happened to me, along with a different incident that happened to Rebecca. I was naturally interested in the comments on that thread.)
More on that “trans people have worse mental health” gotcha:
In fact there’s a large stream of people saying “Well duh of course they have more mental health issues, like for instance thinking they’re in ‘the wrong body’.”
Transgender people in England are much more likely to have a long-term mental health condition, the first study of its kind shows, with some facing a risk five times higher than cisgender people.
…
The research, led by the University of Manchester in collaboration with the Proud Trust and LGBT Foundation, was published in the Lancet Public Health journal.
“Trans, non-binary and gender-diverse people across England face widespread discrimination, leading to stressful social interactions and feelings of unacceptance, increasing the risk of poor mental health,” said Dr Luke Munford, a senior lecturer in health economics at Manchester and co-author of the paper.
Or maybe it’s the other way around? Maybe it’s bad mental health that caused them to try to be the opposite sex?
The survey questions did not record when their mental health condition developed. Munford said the researchers could therefore not rule out the possibility that the mental health condition predated the change of their gender identity.
Ah. Well then it’s not much use as a survey, is it.
Alongside investigating the frequency of mental health conditions, the researchers looked at how well people’s mental health needs were met at GP appointments. Those with a gender identity other than cisgender male or cisgender female were more likely to report unmet needs at their last consultation.
But there again – who is deciding what these “mental health needs” are? Maybe those with a specialty “gender identity” are reporting “unmet needs” that their GP considers delusions as opposed to needs.
Well capitalism isn’t taking all this climate change stuff lying down. It’s SUING, god damn it.
Business and agricultural groups sued California on Tuesday over the most sweeping climate disclosure mandates in the nation, arguing the policies signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year overstep on the federal government’s authority to regulate emissions nationwide.
While business and agriculture have every right to destroy what’s left of the planet so that they can keep making a profit.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, California Chamber of Commerce, American Farm Bureau Federation and other groups filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. They argue the new rules go too far in part because they apply to companies headquartered outside of California as long as they do business in the state.
The nerve! State borders are sacred, and far more important than not cooking the planet.
The groups also allege the laws infringe upon the First Amendment by requiring companies to comment on what the lawsuit calls a “politically fraught” topic — climate change.
Yes but you know what climate change is besides politically fraught? An unfolding disaster that will alter the entire planet and everything that lives on it.
Be sure to keep the causes of climate change a secret so that the causes can continue to cause.
Business and agricultural groups sued California on Tuesday over the most sweeping climate disclosure mandates in the nation, arguing the policies signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year overstep on the federal government’s authority to regulate emissions nationwide.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, California Chamber of Commerce, American Farm Bureau Federation and other groups filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. They argue the new rules go too far in part because they apply to companies headquartered outside of California as long as they do business in the state. The groups also allege the laws infringe upon the First Amendment by requiring companies to comment on what the lawsuit calls a “politically fraught” topic — climate change.
Here’s the thing: the “topic” can be as politically fraught as you want but that doesn’t change the reality of climate change and what it’s going to do to the children of all these Chamber of Commerce and Farm Bureau litigators. Climate change doesn’t care about your political; it just does what it does.
State Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat representing San Francisco who authored the law, called the lawsuit “straight up climate denial.”
“The Chamber is taking this extremist legal action because many large corporations — particularly fossil fuel corporations and large banks — are absolutely terrified that if they have to tell the public how dramatically they’re fueling climate change, they’ll no longer be able to mislead the public and investors,” he said in a statement.
But hey he’s a D so he would say that, while the people who are R say the other thing. Meanwhile, climate change continues, in complete indifference to the D and the R.
The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called “Keeling curve” that has charted the upward march of the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels.
A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 in today’s money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling’s earliest work in measuring CO2 levels across the western US, the documents reveal.
Keeling would go on to establish the continuous measurement of global CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This “Keeling curve” has tracked the steady increase of the atmospheric carbon that drives the climate crisis and has been hailed as one of the most important scientific works of modern times.
…
“The possible consequences of a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate, rates of photosynthesis, and rates of equilibration with carbonate of the oceans may ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization,” [Samuel] Epstein, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology (or Caltech), wrote to the group in November 1954.
Experts say the documents show the fossil fuel industry had intimate involvement in the inception of modern climate science, along with its warnings of the severe harm climate change will wreak, only to then publicly deny this science for decades and fund ongoing efforts to delay action on the climate crisis.
Fascinating. They were among the earliest to know, I guess so that they could get a head start on hiding it.
The newly discovered documents now show the industry knew of CO2’s potential climate impact as early as 1954 via, strikingly, the work of Keeling, then a 26-year-old Caltech researcher conducting formative work measuring CO2 levels across California and the waters of the Pacific ocean. There is no suggestion that oil and gas funding distorted his research in any way.
The findings of this work would lead the US scientist to further experiments upon the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii that were to provide a continual status report of the world’s dangerously-rising carbon dioxide composition.
Keeling died in 2005 but his seminal work lives on. Currently, the Earth’s atmospheric CO2 level is 422 parts per million, which is nearly a third higher than the first reading taken in 1958, and a 50% jump on pre-industrial levels.
This essential tracking of the primary heat-trapping gas that has pushed global temperatures to higher than ever previously experienced in human civilization was born, in part, due to the backing of the Air Pollution Foundation.
Victorian MP Georgie Purcell has
hit out[objected] after an edited a picture of her was shown on a commercial television bulletin last night.The Animal Justice Party MP says an image used by 9News Melbourne to illustrate a story about her opposition to duck hunting featured enlarged breasts, while her dress was altered to become a cropped top and skirt.
Seems too conservative. Why not put her in a bikini?
Ms Purcell says it’s an example of the “ongoing, insidious” treatment of female MPs in the media.
9News Melbourne director Hugh Nailon apologised in a statement. “As is common practice, the image was resized to fit our specs,” he said. “During that process, the automation by Photoshop created an image that was not consistent with the original.”
Uh huh and the changes just happened to be in the direction of “make this bitch look hotter.”
Beyond parody:
But wait! Network Rail can say which people it’s talking about…when they’re the right people.
Where a man identifies.
Oh god what it actually looks like.
You’re trapped with a billion people in their ugliest sloppiest clothes slouching around scavenging for more hot dogs. There’s no escape! Never mind the rain and the slopping water everywhere, it’s the people the people the people.
We’re not women, we’re “bodies with vaginas.”
In
the
Lancet.
A surge of a hormone made by fetuses triggers the stomach-turning nausea and vomiting of morning sickness, a new study suggests.
People who have naturally low levels of the protein in their blood before pregnancy are more susceptible to a severe form of morning sickness called hyperemesis gravidarum when hit with the rush of protein, researchers report December 13 in Nature. The findings could help identify people at risk of the severe illness and lead to treatments.
Up to 80 percent of pregnant people get nauseous in the early stages of pregnancy, and about half vomit — a combo of symptoms often called (misleadingly) morning sickness. A small percentage of pregnant people — up to 3 percent — will develop hyperemesis gravidarum, vomiting so severe and frequent it can lead to weight loss, dehydration and even hospitalization and death of the fetus or mother.
Emphasis added. Also oops oops oops how did that filthy word “mother” get in there?
Previously, researchers speculated morning sickness is caused by estrogen or other hormones that are elevated early in pregnancy, says gynecologist and obstetrician Jone Trovik, who was not involved in the study. For severe sickness, she says, studies implicated elevated thyroid hormone, infections and other causes.
“Most problematic has been that it has been considered to be a psychological cause, which has been widely refuted,” says Trovik, of Haukeland University hospital and the University of Bergen in Norway. “Women have been told, ‘Maybe you don’t want this pregnancy. Maybe you’re angry with your husband.’”
Oh dear. She’s not on board with the People People, is she.
Patients who had nausea and vomiting during pregnancy had higher levels of a protein called GDF15 in their blood than pregnant people without the symptoms, endocrinologist Stephen O’Rahilly of Cambridge University and colleagues report. That protein, which is made throughout the body and helps cells respond to stress, was previously found to act on a part of the brain involved in producing nausea and vomiting.
Study coauthor Marlena Fejzo and colleagues had already shown that people with a certain genetic variant in the GDF15 gene have up to 10 times the risk of developing hyperemesis gravidarum than people without the variant. But those with the variant produce less GDF15 than is typical, those researchers discovered.
4 virtuous gender-neutrals, zero women. Success!
Turns out that people with the risk variant make less of the protein before pregnancy, but have elevated levels of GDF15 in their blood when pregnant. The twist is that most of the GDF15 produced in pregnancy comes from the fetus and placenta, the study’s researchers found. People with the risk variant aren’t used to GDF15’s sick-making effects. “So when you’re met with those high levels in early pregnancy, you’re highly sensitive to them, more than the average person,” Fejzo says.
Conversely, people with a rare blood disorder called beta thalassemia have high levels of GDF15. Those people rarely get queasy during pregnancy, the researchers found. That finding suggested that exposure to the protein before pregnancy might desensitize people so they don’t become so sick.
Six! Six neutrals! Truly impressive.
H/t Jeffrey Chamberlain
Let’s have another casual insult, shall we?
Sutton United appoint transgender former referee Lucy Clark as manager
Of a women’s team, that is.
While of great personal significance to Clark, the appointment is also noteworthy as it makes her the first transgender woman to be appointed as a manager in the top five divisions of English women’s football.
But we hope there will be many many more? Is that the idea?
Clark returns to management at a time when the place of transgender women in women’s football has come under intense scrutiny.
Gee, why might that be, do you think? Possibly because it’s dangerous as well as unfair?
A group of 48 MPs and 27 peers recently signed a letter urging the Football Association to change its rules on transgender inclusion to “protect women and girls”.
However that is focused more on players. In the dugout, greater diversity of gender is common across women’s football.
But not, of course, men’s football. Men get to go everywhere; women get to go a littlewhere but men get to follow them.
Evidence from the employment tribunal involving Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre stirred some distressing memories. A service designed to help traumatised women appears to have forgotten its core purpose.
In a constructive dismissal case, Roz Adams, a counsellor, said she was told that revealing the biological sex of support workers was transphobic – even if it was done to reassure a rape survivor that she’d be talking to another female.
Transphobic how? I suppose because doing so reminds people that there is such a thing as biological sex and that women often need to know which is which for our own safety.
But so does Mridul Wadhwa really expect the entire world to pretend there’s no such thing as biological sex? Is he hoping that from his little corner of the rape crisis world this new rule will spread until it embraces the entire planet? So women will have no refuge at all anywhere ever?
For many sexually abused women, a male presence can cause distress. The Equality Act uses rape counselling as an example of a service where it is proportionate to “discriminate”, for example by restricting counselling jobs to women.
Oh does it. So that’s why Wadhwa decided to take over and destroy Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre! He wants to make that bit of the “Equality” act null and void.
Rape Crisis Scotland last week took the unusual step of issuing a statement about the Edinburgh tribunal before evidence concluded. The umbrella group seemed to distance itself from the Edinburgh centre, saying services should be “survivor-centred” and “protect dedicated women-only spaces”. The effrontery of this defies belief.
The leadership of Rape Crisis Scotland has been a cheerleader for the removal of women’s sex-based rights. It fully supported the Gender Recognition Reform Act and the notion of self-ID, and failed to endorse former Labour MSP Johann Lamont’s successful amendment to the Forensic Services Bill, designed to ensure victims of sexual assault could choose the sex of their medical examiner.
So Rape Crisis Scotland should change its name to Rape Promotion Scotland.
But wait, it gets worse. The whole article is jaw-dropping.
When I was an MSP, I was approached by several women who needed to access rape crisis support, but wanted the assurance of a female-only service. They were concerned about statements by Mridul Wadhwa, a trans-identified male, who then ran Forth Valley Rape Crisis and had a senior role training volunteers in the service across Scotland.
Why??? What kind of malevolent asshole decides to put a usurping man in that job?
Wadhwa publicly criticised the part of the Equality Act that allowed jobs in the violence against women sector to be reserved for females.
At which point he should have been told to get out of the rape crisis field immediately and never come back. The man is a fucking monster.
I contacted the chief executive of Rape Crisis Scotland, Sandy Brindley, to request a meeting. It was a sensitive undertaking. These were distressed women [the rape survivors, that is]. Most had not met each other in person. We gathered in the offices of Edinburgh Rape Crisis, which were welcoming and comfortable. Myself, Sandy Brindley, and the representative of Edinburgh Rape Crisis gave our full names and job titles. The women used first names only and shared their stories.
One introduced herself simply as “Sharon”. It was assumed she was one of the survivors. However, Sharon soon became quite vocal, asserting that it was against the law to insist your rape counsellor was biologically female (something other experts on the Equality Act dispute). She was, it turned out, Sharon Cowan, a professor of Feminist and Queer Legal Studies, a high-profile trans-rights campaigner who has submitted evidence to both the UK and Scottish parliaments on reform of the gender recognition act advocating for gender self-ID.
For fuck’s sake. Why the hell would you bring a quisling woman-hating academic to that meeting? What is wrong with people?
Bringing a third-party campaigner to a meeting of such vulnerable women without asking their permission, or even offering an introduction, was and remains astounding to me. And, indeed, Brindley later apologised for this oversight in an email.
I’m astounded myself, and I think an after the fact “apology” via email is insultingly worthless.
Rape Crisis Scotland and the network it serves receives large amounts of public money (some of which in Edinburgh’s case is paying the services of a KC to fight this case).
What???
I did not know that.
Like other government funded “official” women’s organisations in Scotland, Rape Crisis say sex self-ID causes no problems. But what I can’t forget is that I was in the room when its CEO heard those women, saw their distress, and knew they were self-excluding from a service they needed.
And did not give one tiny flying fuck.
