All entries by this author
Mar 12th, 2024 8:36 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Reading Kathleen Stock’s heartwarming review of Judith Butler’s new book on Y R terfs so evil. I’ll say one thing for JB: she’s a brilliant catalyst for jokes.
Not for her the pedestrian business of going through critics’ arguments, providing non-partisan evidence, and patiently exposing internal contradictions and gaps in an understated but cumulatively devastating manner.
She could do that, she says, but she goes on to not do it.
Instead, she wants to give the people what nobody was really asking for: a deconstruction of the “syntactical elements” of the “anti-gender movement”, understood as a “phantasmic scene” according to the “theoretical formulation of Jean Laplanche”.
Oh well then. If we’re bringing in Jean Laplanche then it’s game over. (New … Read the rest
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Mar 11th, 2024 4:05 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Is that true?
I assume that by ” those who have whipped up Britain’s unhinged transphobic moral panic” Jones means those who have pointed out that people can’t change sex and that men who claim to be women are displacing and bullying women.
Is it likely that four teenagers would stab a man who claims to be a woman because … Read the rest
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Mar 11th, 2024 10:57 am |
By Ophelia Benson
What was their first clue?
To Donald Trump, Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán is “fantastic,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping is “brilliant,” North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is “an OK guy,” and, most alarmingly, he allegedly said Adolf Hitler “did some good things,” a worldview that would reverse decades-old US foreign policy in a second term should he win November’s presidential election, multiple former senior advisers told CNN.
“He thought Putin was an OK guy and Kim was an OK guy — that we had pushed North Korea into a corner,” retired Gen. John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff, told me. “To him, it was like we were goading these guys. ‘If we didn’t have NATO, then Putin
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Mar 11th, 2024 9:49 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump and Orban agree to murder Ukraine.
Donald Trump “will not give a penny” to Ukraine if he is re-elected US president, the far-right Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said after a controversial meeting with Trump in Florida.
“He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war,” Orbán told state media in Hungary on Sunday. “Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine can not stand on its own feet.” According to Orbán, Trump has a “detailed plan” to end the Ukraine war, which began two years ago when Russia invaded.
Oh please. Trump has no detailed anything. It doesn’t take a detailed plan, all it takes is a Toddler No, and that’s all Trump … Read the rest
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Mar 11th, 2024 6:48 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Wait, you mean Hamas aren’t the good guys? Are you sure? Did you check with them?
Arresting the victim part 3:
During the protest some activists were heard chanting “Zionist scum, off our streets” and several placards showed support for the Houthi militias in Yemen targeting ships going through the Red Sea.
One pro-Palestine activist on the march could be seen wearing a protective helmet and carrying a riot shield. The man, whose helmet was similar to those used by reporters in combat zones, paraded holding the riot shield with the slogan: “Resistance is justified when your land is occupied.”
One young woman held a placard that read: “One holocaust does not justify another,” in defiance of
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Mar 11th, 2024 6:30 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Remember how the police arrested and then “de-arrested” a guy who was protesting Hamas on Saturday? It’s not working out well for them.
A former Cabinet minister has accused the Metropolitan Police of “emboldening” the mob after a counter-protester carrying a sign saying “Hamas is terrorist” at a pro-Palestine rally was arrested.
Niyak Ghorbani, 38, was pulled to the ground and handcuffed by officers after an incident close to the march through central London on Saturday. He was arrested over an allegation of assault but was later de-arrested after officers reviewed footage of the incident.
The Met is now facing calls to take action against a protester who Mr Ghorbani, an Iranian who lives in Balham, says
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Mar 10th, 2024 5:02 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Deutsche Welle on the opening of the Amsterdam Holocaust Museum:
Israeli President Isaac Herzog attended the opening of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam on Sunday. The museum tells the stories of some of the 102,000 Jews who were deported from the Netherlands and murdered in Nazi camps during the Holocaust in World War II. Three-quarters of Dutch Jews were among the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.
Who were the Nazis? Members of a genocidal political movement in Germany. DW is to the Nazis as the Washington Post is to slavery. That’s a crude comparison, but my point is that nationality is not the same as political or moral orientation. Netanyahu isn’t Israel, Germany isn’t Nazism, the … Read the rest
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Mar 10th, 2024 3:14 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Well whaddya know:
Transgender golfer Hailey Davidson’s playing options just got significantly smaller.
Transgender i.e. male.
NXXT Golf announced on Friday that, effective immediately, competitors must be a biological female at birth to participate. A statement from the tour notes that it underscores the organization’s commitment to “maintaining the integrity of women’s professional golf and ensuring fair competition.” The news comes on International Women’s Day.
“As we navigate through the evolving landscape of sports, it is crucial to uphold the competitive integrity that is the cornerstone of women’s sports,” said NXXT Golf CEO Stuart McKinnon in a statement.
Yes, it is. Thank you for noticing.
“Our revised policy is a reflection of our unwavering commitment to celebrating and
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Mar 10th, 2024 12:55 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Gender gender gender gender.
Did I mention gender?
Hannah Gadsby has a new gendersomething. Yay.
Nanette was already an awards-scooping live show before Netflix’s cameras started rolling, but its meteoric success made a proper international celebrity of the festival circuit staple. It also made Gadsby, who grew up in a small town in north-west Tasmania, an unexpected figurehead for LGBTQ+ representation in Hollywood.
Yet again – how does that work? How can anyone be a figurehead for all of those categories?
Gadsby spends much of their time based in Australia but has seen trans rights become a divisive political issue in the US and UK, one often divorced from the voices and experiences of trans and genderqueer people.
I … Read the rest
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Mar 10th, 2024 9:55 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Washington state department of health promoted this article on Facebook and did so without any “pregnant people” genuflection so I got my hopes up, but of course that was a mistake.
Abortion
Abortion is legal and protected in Washington state. Abortions have been legal in Washington since 1970, and that has not changed even after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
A lawsuit in Texas seeks to remove U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of mifepristone, a safe and effective drug that’s been used in medication abortions by millions of Americans for over 20 years. As of April 21, 2023, the Supreme Court maintained full access to the drug nationally.
Third sentence in and it’s … Read the rest
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Mar 10th, 2024 4:31 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Sarah Ditum takes a chainsaw to Judith Butler’s new book:
Who’s Afraid of Gender? is an elaboration on her big idea, as laid out in the 1990 book Gender Trouble, that gender is “performative” — that is, whether you’re a man or a woman is determined by whether you act in a manly or womanly way, not by your physical body. This is the intellectual ballast in the now-common claim that “trans women are women, trans men are men”. (Butler identifies as nonbinary, but generously tolerates being called “she”.)
The insight that men and women’s behaviour is at least partly socially constructed wasn’t new, but Butler pushed it further. Not only gendered behaviour but sex itself was socially
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Mar 9th, 2024 3:27 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
“India” Willoughby is trying to make a career for himself out of harassing JK Rowling. He’s hugely productive in the sense of churning out content, but he’s not very strategic or effective or even interesting.
JKR is underwhelmed.
I hope the draft Willz lives in is icy and howling.
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Mar 9th, 2024 9:55 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Major doubts.
I’m starting to think that Willyboy is really stupid enough to think that because something exists as a matter of law it is, ipso facto, illegal to deny it. [Francis Boyle]
I’m not so sure; I don’t think he would have seen this coming, and not because of stupidity or for having been blinded by his narcissism. Given how much the police had become the enforcers of trans ideology, Willoughby would have been justified in expecting the police to continue harassing and arresting those who resist and speak out against trans demands, or more accurately, those who defend women’s rights, particularly women themselves. We’ve certainly seen plenty of … Read the rest
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Mar 9th, 2024 8:22 am |
By Ophelia Benson
News from Nigeria:
Nigerian security forces are searching for more than 200 children abducted from their school by gunmen on motorcycles Thursday, in the latest mass kidnapping to hit Nigeria.
Officials and witnesses have given varying figures of the number of students taken from the school in Kuriga, a town in northwestern Nigeria, with between 200 and 300 children reported to be missing, some of them as young as 8 years old.
It was the second such abduction in Nigeria in a week, after around another 200 people — mainly women and children — were kidnapped by militants in Borno state in the country’s northeast.
“Militants”? Funny kind of militancy.
If the higher total this week is confirmed, it
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