Theocrats pick another fight:

Thousands of supporters of a banned radical Islamist party have departed from the eastern Pakistan city of Lahore, clashing with police for a second day, a party spokesman and witnesses said on Saturday.

The group formed on Friday with the goal of reaching the capital, Islamabad, to pressure the government to release Saad Rizvi, the head of the Tehreek-e-Labiak Pakistan party.

“Radical” coupled with Islamist means deep hatred of women and “blasphemers.” (They consider most people blasphemers.)

Rizvi’s party gained prominence in Pakistan’s 2018 elections, campaigning on a single issue: defending the country’s blasphemy law, which calls for the death penalty for anyone who insults Islam. It has a history of staging violent protests to

Judith Butler has a crappy predictable abusive piece in the Guardian complaining of a “backlash” over sacred Gender.

The attacks on so-called “gender ideology” have grown in recent years throughout the world, dominating public debate stoked by electronic networks and backed by extensive rightwing Catholic and evangelical organizations. Although not always in accord, these groups concur that the traditional family is under attack, that children in the classroom are being indoctrinated to become homosexuals, and that “gender” is a dangerous, if not diabolical, ideology threatening to destroy families, local cultures, civilization, and even “man” himself.

Meanwhile, in the real world, feminist women object to being shoved aside and told to shut up by men who claim to be women.

It

Remember Charles Clymer the “male feminist” who was always talking over women? Then declared he was “Charlotte” and it all made sense? As Charlotte he gets to talk over everyone.

You're a cis gay man. You are not a trans or non-binary person. This is not your experience, and you are not qualified to talk about what is and isn't offensive to the trans and non-binary community. Stay in your lane.

— Charlotte Clymer 🏳️‍🌈 (@cmclymer) October 23, 2021

And Charles is a man. He is not a woman. Being a woman is not his experience (7 years in the army azza man) and he is not qualified to talk about what is and isn’t offensive and intrusive and … Read the rest

Let’s have a campaign against spiking women’s drinks in order to rape them and let’s make sure our campaign is incloosiv of men.

'Girls Night In' initiative was launched in response to the heightened reports of spiking in nightclubs. The idea was for young women to boycott clubs to raise safety concerns. Then the wokeists got involved. Read and weep at the nonsense that results. @IainDale @TomSwarbrick1 pic.twitter.com/6NWP99D9Ci

— Martin in Yorkshire (@martinradio) October 23, 2021

The campaign started on Instagram, and that’s also where it was interrupted and hijacked and bullied into including men, thus making it a completely meaningless campaign to stop people doing something to people.

We’re sorry!!! We’re sorry we’re sorry we’re sorry – we’re … Read the rest

Originally a comment by As the smoke rises upward on A long-awaited judgment.

One can make the same argument for selling organs. There are thousands of desperately poor people in rural India suffering from the lifelong health effects of having one kidney because they—ostensibly voluntarily—sold the other one.

Here’s another, more obscure analogy: midget bowling. If you are fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with this phenomenon, it’s the practice of tossing a little person down a bowling lane in place of a bowling ball, which is apparently high comedy to certain crass fratboy types. Some little people rent themselves out to would-be midget bowlers, but some state legislatures have passed laws prohibiting the practice, on the grounds that it … Read the rest

We’re not confused.

For anyone confused by our usage of inclusive language, please read the editorial from our August issue, which was focused on pregnancy. https://t.co/MPwCT8pV78

— The Scientist (@TheScientistLLC) October 22, 2021

I’m not confused, but I’ll have a look.

Beyond these clinical technicalities, for many people pregnancy also starts before conception in a figurative sense.

I’m definitely not confused, I know exactly what you’re doing. You’re pandering to a stupid fad for pretending that we don’t know which sex does the baby-having.

…two medical centers in the US, Baylor University Medical Center and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, are now offering uterus transplants to allow XX-carrying people lacking a functional uterus to gestate their own children

The mindset.

What letters? The usual suspects.

And while he’s got your attention, he’d also like you to take his directions on what people it’s permitted to follow on Twitter.

Nine mutual acquaintances who I like and respect follow this person. I'd appreciate it if you didn't.

(there's more and it's not pretty if for some reason that is required) pic.twitter.com/Bvrzo1tQVa

— Dave Hitchcock (@Hitchcockian) October 19, 2021

Nine acquaintances, and he’s telling them he’d “appreciate it” if they stopped following someone because he says so. I might as well tweet that I’d appreciate it if Jeff Bezos ran his friends past me for approval.

Pompous little dictators everywhere.

Updating to add:

"If you're a physicist and you

The Come Out of Stonewall protest:

Behind us is a statue of George Orwell & the quote, “if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people that which they do not wish to hear” #comeoutofstonewall pic.twitter.com/4BbEArvwJM

— Lily Maynard (@LilyLilyMaynard) October 22, 2021

That’s our mate latsot in the wheelchair in front.

It’s good that there are always dinosaurs now.… Read the rest

Ceri Black (Ceri pronounced like Kerry) spoke at a Belfast protest today.

I’m here to stand against the protection racket that is the diversity champion’s scheme, and to call for employers to join the flood of others who have left it.

But I hope you don’t mind if I take this opportunity to speak about what’s been happening to me over the last 48 hours instead of the speech I originally prepared.

You may know this already, but a man has managed to persuade the police to invite me to an interview, under caution, regarding my twitter account, @femmeloves.

I did know it already. It’s That Man Again.

If it were not prohibited by the twitter terms of service,

Define the rights you’re talking about, OJ.

If this piece was a proper piece of journalism, it would note that Kathleen Stock signed the "WHRC Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, which Sussex University students contend seeks to abolish trans rights".

But there's no reference to it at all.https://t.co/Pyxh7M7wEK

— Owen Jones 🌹 (@OwenJones84) October 21, 2021

If this piece were a proper piece of journalism – the counter-factual subjunctive exists for a reason. (Of course, the piece is a proper piece of journalism, but OJ is claiming it isn’t, but doing it badly, because he doesn’t write well.)

But the substantive point here is that the LGB Alliance is not “anti-trans rights” and that OJ is smuggling the claim … Read the rest

Love is not a human right and neither is sex. (Remember when Amnesty International decided it is? I do. How can you make sex a human right without implying a requirement? Who are the people who would be most subject to that requirement?)

This morning the Court of Appeal handed down a long-awaited judgment in the case of Re C, a legal case fraught with tension due to the sensitive and complex nature of what lay at its heart.

In short, C, a learning-disabled man, wished to seek out the “services” of a prostituted woman to pay her for sexual access, but he lacked the mental capacity to make such arrangements for himself.

One of several legal issues

Amnesty UK has a stupid mealy-mouthed blamey “statement” distancing itself from the “suck my dick you cunts”- type activism at the FiLiA event.

We have a long history of campaigning against violence against women and this continues to be a vital part of our work.

But they’ve forgotten who women are, and which people are women.

We are equally committed to campaigning for the rights of transgender people to live freely, authentically, and openly, and to have their gender legally recognised without having to go through a dehumanising, long and costly procedure. 

But the “right” of transgender people to live “authentically” entails requiring everyone to agree with them that they are their new gender in every possible sense, in other … Read the rest

Updating to add: the photo is probably (or certainly?) a fake. Just look at it as a pretty imagining.

A snapshot from the International Space Station. That’s a little item called South America.

I had no idea the moon looked like that from the ISS. … Read the rest

I hope they lock him up.

 The House voted Thursday to hold Steve Bannon, a longtime ally and aide to former President Donald Trump, in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the committee investigating the violent Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.

…

The House vote sends the matter to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, where it will now be up to prosecutors in that office to decide whether to present the case to a grand jury for possible criminal charges. It’s still uncertain whether they will pursue the case — Attorney General Merrick Garland would only say at a House hearing on Thursday that they plan to “make a decision consistent with the principles of prosecution.”

Update on that rape on the train story:

Passengers did not sit around and record cellphone video of a rape aboard a SEPTA train for their own gratification without contacting authorities, Delaware County’s top prosecutor said Thursday.

The revelation from District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer runs counter to the police narrative of the rape on a SEPTA Market-Frankford elevated train at the 69th Street Terminal in Upper Darby. Police said in that case that passengers took cellphone video without calling 911 before a SEPTA employee called police.

“There is a narrative out there that people sat there on the El train and watched this transpire and took videos of it for their own gratification,” Stollsteimer said using the nickname for

Gaby Hinsliff on yet another way to keep women down:

Yet reports of so-called “spiking by needle” – young women on a night out allegedly being injected by unseen strangers with something that knocks them out – are being taken seriously by police in cities including Nottingham, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Heartbreakingly, there have been reports of nervous women going out in thick, needle-proof jeans and leather jackets. However rare these incidents may turn out to be, they fit a pattern of behaviour that for many feels horribly familiar.

Emphasis on the horrible. The pattern is that women aren’t real people, women don’t matter, women have no rights, women are walking cunts who exist to receive men’s penises. … Read the rest

Then there was dancing with our extinct friends.

Dancing with dinosaurs pic.twitter.com/jZePCcIGmY

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) October 21, 2021

Get down.

Terfasauras Rex on the dance floor pic.twitter.com/T5HVYkvG7A

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) October 21, 2021

… Read the rest

Today in “I wish I could teleport to London” –

Look who she found! Lovely to see @simonjedge @DreyfusJames and Graham!#LGBAlliance2021 pic.twitter.com/JaduoGpNfS

— For Women Scotland (@ForwomenScot) October 21, 2021

‘Do right and fear no one.’ @BluskyeAllison addresses #LGBAlliance2021 about the importance of protecting #LGB rights as well as Trans rights & #FreeSpeech pic.twitter.com/X1GWPnhSYV

— Joanna Cherry QC (@joannaccherry) October 21, 2021

Vast Sex Matters infrastructure at #LGBAlliance2021 – say hi if you’re around! pic.twitter.com/UIMmCSRKuO

— Sex Matters (@SexMattersOrg) October 21, 2021

Oh, man, look at all that infrastructure. No wonder they’re getting sexual threats.

Agree/disagree whatevs but stop with the coercive abusive male pattern sexual threats. It is not a good look. Why are there no adults in

Finally.

Over the past two weeks, the University of Sussex has vigorously and unequivocally defended Professor Kathleen Stock’s right to exercise her academic freedom and lawful freedom of speech. These freedoms apply to and benefit us all. (1/5)

— University of Sussex (@SussexUni) October 21, 2021

This is all the more important when the rights of people to hold the beliefs in question are protected by law, as is the case for those with gender-critical views, which is a protected philosophical belief. (3/5)

— University of Sussex (@SussexUni) October 21, 2021

The University cannot and will not tolerate discrimination based on protected characteristics, including sex and philosophical belief, and we will take action through our policies and procedures if this

Ah yes, if the science says fossil fuels are cooking the planet the thing to do is…lobby to change what the science says.

A huge leak of documents seen by BBC News shows how countries are trying to change a crucial scientific report on how to tackle climate change.

The leak reveals [that] Saudi Arabia, Japan and Australia are among countries asking the UN to play down the need to move rapidly away from fossil fuels.

Similarly, if your house is on fire, the thing to do is take the phone away from the damn fool who is calling the fire department and call for pizza instead.

The leaked documents consist of more than 32,000 submissions made by