Zoe Williams has some thoughts on “incels”:

Some of the fault, in their eyes, is with attractive men who have sex with too many women – “We need to do something about the polygamy problem,” said the Incelcast, an astonishing three-hour podcast about the Toronto attack – but, of course, the main problem is women themselves, who become foes as people, but also as a political entity. There is a lot of discussion about how best to punish them, with mass rape fantasies and threads on how to follow women without getting arrested, just for the thrill of having them notice you. Feminism is held responsible for a dude who can’t get laid, and birth control is said to

The US health care “system” is chaotic but there’s one thing we can say: it’s the worst of its kind.

The U.S. health care system has been subject to heated debate over the past decade, but one thing that has remained consistent is the level of performance, which has been ranked as the worst among industrialized nations for the fifth time, according to the 2014 Commonwealth Fund survey 2014. The U.K. ranked best with Switzerland following a close second.

Isn’t that impressive? Go us.

The Commonwealth Fund report compares the U.S. with 10 other nations: France, Australia, Germany, Canada, Sweden, New Zealand, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the U.K. were all judged to be superior based on various factors.

It turns out Bill Cosby isn’t nice Cliff Huxtable after all.

The 80-year-old actor, a fixture in American family entertainment for decades, erupted in response to a suggestion by the Montgomery County district attorney, Kevin R. Steele, that his bail should be revoked because he was a potential flight risk and owned a plane.

“He doesn’t have a plane, you asshole!” Mr. Cosby shouted. It was all the more startling coming from a man once beloved as the mild Dr. Cliff Huxtable on his hit NBC sitcom, the Jell-O pudding pitchman and the whimsical creator of the character Fat Albert.

In other news, sitcoms are not reality.… Read the rest

Who?

Bill Cosby. Finally.

A jury found Bill Cosby guilty Thursday of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman at his home near here 14 years ago, capping the downfall of one of the world’s best-known entertainers, and offering a measure of satisfaction to the dozens of women who for years have accused him of similar assaults against them.

Finally.

On the second day of its deliberations at the Montgomery County Courthouse in this town northwest of Philadelphia, the jury returned to convict Mr. Cosby of three counts of aggravated indecent assault against Andrea Constand, at the time a Temple University employee he had mentored.

The three counts — penetration with lack of consent, penetration while unconscious, and penetration after

A couple more exhibits at the San Francisco public library’s Degenderettes installation:

Note the barbed wire wrapped around the bottom one. Those bats are not for hitting baseballs, they’re for hitting women.

An axe and a “femme sledgehammer.”

As far as I know these are still there, still on display. In a public library.… Read the rest

Mick Mulvaney may have made things hot for himself by publicly saying he requires payment before he will meet with lobbyists.

Ethics experts say Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director and interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, should be investigated for potentially violating federal bribery laws after he admitted that, as a congressman, he only gave meetings to lobbyists who donated to his campaign.

Speaking before 1,300 financial industry executives at the American Bankers Association conference in Washington on Tuesday, Mulvaney encouraged the officials to use their money to influence policymaking.

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” said Mulvaney, a former lawmaker from South Carolina, according to The New York Times. “If you’re

Hm, maybe beautiful friendship not so beautiful after all.

[O]n the last day of his state visit on Wednesday, Macron showed he will not be trifled with. He used a speech to a joint session of Congress to engage in a full-scale takedown of Trumpism, wrapped in a love letter to the United States and a call on Americans to live up to the values embedded in our own history.

Macron, speaking forcefully in English, held nothing back. He warned against “the illusion of nationalism” and politicians who “play with fear and anger.”

No president we’ve had in living memory (I can’t swear to anything about Jackson) has played with fear and anger more enthusiastically than Donald Trump. Macron … Read the rest

The French are not as in love with Macron as Donnie is. They’re definitely not in love with the beautiful friendship between the pair of them.

[D]isdain for Trump is not a fringe phenomenon in France, where opinion polls consistently show that the U.S. president is deeply unpopular — much more so than Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and China’s Xi Jinping. The general sense is that Macron is playing with fire, even if he can establish himself, and France, as Trump’s leading interlocutor in a Europe that has largely remained at arm’s length.

Some in France have also started using the evidence of the increasingly tactile relationship between Macron and Trump to point out what they consider

In other misogyny news…the San Francisco public library is hosting an exhibit that includes an “I punch TERFs” Tshirt.

Just in case the original poster blocks me, I am posting the image here. But this is 2018 a display in a public library in San Francisco. pic.twitter.com/AU24mItuRm

— Sarah Stuart (@sarahstuartxx) April 25, 2018

Another view:

Die cis scum. Again, a lovely message to send to the users of your library, @SFPublicLibrary pic.twitter.com/gOMbTaY0CK

— PERF (@schmendergender) April 25, 2018

I found the page for the exhibit on the library’s website. Sometime in the last few hours it has added a note:

Note: This exhibit contains strong language, blood and mentions of transmisogyny and police violence. Due to concerns raised by

Glosswitch points out what ought to be obvious: that men don’t have a “right” to access to women’s bodies.

Maybe, rather than just raging at "incels", we should question the idea that any man has a right to violent porn, paid-for sex and women's bodies in general. This entitlement doesn't come from nowhere. Even Amnesty have suggested men have a "right to sex".

— Victoria Smith (@glosswitch) April 25, 2018

Maybe, rather than just raging at “incels”, we should question the idea that any man has a right to violent porn, paid-for sex and women’s bodies in general. This entitlement doesn’t come from nowhere. Even Amnesty have suggested men have a “right to sex”.

I think they ended up walking … Read the rest

It’s possible that the Toronto sidewalk-murderer is one of those guys who thinks he’s entitled to sex and thus that women are required to say yes to his demands for sex.

Shortly before a rented van ploughed into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10 and wounding 14 others, a short and cryptic message was posted on the Facebook account of Alek Minassian, the man accused of carrying out the attack.

The post referred to another mass killer – Elliot Rodger, who shot dead six people and wounded 13 others in Isla Vista, California, in 2014 – and said that the “incel rebellion has already begun. We will overthrow all the Chads and the Stacys”.

What’s “the incel … Read the rest

Ah how touching – they’re celebrating “Confederate Memorial Day” in selected Southern states.

State government offices are closed today in Mississippi and Alabama for Confederate Memorial Day.

Georgia on the other hand renamed it “State Holiday” in 2015 after the slaughter in Charleston.

In some parts of the South, the debate has prompted a counter-effort to honor Southern heritage and preserve symbols of the Confederacy.

A Georgia lawmaker tried to revive Confederate Memorial Day in name in 2017. The proposal, which did not gain traction, made no direct reference to slavery or the Civil War. But it sought to recognize the “four-year struggle for states’ rights, individual freedom and local government control.”

“Southern heritage”=slavery. That’s it. There is no … Read the rest

The Great Piece of Turf never comes amiss.

Albrecht Dürer, The Great Piece of Turf, 1503 pic.twitter.com/xlDqxjTp7V

— Rabih Alameddine (@rabihalameddine) April 24, 2018

… Read the rest

The Beeb a few days ago:

Campaigners have lost a High Court challenge to the government’s two-child limit on some benefits.

Lawyers representing three families had argued that the policy was incompatible with human rights law.

But a judge has ruled that limiting tax credits and universal credit to a family’s first two children is lawful.

Kate Smurthwaite draws the inevitable conclusion:

I don’t see why the public purse should be paying for Kate Middleton’s third child unless it was the result of rape. Right?

Truth innit!

 … Read the rest