I’ve been putting this off all day because I’m lachrymose enough already, but here it is: my much (and widely) loved friend Maureen Brian died this morning. She’s been a regular (though not terribly frequent) commenter here since forever, so you may know of her that way.

I met her in person at QED (in Manchester) in 2012. It was between talks and I was cruising around and this woman came up and started a conversation with me, and we drifted into the next talk together and sat down – and then I saw her badge and exclaimed “Oh, you’re Maureen! I know you!” I knew her via Pharyngula rather than here, but I knew her as fierce in a … Read the rest

Is access to the bodies of women a right, or is it not? Can access to women’s bodies be treated as a right without making women into commodities?

Cherry Smiley at Feminist Current tells us about a change in views and policies at a Vancouver rape crisis center:

In 2008, Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW), a rape crisis centre in Vancouver BC, published a position paper documenting a two-year collaborative process between their staff, board, volunteers, and practicum students exploring the issue of prostitution. It states:

“The argument of supporting individual women’s choices pales when one considers the way in which prostitution plays out in the global arena. As a global phenomenon, it must be analyzed in its

I guess despite decades of flat wages for workers, despite the fact that the richest 1 percent in the United States now own more $$$ than the bottom 90 percent, despite the massive burden of debt on the non-rich, despite skyrocketing housing and health care costs and aforementioned flat wages – despite all that Trump and the Republicans want to make rich people even richer, because why have 4 yachts when you could have 10?

The Trump administration is considering bypassing Congress to grant a $100 billion tax cut mainly to the wealthy, a legally tenuous maneuver that would cut capital gains taxation and fulfill a long-held ambition of many investors and conservatives.

Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said

Well this is sleazy:

President Trump has become personally involved in plotting a new FBI headquarters in downtown D.C., an interest that for now has left the project in limbo and the agency stranded in a building that no longer suits its needs, according to officials and people familiar with the administration’s deliberations.

For years, FBI officials have raised alarms that the decrepit conditions at its current headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, constitute serious security concerns. A year ago, federal officials had finally decided on three finalist locations in Maryland and Virginia and Congress appropriated $913 million toward the more than $3 billion project.

Six months after Trump entered the White House, his administration abandoned the plan and 

The elves are busy.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Monday that the Department of Justice is creating a “religious liberty task force.”

Sessions said the task force, co-chaired by Associate Attorney General Jesse Panuccio and the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy, Beth Williams, will help the department fully implement the religious liberty guidance it issued last year.

The guidance was a byproduct of President Trump’s executive order directing agencies to respect and protect religious liberty and political speech.

Huh. That’s a little surprising, given the way Trump explicitly banned people from selected “Muslim countries” from traveling to the US.

I’m just kidding. Of course he doesn’t mean those other people. He means fanatical … Read the rest

A couple of weeks ago:

University of Virginia professors, alumni and others are up in arms over the school’s plan to hire President Donald Trump’s former legislative affairs director, calling it “unconscionable” as the one-year anniversary of the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, approaches.

Marc Short, a frequent Trump spokesman on television, is leaving the White House Friday and is slated to serve as a senior fellow at the Miller Center, a wing of the university focused on presidential history and public policy. Short received an MBA from the university’s business school.

A business degree, and a job working for Trump. That seems like a very odd CV for a wing of a genuine university focused on … Read the rest

More righteous enraged outraged indignant furious huffy anger:

!!!!! OPEN LETTER FROM A MELBOURNE SEX WORKER TO READINGS RE: HOSTING JULIE BINDEL. PLEASE SHARE !!!!!

Dear Readings,

I am a Melbourne-based sex worker writing to express my concerns about an event that is being held at the Readings store in Hawthorn on Thursday, the 26th of July: the launch of Julie Bindel’s book The Pimping of Prostitution. This event involves a Q&A between Bindel and Mary Crooks, the Executive Director of the Victorian Women’s Trust.

Where to begin.

Bindel is a whorephobe, plain and simple. She has spent decades doing her utmost to stigmatise sex workers, misrepresent and demonise our peer organisations, and campaign for the Swedish Model,

There’s an upside to all this grabbing immigrant children away from their parents – MONEY.

Detaining immigrant children has morphed into a surging industry in the U.S. that now reaps $1 billion annually — a tenfold increase over the past decade, an Associated Press analysis finds.

Health and Human Services grants for shelters, foster care and other child welfare services for detained unaccompanied and separated children soared from $74.5 million in 2007 to $958 million in 2017. The agency is also reviewing a new round of proposals amid a growing effort by the White House to keep immigrant children in government custody.

Persecution and profit in one exciting package.

Currently, more than 11,800 children, from a few months old

I’ve been reading the New Yorker pretty regularly since Trump got elected, thanks to some useful person in the nabe who puts them in a Little Library a couple of days before the publication date. Reading it more regularly I’ve started to wonder what the hell has happened to their cartoon department, and why they have so many now that are just not funny even a little bit. Cartoon after cartoon after cartoon I look at and move on, stonefaced. They are not funny. But some of them are not just not funny, they’re also faintly or intensely repellent, and of those, the standout is one Edward Steed. I just decided to search him on Google images and … Read the rest

The northern half of the planet is bursting into flames in many places, and in a few months it will be the southern half’s turn. We’re seeing the stories, but the stories aren’t disturbing our slumbers by mentioning the underlying mechanism. David Wallace-Wells considers what the reasons for that may be.

In a single week earlier this month, dozens of places around the world were hit with record temperatures in what was, effectively, an unprecedented, planet-encompassing heat wave: from Denver to Burlington to Ottawa; from Glasgow to Shannon to Belfast; from Tbilisi, in Georgia, and Yerevan, in Armenia, to whole swaths of southern Russia. The temperature of one city in Oman, where the daytime highs had reached 122 degrees

Those evil demons.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos plans to eliminate regulations that forced for-profit colleges to prove that they provide gainful employment to the students they enroll, in what would be the most drastic in a series of moves that she has made to free the for-profit sector from safeguards put in effect during the Obama era.

The so-called gainful employment regulations put into force by the Obama administration cut off federally guaranteed student loans to colleges if their graduates did not earn enough money to pay them off. That sent many for-profit colleges and universities into an economic tailspin because so many of their alumni were failing to find decent jobs.

In a tailspin is where they belonged, … Read the rest

So apparently “inclusion” requires not mentioning lesbians and gays. Funny how “inclusion” somehow gets us back to the 1950s and calls it progressive.

One of the longest running LGBT film festivals has changed names for its 31st birthday. The Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival, happening September 6-9, is now officially the All Genders, Lifestyles, and Identities Film Festival. Festival director Jim Brunzell says this year is the perfect time to address issues of inclusion and intersection the queer community has faced all year. And judging by the festival’s lineup it’s totally walking its talk.

And this is different from “all lives matter” and “I don’t see color” how exactly?

Spoiler: the Advocate doesn’t say.… Read the rest

There are mantras. This is one of the mantras.

Trans women are women. I am a woman because I say I am. There’s no getting rid of trans women. If you don’t like it? There’s nothing you can do about it. History isn’t going backwards sorry

— shon faye. (@shonfaye) July 25, 2018

“I am a woman because I say I am.” It’s supposed to be, and often is, a conversation-ender. But that seems to be not so much because it’s convincing or persuasive (let alone a good argument) but because it’s a mantra. Repetition makes it true and shouting makes it mandatory – something like that. I googled the sentence in quotation marks and got about 96,600 results, so … Read the rest

Beautifully done.

… Read the rest