Oh look, another  sighting of “womxn” already – this time in a piece at Vice explaining what “cis people” have to do to be allowed to live helpful to trans people.

Kai Isaiah-Jamal begins briskly.

Let’s cut the shit – there’s no positive way a cis person can dictate or speak on a life that you do not live and a world you do not have to navigate as a trans person.

Well, if that’s true, then nobody can say anything about anything, right? We can all come up with labels to brandish at the rest of the world by way of saying “don’t you dare disagree with me or dispute anything I say no matter how stupidly and irrationally … Read the rest

The Republicans are saying it’s all a matter of mistaken identity.

The politically convenient, scientifically baseless theory that sexual assault so traumatized Christine Blasey Ford she mixed up her attacker is now something like common wisdom for many Republicans.

President Trump explicitly endorsed the theory Saturday, shortly after Brett M. Kavanaugh was narrowly confirmed as a Supreme Court judge, telling reporters he was “100 percent” sure Ford accused Kavanaugh in error.

Collins said it, Manchin said it, Graham said it.

[F]or many cognitive researchers who study how memories actually form during traumatic events, the theory never stopped sounding ridiculous.

“The person lying on top of you — who she’d previously met — you’re not going to forget that,” said

It can always be worse. It always is worse somewhere. At least Republican senators didn’t attack Christine Blasey Ford with sticks. The Guardian:

Thirty-six Indian schoolgirls have been treated in hospital after they were attacked by a large crowd of teenage boys and their parents when they complained of sexual harassment.

Six boys and one woman were arrested in the north-eastern state of Bihar after the attack at a girls’ boarding school.

Police and witnesses said girls from the government school in Triveniganj – about 160 miles (260km) east of the state capital, Patna – had been playing in a sports area on Saturday night when a group of teenage boys began making lewd comments.

Welll, you can see … Read the rest

Katha Pollitt talks about the way women have to be “likable” no matter what (and when they are it’s still not enough), while men can be as violent and belligerent and mendacious as they like and the world will still embrace them and say that was way back then.

These are the rules of The Patriarchy that the #MeToo movement has exposed: the education, extracurriculars, service projects, credentials—they were never what being a girl was all about. Being a girl is about pleasing men: What they think of you and want from you and how you negotiate that in a world that does not want to hear about the darker side of what that can mean.

And thus it’s also … Read the rest

China disappears the head of Interpol:

The detained Chinese head of Interpol, Meng Hongwei, is being investigated for alleged bribe-taking, Chinese authorities have announced.

Mr Meng was first reported missing in late September after travelling from Interpol HQ in France to China.

His wife has revealed that he sent her a text message with a knife emoji on the day he went missing.

Mr Meng is the latest high-profile target to be ensnared in China’s sweeping anti-corruption campaign.

Actual corruption case, or China being China?

In a statement on Twitter on Sunday, [Interpol] said it had received Mr Meng’s resignation with immediate effect. Under its terms it has appointed senior vice-president Kim Jong-yang of South Korea as acting president.

The Times yesterday:

Turkish investigators believe a well-known Saudi dissident was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, five people involved in the investigation, or briefed on it, said on Saturday.

The critic of the Saudi government, Jamal Khashoggi, entered the consulate on Tuesday to obtain a document he needed to get married and never emerged, according to his fiancée, who had stayed outside.

Waiting for him inside the consulate, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation, were Saudi agents who had recently arrived in Turkey with the intent to silence Mr. Khashoggi. It was not clear if the plan had been to bring him back to Saudi Arabia alive, and something went wrong, or if the

More from NPR on the Missouri one-abortion-clinic situation:

In 2008, Missouri had five abortion clinics, according to Planned Parenthood. The Columbia Health Center in central Missouri on Wednesday became the latest to stop providing abortions.

I don’t even understand this. Don’t big hospitals do abortions? If not, why not? Abortions should be a normal part of health care, not a rare bespoke luxury that only a few can have. As I mentioned, Missouri is not a small state, and five clinics is ludicrously inadequate.

Under the new requirements, abortion providers must secure admitting privileges at hospitals located within about 15 minutes from their health centers.

“The idea behind that restriction is that it somehow makes patients safer if they

There will be more of this, until they are all shut down and women will have to go to Canada or self-abort (which is often fatal). Missouri now has one (1) abortion clinic.

Missouri is down to one clinic providing abortions Wednesday, after the only other clinic in the state that performs the procedure failed to adhere to new state requirements.

Federal appeals court judges ruled last month that Missouri can enforce a requirement that doctors must have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals before they can perform abortions. The judges issued a mandate Monday for that rule to officially take effect.

The Columbia Planned Parenthood clinic was unable to secure physician privileges to comply with the requirement, so it

This day is the saddest & angriest of my time in the Senate. The Republicans have succeeded in confirming a dangerous & deeply flawed nominee only by breaking all the rules & norms. The damage done today will be enduring—to the United States Supreme Court & to our country.

— Richard Blumenthal (@SenBlumenthal) October 6, 2018

We’ve got men who sexually assault women enshrined in the White House and the Supreme Court.

So, basically, contempt for women has now become official government policy.

It’s just a tad alienating if you have the bad taste to be a woman.… Read the rest

Oh, fucking hell. Sums it up.

Trump on AF1 was asked about women angry about Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

“I don’t think they are,” he said. Women are “extremely happy," he said, “because they’re thinking of their sons, they’re thinking of their husbands and their brothers, their uncles, and others.”

— Rebecca Ballhaus (@rebeccaballhaus) October 6, 2018

Of course. Women simply don’t care about their own well-being, even in the sense of not wanting to be assaulted and nearly suffocated by men who pounce on them when the mood strikes. Women care only about the well-being of men. This works out very nicely because men too care only about the well-being of men, so everybody’s happy.

Actually they don’t, lots of men … Read the rest

Pig Kavanaugh is in, abortion rights and separation of church and state are on the way out.

Meanwhile…

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has received more than a dozen judicial misconduct complaints in recent weeks against Brett M. Kavanaugh, who was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice Saturday, but has chosen for the time being not to refer them to a judicial panel for investigation.

A judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit — the court on which Kavanaugh serves — passed on to Roberts a string of complaints the court received starting three weeks ago, said four people familiar with the matter.

That probably happens with every nominee, right? There are always soreheads.… Read the rest

Another thing – small, but so typical.

A comment on that post of PZ’s:

Silentbob

2 October 2018 at 12:11 am

@ 94 John Morales

(I did withdraw from her blog because I was contentious there, and annoying her, but still, it was not because I was banned there. Like this blog, to which I have returned, thanks to PZ’s (hopefully juditious) sufferance, mainly because I’m not insincere)

I was also contentious and annoying but lacked your circumspection and first got placed in perpetual moderation (for quoting Gloria Steinem) and then apparently banned (silently, sometime in the past couple of years) despite also being sincere (if sarcastic). So I suppose your obsequiousness with respect to anti-trans attitudes paid

The historian Christopher Browning in the NYRB discusses the Trumpists’ similarities to and differences from Nazis and other fascists.

The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections

Oh look, it’s Melania really not caring again.

Melania Trump has prompted consternation, some anger and much derision by choosing a pith helmet – a symbol of colonial rule across Africa – as headwear for a brief safari in Kenya.

On the penultimate day of her tour of the continent – her first solo trip overseas – the first lady visited an orphanage in Nairobi before heading to a national park near the city.

Dressed in riding pants, boots and a spotless white pith helmet, the former model climbed into an open-air vehicle for the safari, taking photos on her iPhone of zebras, giraffes, impalas, rhinos and hippos.

They’re not making it up.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

What the hell … Read the rest

This is nuts.

The Vancouver Sun reports:

A new policy allowing Canadian transgender student-athletes to compete on teams consistent with their gender identity and without hormone therapy is a welcome change, but more can still be done to make athletics inclusive of gender diversity, says a Vancouver trans athlete and consultant.

U Sports, which governs university athletics in Canada, put its new policy into effect Thursday and says it affects student-athletes at all 56 of its member institutions. Athletes can only compete on teams of one gender during a given academic year, and the policy doesn’t require them to undertake hormone therapy. They must also comply with the Canadian Anti-Doping Program.

In other words people with male bodies can … Read the rest