The rapey bros are circling the wagons.

Donnie TwoScoops:

Now the Radical Left Democrats and their Partner, the LameStream Media, are after Brett Kavanaugh again, talking loudly of their favorite word, impeachment. He is an innocent man who has been treated HORRIBLY. Such lies about him. They want to scare him into turning Liberal!

Naturally a rapist says another rapist is “an innocent man” – the rapist thinks he’s entitled to rape, and that women who object are lying whores who should be set on fire.

Brett Kavanaugh should start suing people for libel, or the Justice Department should come to his rescue. The lies being told about him are unbelievable. False Accusations without recrimination. When does it stop?

Oh look, what do you know. Ronan Farrow an hour ago:

Two @nytimes reporters, @rpogrebin and @katekelly, spent months independently reporting out Deborah Ramirez’s allegation against Brett Kavanaugh and found it credible—and documented another serious claim of misconduct with an eyewitness

Raw Story:

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is facing a new allegation of sexual misconduct — that the FBI reportedly knew about, but did not investigate.

The new allegation was discovered during a 10-month investigation by New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly.

“During the winter of her freshman year, a drunken dormitory party unsettled her deeply. [Deborah Ramirez] and some classmates had been drinking heavily when, she says, a freshman named Brett Kavanaugh pulled

Bezos is a bajillionaire, and part-time workers at Whole Foods are having losing their health insurance. Hey that’s capitalism! Bajillionaires don’t get their bajillions by spending any percentage of said bajillions on their workers if they can possibly help it. But this is great, it teaches workers not to be dependent – on either the state or the employer – but to go out there and build their own healthcare out of the trees they cut down on their homesteaded farm, as our grandparents did.

(Remember that news item the other day about Charles Koch spending millions of his precious stash to keep workers from getting better pay or benefits, so that they wouldn’t be dependent? Yeah. That.)

Amazon.com Inc.

Jarvis Dupont at the American Spectator (kind of a National Review with jokes?) is also impressed that Sam Smith is now drum roll a person of plural.

This is of course the most amazingly positive news, and a fantastic leap forward for genderqueer progressiveness. Someone as famous as Sam [OK. Have to admit I’m still struggling here, was he on American Idol?] coming out as non-binary will inspire anyone else out there who may have heard of them and is battling under the weight of their own inflated ego, to embrace their narcissism as if it were a sexual orientation. After all if we are unable to love ourselves, how can we be expected to be able to tell everyone

I don’t think you can sue people for telling a true story.

Edward Dickinson Tayloe II is is the descendant of a “First Family of Virginia,” a euphemistic way of saying white, rich, socially prominent before the American Revolution and—through the Civil War—slaveholding.

The Tayloes’ legacy as one of the largest slaveowning families in the state is well-documented. Amidst nearly 30,000 historical papers donated to the Virginia Historical Society by the family itself are plantation ledgers detailing the expansion of the Tayloes’ enslaved work force over the 19th century, an evidentiary accounting of how the exploitation of free black labor allowed the family to amass wealth, land, and political power.

Which they passed down through the generations, which is … Read the rest

I think “Rachel” McKinnon may not quite understand the motivations here.

Transphobes are obsessed with me. They obsessively monitor everything I say and do. They lie about what I say. And they read stuff that isn’t there into what I do say.

Many feminists do take an interest in McKinnon; I do for one. I do check out his tweets sometimes – not daily or every other day, but still fairly often. But there are reasons for that, reasons that have to do not with how awesome he is or what magical powers he has, but with what a remarkably horrible person he is. We track him the way NOAA tracks hurricanes. We don’t need any Sharpie to draw additional … Read the rest

There’s an organization (or perhaps a person) called Gender Inclusive Schools. It has a Facebook page of the same name. I saw people passing around a post from last June:

“Biological sex” is a myth and
the term has no place in the classroom.
We need to be honest with students and teach them about the expansive and variable genders of people who exist in their communities.

People are leaving comments and Gender Inclusive Schools is hiding them all, calling them ignorant and in need of adapting their assumptions to new understandings. All this made me curious about what exactly this organization (or person) is and whether it has any clout and if so how much, and … Read the rest

Oh good lord will people ever get a grip?

Sam Smith, who, I read, is a celebrated singer:

Today is a good day so here goes. I’ve decided I am changing my pronouns to THEY/THEM ❤ after a lifetime of being at war with my gender I’ve decided to embrace myself for who I am, inside and out…

And who he am is “they/them.” Cue the trumpet fanfare!

Or to put it another way, who gives a fuck?

The “politics” of self-obsession is not a pretty sight. Embrace yourself all you like, but don’t be telling us about it!

But he does. He does tell us about it.

I’m so excited and privileged to be surrounded by people

Not a smart shopper.

At a mid-August fundraiser in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Ivanka Trump was asked to name the personality traits she inherited most from her parents.

Without much of a pause, Trump told the crowd of roughly 120 high-end donors that her mother gave her an example of how to be a powerful, successful woman.

Uh, no. Her mother was married to Donald Trump. Not powerful, not successful.

And her father? He passed onto her his moral compass, she said, according to two event attendees.

His…………

What could he possibly have shown her? What could it be, that she mistook for a “moral compass”?

Ivanka Trump‘s comment about the traits she inherited from her father echoed a similar

Arwa Mahdawi at the Guardian raises the burning question of pronouns.

Little attention used to be paid to pronouns. In recent years, however, they have become a cornerstone of the culture wars.

It’s all been such a mistake. It should have been prepositions that became a cornerstone of the culture wars. We could argue over whether “in” is patriarchal, whether “with” is heteronormative, whether “for” is socialist.

Pronoun preferences are a favourite joke among unimaginative reactionaries who use them as proof that “snowflake millennials” just want to feel special.

Meaning, people who make pronouns a cornerstone of the culture wars are imaginative? I don’t see it, myself. I think the pronoun wars are peculiarly dull and empty, and not … Read the rest

That’s no good.

A Republican state lawmaker from Texas has caused outcry for tweeting “My AR is ready for you Robert Francis” after Democratic presidential candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke pledged to ban and confiscate AR-15 military-style rifles.

That’s no good. People shouldn’t have military weapons if they’re not in the military, people shouldn’t threaten to kill people who want laws saying we can’t have military weapons if we’re not in the military. That’s no good at all.

Within hours, Twitter took down Briscoe Cain’s post, which O’Rourke’s campaign labeled a “death threat”. “It violates our rules for threats of violence,” a company spokesperson said late Thursday night.

…

Earlier, Cain, a 34-year-old “conservative Republican” lawyer who represents a

What higher purpose could a billionaire have than to get poor people thrown off food stamps and Medicaid?

Last December, an innocuously named nonprofit, the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), wined and dined Republican politicians and White House staffers at a Walt Disney World resort, according to a new report from the Center for Public Integrity. The pitch: make it harder for poor Americans to access government programs meant to help them get on secure financial ground, especially the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, and Medicaid.

In other words, make already poor people even poorer. Take the already pathetic hanky of a “safety net” and shred it more.

FGA is heavily financed by a powerful

Someone has commented on Know her name, the post about Chanel Miller and the guy who raped her. It’s a first-time comment and I’m not going to let it appear on the post like a normal comment. I’m going to quote it in a post instead, like an abnormal comment.

Only 3 months? Brock Turner’s life was completly ruined. He lost his scholarship to Stamford was banished from the campus for life, lost his membership in the amateur swim association so he can never swim in competion again, lost his once in a lifetime bid to try out for the olympic swim team, is now a convicted felon and sex offender so he can never enroll in any school

Dirtier more toxic water please; that’s what we want.

The Trump administration is changing the definition of what qualifies as “waters of the United States,” tossing out an Obama-era regulation that had enhanced protections for wetlands and smaller waterways.

Thursday’s rollback is the first step in a process that will allow the Trump administration to create its own definition of which waters deserve federal protection. A new rule is expected to be finalized this winter.

The repeal ends an “egregious power grab,” Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler says. He adds that the 2015 rule had provoked 31 states to file complaints and petitions for legal review.

“We’re delivering on the president’s regulatory reform agenda,” Wheeler says.

It’s not … Read the rest

Sometimes an unpopular opinion is unpopular because it’s kack. This one for instance:

Unpopular opinion: hating on astrology is masculine distaste for female-coded interest in emotions and psychology which feeds misogyny that denies women access to scientific spaces

Say what? If you’re interested in emotions and psychology talk about them. What’s astrology got to do with it? Also astrology is pre-scientific handwaving. Also defending astrology seems like a pretty inept way to give women access to “scientific spaces”…whatever those are.

The tweets @karenmcgrane was replying to:

Unpopular opinion: your just-for-fun flirtation with astrology apps is normalizing belief in anti-scientific bullshit that undermines important, life-and-death public health and policy debates.

I used to work at a company that sold