Reading The Letter again. Much of it is reworked by the grownups in an attempt to disguise quite how infantile and incapable Trumpbaby is, but he pops up like a jack in the box despite them. Like here:

President Zelensky has repeatedly declared that I did nothing wrong, and that there was No Pressure. 

The grownups would not have said No Pressure. The grownups know that we don’t use capital letters for emphasis in formal writing.

You are unwilling and unable to accept the verdict issued at the ballot box during the great Election of 2016.

The great Election of 2016? What was so great about it? Given the whole Russian interference problem, and the discrepancy between the popular vote … Read the rest

They are BOYS’ socks, dammit. They are masculine socks. They are woven from the finest grass-fed testosterone. They are in BOY COLORS.

Bought these @peacocks –
Me: why labelled ‘boys socks’?Peacocks: they’re not for girls
Me: they’re for my daughter
Peacocks: girls can’t wear them
REALLY @peacocks – it’s nearly 2020 and you’re still labelling stuff and your staff are still saying this ???? pic.twitter.com/5sKmALe3E2

— Jenny Eastop (@jennyeastop) December 17, 2019

They are in STRONG COLORS. Not a pastel among them. Those are MANLY colors. Girls can’t wear colors like that, they can’t carry the weight.

Besides, they have dinosaurs on them. Duh. Girls can’t wear dinosaur socks! What rock do you live under? Girls can wear flower socks, … Read the rest

Trump has sent an idiotic “letter” to Speaker Pelosi, to underline how stupid and uncomprehending he really is.

Over six pages, on White House letterhead, the president piles adjectives like cords of wood, fires rhetorical fusillades in all directions and invokes the judgement of the American people, the nation’s founding fathers and history itself.

As if we hadn’t been judging him all along. He’s given us bales of evidence, and we’ve made our judgement: he’s a disaster in almost every category one can think of. (Possible exceptions: he’s probably not a literal pollutant; he hasn’t so far burned down the White House.)

Here are five choice lines from a president whose capacity for the extraordinary and unprecedented is ever-expanding.

Of course he does.

The Trump administration has said it does not consider the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 to be a genocide, contradicting a unanimous vote by the US Senate.

That is, Trump has, and his pathetic slaves are echoing him.

The historic vote last week incensed Turkey, which has always denied that the killings amounted to a genocide.

Turkey’s foreign ministry on Friday summoned the US ambassador to express its anger over the vote, accusing the US of “politicising history”.

Because saying it was a genocide is political while saying it wasn’t is totally not political.

There is general agreement that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died when the Ottoman Turks deported them en masse from

I’m not seeing the source of the puzzlement.

There are an enormous number of young US women in their mid 20s to mid 30s who don’t appear to be prioritizing motherhood. Many of their parents have assets while many of them do not. No massive transfer is seen.

I find the lack of major discussion on this biologically puzzling.

— Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein) December 16, 2019

In other words, some women are not having children. And?

Having children is like almost everything else (the exceptions being things like breathing, drinking, eating): some people like it and some don’t; some people want to and some don’t. Isn’t that fairly easy to understand?

Until extremely recently this fact (if I’m right that … Read the rest

It was all a mistake about the proletariat and the means of production and all that. It turns out it’s trans people who are the true proletariat and cis people who live off their exploited labor.

Transition is work. Transition is the labour that continually gives birth to gender, that produces liveably gendered lives under intolerable conditions. And the workplace of gender, like any workplace, cannot be borne except through self-abnegation, exhaustion, lies, glimpses of satisfaction strung out along the working week, alienation, and endless work.

I’m not clear on where we go to buy the gender that they produce with the labour of transition, but I’m deeply sympathetic about the endless work. (Most of that work is shouting … Read the rest

I did an errand this afternoon and then did some urban exploring after – not real exploring, but walking around places I don’t get to every day, so close enough. I walked along the canal in Fremont then under the beautiful Fremont Bridge.

A minute after I crossed under it the bell rang that means it’s about to go up, so I stopped to watch because it’s always fun to watch a bridge go up from below, especially a deep blue one with orange trim. Then I got to watch the Rachel Carson chug through.

Then I walked on a hundred yards or so to under the Aurora Bridge to look up at the engineering marvel.

Exploring is good, even … Read the rest

Take his wisdom to heart.

Lindsey Graham: "All I ask of the Senate is to take your oath, listen to the evidence in some way that will withstand historical scrutiny, that you'll have a record that will justify any decision you make…that whatever decision was made be based on evidence and the law." pic.twitter.com/QynbehB8Be

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 16, 2019

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by iknklast on Another scourge of White Feminism.

I definitely understand the “not wanting to start from zero” argument, because I face it so much myself in discussing global warming. I really don’t want to have to present the basics of the evidence over and over to people who have made up their mind. But I have to. The problem is, that takes time from actually doing what needs to be done, so it feels like we never progress.

I feel the same way about women’s issues. Even in groups of women, I sometimes have to start from zero to say, yes, there are women out there who do not make what their male counterparts make, … Read the rest

So Rudy the Gee has artlessly admitted – to The New Yorker, so not at all conspicuously or anything – that yes he needed to get Marie Yovanovitch out of the way of his cunning plan.

Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney to President Trump, has admitted that he saw former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch as an obstacle in his plan to find dirt on his client’s potential rival—former Vice President Joe Biden—in advance of the 2020 election, he said in an interview with The New Yorker. “I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way,” Giuliani is reported to have said, telling the magazine that he compiled a dossier on the former VP and his

Double back-flip with walnuts:

The chief executive of Hallmark Cards has apologised for its decision to withdraw television advertisements featuring same-sex couples.

The company’s cable network pulled the ads for wedding registry and planning site Zola under pressure from the conservative group One Million Moms.

The decision drew criticism on social media and calls for a boycott.

Hallmark said it would reinstate the adverts and attempt to re-establish its partnership with Zola.

Ok well next time just skip the part about doing what conservative groups tell you to do, especially ones that call themselves “moms” instead of “mothers” as if we were all six. No but seriously, just ignore people who whine about same-sex marriage. We’re past that.

The

Another one of those “being a man who identifies as a woman is such an excellent screen for misogyny” types:

That’s longstanding Pharyngula commenter abbeycadabra, who joined the populous but thin roster at Freethought Blogs a few days ago. That photo on the blog is captioned:

Abbey St. Brendan is five or six kinds of artist, maybe one kind of successful at it, a long-time FtB reader and grizzled veteran of the deadly TERF wars.

The opening of Cadabra’s hello world post:

Hi folks! I reckon most of you who might look at this post at least have seen my handle around, probably complaining bitterly at someone who is being a dicknostril, especially about trans issues. The plan here is

Apparently this Louis Staples guy went on shit-tweeting about Helen Lewis for hours after his first barrage, and then – uh oh – must have had a tap on the shoulder from a higher up at the Independent (where he is a columnist).

That was so wrong of me. I’m going to reflect on this and try to be better next time – I’m really sorry

[2/2]

— Louis Staples (@LouisStaples) December 15, 2019

Do we believe he’s sincere? No.

Presumably someone gave him a quick primer on the law pertaining to defamation and harassment. I hope he's also sent a longer and more complete apology directly to @helenlewis, who has shown nothing but grace and class in responding

That whole piece about Casablanca by Meredith Hindley is interesting.

With few Americans knowing Casablanca was a city in French Morocco — let alone how to find it on a map — the studio banked on audiences’ love of wartime intrigue, along with the star power of Bogart and castmates Claude Rains and Paul Henreid, to sell the film.

But on November 8, reports began to trickle in that the Americans and British had launched Operation TORCH with the goal of seizing Algeria and French Morocco from Vichy France. The assault was a new phase in the war against Nazi Germany, one designed to help the Soviets, who fought a bloody battle against the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Over

Have just learned, chatting on Twitter, that a friend has never seen Casablanca. The tragedy of it!

Nearly all the bit players in that scene are refugees from the Nazis.

Casablanca made its debut two-and-half years after Germany marched into France, triggering a massive refugee exodus. As the Nazis advanced, the population of France fled south, hoping to avoid being swallowed up by Hitler’s burgeoning empire. Hungarians, Poles, Russians, Austrians, and Spanish Republicans who had fled their homelands to seek sanctuary in France before the war, once again found themselves on the run. Thousands would end up in Casablanca.

In July of 1940, more than two hundred ships arrived off the coast of Casablanca, the largest port in

From the Venomous Thugs on Twitter files:

Updating to add a few later tweets:

His venomous unprovoked attack was on Helen Lewis. He probably didn’t expect that the result would be fellow journalists and editors saying how brilliant she is and how zero she deserves this venomous unprovoked misogynist attack. Dude has now apologized and set about deleting his shitty tweets, all too late.

End of update.

The Independent should fire him, but leaving that aside – what I’m interested in is the (all too typical) loose analogy that, if you think about it for .5 second, is complete bullshit. “Imagine a “left wing” magazine publishing this sort of thing [meaning: the sort of thing he doesn’t like] … Read the rest

If you’re going to make a case for something, try using a little care in the way you make it. For instance:

I was going to argue with the column, so as a preliminary step I read it, which is just as well because I found I don’t disagree with it all that much. If particular person X asks to be called “them” I’m not going to go to war over it. The issue is when you try to generalize that into a Big Rule that applies everywhere – as Clarke did in that tweet. It’s laughably easy to think of exceptions to Clarke’s Big Rule, so it won’t work as a Big Rule.

And this is part of … Read the rest

Originally a comment by latsot on Hands.

Of course he has posted a passive-voice notpology about how mistakes were passively made when she was passively “touched” on the “back” in an incident involving a hand, which might or might not be connected to his arm, as opposed to her being deliberately slapped on the arse by his hand, which is what happened. And happened because he thought she was his to use. And because he thought he’d get away with it, because you can grab them by the pussy.

Of course the part of the not-pology about how he is a loving husband and father is not in the passive voice. That part is very clear about how it’s … Read the rest

Life lesson: if you’re running in an event and you spot a reporter doing a live bit, and you’re a man and the reporter’s a woman, don’t take the opportunity to slap her bum on the way, because the thing is, since she is a reporter doing a live bit, you will be on camera. 

A Georgia man who was videotaped slapping a female reporter’s bottom on live TV was arrested on Friday on a misdemeanor charge of sexual battery.

A Savannah police spokeswoman, Bianca Johnson, confirmed that Thomas Callaway, 43, of Statesboro was charged in connection with the incident that occurred while WSAV-TV reporter Alex Bozarjian was broadcasting live as runners streamed past her on a prominent bridge