So of course we get this:

Tucker Carlson loses it when a guest corrects his pronunciation of Kamala Harris's name pic.twitter.com/1fHIrPGuwN

— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) August 12, 2020

Thanks What a Maroon for alerting us to that.

“So what?!” says Tucker Carlson in fake fox anger.

Margaret Sullivan in the Post:

Not only did Carlson mispronounce it, but when a guest went out of his way to politely correct him, Carlson had one of his trademark fits of pique.

The exchange went like this:

“Tucker, can I just say one thing?” said Richard Goodstein, an adviser to Democratic campaigns.

Carlson: “Of course.”

Goodstein: “Because this will serve you and your fellow hosts on Fox. Her name is pronounced

Of course Trump is calling Kamala Harris the N word.

President Trump has called magazines, pharmaceutical advertisements and questions “nasty.” He has called rumors, numbers and one unnamed TV columnist who gave “The Apprentice” a bad review “nasty.” He has called men “nasty,” and he has called women “nasty.”

So of course he wasted no time in using it on a woman who is more intelligent and impressive than he is.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, the president described Harris’s questioning of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing as “extraordinarily nasty” — “nasty to a level that was just a horrible thing.” He also said she was “the meanest” and “the most horrible” in pressing Kavanaugh.

Jonathan Chait wrote a thing in New York magazine last month, about anti-racism training and some eccentric ideas some such trainers (or entrepreneurs) have embraced. In Googling for more I saw that National Review and Don Junior were also interested, so keep that in mind – but even National Review and Don Junior aren’t wrong about everything. (Nearly everything, in Junior’s case, but not quite everything.)

The star of anti-racism training is Robin DiAngelo of White Fragility fame. What Chait focuses on is the whiteness studies part.

The African-American History Museum has a page on whiteness, which summarizes the ideas that the racism trainers have brought into relatively wide circulation. The museum’s page summarizes what it calls “white culture”

Meanwhile we mustn’t lose sight of the filthy corruption of “senior adviser” Ivanka Trump. (Her brothers are just as filthy but they don’t have pretend jobs in the White House, they don’t insert themselves into conversations among heads of state at international meetings, they don’t take Daddy’s place at the table at international meetings, they don’t have pretend jobs in the White House.)

Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, earned at least $36 million in income outside their White House roles in 2019, according to financial disclosure forms released on Friday. 

The income, first reported by The Washington Post, is from the businesses, properties, and other assets owned by the couple.

“Conflicts of interest?” [giggle, simper] … Read the rest

Donnie Disaster has added a quack to his pandemic team. Donnie D introduced him yesterday at the “press briefing.”

The man Trump was pointing to was Dr. Scott Atlas, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who frequently appears on Fox News and has advised Republicans in the past. And crucially, unlike the government’s medical experts who have advised Trump until now, has adopted a public stance on the virus much closer to Trump’s — including decrying the idea that schools cannot reopen this fall as “hysteria” and pushing for the resumption of college sports.

Just what we need – even more murderous denialism about the pandemic.

“He’s working with us and will be working with us on the

Mermaids? Mermaids who? I think you must have the wrong number.

I see all you celebs deleting your tweets that supported the charity Mermaids? Wonder why you are doing that.

— suzanne moore (@suzanne_moore) August 12, 2020

Maybe the same reason the BBC did.

Mermaids saga is why the Solnit "Be cool" piece so naive. Brit feminists dont hate trans people at all but some of us are concerned about young women being put on medical pathways by homophobic parents/society without understanding long term implications of that.

— suzanne moore (@suzanne_moore) August 12, 2020

Along with the non-stop bullying of women.… Read the rest

Oh have they now.

The BBC has quietly dropped four LGBT+ charities from an information page for transgender people seeking support.

The LGBT Foundation, Mermaids, The Gender Trust, and The Gender Identity Research and Education Society (GIRES) are all registered British charities that provide vital support and advice for trans, non-binary and gender-questioning people.

“Support” in the form of eager encouragement of delusional thinking.

As recently as June 29, they were all listed on a page on the BBC website called “Information and Support: Gender Identity”.

Pages such as this are often linked to under BBC articles or videos covering topics people may need further support or information about, including gender identity, sexual or mental health, and addiction

From The Australian:

Australia’s psychiatrists have been urged to be very cautious about giving official backing to gender clinic treatments for under-18s after an international scandal over false claims of mental health benefits for transgender surgery.

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists should be “extremely careful” before endorsing so-called “gender affirming” hormonal treatment and surgery for minors, according to Philip Morris, president of the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists whose members look after patients in the private and public sector.

In other words don’t cut crucial bits off people or give them dangerous hormones, or both, unless you’re very sure it will be beneficial. (Shorter: first, do no harm.) You’d think that would be self-evident, but … Read the rest

The Kamala Harris news has given me a second wind so I’ll go back to TERF wars an intro for a bit.

The next theme, after the “cis women and white fragility” bullshit, is “what do they mean it’s an ideology??”

The language of ‘gender ideology’ originates in anti-feminist and anti-trans discourses among right-wing Christians, with the Catholic Church acting as a major nucleating agent (Careaga-Pérez, 2016; Kuhar & Paternotte, 2017). In the last decade the concept has been increasingly adopted by far-right organisations and politicians in numerous American, European and African states. They position gender egalitarianism, sexual liberation and LGBTQ+ rights as an attack on traditional values by ‘global elites’, as represented by multinational corporations and

Trump can barely get the words out.

Trump has a total meltdown, mispronounces Kamala Harris's name, accuses Obama and Joe Biden of treason, and calls Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas" all in the same rant. Trump is not handling the Harris news well. pic.twitter.com/z0hePzH5oa

— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) August 11, 2020

He also says Harris was “very disrespectful” to Biden. Trump says that. Trump is the rudest person on the planet, and he says that. Also…

He seemed sedated. Like someone shot him with one of those zoo darts.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 11, 2020

… Read the rest

Good news I think, Biden’s choice. He’s such a lousy choice himself, he needs an exciting companion on the ticket. I know people have qualms about some of Harris’s work as a prosecutor, but I think she’ll rock it anyway.

Once a rival for the top job, the California senator of Indian-Jamaican heritage had long been considered the front-runner for the number two slot.

The former California attorney general has been urging police reform amid nationwide anti-racism protests.

…

Mr Biden had faced mounting calls to pick a black woman as his running mate in recent months as the nation was convulsed by social unrest over racial injustice and police brutality against African Americans, a key voting bloc to

Now that I’ve calmed down a little I’ll tackle another chunk of Terfwarsanintro.

By positioning (cis, white) ‘females’ as a category uniquely vulnerable to the threat of ‘male’ violence (and especially ‘biological’ male sexual violence), trans-exclusionary arguments around toilet access – including those advanced by self-proclaimed feminist groups – lend support to the gendered and misogynistic discourses that have long positioned (white) women as the ‘weaker sex’ needing protection (by men, from men).

These discourses have racist undertones, as the implicit whiteness of the women who are the subject of protection means that racialised and especially Black women and non-binary people are more likely to be considered dangerously masculine (Patel, 2017).

It would be funny if it … Read the rest

David Kaufman in the NY Times a couple of weeks ago:

Still in its infancy, this movement envisions a future when the ability to create a family is no longer determined by one’s wealth, sexuality, gender or biology.

By “create a family” he doesn’t mean adoption or step-parenthood, he means gestation. But of course the ability to gestate is determined by biology and by sex (not gender). It’s not something men can do. One can “envision a future” in which that’s not the case all one likes, but as of now that’s how it is. People burble about “uterus transplants” but it’s not that simple, to put it mildly.

“This is about society extending equality to its final and

Reading the intro part 2.

 Organisations resisting self-determination discursively position it as ‘dangerous’, arguing that it enables ‘men’ (a category frequently presumed to encompass trans women and non-binary people assigned male at birth) unfettered access to women-only spaces. Trans people and allies often describe proponents of this approach as ‘TERFs’ because they tend to support trans women’s/girls’ exclusion from spaces such as women’s toilets, changing rooms, rape crisis centres, shelters and feminist groups.

That’s because trans women and girls are not literally women and girls, they are men and boys who have adopted the label “trans.” The label is just a label. It’s just a word. It’s not magic. I could say I’m a trans house or giraffe or … Read the rest

Reading the intro part one.

Intense debates over trans issues, feminism, anti-trans ideologies, and the very language employed by various agents in these debates are not just terminological disputes or about how sex and gender should be conceptualised. They are also debates about information, and how people relate to it in a time of information overload; they are debates about truth, and how people relate to truth in a ‘post-truth era’. The trans/feminist conflicts we refer to as the ‘TERF wars’ reflect the current conditions of our time in which public discourse is dominated by political polarisation, deepened by the proliferation of misinformation and distrust in ‘experts’ whose knowledge may not speak to individuals’ cultural common sense. These are contemporary

Talk about institutional capture…

The 3rd ranking journal in Sociology, @TheSocReview has just published this special issue "TERF Wars: Feminism and the fight for transgender futures". No gender-critical feminists seem to have been invited to submit. https://t.co/YXBeCzdWog

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) August 10, 2020

Disclaimer – I haven't read the articles yet -that delight still awaits me (nothing I like better of a morning than reading about how I'm a racist, stupid, insensitive moron who wants death of trans people) – so I'll be totally delighted to be proved wrong. I'll let you know.

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) August 10, 2020

Table of contents.

“Sex wars and (trans) gender panics” by Sally Hines.

“Whose feminism is it anyway? The … Read the rest

A publisher – in fact Hachette, which publishes JK Rowling – asked the trans-cult group Mermaids to check an article for thought crime. The Times reports:

JK Rowling’s publisher invited the transgender activist group Mermaids to review an article in a magazine for A-level law students, which summarised a High Court test case on freedom of expression.

To review an article! Mermaids! Why??!!

The case made headlines in February when the judge likened police to the Gestapo or the Stasi for the way they responded to Harry Miller, 55, a businessman accused of sending transphobic tweets on social media.

Humberside police visited Miller’s place of work and told him his tweets would be recorded as a “non-crime hate incident”.

Sir has his wars mixed up (also the 1918 flu was in 1918, not 1917).

The ignorance is so painful. https://t.co/GVbgEiWHRl

— Charles M. Blow (@CharlesMBlow) August 10, 2020

… Read the rest

LGBT+ Labour has put out a stupid bullying “statement” on Labour MP Rosie Duffield who had the unmitigated temerity to say that it’s only women who have a cervix.

It is with great sadness that we have decided to put out this Statement on Rosie Duffield.

Solidarity, always, with our trans members, and the trans community. pic.twitter.com/pDZ8DuKl3m

— LGBT+ Labour (@LGBTLabour) August 10, 2020

Solidarity, always, with our trans members, and the trans community, and the trans people, and trans individuals, and all trans people, and trans groups, and trans collectives, and each and every trans person, and all the trans people, and every single trans person, and have we said it enough ways yet?

But solidarity never with women. … Read the rest

Originally a comment by iknklast on In middle-of-nowhere Arizona.

Omar, as someone who is a higher education faculty member, I feel the answer to the question of what is the product is of utmost importance. As you said, many see the diploma/graduate as the product. It is not. You said the experience. I think that is important, giving the student experiences that no other setting offers; they may or may not enhance their future career, but they add richness to life.

But the most important product of education is…education. Learning how to think. Learning some facts so you can think about things. Learning how to learn. Learning how to work with others

The product is education; the diploma/degree/certificate is … Read the rest