Originally a comment by Rob on The motives.

When you’re part of a dominant culture, as I am, and I suspect most of us here, it’s always more comfortable to keep things much as they are. Sure let in some ‘ethnics’. It gives us great choice in restaurants after all, but at the same time we don’t want to deal with different language, religions, restrictions on marriage or schooling. Sometimes for good reason perhaps, sometimes not.

But western centrist governments have all wanted to promote some flavour of globalism, particularly with respect to free or low barrier trade. Ask most economists and they’ll tell you there is no truly free trade without free migration. Labour is a resource, and … Read the rest

Migrants or refugees?

The home secretary, Priti Patel, has said she will ask the BBC and other media to reflect on their language after the term “migrant” was used to describe people who drowned in the Channel.

It’s considered dehumanizing.

The home secretary has most recently adopted the term “economic migrants”, a label favoured by the likes of the hard-right campaigner Nigel Farage but seen by charities as an attempt to undermine the motives of those who risk their lives to cross from France.

In other words as saying they’re not fleeing persecution but seeking better conditions.

But that raises the question of why the second is frowned on. Better conditions are better, so yes people are going to … Read the rest

I get so tired of the mockery.

A transgender swimmer on the University of Pennsylvania women’s team continued to smash records in the pool over the weekend.

Yes haha very funny. Of course a man continued to smash records set by women. Quit rubbing our noses in it.

Lia Thomas won the 200-yard freestyle in 1:41.93 at the Zippy Invitational in Akron, Ohio, on Saturday to break the school’s all-time mark and establish the best time in the nation this season, according to the university. On Sunday, she won the 1,650 freestyle by more than 38 seconds in 15:59.71 to set another university record.

Yes, because he’s a man, doing what’s known as “cheating.”

In a previous meet against

Like…what?

If Liz Truss replaces Boris, it will be like Hitler coming to power. We’re f******.

— India Willoughby (@IndiaWilloughby) December 9, 2021

Like Hitler? How?

Ah he explains.

For those saying I shouldn’t invoke Hitler, Truss is a fan of Kathleen Stock – who backs the ‘elimination’ of trans. Truss has already used her position to remove legal protections for trans people. She’s also enshrined in law the right to be ‘Gender Critical’ in the workplace.

— India Willoughby (@IndiaWilloughby) December 9, 2021

It’s weird to put your own lie in scare quotes. It’s a grotesque and dangerous lie to say that Kathleen Stock backs the elimination of trans people – and it doesn’t become less of a lie … Read the rest

Another heretic for the pyre:

Choreographer Rosie Kay has never shied away from controversial subjects. Her ballet MK Ultra addressed conspiracy theorists; her award-winning 5 Soldiers, inspired by the weeks she spent embedded with an infantry regiment, tackled war. And on Tuesday Kay resigned from the dance company that bears her name, forced out by her belief that biological sex is immutable.

Such a cranky “belief,” isn’t it. It’s like the “belief” that animals are born and die.

What led to Kay, 45, abandoning her life’s work was an argument at a party she held for young dancers at her home. Telling them that her next ballet was based on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a male aristocrat who

So Catholics think they have a monopoly on organ music? They think they get to dictate who can and can’t compose and play organ music? Why would that be the case? Who has the authority to make it the case? What’s next, we have to seek permission from religious fanatics to play any instrument at all, and to sing, and to hum under our breath?

After Catholic fundamentalists prevented Swedish musician Anna von Hausswolff from performing in a church in Nantes on Tuesday, the Paris church Saint-Eustache has cancelled her planned 9 December concert, citing concerns over security.

On Tuesday, a group described by Nantes’ deputy mayor, Bassem Asseh, as “intolerant radicals” blocked the entrance to the church Notre-Dame

Oops now she’s had to resign.

Allegra Stratton has stepped down as the government’s spokesperson for the Cop26 climate summit after footage emerged of her joking about a party at Downing Street during the peak of lockdown rules in December last year.

Where’s everybody’s sense of humor? Pandemics are funny, dammit! People who impose rules on underlings that they flout themselves are funny. Do what I say not what I do is funny. Hypocrisy is funny. Privilege and contempt are funny. … Read the rest

Boris Johnson partied right after telling everyone not to party.

On Tuesday last week, the British tabloid newspaper, the Mirror, published a story that claimed parties had been held at Johnson’s Downing Street residence in the run-up to Christmas last year.

One of the events was said to have taken place on 18 December, with dozens of people drinking wine and playing party games.

There was one major problem with this: London had just been placed under new restrictions to stop the spread of coronavirus. Last December, Covid was spreading rapidly, hundreds of people were dying every day, and Johnson’s government had told people that parties were no longer allowed.

Yes but he told people – as in he … Read the rest

UN Women seems to have forgotten its own name.

Trans women are 4 times more likely to experience violence than cisgendered people.

This #16Days of Activism, learn with our friend @NikkieTutorials about how we can all support and protect trans women. #OrangeTheWorld pic.twitter.com/UPMb5pmBLN

— UN Women (@UN_Women) December 7, 2021

UN Women is UN Women, not UN Men Who Say They Are Women.

Also that stupid little factoid isn’t even true, and it’s also absurd on its face – why are they comparing trans women to cis people? It should be either trans women compared to women or trans people compared to people in general.

But it shouldn’t be trans women at all. UN Women should be about … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Papito on Smile when you call us that.

Lumping Hispanics together into a single group would be an improvement over what “Latinx” does. Creating a unified Latin American group is what Univision has done so successfully, and as the article says, they never say “Latinx.” When I saw what Univision was doing in creating a broad yet unified Hispanic audience I was amazed.

What “Latinx” says is that Hispanics are using their own language wrong, and they need Anglos to fix it for them. It’s colossally demeaning, and utterly unnecessary. The word is used in English, and English doesn’t have genders (either to fix, or be left alone). If they just used a different word, … Read the rest

Trump wants to be the next Zuckerberg as well as the first Emperor of Amurrika.

Donald Trump’s plan to launch “Truth Social”, a special purpose acquisitions backed social media company, early next year may have hit a roadblock after US regulators issued a request for information on the deal on Monday.

The request from the SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority for information from Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC), a blank-check SPAC that is set to merge with Trump Media & Technology Group, comes as a powerful Republican congressman, Devin Nunes, announced he was stepping out of politics to join the Trump media venture as CEO.

The twin developments set the stage for a major political battle over Truth

“Are you a woman or gender variant?”

I beg your pardon? Why are those my options? Do you ask everyone that?

It’s the Green Party.

The British Green Party says in an email sent to its members that anyone who “identifies” as woman or “other gender variant” is eligible to vote in the next Women Committee Election, party members have said.

So men are the normal and women are the weirdo variant along with other weirdo variants?

On December 6, members of the Green Party received an email about registering to vote in the 2021/22 Green Party Women Committee Election.

I just received an email from The Green Party about registering to vote in the Women Committee Election.

IT

Students outraged, onlookers concerned, words exchanged.

AN urgent investigation is underway at Durham University after students walked out of an event at which controversial journalist Rod Liddle was a guest speaker – and were later branded “pathetic” by a college principal.

Well, Rod Liddle – he lives to irritate people. Making a fuss just amplifies him.

This is the bit that interests me:

Durham’s Intersectional Feminist Society launched an open letter condemning Liddle’s remarks and the decision to invite him.

Durham’s what?

Does Durham have other “intersectional” societies or is it just women who are expected to be inclooosive and to enforce that inclooosivity on each other?

The society doesn’t seem to have its own website or space on … Read the rest

Dud analogy time.

Richard. If I was at university and a lecturer publicly expressed the view that there could not be same-sex marriage because of the definitions of male and female, would you call that humane? It’s possible to be clear thinking and very wrong. /1

— Steve Zara. (@sjzara) December 7, 2021

If a lecturer publicly expressed the view that people with red hair should never eat sauerkraut would you call that humane?… Read the rest

He’s on fire today.

3/ Professor Dawkins laments the openly homophobic campaign against Professor Stock, and yes it was openly homophobic because lesbians more often than not tend to be pro-reality / GC. Nothing else explains the vigour or assiduousness of that persecution. I recognise it.

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) December 7, 2021

Lesbians are women, so you get your homophobia and your misogyny and pretty soon things start getting really ugly.

5/ We are in the grip of stage 2 homophobia and, as in Scream, the call is coming from within the house. Our own movement is fatally corrupted and compromised by a religion so stupid it says boy=blue and pink=girl. We are openly abused on social

Journalism: stop doing this. Don’t EVER do this. Don’t report that a woman sexually assaulted a woman when it was a man who did the assaulting.

Headline:

Lisa Jones sexually assaulted female stranger she followed in Melbourne

Subhead:

A woman has been thrown behind bars after sexually assaulting a stranger she followed down a Melbourne street before issuing a shocking demand.

First three paragraphs:

A Melbourne woman was walking home when another woman grabbed her and told her to “lie down and have sex with me” in a shocking attack.

Lisa Jones pleaded guilty to assault with intent to commit a sexual offence and sexual assault.

She was jailed for three years and three months in the County Court of

Oops.

When woke Language Reform turns out to be not so much a reform as a mistake:

As Democrats seek to reach out to Latino voters in a more gender-neutral way, they’ve increasingly begun using the word Latinx, a term that first began to get traction among academics and activists on the left.

That is, non-Hispanic academics and activists, apparently.

But that very effort could be counterproductive in courting those of Latin American descent, according to a new nationwide poll of Hispanic voters.

Only 2 percent of those polled refer to themselves as Latinx, while 68 percent call themselves “Hispanic” and 21 percent favored “Latino” or “Latina” to describe their ethnic background, according to the survey from Bendixen &

Disgusting narcissistic pig.

The fact that CBC had to close comments on the article about me being the speaker at the memorial today is exactly why we have to keep working for trans women and other minorities to be included in conversation about GBV.

— Ana (@AnastasiaPres11) December 6, 2021

No we fucking don’t. We have to keep working for women to be able to talk about violence against us, not violence against men in lipstick.

And it’s violence against women – it’s not “GBV.” Men in red dresses don’t get to rename it GBV so that they can pretend it happens to them too. Get your self-obsessed kicks somewhere else you creep.… Read the rest

This just in (well, an hour ago) –

Breaking: Justice Department files suit challenging extreme gerrymandered Texas redistricting maps

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) December 6, 2021

It’s not great that it takes extreme gerrymandering to get the DoJ involved.

95% of population growth in Texas from communities of color during last decade but gerrymandered GOP maps increase # of majority white districts & decrease # of majority Latino/Black districts. Incredibly brazen racial gerrymandering https://t.co/KD981rML6A

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) December 6, 2021

If only we could go back to reserving voting for white men of property.… Read the rest

Please, CBC, tell us more about this insulting and offensive move.

A transgender woman in Prince Edward Island has been invited to speak at a Montreal Massacre memorial service being held today by the P.E.I. Advisory Council on the Status of Women.

Monday marks 32 years since 14 women were killed at École Polytechnique.

Since 14 women were killed for being women, by a man who said that was why they were being killed. It was an explicitly, avowedly misogynist massacre of women.

“I was deeply touched,” said Anastasia Preston. “It is a huge honour for myself and it’s a huge honour as a trans woman to be included in an event like this.”

But there shouldn’t be… Read the rest