The war between peasants and pheasants continues.

Some people from Totnes, in Devon, went out for a picnic in the woods.

[T]he Duke of Somerset owns much of the area’s woodlands, and they remain largely off-limits to the public because they are used for a large pheasant shoot.

The Duke owns 2,800 acres of land in some of the most beautiful areas of Devon, but the vast majority of it is inaccessible to the public. This is despite the fact he has received funds for the woodland the protesters picnicked in under the English Woodland Grant Scheme, which comes from taxpayer money.

Yes but owning huge tracts of land is what being a duke is all about. Nobody … Read the rest

Ursula K. LeGuin on abortion rights:

My friends at NARAL asked me to tell you what it was like before Roe vs Wade. They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke….

What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could

Amy Davidson Sorkin on how it’s going to be if Alito’s poison pen ruling stands:

The most immediate effect of Dobbs, if the draft opinion holds, will be that tens of millions of women will abruptly lose access to abortion. The ruling itself would not institute a ban, but it would give states almost boundless power to do so. More than twenty states already have measures in place that would severely curtail access: “trigger laws,” designed to go into effect once Roe is overturned; restrictions in state constitutions; or laws that predate Roe but were left on the books. After the draft was leaked, Louisiana legislators moved forward with a bill that would not only ban almost all abortions but

New Mexico:

“Historic” and “extreme” weather conditions could fan a wildfire in New Mexico which is already the second biggest ever seen in the US state.

The so-called Hermits Peak Fire has been burning for more than a month and has torn through an area larger than the city of Chicago.

Many families have been left homeless and thousands have been evacuated.

Winds, near-record high temperatures and dry conditions are now expected to stoke the blaze further.

This is the new reality. In some places it’s rising sea levels, flooding, land disappearing the way it is in the bayous south of New Orleans, in other places it’s crops failing because of heat and lack of water or torrential rain, … Read the rest

Make sure to nail all the windows closed before releasing the cyanide.

As the Supreme Court considers potentially overturning Roe v. Wade, abortion rights activists are heralding abortion pills as a potential option in places where clinics may have to close — but several red states are already cracking down on the pills.

They’ll be mandating bags over the head next.

The governor of Tennessee signed a law in May making it a felony to mail abortion pills, punishable by 20-year imprisonment and a $50,000 fine. The law also adds further restrictions to medication abortion.

There is no crime worse than aiding The Enemy Woman to be free.… Read the rest

Unbelievable.

"A child who is, in fact, living out part of his or her early life as an ectopic pregnancy is still a unique human being with its own DNA. I don't understand why we allow those children to be murdered."—Okla Sen. Warren Hamilton

Ectopic pregnancies KILL women & are NEVER viable. https://t.co/wvEQqYgnk6 pic.twitter.com/jFIJOBLyuL

— Kendall Brown (@kendallybrown) April 29, 2022

… Read the rest

Clair Wills suggests we think about Ireland’s experience with the unwanted pregnancy problem:

In a couple of weeks’ time, on May 25, Ireland will mark the fourth anniversary of the abortion referendum, when, with broad cross-party support, 66.4 percent of the population voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution. 

Adopted following a deeply divisive referendum in 1983, “the Eighth” asserted the right to life of the unborn, “with due regard to the equal rights of the mother.” Abortion had been illegal in Ireland since the passage of the British Offences Against the Person Act 1861, which was kept on the statute books after independence. But for religious conservatives it was not illegal enough.

In the early

Garrett Epps on Alito’s arrogance:

…one paragraph in Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization stands out for its thoroughgoing mix of hypocrisy and dishonesty. Advocates of legalized abortion, Alito writes, argue that “without the availability of abortion … people will be inhibited from exercising their freedom to choose the types of relationships they desire, and women will be unable to compete with men in the workplace and in other endeavors.”

Do they? I don’t know. I just argue that women should be able to stop being pregnant if they don’t want to be pregnant.

But, Alito explains, the foes of abortion have the answer to this lament:

They explain that attitudes about the

Clarence Thomas tells us he will not be bullied.

Following protests sparked by the leak of a draft U.S. Supreme Court decision indicating the justices are poised to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, Justice Clarence Thomas said on Friday that the court cannot be “bullied.”

We know. That’s the nature of the Court: once they’re there, we’re stuck with them (barring impeachment, which is vanishingly rare).

Thomas, one of the most conservative justices on the nine-member court, made only a few passing references to the protests over the leaked draft opinion as he spoke at a judicial conference in Atlanta.

As a society, “we are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t

Kathryn Joyce wrote about Amy Coney Barrett and abortion and the “supply” of babies the day after the leaked ruling:

If you want to understand what using adoption as the solution to unplanned pregnancies looks like, you don’t need to look far. But you do need to look. There’s a long and ugly history in the U.S. of coercive and even forced adoption. From roughly 1945 to 1972 — the year before the Supreme Court’s original Roe v. Wade decision — somewhere between 1.5 million and 6 million women relinquished infants for adoption, often after being “sent away” to homes for unwed mothers, where many women faced brutal coercion, were prohibited from contact with outsiders, went through labor and gave

Guy with an ugly habit of calling women names in public.

You are judged by the company you keep. If want to know why JK Rowling is detested by most right-minded members of the LGBTQ community, and disowned by the Emma Watsons and Daniel Radcliffes of this world, then this thread will do it. She is utterly loathsome. https://t.co/SUYmy999dl

— Darren Styles OBE (@bydarrenstyles) April 11, 2022

Please don’t donate. Allison is a terrible person, @stonewalluk saves lives. Thanks x https://t.co/UFas8wsm8K

— Darren Styles OBE (@bydarrenstyles) April 27, 2022

… Read the rest

This has taken my breath away. (You know how that goes, right? That one that’s so stunning you stare at it for long seconds, forgetting to breathe?)

BREAKING: In a brief re abortion, Supreme court Justices Amy Coney Barrett/Alito's Draft, said US needs a “domestic supply of infants” to meet needs of parents seeking to adopt — that those who would otherwise abort must be made to carry to term — giving children up for adoption.

— Dr. Jack Brown (@DrGJackBrown) May 7, 2022

The shops are running low on tomato sauce, so let’s offer farmers incentives for growing more tomatoes.

The adoption system is running low on babies, so we will now force women to produce them.

If Amy … Read the rest

Wearing a bag over the head is now mandatory in Afghanistan.

For women that is. Not for men, of course. Men get to see and breathe and talk like normal human beings. Women have to wear bags over their heads because they are whores.

Afghan women will have to wear the Islamic face veil for the first time in decades under a decree passed by the country’s ruling Taliban militants.

The country’s woman-hating theocrats who seized power by force. And the thing is not a face veil, it’s a literal bag over the head, with a thick mesh to peer through in hopes of seeing the car in time to avoid being run over.

The decree was passed by the

Not our crimes.

A transgender woman was sentenced Friday to 25 years in prison for forcing the 7-year-old daughter she fathered to participate in child pornography.

The 7-year-old daughter HE fathered. It’s a man’s crime.

Marina Volz, 32, of Franklin, was sentenced, along with three others, by Superior Court Judge Peter Tober for their roles in running a child pornography production company in their Coburn Lane home in Franklin Township.

…

Assistant Somerset County Prosecutor Brian Stack told the judge that the quartet was a “vortex of darkness” that “snuffed out” the girl who was taken from her mother in Oregon to New Jersey to be in the child pornography.

Imagine that poor child’s life there.

While not

I’ll be darned, the ACLU has a women’s rights project. I suppose it’s fully “inclusive.”

Its director is Ria Tabacco Mar, who writes in the Washington Post today about Alito’s cheery view of pregnancy:

Among the many shocking elements of the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, this one jumped out at me: the rosy picture of pregnancy painted by Justice Samuel Alito, who has never been pregnant.

Some wags on Twitter are asking how she can know that. Never mind; she corrects her error soon enough.

But anyone who has been pregnant — or cares to understand — knows that the reality in the United States is not rosy at all. At best, pregnant

How sad it is that we can’t do without women entirely, because of that one silly arrangement…

Brian Dowling has set his sights on becoming a first-time dad in 2022.

The Big Brother icon, 43, is hoping that this year will finally be the right time for him and husband Arthur Gourounlian to welcome their first child together.

The lovebirds, who tied the knot in 2015, have both shared their dreams of becoming parents over the years, but the process has been much harder than they first anticipated – partly due to the strict surrogacy laws in Ireland.

The process, you see – it turns out to be much harder than they expected because there has to be a … Read the rest

Department of Ridiculous Headlines:

Can the women’s movement be as effective without the word ‘women’?

Of course not. Any other questions?

If you were raised on 1970s feminism, as I was, the linguistic shift toward phrases such as “birthing people” and “uterus havers” has been a bit jarring.

No it hasn’t. It’s been utterly enraging.

The incongruity between old language and new became particularly noticeable this week, after Politico published a leaked draft of a Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade.

Particularly noticeable and enraging. You’re god damn right it did.

In 1987, the National Women’s Law Center called the nomination of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court “a particular threat to women”

Kathleen Stock has a dazzling piece on queeritude. It’s a must-read; I’ll just dangle a few amuse-bouches to tempt you.

In recent years, queerness has also become a fascinatingly multifunctional symbolic object in the psyche of the nation, simultaneously representing both sexily avant-garde transgression and fully paid-up membership of the British establishment.

Both a salad dressing and a drain cleaner!

A project on the history of the gerrymandered categories of “LGBTQ+” and “queer” is, of course, a fantastic idea; were it done properly, it would be genuinely exciting. Ideally such a museum would interrogate the sociological and historical conditions of its own movement. It might ask, for instance: what economic forces have shaped its transition from the gay rights

Well how about that. Strangio manages to retweet Democracy Now using The Word not once but twice.

Alito cited Matthew Hale in his draft. Who? Bess Levin at Vanity Fair has the deets:

As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern notes, the draft—which could change before a the final ruling, as could the various justices’ votes—doesn’t just lay out the case for why Roe should be overturned, it goes full scorched earth. Alito, Stern writes, “does not seek out any middle path. He disparages Roe and its successors as dishonest, illegitimate, and destructive to the court, the country, and the Constitution. He quotes a wide range of anti-abortion activists, scholars, and judges who view abortion as immoral and barbaric; there’s even a footnote that approvingly cites Justice Clarence Thomas’s debunked theory that abortion is a tool of