Life on a cooking planet:

About 15,000 households have been ordered to evacuate in Canada’s British Columbia, as firefighters battle raging wildfires that have set homes ablaze. Officials said a “significant” number of buildings caught fire in West Kelowna, a city of 36,000 people, and more than 2,400 homes were evacuated. A state of emergency has been declared for the entire province, where hundreds of separate fires are burning.

Meanwhile there are only about a thousand people left in Yellowknife.

In British Columbia, evacuation orders grew from covering 4,000 homes on Friday afternoon to about 15,000 in the space of an hour. Another 20,000 homes are under alert. Premier of the province, David Eby, said that evening that the

Blah blah blah women must not be allowed to have anything for themselves blah blah trans blah blah blah.

The International Chess Federation (FIDE) says it is temporarily banning transgender women from competing in its women’s events. The FIDE said individual cases would require “further analysis” and that a decision could take up to two years. The move has been criticised by some players and enthusiasts.

…

Yosha Iglesias, a trans woman professional chess player with the FIDE rank of chess master, said the policy would lead to “unnecessary harm” for trans players and women. “This appalling situation will lead to depression and suicide attempts,” Iglesias said.

See? That’s all he’s got. Men must be allowed to take what belongs … Read the rest

Another shipment of pestilent bullshit:

Please read Almut Gadow's crowdfunder statement. It is jaw-dropping.

She is bringing a case against the Open University for unfair dismissal. She was dismissed for questioning gender ideology.

The details are horrifying.https://t.co/OAcJHVc7LZ pic.twitter.com/e1FEzspw1f

— Professor Alice Sullivan (@ProfAliceS) August 18, 2023

I am reading it and it is indeed horrifying. The case:

My name is Almut Gadow. For almost 10 years, I taught law at the Open University. I was dismissed for questioning new requirements to indoctrinate students in gender identity theory, in ways which, I felt, distorted equality law and normalised child sexual exploitation.

I am bringing an employment tribunal claim arguing that I was harassed, discriminated against, and unfairly dismissed because

The BBC’s AntiSocial on “queering” museums.

The debate sparked by reviewing historic collections through a queer or LGBT lens. A “queering the collection” blogpost from the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth was criticised for making what some saw as tenuous links between historic objects from the ship and the experience of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. Supporters of “queering” museums and galleries say it’s needed to redress a traditional approach to history that has often ignored non-heterosexual people or stories. But it’s led to controversy and criticism that some institutions have gone too far by focusing on the LGBT angle at the expense of others or imposing a modern interpretation that wouldn’t have made sense at the

Interesting.

Do you ever see signs like this on the mens washroom? pic.twitter.com/gVutx6uRYC

— Buck Angel® Transsexual (@BuckAngel) August 18, 2023

The * in trans* leads to a clarification at the bottom of the poster: “In this case, trans refers to people who identify as transgender, transsexual, two-spirit, non-binary, genderqueer, or gender diverse.” In other words, anything and everything. Any guy who feels like going right on into the women’s washroom [rest room, toilet, bathroom, WC, etc] is welcome to; all he has to do is say he’s gender diverse. Who’s going to challenge him on that? Who even knows what the fuck it’s supposed to mean? So come on in, bros, fill the place up, make it so bro-friendly … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Empowering the bullies.

I think the block feature is an absolute necessity to prevent harassment.

It’s true that mass-blocking tools were bad: the promotion of block-lists to true believers to get them to isolate themselves from dissenting views was a move straight out of the Scientology playbook. But I don’t think that problem — which appears to have largely abated anyway; I don’t hear about mass block-lists anymore — merits getting rid of the block feature altogether.

Very often we have to be able to block specific accounts from replying to our posts, because they harass us. It’s true that people can create sockpuppet accounts to circumvent blocks, but very often harassers want … Read the rest

Yes, we do want someone who knows how to utter a coherent sentence, whether to us or to Putin or to Zelensky. That’s one reason we don’t want Trump.

Trump told Newsmax he would say this week if he’s debating. It’s Thursday. pic.twitter.com/HldvmTJxZs

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 18, 2023

Word is he’s gonna snub the debate and have a chat with Tucker Carlson instead.… Read the rest

Musk tells us he is getting rid of the block feature. Auschwitz Museum tells him why that’s a terrible idea.

Failing to address the antisemitic and Holocaust denial comments that appear under our posts commemorating the victims of Auschwitz would be a disservice to their memory.

We've chosen to block users who promote denial and hatred. This decision stems from our deep dedication to… pic.twitter.com/snLlW2pHtx

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) August 18, 2023

The whole reply:

Failing to address the antisemitic and Holocaust denial comments that appear under our posts commemorating the victims of Auschwitz would be a disservice to their memory.

We’ve chosen to block users who promote denial and hatred. This decision stems from our deep dedication to our

We’re the creationists???

Talking to people who know that men are not women is like talking to creationists.

So we’re the ones engaged in magical thinking? We’re the ones who deny reality? We’re the ones who believe in the power of thought to change physical givens? We’re the ones who value faith and submission and compliance more than truth and evidence?

We’re the ones who believe what we’re told to believe as opposed to what it’s reasonable to believe? We’re the ones who conform? We’re the ones who let The Community tell us what we’re allowed to think?

We’re the ones who put fantasy ahead of reality – who let fantasy contradict reality? We’re the ones who believe in … Read the rest

Hahahaha nothing to do with being a woman.

The requirements of being a surrogate aren’t even remotely related to “being a woman.” Please stop speaking about things you know absolutely nothing about https://t.co/gBDc6k2uzk pic.twitter.com/Sj7vLN9hXj

— celia (@_celia_bedelia_) August 18, 2023

… Read the rest

Even Republicans are saying Trump is lying.

Former President Donald Trump now says he won’t be holding a news conference next week to unveil what he claims is new “evidence” of fraud in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election — even though no fraud has ever been substantiated — citing the advice of lawyers as he prepares to face trial in two criminal cases that stem from his election lies.

No compelling evidence of the wide-scale fraud Trump alleges has emerged in the two-and-a-half years since the election in Georgia or elsewhere, despite Trump’s baseless claims. Republican officials in the state have long said he lost fairly and three recounts there confirmed President Joe Biden’s win.

“Rather than releasing the Report

Trump cancels himself.

BREAKING: Donald Trump calls his own bluff and CANCELS his press conference where he would show "evidence"!!!

Is he a fraud, or a coward? 🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/fKGQF36qeK

— Jon Cooper (@joncoopertweets) August 18, 2023

Note that that’s all one sentence – one long, tangled, inelegant, confusing, direction-changing, clumsy sentence. Man woman person camera tv.… Read the rest

Investigating:

Officials in the US state of Georgia are investigating online threats made against members of the grand jury that indicted Donald Trump on Monday. Personal information, including the addresses and photos of the jurors, were shared on right-wing platforms. Fulton County Sheriff’s Office said it was aware of the threats, and was trying to track down those behind them.

The names of the jurors were published in the indictment, a routine practice in Georgia. But after their identities emerged in that document, supporters of former President Trump seemingly compiled further information available online and posted photographs and addresses to forums, including the social media site Telegram…

Officials said that along with jurors’ personal information, threats against them were

More on the Yellowknife evacuations:

This is Canada’s worst-ever wildfire season with more than 1,000 active fires burning across the country, including 265 in the Northwest Territories. Experts say climate change has exacerbated the wildfire problem.

Drought has been a contributing factor to the number and intensity of this year’s fires, officials say, with high temperatures exacerbating the situation. Much of Canada has seen abnormally dry conditions.

Shane Thompson, the territorial environment minister, said the evacuation order had been issued late Wednesday to give people time to get out before the weather turned bad.

“The urgency is, fire changes drastically … the conditions are in our favor right now, but that will change on Saturday,” he told the CBC.

The show must go on… pic.twitter.com/VF8L9FHxah

— Andrew Doyle (@andrewdoyle_com) August 17, 2023

… Read the rest

Oh shut up bro.

There’s no such thing as “cis” female pals, much less feminist ones. Women are in no need of a prefix or adjective to indicate that we are women, because the word “women” already does that. “Cis” is superfluous. It’s there to trick us into thinking there are two kinds of women, the female kind and the male kind. There aren’t. There is only the one.

It’s perfectly possible to “support trans people” without insisting that men can be women.

If empathy is a good thing why not have some for women? There are a hell of a lot more women than there are men who call themselves women, so why all the exaggerated concern for … Read the rest

Farking hell.

The purported names and addresses of members of the grand jury that indicted Donald Trump and 18 of his co-defendants on state racketeering charges this week have been posted on a fringe website that often features violent rhetoric, NBC News has learned.

NBC isn’t naming the website for obvious reasons.

The Fulton County District Attorney’s Office declined to comment. District Attorney Fani Willis faced racist threats ahead of the return of the indictment, and additional security measures were put in place, with some employees being allowed to work from home.

The grand jurors’ purported addresses were spotted by Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan research group founded by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI investigator and staffer for

There are norms, and there are laws. Trump likes to smash both.

The Trump presidency generated an enormous amount of discussion about “norms”—the unwritten rules of American political life that everyone tacitly agrees to and that keep democracy functioning. Many of these norms had been somewhat invisible until Trump began shattering them, by doing things like profiting from his business during his time in office or demanding that the Justice Department investigate his political enemies.

But what makes a norm a norm is, at least in part, the fact that it’s not necessarily a legal obligation. When Trump bulldozed through these collective agreements about how politicians and particularly presidents should behave, in many cases there was no obvious

His what?

Former President Donald Trump’s promised press conference to refute the allegations in the indictment handed up by the Fulton County DA’s Office is now very much in doubt, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.

He wants to blather about the indictment in a press conference? Is there any limit to his stupidity?

Sources tell ABC News that Trump’s legal advisors have told him that holding such a press conference with dubious claims of voter fraud will only complicate his legal problems and some of his attorneys have advised him to cancel it.

Trump announced the planned press conference with a social media post shortly after he and 18 co-defendants were indicted late Monday in

How we live now:

Yellowknife residents have been ordered to begin evacuating the city immediately as wildfires approach, N.W.T. officials said Wednesday evening.

While the city is not in immediate danger, Environment Minister Shane Thompson said a “phased approach” to evacuating will allow citizens to get out safely by car or by plane.

People most at risk go now, the rest have until noon tomorrow.

“The fire now represents a real threat to the city,” Thompson said at a news conference Wednesday evening, adding it could reach the outskirts of the city by the weekend. The fire was about 17 kilometres from the city on Wednesday, he said.

…

Thompson said Wednesday that the highway from Yellowknife to Alberta is safe to