Miscellany Room 15
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86 responses to “Miscellany Room 15”
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Lovely picture. It looks like one of the lakes I used to frequent in Oklahoma, but I imagine it isn’t.
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It’s dear Lake Washington on the east side of Seattle. It is indeed extremely beautiful, and there’s a lot of it.
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Thank you. I didn’t even know these filled-up.
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‘Who’s this fool?’ asks Ophelia about Kylie Cheung, the journo who’s attacking Sophie Cunningham for the latter’s sex realist views.
https://x.com/OpheliaBenson/status/2079882017001619932#m
I can answer. Cheung is a journalist who used write for Jezebel and Salon, and a strong TRA.
Cheung is also behind the ‘Dark Woke’ movement, where Democrats post cringe comments about things like clogging MAGA supporters’ toilets online.
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We went to dinner tonight with the kids in a trendy part of DC. Good pan-Mediterranean food (even if no one can get patatas bravas right these days), a nice Lebanese Grenache, friendly if spotty service.
Anyway, there were four toilets. One for men, with three urinals and a sit-down toilet, and three (including an accessible one) for both sexes. I didn’t go into any of those, but I assume they were single occupancy. But even so, that leaves four outlets exclusively for men, and three that women have to share. Maddening.
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Good post by Mary Jane Murphy about speaking to a loved one stuck in the TRA ideology, ‘How to talk to someone who is still inside the Spell’.
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That sounds like appropriate tactics for deconverting someone from any religion.
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Amnesty International backs down, because apparently “all bullies are cowards really, stand up to them” is more than a platitude.
https://www.amnesty.org.uk/latest/an-apology-a-growing-threat-briefing-published-on-8-july-2026/
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I had to look up some background, but apparently the New York Times is getting into trouble because they recently published articles that are not following the “trans” playbook, and some activists are calling for a boycott of everything NYT, including the games and the recipes. Ken Jennings, the host of Jeopardy, has been supportive of gender identity ideology, but apparently not strongly enough. He made social media posts about some NYT games, and got yelled at for daring to have a subscription, so he made a joke about getting express permission from the trans community to maintain his subscription. That got him in more hot water from activists.
Apologies in advance for the NY Post link, but that’s where I saw the story.
Ken Jennings triggers outrage after joke about trans protest of NY Times word games
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Good grief.
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In 2021, Capital One gave notice to close over 300 Trump-related accounts, based on Anti Money Laundering analysis (AML). This was not an accusation, but due diligence. Capital One kept it private.
In 2025, the Trump Organization and Eric Trump sued Capital One for debanking them illegally for political reasons.
Friday, Capital One defended itself by citing their AML analysis in court. Something like a Streisand Effect, backfiring on the Trumps.
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Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve on the subject of transwomen in women’s sport, in response to Sophie Cunningham’s own opinion on the subject:
“The issue isn’t as big as the issues that we have in women’s sports,” she said. “Whether it’s, you know, cisgender men that have held us down for years in spaces like being able to have access to facilities and uniforms in locker rooms. These young girls that are sitting at games with anti-trans signs, do they understand actually what the real problems are and what they’re how they’re being marginalized? We’re still not in a space where we have equality.”
Such whataboutism doesn’t mean those not wanting males in female sport are ignorant of the past, and this amounts to trying to change the subject and ridicule the other side while doing it. It’s bullshit. Here’s another more lengthy quote:
“I come from a space of inclusion and the narrative that I think that is problematic is to suggest that, number one, that transgender athletes are the biggest problem in women’s sports,” Reeve said. “And I think this is what’s bothersome is that there’s a faction of people in our country that are making this a massive issue.”
She added: “We need to protect trans kids. Every kid. To me, it’s a human rights issue. Every kid has a right to sports, regardless of gender-diverse, transgender. Every kid has the right to access. What gets nuanced is, you know, when you’re beyond puberty. When you’re in an Olympic sport. When you have scholarships at stake and that sort of thing. That’s where I say that common sense people get together, and you find common ground to find a way to be inclusive.”
She also criticized “the innuendo there that, somehow, transgender women are predators of some kind in the locker room.”
Golly it’s not like many haven’t spent time and effort exploring the nuances of male physical advantage in elite sport and trying to find common ground, only to be told they’re transphobes and shutupshutupshutup by insinuating they’re just making false accusations about transwomen in locker rooms. Sheesh, as if we don’t have norms about males undressing with females in locker rooms!
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She can’t even figure out that “every kid should have access to sports” does not mean that every kid should have access to the opposite sex sport?
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Journalist Rod Liddle passed away recently.
Liddle had a history of making crass and offensive comments about women, Black people, and disabled people.
So why is Kathleen Stock not only praising a vicious misogynist, but also sneering at the ‘online sisterhood’ who found Liddle’s behaviour objectionable?
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And just in case you think I’m over-reacting, here’s a Liddle article where he said he couldn’t be a schoolteacher because he’d want to ‘shag’ the female pupils (YUCK!) :
Again: why is Kathleen Stock praising this revolting man?
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Are you asking me? I don’t know. I don’t keep track of all the disagreements among feminists, because apart from any other reason it would take up all of my time and I would still never catch up.
At any rate – I think admitting to hypothetically wanting to shag the girls is not terrible. Wanting to torture them to death would be terrible, but wanting to shag them is just kind of normal. Wanting to shag them isn’t the same as shagging them.
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Thought I’d check what Kathleen Stock had said on twitter and found her account has been suspended. Seems like someone working at twitter has it in for her because as far as I can tell she’s said nothing that warrants a suspension. I’m sure Stock will keep writing though, so maybe she will have more to say about it later.
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Ophelia: Rod Liddle didn’t write in that “Spectator” piece that he found 18-year old schoolgirls attractive.
He explicitly wrote in it that he wouldn’t be able to be a teacher, because :
I could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids. It seemed to me to be virtually impossible not to, and I was convinced that I’d be right in there, on day one. We’re talking secondary school level here, by the way – and even then I don’t think I’d have dabbled much below year ten, as it is now called.
“Year Ten”, in the UK, is the year for girls aged 15 and 14.
https://www.bcpcouncil.gov.uk/schools-and-learning/school-admissions/school-year-group-table
Pass the sick bag.
So Liddle was saying he couldn’t be an educator because – poor, helpless, male that he was – he would be compelled to have sex with 14-year old girls. If that paragraph is meant to be funny, I can’t see the humour, and if it’s meant to be a serious argument, I can’t see the seriousness.
I do wonder what all the women (and men) who were sexually abused as minors by teachers, thought of Mr. Liddle’s little screed.
As for Kathleen Stock: even if she doesn’t know about that particular Liddle piece, she surely knew that Liddle had a history of insulting women in his columns, such as Harriet Harman. Yet she expresses pride in appearing on his show, praises his support for her, and sneers at the “online sisterhood” who found Liddle’s behaviour towards women objectionable.
I know it’s a dispute between feminists, and I know Jane Clare Jones is somewhat controversial even among the sex realist crowd.
But I’m on Jones’ side here. Rod Liddle is currently being lauded by the Times, the Telegraph, and Nigel Farage. I believe Jones is correct in criticizing Stock for acting like “stanning for the man is edgy”.
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Well, but consider the context. He’s saying this is why he DIDN’T go into teaching. He’s offering a hypothetical. He’s confessing to being a goat.
I’m just not as outraged by it as you are.
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A little light relief. Ellen / Elliot Page appeared on a ‘TransLash’ podcast to have a rather confused rant about school biology lessons being ‘weaponised’ against the trans, among other things. But the highlight had to be this pearl of wisdom:
Human beings are the only species that are ridiculous enough to seem to have a huge problem with trans folks.
Gee, I wonder why that might be.
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Eeeeeeeesh
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Ophelia – a few years ago, Suzanne Moore protested when she heard that Rod Liddle was being offered the editorship of the London “Independent” newspaper.
She said this was why:
My credentials were simply that I loved that paper and did not want it edited by a racist misogynist, which is how I then perceived Liddle.
The common assault on his pregnant girlfriend, for which he accepted a police caution but later denied, was public knowledge.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/17/rod-liddle-spectator-race
So add that behaviour to a misogynistic list of actions that includes the revolting sexist comments Liddle made about Harriet Harman, Mary Beard, female soccer players, and other women.
Interesting that Moore hasn’t joined Kathleen Stock, Julie Bindel and Rosie Duffield in the “Rod was such a talented writer! And he was so *nice* to me!” chorus.
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I’m not defending Liddle. I just said I’m not that outraged by a man’s admitting he would want to shag young girls if he spent time around them. That’s it; that’s all; it’s a very specific and limited remark. It’s not a secret that men can get turned on by female people even when they don’t want or choose to, is it?
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Bash Back replying to Mary-Ann Stephenson.
“Nice office you got there. Be a shame if something happened to it…again”.
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Here’s something nice: a fascinating article about morning sickness, and the scientific quest to identify its cause and find a cure. Refreshingly, not once does the author refer to “pregnant people” — it’s pregnant women and mothers all the way down, even when she brings up Elliot Page’s titular character in the teen-pregnancy comedy-drama film Juno.
(Well, there’s one sentence, “People resist epidurals because they want to be present when they usher in a new life,” that could just as well have swapped “women” for “people”, but I think that was just a slip.)
And the piece appears in the preposterously trans-addled New Yorker, no less. Perhaps their editorial stance has relaxed a bit…
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Wow!
I don’t even mind an occasional “people” when it’s just ordinary variety of wording. If there are plenty of “women”s the odd “people” is fine. I’ll leave it to science to figure out what the exact ratio should be.
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I half-suspect it was a small but deliberate provocation when the author, Anna Russell, brought up Elliot Page and thrice referred to her pregnant character as a her or a she.
I can imagine there was a lot of back-and-forth between Russell and her editor before this article came out…
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A male basketball player has announced he will enter the Women’s National Basketball League in protest of the policy letting trans women in, and in support of Sophie Cunningham’s opposition to it.
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The. President. Of. The. United. States. Had. His. Bank. Accounts. Closed. Due. To. Concerns. Over. Possible. Money. Laundering.
And this story is barely making the news!
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The. President. Of. The. United. States. Had. His. Bank. Accounts. Closed. Due. To. Concerns. Over. Possible. Money. Laundering.
This must be a first in our history (I refer only to the US, because I don’t know enough of the history of other countries to know all their scandals).
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“Sunday Times” article about detransitioners in the United States, who say they were rushed into “gender reassignment surgery” without being told of the full consequences:
I feel really sorry for these people. They were sold a lie of the Magic Gender Surgery that would solve all their problems and make them happy.
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More miscellany, and also more good news:
Currently I’m transit-nerding out on YouTube, googling random subway stuff, as I do when I’m bored. (I love me some urban planning and infrastructure!) I looked up a video of the Tehran subway, just to see what it’s like. Did you know that it’s the largest metro system in the Middle East? I could regale you with more nerdy facts about it, but what’s far more interesting is the people in the footage I’m watching, which was taken two years ago. It shows ordinary, everyday Tehranis (Tehranites? Tehranians? Tehrantonians?) going about their day-to-day business.
And it can’t not be noticed, almost instantly. It’s shocking:
The women are not wearing hijab!
Not just one or two daredevils. I’m talking, like, virtually every woman under 50.
Just straight-up nope-ing the headscarf. Young women, nonchalantly chewing gum, idly scrolling on their phones, shoulders relaxed. No scarves. Dozens and dozens and dozens of women, out in public.
The vast majority of younger women in the video are scarfless. (Well, many still have scarves, but slumped around their shoulders, demoted to a mere accessory — at the ready, as it were. But they ain’t really wearin’ ’em. And some women don’t appear to have brought one at all, not even just in case.) Interestingly, virtually all women about middle-aged and older still do wear scarves. Maybe it’s an ingrained habit; maybe it’s cultural; I dunno. It’s interesting, in any case. I don’t think I saw a single woman over 50 without one. And under 50, only a small minority had one on. An acute divide.
I had no idea that this had happened! Or I guess, I didn’t quite process its significance. I’m pretty sure I’d heard about the death of Mahsa Amini at some point, and the wave of protests that ensued. (If anything, I probably read about it here at B&W.)
But it’s one of those things where the headlines don’t hit the story home like the images do. To read something about, say, how some women have become increasingly defiant about the hijab in Tehran following a high-profile flashpoint involving the death of a young woman… That seems like a pleasingly optimistic headline, a little tick of the dial in the right direction. A nugget of good news.
But to see actual footage of what has taken place, what has changed — the sheer scope of it, it knocks your socks off.
(Or your scarf! hurr! Sorry, sorry…)
For some reason I have extra fondness for the young woman in the footage who’s wearing the baseball cap. Like, she’s got something covering her hair, yes, but it’s entirely of her choosing, and it has nothing to do with the morality police. She’s free to decide what she does or doesn’t wear on her head.
It’s also telling: a tiny moment near the beginning, when a woman realizes she’s being filmed and, for a brief second, hesitatingly reaches for her scarf, only to release it just as quickly and regain her composure. There’s a huge amount of human story compressed into that fraction of a second alone…
Here’s the video of the subway:
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Interesting! I’m not seeing quite what you’re seeing though. Lots and lots wearing them. But still, yes, since I thought the hijab-police terrorized all the naked heads, it is good to see so many.
I might have to join you in the watching subway videos habit.
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As long as Iran is the topic:
Sunk Costs & Diminishing Returns of Iran’s Nuclear Program w/ Farzan Sabet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFEvHChPGlA
BTW the interviewer lives in Toronto.
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Right now, one of NASA’s three WB-57 high altitude research aircraft is flying a racetrack pattern at 50,000 feet to collect data on the total eclipse of the Sun today.
They are something like a U-2 spy plane, but with thicker wings to carry a heavier load of equipment.
This link should work to open a browser window centered on the plane flying live, then you should be able to zoom out and see the plane is flying over the Greenland Iceland gap.
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@Ophelia,
Yeah, upon second viewing, I think my initial assessment was coloured by my genuine surprise at having seen really any women unscarved in public at all in Tehran. But it wasn’t really “the overwhelming majority”; that was, I can see now, heat-of-the-moment excitement. Still, it’s an optimistic development for the women and girls in Iran, certainly a piece of good news amid so much bad stuff.
And yeah, urban transit videos are generally a great source of light, pleasant, optimistic infotainment. Who doesn’t love to see the tangible results of people coming together to improve the place they live, the fruits of collective civic effort that will benefit generations to come.
This kind of wholesome content is what YouTube does best, if you ask me.
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And I’m a huge fan of urban transportation myself, and use Seattle’s hundreds of bus routes to explore every inch of it.
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Ah, that’s lovely!
One great benefit of buses over subways is that, being aboveground, they give us wonderful streetscapes to behold. I do love me the Toronto Subway and the London Underground — two transit systems I’m practically married to — but the cities’ overground networks — Toronto’s streetcars and London’s double-decker buses — are much more fun to ride, because of course you get to see so much city life out the window.
I’m proud to say I’ve never driven a car in my life, and that’s only possible because as an adult I’ve only ever lived in urban environments where public transit is supported: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, London.
And yet, Toronto is also home to Highway 401, by far the busiest highway in North America and one of the widest on the planet.
Toronto is two cities that overlap***: the transit city and the car one, and they’re always bickering.
Whatever hassles that public transit has — it’s not perfect — they’re nothing compared to the tedium of car traffic, especially in this town. And transit is cheaper and better for the air and the planet, to boot.
Urban transportation for the win!
***Really, in Toronto it’s kinda three or four overlapping city networks: there’s also a so-so bike-lane infrastructure, and — unique in North America — the ravines, like deep gashes that slash across the city grid here and there, forming a sort-of below-grade network of dense forest channels that can serve as on-foot passages between various city districts, if you’re willing to brave these shaded, slightly eerie, shaded, wild and unpaved running paths, where raccoons, bunny rabbits, coyotes, and the occasional family of deer quietly reside, mere tens of metres down and away from major urban arteries above…)
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Really, Toronto is more like The Borg …
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@chigau
The Condo Borg!
Resistance is Futile!
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Artymorty
At least in TorontoBorg you won’t be attacked by a bear. Unlike VancouverBorg. In CalgaryBorg the closest I’ve ever come was a Canada Goose.
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Seattle too is heavily endowed with ravines. There’s at least one whole entire park that’s really just a ravine – and masses of what are called green belts, which are really slopes too steep to be worth building on.
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Surroggacy in the news again . Short version: couple in California contracts with woman to use her body to carry their baby. Baby is found at twenty weeks to have heart defect that requires multiple surgeries. Pregnant woman alleges that couple wants her to abort; she flees to Texas and delivers baby. Court orders that baby must receive life-saving care; couple claims they never wanted to deny it.
There’s a lot to unpack here; I certainly don’t trust the motives of Ken Paxton in taking advantage of the case. But what I find most egregious (if the allegation is true) is the idea that a couple who’s rented the use of a women’s body can force her to have an abortion. Surely pro-choice means just that; forced abortion is as evil as forced birth.
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We’re in Bilbao for the week. We had unseasonably clear weather yesterday, and a great view of the eclipse from above the city (though we were right on the edge, so totality lasted for only about half a minute).
It’s been hot here, and dry. Not as bad as other parts of Europe but Bilbainos aren’t used to this. Being near the sea helps and hurts—nice breezes, but also high humidity.
My suegra is 90-something and lives alone (with some help). I don’t know how she stands it—she’s won’t turn on the fan and is too housebound to sit in the park, and there’s no convincing her to move to an old folks’ home.
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Urban transportation for the win!
Hey Arty, do busses run to the airport (YYZ!) on Sundays yet? I think it was 1998 for a Flyers game (last season for the Garden now that I recall) we had to cross highway ramps to get there from the bus “stop” because it was Sunday. Entered the terminal through a kind of a back door from a grass field instead of the main entrance.
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Since 5Pillarsuk seems to be trending, here is a piece by Pakistani-British activist Sara Khan criticizing the organization for advocating violence and for supporting a Caliphate:
https://www.sarakhan.co.uk/blog/5pillars-uk-what-are-british-islamists-thinking/
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Unfortunately the two items in that link that look like they should run the video Sara Khan refers to, don’t run any video. (At least on my computer)
Perhaps 5pillars decided to remove an embarrassing video
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The piece is dated 2017, so stale links may be inevitable.
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Jason Arday, the man at the centre of the Cambridge plagiarism scandal, has been found dead.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1j1ye6n30no
A tragic conclusion to this series of events.
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Jason Arday’s plagiarism was wrong. But it seems also that he had mental health issues, and he should have been getting treatment for those issues instead of an academy position.
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Opps, I had missed Mostly’s comment above stating the same fact. I follow this thread via its RSS feed, and my feed reader hadn’t caught up.
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Thank both of you.
What a mess in all directions.
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What a terrible shame. Arday’s errors were not so egregious to justify his demise. He was human as are we all.
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UK PM Andy Burnham has now commented on this tragedy:
“It’s a tragedy on so many levels, but particularly just for everybody who knew Jason, his family obviously, his friends. We think of think of them today.
“It’s not a moment for any rushing to judgment. It’s a moment for reflection, I would say, reflecting on how things came to this.”
“A really sad, sad and sorry state of affairs and I think we all today think of Jason, his contribution, and his family and friends.”
https://www.itv.com/news/2026-08-15/burnham-calls-jason-ardays-death-a-tragedy-on-so-many-levels
A compassionate and sensible response to a tragedy.
Quite unlike the behaviour of a certain other Anglosphere world leader that I won’t mention.
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I frequently silently ask myself, “What if Obama did it?” about Trump’s idiocy and corruption, but this one ranks right near the top of that very, very long list of such items:
“The Trumps’ Crypto Project Just Got One Step Closer to Becoming a Bank” https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/08/donald-trump-world-liberty-regulatory-approval/
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Should all Trump assets be considered stolen goods and confiscated?
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Along with Elon Musk. Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars stolen.
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J. K. Rowling speaks out about the Jason Arday affair:
I have some personal experience of becoming a dehumanised online punchbag. It takes a lot of psychological strength not to go under.
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Nathan Cofnas, the American academic and “race realist” who made plagiarism allegations against Jason Arday before the latter died, has now been suspended by a Belgian university.
Reminder that Cofnas joked about becoming “the head of the Department of eugenics and race science at Harvard.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-real-meaning-of-the-jason-arday-scandal
Cofnas doesn’t seem like a nice person at all.
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I have a pen-pal in federal prison. We’ve been corresponding for years and we’ve become friends. Recently he let loose with a bit of a rant about some of his neighbors, which I thought the B&W comunniny would enjoy reading also. Copied with his permission:
Regarding the transgender inmates…
They used to sell makeup and women’s things like bras (bros?) in the Commissary, and Laundry issued them “dresses” (which look like potato sacks with holes cut out). When Trump issued the executive order all that went away but after the lawsuit they brought back the dresses. [On the first day of Trump’s second term he issued an order that TiM inmates in federal prisons would be confined only in men’s facilities and would no longer be receive “gender-confirming medical care”; this was overturned by court order — PN] I have a few issues with all of that.
1) This is a men’s prison and we are all required to wear a uniform. I’d much rather wear jeans and nice t-shirt, but the uniform is a khaki (button down) shirt and slacks. It isn’t a matter of functionality, and in fact inmates in women’s prisons (you know, actual females), they wear a version of the same uniform as the men (i.e., no dresses).
2) It is expressly against the rules to alter your appearance (it’s considered escape-related), so makeup shouldn’t be allowed — and none of that affects a persons “rights”. [Apparently cosmetics are available to transwomen inmates in male prison commissaries — PN]
So, the transgender inmates have made it their whole thing to be a thorn in the ass of the Bureau of Prisons — filing paperwork on everything under the sun to gain “rights”, when actually it’s just a ploy to be so annoying that they get whatever they want, just to shut them up. My point has always been that transgenderism is a mental illness, a form of body dismorphia akin to anorexia… It’s a subjective experience that has no bearing on the real world (AKA the objective reality we all share). If I claim to “identify” as a free person the Bureau of Prisons is under no obligation to let me go! If I claim to “identify” as a millionaire nobody is under any obligation to give me a million dollars. It’s all nonsense, and when you cater to people who act like spoiled children it shouldn’t surprise anyone when they act like entitled brats (entitled is a word they love to throw around… they claim to be “entitled” to wear dresses, etc.).
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Very interesting; thank you.
(I must remember to stay out of prison; the clothes mandates would drive me nuts. I never wear woven shirts next to the skin because I hate the feeling; it has to be the soft knitted texture of T shirts and turtlenecks.)
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Apparently one of the WNBA teams has adopted a “nonbinary” mascot with the purpose of taunting Sophie Cunningham. As if her comments about keeping males out of female sports has anything to do with mascots or with people declaring themselves “nonbinary”. The NYPost article is pretty decent, stating what she actually said and noting that the vast majority of people agree, but stopping short of pointing out the absurdity and irrelevance of “trans” identified mascots.
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@Peter
Oh wow, that’s amazing. I wonder if your pen pal would share more with us about the transgender thing, from the prison vantage? Please convey to him that his writing is very much appreciated, his observations are valued, and that we agree with him! (By we, well, I mean me for one, but surely others here, too.)
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Arty — I will convey your comments to my pen-pal, and I’m sure it will mean a lot to him! Would you like to correspond with him directly? He’s an interesting fellow — I first got to know him as one of the vanishingly rare atheists in prison, and we’ve been corresponding for years. It’s done via a special email system at no cost to us outsiders (and there’s always snail-mail as well). What’s the best way for me to connect with you directly? Maybe Ophelia, who has my email address, can forward it to you. [And I really don’t mind divulging my email address here — and if I do, the rest of you are welcome to get in touch also!]
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I can certainly forward your address to Arty.
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X /Twitter has sent a cease and desist letter to the open source project Nitter for alleged scraping :
Since a few of us GCs use Nitter, this is not good news for us.
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Colin Wright posted about a new report from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) showing links between transgender ideology and support for left-wing violence. The report is a product of an ongoing research collaboration between HHS, NCRI, Rutgers University, and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (where Wright works).
New Research on Gender Ideology and Left-Wing Authoritarianism
Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? is a report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services examining the psychology behind strong support for radical gender ideology and left-wing authoritarianism.
Researchers surveyed over 1,200 U.S. adults using a new measurement tool built from “gender-affirming” guidance issued by major medical and psychological associations. The study found that people who scored higher on this measure (i.e., those who are more likely to agree with the guidance) were also more likely to hold left-wing authoritarian views — and more likely to say political violence could be justified in certain cases, even after accounting for political party alone.
The authors conclude that support for “gender-affirming” norms is strongly associated with broader authoritarian attitudes, not just political identity, and predicts support for political violence.
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How very interesting. And unsurprising. Authoritarian thinking—>more authoritarian thinking.
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Mostly Cloudy, I remember when Nitter came back after the attempt to shut it down by technical means in 2024, but this time seems different and I will miss it. Not going to join ex though as I have developed an allergy to having my personal data collected by assholes like Musk. For now then I just google twitter feeds and see the latest tweets of those I’ve followed on twitter.
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A brief update from my prison pen-pal:
“In other news it looks like one of the bad actor transgender inmates is going to be shipped. It’s been much quieter without him around.”
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Senator Blumenthal has released a whistleblower letter regarding USPS’s attempt to implement Trump’s executive order on mail in voting. This tracks with what I’ve heard from someone I know who’s working (reluctantly) on the project. Bottom line: it’s a shit show, and probably won’t work. But if it does, it will effectively eliminate voting by mail as an option. Just one example of how it does that:
Not only is this system astonishingly untested, USPS has simultaneously implemented an impracticable zero percent failure rate. When ballots are submitted to USPS in large-volume batches, if any one ballot in the batch cannot be verified against the Portal, all ballots in that batch will be rejected. For example, if a state election official brings a batch of 10,000 ballots to USPS and USPS is unable to match just one of those ballots against the Portal – because, for example, someone has recently changed their name after marriage or they’ve moved – then USPS would refuse to mail the remaining 9,999 ballots as well. As the whistleblower notes, “USPS expects the state to take back the entire batch to cure the issue with the single ballot…” Should the slapdash Portal mistakenly mark a ballot as unverified, there is no clear process by which state election officials or voters themselves can challenge the rejection. The Rule simply vaguely states that they “will be informed of the escalation procedures should they decide to challenge a rejection.” Voters intending to cast ballots by mail may not even be aware that their ballots have been rejected, or were part of a rejected batch, until it is too late to secure an alternative ballot or vote in person. Expecting a well-built, thoughtful Portal to return an accurate result 100 percent of the time is already a stretch—expecting a “rushed,” “risky and haphazard”Portal to do the same is a recipe for disaster.
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Looks like game over if they succeed.
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My takeaway: if at all possible, don’t vote by mail.
Which I realize doesn’t help in the state of Washington.
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Seriously.
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I have only voted by mail once in my life, when I lived in Oklahoma and went to school in Texas. I’m never sure I trust the voting machines, but we use paper ballots here, and the elderly ladies who run the polling station are wonderful. I think I’ll stick with that, even though the school where we vote can be formidable for my husband to access with his difficulty walking. Now that you told me that, I definitely will stick to it, even if I have to rent a wheelchair to get him in. (One of the reasons it’s so hard to access is that they are ADA compliant, which is good for wheelchairs, but not so good for canes. And their handicapped parking is set up for the front entrance, quite a distance from the entrance for voting.)
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Tennessee’s Republican supermajority is making its high schools observe “Victims of Communism Day” where students will have to spend 45 minutes learning about the harms of Communism:
What sort of critics of Communism will be cited in these classes? I doubt the students will learn about Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus or Bertrand Russell’s objections to Communism in these sessions. It’ll probably be all print-outs of Fox News and Breitbart propaganda pieces.
Also, why aren’t those schools also observing “Victims of Fascism Day?” Far more Americans were killed by the fascist Axis soldiers in WWII ( 214,938 deaths in combat) then were killed by Communist soldiers in the Korean (33,686 deaths in combat) and Vietnam (47,434 deaths in combat).
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If you aren’t aware of it yet, Gloria Steinem has died.
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I know. I don’t love doing obits.
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This is revolting.
Robin Morgan, the feminist activist, has sadly passed away.
This is how Osama bin Laden fan Gretchen Felker-Martin responded to Morgan’s death:
Morgan was a lifelong TERF/SWERF who cared more about enforcing hierarchy and brutalizing her perceived inferiors than she did about creating a just and dignified world. Rot in Hell, creep. 1/2
With the second wave starting to die off, modern feminists have a choice between whitewashing their deeply ugly bigotry and choosing to uproot that same bigotry from our own hearts and renounce it forever. We can deny, or we can learn and change. 2/2
https://bsky.app/profile/scumbelievable.bsky.social
“Deeply ugly bigotry?” The projection here is off the charts. Off the charts, through the ship’s window and into the sea.
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FWIW, I only know about Robin Morgan’s work because my aunt was an active feminist in the 1970s and 1980s and told me she admired Morgan’s writings. But Morgan seems like a good person who helped people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/us/robin-morgan-dead.html
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That is indeed revolting.
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