Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Gag

    Trump won himself a gag order the other day.

    The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial issued a gag order Tuesday barring Trump from making comments about court staff after the former president posted a social media attack on the judge’s principal law clerk that included her photo.

    “This morning one of the defendants posted to his social media account a disparaging, untrue and personally identifying post about a member of my staff,” said Justice Arthur Engoron, addressing Trump as he sat in the courtroom, about 15 feet from the clerk, Allison Greenfield.

    “Personal attacks on members of my court staff are unacceptable, inappropriate and I will not tolerate them in any circumstances,” Engoron continued.

    The judge said he had warned Trump Monday “off the record” about making such comments, but that Trump had ignored him. After Trump posted the material online Tuesday, Engoron ordered him to delete the post — and it quickly disappeared from Trump’s social media site, Truth Social.

    Trump is such scum.

    Earlier Tuesday, Trump posted a message alleging Greenfield “is running this case against me.” The message was pulled from an account on X with fewer than 200 followers. Trump then linked to an Instagram account for Greenfield’s campaign for a judgeship in Manhattan civil court.

    “How disgraceful! This case should be dismissed immediately!!” Trump added. He also posted a photo of her alongside Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and referred to her as “Schumer’s girlfriend.”

    Several minutes later, Trump’s campaign sent out his social media post in an email blast.

    Scum. Garbage. Trash. A talentless conceited greedy noisy bully.

    Engoron’s decision lands at the precise moment a federal judge in Washington, D.C. is weighing prosecutors’ request for a more severe gag order on Trump, whom they’ve accused of repeatedly harassing and intimidating witnesses, tainting the D.C. jury pool and fueling threats against prosecutors and the court in one of the four criminal cases he is facing.

    U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan has scheduled an Oct. 16 hearing to consider the matter. Trump, despite being put on notice that prosecutors were seeking a gag order, posted a string of social media attacks on key witnesses in the Washington, D.C.-based federal case against him brought by special counsel Jack Smith. His most pointed attacks came against former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who is expected to be a witness against him in both of his federal criminal cases.

    Trump’s verbal assaults on judges, prosecutors and court personnel have already resulted in consequences in another one of his criminal cases, the New York state indictment brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. The judge overseeing that case, Justice Juan Merchan, issued a protective order preventing Trump from receiving the names or other identifying information of personnel in Bragg’s office, other than prosecutors and law enforcement members, until the start of jury selection.

    In requesting the protective order, prosecutors argued in a court filing that Trump “has a longstanding and perhaps singular history of attacking witnesses, investigators, prosecutors, trial jurors, grand jurors, judges, and others involved in legal proceedings against him, putting those individuals and their families at considerable safety risk.”

    That’s who he is, and half the country loves him. It’s sick-making.

  • How about all five?

    You mean…this isn’t satire? Really?

  • The science of gender idenniny

    Oh no oh no, says Philip Ball: government is messing with science!

    The science secretary, Michelle Donelan, told the Conservative party conference this week that the Tories are “depoliticising science”. Or as a Conservative party announcement later put it, in case you didn’t get the culture-war reference, they are “kicking woke ideology out of science”, thereby “safeguarding scientific research from the denial of biology and the steady creep of political correctness”.

    I wish we could skip the stale “political correctness” bit along with the stale “woke” bit, but denial of biology is not something to laugh off as if it were imaginary.

    What exactly does Donelan think science needs protecting from? What is this woke threat? At the conference, she expanded on that. “Scientists are told by university bureaucrats that they cannot ask legitimate research questions about biological sex,” she claimed, adding that Keir Starmer thinks the “legitimate concerns of the scientific community” on these issues of sex and gender “don’t matter”. She said she will launch a review of the use of gender and sex questions in scientific research, apparently to be led by Alice Sullivan, a professor of sociology at University College London, which will be used to formulate guidance.

    Such a review should not be necessary, but we don’t live in that world.

    You would need to have been hiding under a rock not to appreciate that questions of sex and gender have become controversial, bordering on incendiary, in some areas of academia. As a recent exchange by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and professor of humanities Jacqueline Rose in the New Statesman revealed, academics are often talking at cross-purposes: Dawkins defended the binary nature of human sexes from an evolutionary angle, Rose the socially constructed aspects of gender identity.

    That’s just a bit of obfuscation. The issue is scientists – and we know there are some – who insist that trans women are literally women in every sense. Adherents of trans ideology consider it blasphemy to distinguish between “the socially constructed aspects of gender identity” and the physical ones. “Trans women are women” is the slogan. No exceptions allowed, not even for biologists.

    But one doesn’t need to take a strong stand about rights or wrongs in these debates to recognise that they are difficult and subtle – and to acknowledge it is proper that they be rigorously discussed. 

    They’re not all that difficult and subtle. Dressing up as Darth Vader isn’t all that difficult and subtle, and neither is dressing up as a woman.

    More to the point, why is the government getting involved in the first place? What chills Baum is the idea of “politicians telling scientists about the nature of biology”. Some scientists can’t help thinking of previous instances where governments imposed their views on the subject: the spurious “race science” of the Nazis and the anti-Darwinian denialism of Stalin’s regime.

    Yes but this time the role of Stalin and the Nazis is being played not by governments but by narcissists on social media. This time it would be the government stepping in to shove the ideologues out of the science. (That is, if the government does it right. That is a big if.)

  • The beady eyes, the floating hair

    Willoughby bullying women as usual.

    Note: He hasn’t given birth himself, because he couldn’t, because he’s a man. Barren yerself boyo.

  • No thanks

    Gee I wonder why.

    What’s stopping them? The fact that they won’t win, of course. The whole point of invading women’s sports was the guaranteed win. William Thomas was a middle of the pack swimmer; Lia Thomas won first prize. It really is that simple.

  • For world economy

    Why we can’t have nice climate:

    On Friday, Dr Gianluca Grimalda, an environmental campaigner who refuses to fly on principle, was told by his employer, Germany’s Kiel Institute for World Economy, that if he was not at his desk on Monday he would no longer have a job to return to.

    Trouble is he’s 14 thousand miles away.

    Instead this week he was still waiting in Buka Town, Bougainville, to embark on a cargo ship to begin his journey back to Europe, after six months studying the impact of climate change and globalisation on communities in Papua New Guinea.

    Grimalda said he intends to make the 22,000km (14,000-mile) return trip to Europe entirely without flying, instead travelling on cargo ships, ferries, trains and coaches – a journey he estimates will take two months, but that will, he estimates, save 3.6 tonnes of carbon emissions.

    It seems pointless, of course, because the planes will fly anyway, but that’s why we can’t seem to do what needs to be done. What’s the use when everybody else keeps right on taking cruises and hopping on planes and driving 100 miles every day? So nobody does anything and on goes the rush into the abyss.

    Papua New Guinea, of which Bougainville is a part, is one of the countries most vulnerable to the impacts of the warming climate. In a long Twitter thread detailing his encounters, Grimalda details his meetings with islanders who have been forced to move entire villages inland to avoid rising tides, or who were desperately planting mangroves to hold back the waters.

    Yes but that’s far away. We can ignore what’s far away.

  • Some people are more than others

    Oxford vice-chancellor gives her annual speech, which includes thoughts on the free kind.

    Free speech has been centre stage this year. I have been clear about our role in the university sector to protect free speech: it is core to how we teach subjects and expose students to different views; and it also goes hand in hand with our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion. I have publicly acknowledged that this means some legal free speech will be hard for some individuals to hear. However, I am also disturbed by what I witness as an amplification of discourteous, intolerant and hateful rhetoric on social media platforms under the guise of free speech. I was deeply saddened to learn of the abusive and threatening language and behaviours that our trans community suffered this year. We should have done more to support them; rest assured lessons were learned. In this University, I expect more and we will continue to strive to create a culture of tolerance and respectful disagreement on key issues of the day. That is how we learn together and evolve. 

    Hm. She’s deeply saddened about abusive and threatening language and behaviours she claims their “trans community” suffered, but apparently not even shallowly saddened about the equivalent directed at women or feminists or “terfs.” The “trans community” gets a shout-out but the women’s community gets nothing. Why is that?

    According to a survey of students and the public last year, conducted by King’s College London Policy Institute, while there is strong agreement that free speech is protected in universities, only 20% of those surveyed agree that universities should allow for all ideas and opinions to be expressed when it means that people feel threatened. This highlights one of the tasks we have: making sure that free speech happens within the bounds of civility, intellectual rigour and the law. So I’m grateful that colleagues from a few colleges, led by David Isaac, have created a toolkit in consultation with students with top tips for how to navigate free speech.

    Well it’s clear that one way to “navigate” free speech is to be careful to say nothing the “trans community” dislikes. There is of course no such obligation when it comes to the female “community.” Badger and threaten and libel women all you like.

  • Droves of men showed up

    Oh golly gee now who could have seen that coming?

    Men Overran a Job Fair for Women in Tech

    IT WAS MEANT to be a week for women in tech—but this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration was swamped by men who gate-crashed the event in search of lucrative tech jobs.

    The annual conference and career fair aimed at women and non-binary tech workers, which takes its name from a pioneering computer scientist, took place last week in Orlando, Florida. 

    Wait. Why women and non-binary? Why not just women? Include women who call themselves non-binary and there you go, the conference is still for women. But if you say women and non-binary you’re going to get men who call themselves non-binary…which, of course, they did, along with men who weren’t even that subtle.

    The event bills itself as the largest gathering of women in tech worldwide and has sought to unite women in the tech industry for nearly 30 years…

    This year, droves of men showed up with rĂ©sumĂ©s in hand. AnitaB.org, the nonprofit that runs the conference, said there was “an increase in participation of self-identifying males” at this year’s event. The nonprofit says it believes allyship from men is important and noted it cannot ban men from attending due to federal nondiscrimination protections in the US.

    Invading a conference for women isn’t “allyship.” Those bros were there to hoover up all the jobs.

    Cullen White, AnitaB.org’s chief impact officer, said in a video posted to X, formerly Twitter, that some registrants had lied about their gender identity when signing up, and men were now taking up space and time with recruiters that should go to women. “All of those are limited resources to which you have no right,” White said. 

    That just makes it more fun.

    Avni Barman, the founder of female-talent focused media platform Gen She, says she immediately noticed “tons” more men and a more chaotic scene this time compared to previous years.

    Barman was at the conference to host a meetup. During and after the conference, she heard from a number of women who were sad and frustrated after. “This is a conference for women and non-binary people,” Barman says.

    Nelly Azar, a student at The Ohio State University studying computer science and engineering, attended the conference and saw long lines of people waiting to speak to employers. That was entirely different from 2022, they say, when they attended and saw few men.

    Sigh. Why is Nelly Azar called “they”? Why have a conference for women and pretend some of the women are not women but “non-binary”? No wonder it gets swamped by men.

  • Guest post: But in the meantime

    Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Desk job.

    It does put us Democrats in a quandary the way that the party has embraced gender ideology. I see on Twitter how many Democrats plan to vote Republican even though they’ve always been Democrats; over gender and the roles that men like Richard Levine and the guy here in Minnesota who said that detransitioners should be dismissed because they are very low in number, Leigh Finke. But in the meantime:

    1. The Republicans voted to oust their leader in the House because he refused to let the government shutdown, after previously refusing to let the country default on its loans.

    2. The Republicans cut heating assistance for those unable to pay for high gas and oil costs in the winter.

    3. The Republicans are looking for ways to cut Social Security and Medicare even though they are not funded by the general fund.

    4. The Republicans are trying to keep us beholden to carbon-based sources of energy.

    5. The Republicans are going to nominate for President a man who is under indictment for several crimes, including interfering with election officials, and has stated that he will initiate a purge of Deep State Operatives in the Executive department (meaning anyone who is not a true-redTrump-loyal conservative.) He is a man who has stated that the punishment for shoplifting should be death, just shot on sight. Never mind the Constitution!

    Should I go on?

    Yes, many liberals will leave the Democratic party for their stance on gender, but not enough for the Democrats to get the message of why, so they will go on with it. Some of us will try to find allies within the party as gender skeptics to try to turn this leaky ship around because the alternative is far worse.

    In all the years I have been an active member and apparatchik on the volunteer side of Democratic politics, I have found many things I don’t like about the party. Now that I own property, I can see why many people get sick of their mortgage escrow being raised every year by Democrats and property taxes. I’ve also seen many people get fed up with the failures of the party to see reason on a particular issue and go to the other party, and we really are stuck with just the two.

    So, I see what you are saying on this, but if some women have been trying to get their fellow liberals to see sense and get met with charges of bigotry and hatred rather than be heard, and find an outlet for their issues in a conservative framework whose only issue of agreement is on the issue of how transgender ideology is bad for women, I can hardly blame someone for using Fox News or whatever outlet that will actually put them on the air. And the intransigence of many liberals on the gender issue is going to turn some women conservative, no doubt. But if you place yourself in their shoes, can you fully blame them? The trans capture has fucked things up, royally. But one thing that it demonstrates is that our idea of what’s left and what’s right is based on the fallacy that people can be pinned down to one of two ideologies. Left and right blurred long ago, when you saw people jump from Sanders to Trump in 2016 it was just an example.

    So, I don’t think it’s justified to say “they were never principled leftists/progressives/liberals.” Banging your head into a wall can do many things, among those changing one’s perspective.

  • How about 10? 100? What’s the cutoff?

    Broadcaster Michael Crick actually says, starting at 52 seconds in, that one rape in a hospital is probably not too many.

  • One consolation

    PROFESSOR Stephen Whittle wants to make sure women don’t get to have women-only wards in NHS hospitals.

    Weird that Whittle sees it as cruel and “fascistic” to put men in men’s wards but sweet and angelic to put men in women’s wards. Last I heard men were more of a danger to women than women are to men.

  • Who me I’m enby

    Of course they did.

    Non-binary male of course, which is TOTALLY VALID.

  • Desk job

    Inside Higher Ed reports:

    The head women’s lacrosse coach at Oberlin College in Ohio was removed from her position this week, more than a year and a half after she posted her personal views on social media criticizing the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports.

    The news of Kim Russell’s reassignment to a different position in the athletics department follows her release late last month of a mini-documentary explaining her side of the story, through the Independent Women’s Forum, or IWF, a national conservative organization.

    The documentary includes audio clips of lacrosse players and university officials, which were recorded by Russell during what she called “disciplinary meetings” following her social media post. An Oberlin spokesperson says the other individuals involved were not aware that recordings were being made.

    They wanted to do their bullying in secret.

    “I have been taken out of the role of coach, which is what I’ve done for 27 years,” Russell said in an interview with Fox News this week. “I’ve been a PE teacher, a coach and a teacher of programs of wellness, yoga, all sorts of things, kickboxing 
 and [been] asked to take a role as employee wellness program manager, which would have no contact with students and be creating things—which is paperwork.”

    …

    Oberlin College said in a statement via email that the decision to reassign Russell to a new role pertains to a “breach of trust rather than any views she has expressed.”

    I don’t believe Oberlin’s statement.

    Discussions over whether transgender women, those who were assigned male at birth, should be allowed to participate in women’s sports have become a lightning rod for conservative criticism.

    Oh fuck off. It’s not just conservatives who think letting males take over female sport is bad and wrong.

    The Biden administration is currently rewriting Title IX rules to allow individual athletes to decide which team and/or locker room suits their gender identity.

    That makes no sense. If men decide women’s teams and locker rooms best suit their “identities” then those teams and locker rooms will no longer best suit the women who have to use them.

    The Oberlin controversy began back in March 2022, when University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas became the first transgender athlete to win an event at a Division I NCAA championship. Russell took to Instagram to weigh in on the news, reposting a headline that facetiously congratulated the silver medalist, Emma Weyant, for being the “the real woman who won” the event. 

    Facetiously?!! God these people are so stupid it takes the breath away. This is no joke. Emma Weyant should have been the gold medalist, but a man stole it from her. There’s nothing funny about that.

    Travers, a sociology professor at Simon Fraser University who uses a single name, said Russell’s belief that transgender athletes “unfairly erase” the hard work of cisgender female athletes is a “myth” used to “provoke” and “propagate” a sense of public “moral panic.”

    “For a coach at a college like Oberlin to make such an antitrans and ignorant statement is deeply disturbing,” Travers said. “If someone won the gold medal, you never say that the silver and bronze medalists, or any other competitors, had their hard work unfairly erased by being beaten. It’s particularly transphobic.”

    Oh for god’s sake. Of course you don’t, because there was no cheating. If there is cheating, then you do say so. Capeesh?

    Also that “uses a single name.” Notice how everyone has to stop and waste a few seconds on having this name explained, so that people will thinking about the guy who uses the single name. Notice the ever-spreading fog of ego, and the absurdity that it’s being mistaken for peak progressive-think.

  • A series of disciplinary meetings

    In late August the Independent Women’s Forum reported:

    In Kim Russell’s memory, the room had dark energy. Chairs were set up in a circle, and she was at the epicenter. For nearly two hours, Russell, who has been Oberlin College’s head women’s lacrosse coach for five years, recalled feeling critiqued, crushed, and degraded by the condescending and censorious voices of colleagues, players, and friends.

    So you know instantly what the circle was addressing.

    This was one of a series of disciplinary meetings Oberlin College staff subjected Russell to after a post she shared on her personal Instagram account upset students and staff. The post congratulated Emma Weyant, now an Olympian swimmer, who had her first-place podium spot at the 2022 NCAA swimming championships taken from her by transgender-identifying swimmer Lia Thomas.

    Oh oh oh, The One Forbidden Thing.

    “I was not just chastised,” Russell began, recounting what took place in an interview with Independent Women’s Forum. “I was burned at the stake. I was stoned. I was basically told I was a horrible person, and it was heartbreaking, really.”

    I know the feeling. I know the feeling exactly, although in my case it expressed as more like rage than heartbreak. But I know that goddam sit in the center of the circle while they all throw rocks at you feeling, when the “they” throwing the rocks are people who were friends five minutes ago.

    With Oberlin’s reputation as a “bastion for progressive politics,” Russell thought she would fit right in on campus…

    But every time she has voiced a dissenting opinion, Russell says she has been silenced—the opposite of how she expected this liberally-minded campus to operate.

    …

    When Russell saw that transgender-identifying swimmer Lia Thomas from University of Pennsylvania won the 2022 NCAA swimming championships, beating top-ranked female swimmers, she felt empathy for the athletes whose hard work had been unfairly erased.

    Ah but they’re “cis” women, so they deserve everything they get. Bitches.

    So on March 20, 2022, Russell shared a post from another Instagram user that read “Congratulations to Emma Weyant, the real woman who won the NCAA 500-yard freestyle event,” to her own personal Instagram story.

    All she added to the post was her own brief commentary, reading “What do you believe? I can’t be quiet on this
 I’ve spent my life playing sports, starting & coaching sports programs for girls & women..”

    Little did she know, a player she said she was quite close to screenshotted the post and sent it in an email to Natalie Winkelfoos, athletic director at Oberlin College and a member of the president’s senior staff. The following day, on March 21, Russell was called into a meeting with Winkelfoos and Creg Jantz, assistant athletic director, where she was chastised for sharing her beliefs on Instagram.

    Her “beliefs” that women’s sports should be for women, not women plus men who call themselves women. “Lia” Thomas is a giant, with a male skeleton and male shoulders and all the rest of it. It’s obviously not fair to let him compete in women’s races.

    “Unfortunately, you fall into a category of people that are filled with hate in the world,” Winkelfoos said, according to Russell’s recording.

    Jantz told her: “It’s acceptable to have your own opinions, but when they go against Oberlin College’s beliefs, it’s a problem for your employment.”

    Winkelfoos then asked Russell to sit down for a meeting with her entire lacrosse team and apologize. Russell said many of her players hadn’t even seen the post but, once the meeting began, a “mob mentality” took over. For about 45 minutes, several impassioned players voiced how upset they were with Russell, saying things such as, “A trans woman is a woman,” and “How can you not think that?”

    But that wasn’t enough; there had to be a further meeting, with even more bullying.

    There, Russell faced what she described as a two-hour “struggle session” with her entire team, Winkelfoos, the athletic department’s Title IX director and its diversity, equity, and inclusion representative, as well as the Title IX director for the entire college. The Title IX director instructed Russell to listen, not respond, and repeat back what she had heard each individual say.

    “That meeting turned into anybody being able to say anything they didn’t like about my coaching style or my assistant’s coaching—anything,” she said. When Russell finally got the floor to explain her position, she said her perspective wasn’t welcome.

    “I know that this is probably a shock because now we’re at this stage where, for this generation, it’s not good enough just to work for women’s issues or white feminism. Your feminism has to be inclusive for everybody and work for everybody,” said one athlete.

    So it’s not feminism it’s everybodyism. Why? Because women are shit and don’t deserve anything that’s just for women, that’s why.

    Russell is still at Oberlin but feels she could be fired at any moment.

    Updating to add:

  • Creepy cult infiltrates Supreme Court

    The Guardian:

    The FBI has interviewed several individuals who have alleged they were abused by members of the People of Praise (PoP), a secretive Christian sect that counts conservative supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett as a lifelong member, according to sources familiar with the matter.

    The individuals were contacted following a years-long effort by a group called PoP Survivors, who have called for the South Bend-based sect to be investigated for leaders’ handling of sexual abuse allegations. The body, which has 54 members, has alleged that abuse claims were routinely mishandled or covered up for decades in order to protect the close-knit faith group.

    What’s a Christian sect doing being secretive? What’s the secret? Isn’t the whole point to welcome everyone? All too often the point is to nag and push and pester people to join, but at a minimum surely being wide open to all potential believers is the goal. The fact that the sect is secretive seems…not entirely healthy.

    A spokesperson for PoP Survivors said: “We urge the FBI to use their power to unearth the long-standing pattern of child sexual abuse and coverup in the People of Praise. All perpetrators and their enablers must finally be held accountable. We must ensure that no child is victimized and silenced by a People of Praise member ever again.”

    I guess that’s why? If the claims are true then the people of praise are secretive because they’re child abusers?

    The PoP was founded in the 1970s as part of a Christian charismatic movement. The group is led exclusively by men. Like other charismatic communities, it blends Catholicism and Protestant Pentecostalism – its members are mostly Catholic but include some Protestants. In meetings, members are encouraged to share prophecies and speak in tongues. One former member said adherents believe God can speak through members to deliver messages, sometimes about their future.

    Which is a very dangerous belief. “Hello, God speaking. I need to talk to little Betsy alone for half an hour.”

    A PoP handbook states that members are expected to be obedient to male authorities, or group heads, and are expected to give 5% of their earnings to the group. Heads are influential decision-makers in members’ lives, weighing in on issues ranging from dating to marriage, and determining where members should live.

    And a Supreme Court justice belongs to this sect. And she’s on the court thanks to the dirtiest most criminal ruthless abusive piece of dung ever to squat in the White House.

  • Roadkill

    How men just causally kill women for sport.

    The short CCTV video of two Indian girls riding bicycles starts off quite innocuously. Dressed in their school uniform – tunics, salwar bottoms and scarves – the teenagers are riding side by side on a near-empty road. But within seconds, the calm of the scene is shattered.

    Two men on a motorbike overtake them and one of them pulls away the scarf of one of the girls. Immediately she loses her balance and her cycle moves right and collides with a second motorbike coming from behind. As she and the riders fall on the road, the 17-year-old is run over by a third motorbike coming from the opposite direction.

    And she’s dead, just like that.

    The tragic death of the schoolgirl has put the spotlight on the issue of sexual harassment of women in public places – with some women’s rights activists also questioning the use of the phrase “Eve teasing” by the local press to describe the case.

    By “questioning” the Beeb means pointing out how thoroughly disgusting it is – making a joke out of bullying harassment along with turning women into a generic “Eve” (or “Nancy” or “Esmeralda” or whatever you like – we don’t all have the same name, because we’re not generic any more than men are). It’s exactly like referring to black men as “Sambo” or “Rastus” (which used to be a thing, yes).

    The term, they say, is “deeply problematic” and point out that recently, the Supreme Court also flagged it, saying it should be replaced with “street sexual harassment” in courts.

    Kalpana Viswanath, co-founder of Safetipin, a social organisation working to make public spaces safe and inclusive for women, says the term makes it sound like it’s just a bit of teasing, but it’s not benign.

    “It’s a typical Bollywood trope that the hero pursues the woman and she likes to be pursued. But it’s a criminal offence, it’s violent, and let’s not minimise the harm of violence by calling it Eve-teasing, let’s not trivialise it” she says.

    Let’s not trivialise both it and the women and girls it’s inflicted on.

    As most Indian women would testify, Eve teasing is very common and happens often while a woman is walking on the road or travelling in crowded public transport – most would have a story or two to tell about when they were groped or pinched or elbowed in the chest.

    Most cases of such harassment are registered under Article 354 of the Indian penal code which deals with cases of “attempt to outrage modesty of women”.

    Oh gawd. No, that’s not it. The outrage is to the woman, not her “modesty.” The outrage is to her self, her privacy, her dignity, her freedom to exist in public. It’s not about whether she’s a tramp or not. Women are people, modesty or no modesty.

  • Bold and daring

    One becomes stupider by reading this sludge:

    A bold and daring new play from one of Australia’s leading trans voices.

    Bold? Daring? It’s a hit piece on JK Rowling. About as daring in Melbourne as wearing shoes.

    Anna Piper Scott stars in a controversial new work that asks, “How did one of the world’s most celebrated authors become one of the most hated?”

    She didn’t. The fact that some ignorant self-involved “activists” hate her doesn’t make her one of the world’s most hated authors. Trump has his name on books. Thousands of fervently hated people have written books. Rowling is way down that list.

    In this rare and exclusive literary event, join world-renowned children’s author JK (as played by Anna Piper Scott) for an exclusive, hard hitting one-on-one interview. Her books have been read and loved worldwide, and her magical world lives in the hearts of millions of adults and children. However, in recent years, her novels have receded into the background as her controversial political views have taken centre stage.

    Some consider her to be the saviour of modern feminism. Others consider her to be the face of a hate movement.

    Yes, all 37 of them.

  • There was an exemption

    Because of a deeply irritating “They should just get over it already” in the comments I’m going to share a little history lesson from the Library of Congress:

    The Convict Leasing System: Slavery in its Worst Aspects, by Lynn Weinstein.

    “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Article XIII, February 1,1865

    Emphasis added. That “except as punishment” clause was resisted by the radical Republicans, and they were right. That clause was death to a lot of former slaves and their descendants.

    While many believe that the 13th Amendment ended slavery, there was an exemption that was used to create a prison convict leasing system of involuntary servitude to fill the labor supply shortage in the southern states after the Civil War.  Black Codes regulated the lives of African Americans and justice-involved individuals were often convicted of petty crimes, like walking on the grass, vagrancy, and stealing food.  Arrests were often made by professional crime hunters who were paid for each “criminal” arrested, and apprehensions often escalated during times of increased labor needs.  Even those who were declared innocent in the courts were often placed in this system when they could not pay their court fees. Companies and individuals paid leasing fees to state, county, and local governments in exchange for the labor of prisoners in farms, mines, lumber yards, brick yards, manufacturing facilities, factories, railroads, and road construction. The convict leasing fees generated substantial amounts of revenue for southern state, county, and local budgets, and lasted through World War II.

    Slavery did not end in 1865.Yes the people whose grandparents lived under this system damn well do have a right to be aggrieved.

  • Imagine

    Exactly.

  • Women’s History Month minus lesbians

    Another example of how ludicrous and interrupting and contrary it is to try to talk about women or lesbians (or indeed men or gay men) by invoking the alphabet soup.

    October is Women’s History Month in Canada. The government tells us:

    October is Women’s History Month in Canada, a time to celebrate the women and girls from our past, and our present, who are contributing to a better, more inclusive Canada.

    In 1992, the Government of Canada designated October as Women’s History Month, marking the beginning of an annual celebration of the outstanding achievements of women and girls throughout Canada’s history. 

    Ok. So far so good.

    This year’s theme, Through Her Lens: Celebrating the Diversity of Women, emphasizes the importance of recognizing the achievements and contributions of women from diverse backgrounds. It focuses on the unique perspectives, experiences, and challenges faced by Indigenous women; women from 2SLGBTQI+ communities; and newcomer, racialized, and migrant women.

    Not lesbians, you see, but women from 2SLGBTQI+ communities. Why not just say lesbians? Why translate “lesbian” to “from 2SLGBTQI+ communities”? Why erase the word “lesbian”??

    What’s up, Canada? You’re not homophobic are you? Are you?