Author: Ophelia Benson

India Willoughby is appropriating the Nazi persecution of lesbian and gay people to himself.

The Nazis made gay men wear pink triangles.

There was no such thing as an “LGBTQ” library in Nazi Germany. The category did not exist. India doesn’t call himself a gay man, he calls himself a woman.

Didn’t happen.

Ah yes people who object to men stealing sporting wins from women are “nasty” and to be shrugged off. Shrug shrug shruggity shrug, bitches. The Daily Beast:

A trans university swimmer attacked by right-wing media for smashing records in her first meet as a woman says she expected some “pushback” but has chosen not to “engage” in the nasty online debate.

The scare-quotes should be on “as a woman” not “engage.” There’s no such thing as “as a woman.” If you’re not a woman then you’re not a woman; you don’t get to take women’s stuff by saying you’re doing it “as a woman.”

Over the weekend, Lia Thomas—now a member of the University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team after three years on the men’s team—smashed multiple swimming records at the Zippy Invitational in Ohio…

Yes quite, after three years on the men’s team, because he’s a man, with a man’s build and a man’s strength. “She” set records, the Daily Beast drools. Yes of course he did, because he competed against women.

The New York Post Editorial Board slammed Thomas in an essay on Thursday, calling the swimmer “selfish” for competing among women. 

And what do you call it, Brooke Leigh Howard of the Daily Beast? Not selfish? Not a shameless punch in the face to all the women in those races?

Thomas, though, in an interview with the SwimSwam Podcast, said that the guidelines from the International Olympic Committee for intersex and trans athletes are fair, with rules that are inclusive and “promote competition integrity” while allowing athletes to compete in whatever category makes them comfortable.

Well he would, wouldn’t he. Thomas says it’s ok for him to cheat – of course he says that, so that he can go on cheating. And the categories are not there to make men “comfortable” competing against women.

Oh yes, completely fair, nothing to dispute here.

Being male is a proven unfair advantage in competing against women.

I daresay “Lia” Thomas would see the point if one or two or six other men decided they were most comfortable competing against him and the dwindling number of women who got that far.

Another target.

She’s not wrong though.

Matt Gaetz and Steve Bannon tell us up front that they plan to take over the country.

Former White House adviser Steve Bannon and GOP Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida want some “4,000 shock troops” to get ready to take control of the federal government if Donald Trump decides to run for president again and wins in 2024.

…

During a segment of Bannon’s War Room podcast on Thursday, he and Gaetz discussed a pro-Trump strategy to take full control of the government should the former president win in 2024.

Gaetz said that “sometimes you’ve got to raise your voice to raise a ruckus and to raise an army of patriots who love this country and will fight for her.” He said the pro-Trump movement is “going to operationalize the performance to go right after the people who are imposing the vaccine mandates, who are enriching themselves and who are selling out the country.”

…

“This is Trumpism in power. That’s when we went to the 4,000 shock troops we have to have that’s going to man the government,” Bannon predicted. “Get them ready now. Right? We’re going to hit the beach with the landing teams and the beachhead teams and all that nomenclature they use when President Trump wins in 2024—or before.”

…

“We’re going to have a sweeping victory in 2022, and that’s just the preamble to a sweeping victory in 2024, and this time we’re going to be ready—and have a MAGA perspective, MAGA policies, not the standard Republican policies,” he said in early October.

“If you’re going to take over the administrative state and deconstruct it, then you have to have shock troops prepared to take it over immediately,” he added.

On the one hand talk is cheap, on the other hand it could easily happen and Bannon would be right there cheering it on.

Newsweek says Trump seems likely to run. I say yes but his head could explode at any time. He’s not what anyone would call in good shape, and he has tantrums all the time. That head is a ticking bomb. I have high hopes.

Originally a comment by Rob on The motives.

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

But western centrist governments have all wanted to promote some flavour of globalism, particularly with respect to free or low barrier trade. Ask most economists and they’ll tell you there is no truly free trade without free migration. Labour is a resource, and for a free market to flourish, that resource has to be able to follow demand. Most developed countries don’t want that of course. Partly through outright racism, partly because we’ve got it very comfortable thank you. Competing against migrants hungry for a better life and willing to work for it isn’t appealing. We also don’t like to be reminded that part of the reason so many people want to come to the west is because we’ve spent most of the last few hundred years fucking over their countries to enrich ours. Roost, meet chicken.

Migrants or refugees?

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

It’s considered dehumanizing.

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

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

But that raises the question of why the second is frowned on. Better conditions are better, so yes people are going to try to get to them. Why wouldn’t they?

[Patel] has claimed that 70% of people who come to the UK via small boats are “single men who are effectively economic migrants” and “not genuine asylum seekers”.

The trumpies say that kind of thing too, but…yes, and? “Economic” here stands for better pay and a better life. People move to a different town or county or region for that, so some are going to try to move to a different country. There are borders and rules and barriers, but that doesn’t make the desire for better pay and a better life contemptible.

In 2015 David Cameron as prime minister was heavily criticised for speaking of a “swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean”. He later defended his use of the term “swarm” and said he was determined to keep out people living in the Calais camps as they attempted to reach Britain, likening some of them to burglars. “They are economic migrants and they want to enter Britain illegally and the British people and I want to make sure our borders are secure and you can’t break into Britain without permission,” he said.

David Cameron has had a pretty comfortable life, I believe.

I get so tired of the mockery.

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

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

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

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

In a previous meet against Ivy League rivals Princeton and Cornell, Thomas won the 500 free in what was the best collegiate time (a Princeton record 4:35.06) so far, in addition to capturing the 100 and 200.

Blah blah blah. In other news, an elephant can carry more than a sparrow can.

Thomas, from Austin, Texas, could become NCAA Division 1 swimming’s first transgender All-American or national champion, Outsports reported. The championships are in March in Atlanta, and Thomas has established herself as a strong contender.

No, he’s established himself as a determined cheater. He’s not any kind of “contender.”

Swimming is “a huge part of my life and who I am. I’ve been a swimmer since I was 5 years old,” she told Penn Today in June. “The process of coming out as being trans and continuing to swim was a lot of uncertainty and unknown around an area that’s usually really solid. Realizing I was trans threw that into question. Was I going to keep swimming? What did that look like?”

It looks like shameless cheating, that’s what it looks like. As he knows damn well. None of this is hidden or obscure.

Thomas, who’s competing as a senior after the Ivy League canceled the previous season due to the pandemic, added: “Being trans has not affected my ability to do this sport and being able to continue is very rewarding.”

Yes it has. It has affected your ability to cheat by competing against women when you have a male body.

Like…what?

Like Hitler? How?

Ah he explains.

It’s weird to put your own lie in scare quotes. It’s a grotesque and dangerous lie to say that Kathleen Stock backs the elimination of trans people – and it doesn’t become less of a lie when you put it in scare quotes. She backs no such thing. The word “elimination” of people means extermination, while Stock is talking about concepts and definitions and self-descriptions.

The tweet immediately before that lying one is all about the womany.

You can tell instantly that he’s a woman! Because bent knee! Men’s knees don’t bend! Only women can do that insinuating coaxing little me bend of the knee, therefore Willoughby must be one.

Another heretic for the pyre:

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

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

What led to Kay, 45, abandoning her life’s work was an argument at a party she held for young dancers at her home. Telling them that her next ballet was based on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a male aristocrat who morphs into a woman, she added: “Woolf knows anyone can change sex in their imagination but that you can’t change sex in your actual body.”

Dancers complained to her board of trustees and now, four months later, having only just seen allegations she totally denies, Kay has lost access to her company’s bank account, social media and email address. She quit her company because she believes a proposed tribunal, run by an external HR consultant, would not rule in her favour.

“My lawyer advised me, ‘You are not going to win. They will find you guilty of transphobia, smear you — and that’s the end of your career.’ But I was just talking about women’s material reality and I am not going to go quietly. I am determined to put my head above the parapet.”

What an insult it is that we have to put our heads above the parapet.

Read the whole thing.

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

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

On Tuesday, a group described by Nantes’ deputy mayor, Bassem Asseh, as “intolerant radicals” blocked the entrance to the church Notre-Dame de Bon-Port ahead of von Hausswolff’s show, accusing her of making “satanist” music, despite the show being organised in accordance with the Nantes diocese.

Why didn’t the police remove the bossy censors from the entrance?

Von Hausswolff’s primary instrument is the pipe organ, largely found in places of worship. British music publication the Quietus described the Swedish Grammy nominee’s music as exploring “unmapped territory where post-rock, prog, doom metal, modern classical and high church music all coexist in uneasy alliance”. Her lyrics have touched on gothic themes.

And she doesn’t need anyone’s permission for any of that.

“Yesterday night the far-right Catholic integralism won over art, but not over love,” Von Hausswolff wrote on Instagram, alongside a photograph of herself sitting in the empty church “while listening to about 50-100 integralists chanting and screaming outside the church’s doors, blocking the way for almost 400 people”.

She said it was tense and scary and that they had no choice about canceling because they didn’t have security. Who knew organ music required security?

Oops now she’s had to resign.

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

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

Boris Johnson partied right after telling everyone not to party.

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

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

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

Yes but he told people – as in he told the servants. He’s not people, he’s Boris Johnson.

The story was fading out but then there was leaked video of a practice press conference, at which someone asked a senior adviser about the party and she completely blew it.

Today was prime minister’s question time and it was awkward.

Johnson insisted he had no personal knowledge of any party, saying: “I repeat that I have been repeatedly assured since these allegations emerged that there was no party, and that no Covid rules were broken.”

Everyone laughed.

But, you know – it’s like Trump. Everyone laughs but the sinister clowns keep popping back up.

UN Women seems to have forgotten its own name.

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

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

But it shouldn’t be trans women at all. UN Women should be about women, as it says on the tin.

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

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

What “Latinx” says is that Hispanics are using their own language wrong, and they need Anglos to fix it for them. It’s colossally demeaning, and utterly unnecessary. The word is used in English, and English doesn’t have genders (either to fix, or be left alone). If they just used a different word, it would entirely obviate the need. Using “Latino” in English in the first place is a patronizing appropriation of Spanish. It gained popularity because Anglos didn’t want to say Hispanic and are too lazy to say Latin American. The problems don’t start only once you get to “Latinx.”

Mostly, Hispanic people don’t dislike being referred to as Hispanic, they’re not squeamish about the idea of Spain (and, BTW, Spanish people don’t refer to themselves as “Hispanic,” they’re Spanish). The idea that we shouldn’t use “Hispanic” because of the reference to Spain is that kind of woke racism McWhorter talks about. It’s because nice Anglo liberals don’t want to be reminded, they want to project more otherness on Hispanics, and on more than just a linguistic level.

I used to teach Spanish at the college level, and the degree of ignorance of the incoming college student can hardly be exaggerated. Most Americans don’t think there are any white people, or black people, in Mexico, or elsewhere in Latin America. They think that “Hispanic” is a race. They don’t know that people speak Portuguese in Brazil. The term “Latinx” helps cover up all that ignorance.

Crap, you got me up on my soapbox now. The reason it’s important, in America, to use the term “Hispanic” is because of the unique history of Hispanic peoples in America. It’s all well and good to want to use the term “Latin American” if we want to talk about other people who may have immigrated here from the South, but Hispanics hold the distinction of the country moving to them, rather than vice versa. Hispanics aren’t a foreign, immigrant minority in the United States, they’re a linguistic minority (and more than one cultural minority) that has been present here since before the United States existed. Lumping Hispanics in with other Latin Americans is a form of denial of this history. The US never stole half of Brazil, or occupied Surinam. People who ended up in the US because the border crossed them are in a fundamentally different position.

Don’t Latinx Me, Bro!

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

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

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

The twin developments set the stage for a major political battle over Truth Social, a platform that purportedly plans to challenge Twitter and Facebook, social platforms that have banned or curbed the former president over his involvement in stoking the 6 January Capitol riot.

I think it’s spelled Truth Soshul. That’s how Trump pronounces social, at least.

“Are you a woman or gender variant?”

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

It’s the Green Party.

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

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

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

“Check that you’re eligible to vote: You are eligible to vote in the Green Party Women committee elections if you are a member of the Green Party of England and Wales and also identify as a woman or gender variant.”

You can’t just identify as a member of the Party, but you can just identify as a woman (or “gender variant” whatever tf that means). Being one sex or the other is all in the mind, but being a party member, that is solid.

But if you don’t sign up you can’t get the constitution changed (repaired) so…

Hand me my boots, I’m going gender variant.

Students outraged, onlookers concerned, words exchanged.

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

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

This is the bit that interests me:

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

Durham’s what?

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

The society doesn’t seem to have its own website or space on Durham’s website but it does have a Facebook page.

Durham Intersectional Feminism Society is an inclusive feminist society, with a focus on providing a safe space for discussion, socialising, activism, self-care and education. We welcome people of all genders, religions, races, abilities and experiences to come to our meetings and talks, and get involved with campaigns.

So it’s not a feminist society but a chat about stuff society.

I wonder if Durham has an actual feminist society.

H/t latsot

Dud analogy time.

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

He’s on fire today.

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

Five stars for “I do not believe we are haunted houses home to gender ghosts.”

On fire.