Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Scorched earth policy

    I didn’t know this.

    Did he literally buy the Post in order to destroy it? Is it that simple?

  • Quid pro whaddyacallit

    Trump throwing more toys out of the playpen:

    The U.S. ambassador to Poland is lashing out at the country’s parliament speaker for the offense of not supporting President Trump’s Nobel Prize aspirations.

    Ambassador Tom Rose raged at Parliament Speaker Wlodzimierz Czarzasty in an X rant on Wednesday. In the post, Rose threatened that the US would “have no further dealings, contacts, or communications” with Czarzasty, due to his “insults directed against President Trump.”

    What did he say?

    Czarzasty made the alleged “outrageous and unprovoked insults” toward Trump on Monday while speaking to journalists.

    The 65-year-old chairman of Poland’s New Left party said he would not support U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Israeli Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana’s campaign to rally heads of the European parliaments to nominate Trump for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.

    Ah. So that’s it. He doesn’t think Trump should be nominated for a Nobel peesprize. Well neither does anyone else with a functioning brain cell. We also don’t think Trump should be stamping around the landscape demanding a Nobel Peace Prize. You don’t get to demand them, and it’s ridiculous and shaming to try. You’re supposed to be surprised when you get a Nobel, not content that your orders were obeyed. You can’t order one as if it were Big Mac.

    Trump, 79, has been miffed since he didn’t win the 2025 Nobel Prize, which went to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. He has used the snub as a cudgel against America’s Scandinavian allies—none of which have anything to do with the Nobel Peace Prize.

    You don’t get to be miffed, either. You can be privately miffed, I suppose, if you’re that determined to be an asshole, but it ends as soon as you leave your Pouting Room. You don’t go public with your delusions of value.

    …he tossed out his peace-loving posture in January when he wrote to Norway, “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.”

    “If you won’t givittame I’ll just bomb everything. I don’t give a shit about Peace, I just want my Prize.”

  • Trump’s affinity for Columbus

    Oh good, we’re making Columbus great again.

    Trump is taking steps toward installing near the White House a replica of a statue of famed explorer Christopher Columbus that had been tossed into Baltimore’s harbor during his first term amid protests against institutional racism.

    It’s all this political correctness, you see, paying attention to the fact that Columbus was not an unmixed blessing to all the inhabitants of the landmass he bumped into on his way to China.

    The White House declined to comment to the AP on plans for the statue but reaffirmed Trump’s affinity for Columbus, whose legacy has shifted as historians and educators amplify how white European figures and their descendants treated Native Americans and enslaved Africans to develop the New World.

    “In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero,” said Trump spokesman David Ingle. “And he will continue to be honored as such by President Trump.”

    Well, you see, it’s like this. Columbus bouncing onto this continent and making himself at home was heroic, but other people doing the same thing are invaders. It all depends on whether their ancestors were from Germany and Scotland or Mexico and Venezuela. You can usually tell by looking closely at their skin.

    Trump endorses a traditional view of Columbus as leader of the 1492 mission that marked the unofficial beginning of European colonization in the Americas and the development of the modern economic and political order. But in recent years, Columbus also been recognized as a primary example of Western Europe’s conquest of the New World, its resources and its native people.

    Not to mention the fact that he was the wedge that opened the door. He’s a symbol of the arrival of all those annoying Europeans who bounced in without an invitation.

  • Toast

    It seems that Trump has blown past some major milestone or barrier – whatever it is that inhibits people from jabbering nonsense in public.

    The bit of transcript sounds coherentish. Trump talking does not. He’s fallen off a cognitive cliff.

  • The ballad of the courteous cashier

    People don’t believe me when I say Joyce Carol Oates is stupid. No, really: she is stupid. Dense. Thick as two short planks. She does not thinkk good.

    Like so:

    Yes she is that stupid. She doesn’t even get that “random men” and “transgender persons” can be one and the same. She doesn’t even get that “random men” can idennify as women and proceed to commit violent acts against girls and women.

  • Widespread non-compliance

    The UN’s Reem Alsalem speaks up:

    GENEVA – A UN expert today expressed serious concern over the United Kingdom’s failure to ensure the effective implementation of a landmark Supreme Court judgment clarifying that the term “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex.

    “The continued absence of clear, updated guidance and effective enforcement measures has resulted in widespread non-compliance with the Supreme Court’s ruling,” said Reem Alsalem, the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. “This situation undermines legal certainty with particularly serious consequences for women and girls.”

    The Special Rapporteur welcomed the ruling in her report following her recent visit to the United Kingdom. She recommended that the UK Government ensure that all public and private institutions uphold the Supreme Court ruling , and that it provide the necessary guidance to all segments of society to understand the implications of the ruling.

    “Without implementation, a court judgment offers little protection in practice,” Alsalem said. “Women and girls are left exposed to continued rights violations and are often compelled to rely on litigation to enforce protections that should already be guaranteed by law — an option that is prohibitively costly and inaccessible for many.”

    Keir Starmer PLEASE NOTE. And please act. Instead of stalling the way you’ve been doing for nearly a year now.

    Nearly one year after the Supreme Court’s ruling of 16 April 2025 in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers, the expert noted that the judgment is yet to be translated into binding guidance or enforced across public authorities and service providers. The expert expressed particular concern that non-compliance appears to extend to government departments and public sector bodies, including the National Health Service, the prison service, universities and schools.

    “Although the UK Government has accepted that the Supreme Court judgment reflects the law, many public bodies reportedly claim they are awaiting government action to secure parliamentary approval of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s revised Code of Practice on Services, Public Functions and Associations,” the expert said. “At the same time, the earlier 2011 Code — now outdated and inconsistent with the ruling — reportedly remains in use.”

    It’s not much use grudgingly and merely verbally “accepting” that the ruling is the law and then refusing to act on it. In fact it looks remarkably like intentionally ignoring the law after saying “Ok ok we hear you.” It borders on trumpish.

    She stressed that the judgment was intended to resolve years of legal confusion surrounding women’s rights to single-sex services, facilities, associations and sports — rights that are central to safeguarding women’s safety, privacy and dignity, and to combating male violence against women and girls. As the first anniversary of the judgment approaches, the expert urged the Government to act without further delay.

    “Prompt issuance of compliance guidance and decisive enforcement are essential to give effect to the Supreme Court’s ruling,” the expert said. “Failure to do so not only weakens legal protections for women and girls, but risks eroding public confidence in the rule of law.”

    How about it, boys? Time to stop stalling yet?

  • He’s toast

    Welp it seems the genie is out of the bottle.

  • Fewer but better

    The twelve of us

  • Mild punching

    They haven’t thought this through.

    Sermon says men can ‘physically discipline’ rebellious wives “as a last resort”

    Last month, Birmingham mosque Green Lane Masjid and Community Centre (GLMCC) live streamed a sermon in which Aqeel Mahmood (pictured) said “discipline in the case of rebellion” is one of the “rights of the husband over the wife”.

    He said: “The husband is a leader. He has his responsibilities. Physical discipline is a last resort on the condition that it doesn’t cause pain, injury, fear or humiliation”.

    Quick question: if physical discipline doesn’t cause pain, injury, fear or humiliation then what does it cause? What’s it for? What’s the point of it?

    It’s a ridiculous claim. The whole point of “physical discipline” is to cause pain. That’s true when parents do it to children and when husbands do it to wives. Here’s a little-known fact: there’s a reason it’s a man blathering about disciplining wives and not the other way around. What’s the reason? Same as the reason parents discipline children and not the other way around. Men hit women because they can. Women can’t compete.

    It’s not discipline, it’s anger and contempt and domination.

    Mahmood also said a husband has a “right” to “intimacy” with his wife and a wife must not leave the house without her husband’s permission. Mahmood is understood to be an imam at the centre.

    The charity’s “welfare and wellbeing” services include a “domestic abuse support” service.

    The National Secular Society, which has reported GLMCC to the Charity Commission twice since 2024 over misogyny concerns, has sent this latest information to the regulator.

    GLMCC was featured in the NSS’s September report on misogyny in religious charities, which was raised during Prime Minister’s Questions last month. Keir Starmer said he would “make sure” to look into the specific issue of religious charities and misogyny.

    Let us know when you’ve looked and what you’re going to do, please.

    H/t Jesus and Mo

  • Celebrate oppression of women day

    Oh you celebrate, do you? What next? Celebrating bound feet? Girls married off at age ten, eight, six? FGM? Slavery? Rape? Sati?

    All of that, plus it implies that women are slutty hoors who lure men to their doom, as opposed to being subordinated by men who think women are slutty hoors.

  • The most glaring symptom

    Gut punch.

  • Guest post: Accusations from a groupuscule

    Guest post by Jonathan Gallant

    Below: an excerpt from an article  in the Democratic Socialists of America website:

    We should support an immediate cease fire, large-scale humanitarian aid, global support for rebuilding Ukraine, and negotiations to  achieve a compromise settlement of what is an underlying conflict between the United States and Russian  imperialist interests.   In a future socialist world there should be no role for spheres of interest for large  countries. However, in the capitalist world we live in,  a viable settlement of this conflict  would have to accept Russia’s right to have security guarantees in its neighborhood. A Ukraine  settlement that includes neutrality for Ukraine along with U.S. and Russian guarantees of  Ukraine’s independence and security could avert further bloodshed and bring some stability to  the region. 

     The Left should continue to point out the role of U.S. imperialism in pushing a NATO  expansion policy that was bound to lead to a costly and dangerous conflict, while also  noting the responsibility of U.S. imperialism for its role in creating the retrograde oligarchic Putin  regime that severely oppresses its own working class while also imposing a deadly war on  working people in neighboring Ukraine.

    So, the DSA charges the United States with: (a) the transparently false pretext the Putin regime uses for its imperial aggression against Ukraine; and (b) the even more far-fetched accusation of creating the Putin regime itself.  Unaccountably,  DSA fails to denounce the US for the failure of the USSR, the drying up of the Aral Sea, and the dismal weather of Siberia.    We can expect these accusations from another groupuscule,  Democratic Flat-Earthers of America.  DFEA will no doubt also proclaim “resistance” against airlines, shipping companies, and academic Geography departments for their adherence to the view that planet earth is round.

  • Why her fellow journalists

    The big question:

    How about this is the last time, eh? How about from now on there is pushback when Trump attacks a woman. How about all the journalists shout at him with one voice. How about he gets humiliated and shamed and rebuked.

  • Back to the mudsill

    Heather Cox Richardson January 31:

    White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted on social media this morning:

    “Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein.”

    After his call for a “labor class” excluded from citizenship and a voice in government, Miller went on to reject the idea that Haitians living and working legally in Ohio should be described as part of Ohio communities. Calling out Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown, who is running for the Senate again this year, for including them, Miller posted: “Democrats just flatly reject any concept of nationhood that has ever existed in human history.”

    Democrats just flatly reject a lot of things. Slavery is one. Punishment by torture is another. Murder is one more.

    History is doing that rhyming thing again.

    In 1858, Senator James Henry Hammond (D-SC), a wealthy enslaver, rose to explain to his northern colleagues why their objection to human enslavement was so badly misguided. “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” he said. Such workers needed few brains and little skill; they just had to be strong, docile, and loyal to their betters, who would organize their labor and then collect the profits from it, concentrating that wealth into their own hands to move society forward efficiently.

    Hammond called such workers “the mud-sill of society and political government.” Much like the beams driven into the ground to support a stately home above, the mudsill supported “that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.” The South had pushed Black Americans into that mudsill role. “We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves,” he said. The North also had a mudsill class, he added: “the man who lives by daily labor…in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and ‘operatives,’ as you call them, are essentially slaves.”

    But Hammond warned that the North was making a terrible mistake. “Our slaves do not vote,” he said. “We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositories of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’ and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided…by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”

    Or, to put it another way, one generation would pave the way for the next generation to get an education and have more options than being an underpaid overworked laborer. The horror!

    The thinking behind Miller’s ideal is that some people just are suited only for grunt work. They’re born that way, their parents were born that way, their children will be born that way. It’s their essence. That used to be quite a normal thing to think, but it has faded out over time. Seeing as how we’ve had at least a couple of centuries of seeing the children of workers and enslaved people get educations and – miraculously! – turn out to be capable of far more than grunt work, you’d think Stephen Miller could manage to make the connection.

    H/t Mike Haubrich

  • So disgusted

    Helen Rumbelow on what it’s like to read the Epstein files:

    As the hours of my time on the site turned into days I started to see these files themselves as a Rosetta Stone through which women might understand male power.

    Powerful men often have their identities, in the email and messages chains, redacted. Powerless girls have their faces, in photos, blacked out. Yes, there are the publicised emails, such as Epstein’s draft alleging that Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, acquired an STD from “having sex with Russian girls”, or Richard Branson advising Epstein on how to recover from his little sex-offending public relations problem. Branson requests Epstein visit his Caribbean island again “as long as you bring your harem!”

    The DOJ has cautioned that the release “may include fake or falsely submitted images, documents or videos”. Yet the three million files are a vast careless jumble that takes shape the more you read. There are multiple sets of “soap on a rope” in the shape of vaginas; girls’ disembodied limbs; and rich, often anonymised, men using punitive, humiliating terms for women. There are Epstein’s searches for porn using categories like “wild teen” and “sexy teen babe” right next to depositions of young girls talking of being raped. I read the Palm Beach report from 2006 — “her head was being held against the table forcibly as he continued to pump inside her” — that led to men in power letting Epstein off with a slapped wrist.

    …

    Andres Serrano emailed Epstein three days after the Access Hollywood tape was released in October 2016, saying, “I was prepared to vote against Trump for all the right reasons.” Serrano is a New York artist whose photographs include those of women bound by the wrists and splattered in blood. “But so disgusted by the outrage over ‘grab them by the pussy’,” Serrano continued, “that I may give him my sympathy vote.” 

    That one really took my breath away. (That’s not just a metaphor, at least not in my case. I really do stop breathing for a bit when something shocks me.) He’s disgusted by the outrage at a powerful rich man boasting about thrusting his hand between women’s legs without permission? He’s not disgusted by the man boasting about hand-raping women, he’s disgusted by the outrage at the man boasting about hand-raping women?

    Well there it is again, Greer’s famous reminder – women have no idea how much men hate them.

  • As more have sought gender transition

    The mountain begins to stir?

    The American Society of Plastic Surgeons has issued a broad recommendation against gender transition surgeries for youths, becoming the first major medical association in the United States to narrow its guidance on pediatric gender care amid a crackdown by the Trump administration.

    Yessssss!

    Never mind the Trump admin. It’s the only thing they’re right about.

    A statement sent Tuesday to the group’s 11,000 members and obtained by The Washington Post recommends surgeons delay gender-related chest, genital and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old. Fewer than 1,000 minors in the United States receive such surgeries every year, according to research published in JAMA, the American Medical Association’s journal, and the vast majority of the procedures are mastectomies, not genital surgeries.

    But there’s an intense debate over when young people should be able to get medical interventions as more have sought gender transition and some systematic reviews have suggested the evidence for the benefits and risks of pediatric transition is insufficient. Supporters of transition care for youths have pointed to the widespread endorsement by U.S. medical organizations.

    Ahhhhh no. That item is tainted. It’s tainted by years of frantic, enraged, threatening rhetoric about suicide and anguish and the divine wisdom of the trans communinny. People are pushed to endorse, they’re bullied and threatened and ostracized and shouted at and accused of monstrous cruelty and evil. I know what a fraction of that is like because I’ve had it done to me. I’m just a writer/arguer/nitpicker; imagine being a doctor and getting all that. In one way perhaps it helps being a doctor because you know a lot about bodies, but in another way, when all your colleagues tell you you’re wrong and evil, it wouldn’t help at all because why don’t your colleagues see what you see?

    “This is a vulnerable, adolescent population,” said Scot Bradley Glasberg, past president of ASPS who did not vote on the new guidance but has been involved in discussions about the group’s stance. “We are mindful that some of these surgeries are irreversible.”

    And another thing about them is that they don’t change the sex of the surgeried.

    The group, which represents plastic surgeons primarily in the U.S., has evolved its stance on the issue. In 2019, the group opposed attempts by states to restrict transition care and said “plastic surgery services can help gender dysphoria patients align their bodies with whom they know themselves to be and improve their overall mental health and well-being.” 

    Except that they’re wrong about knowing themselves to be. If they know themselves to be a rabbit they’re wrong about that. People can know themselves to be anything, and lots of them do. Trump knows himself to be an enormously long list of things he isn’t. We see him enacting that confident knowledge and the gap between it and the reality every day. What people know themselves to be is not an accurate guide to anything, including what they will know themselves to be next year, or tomorrow. What’s in the mind is in the mind; it can’t cause us to grow wings or jump over houses or live on the ocean floor.

  • Deepity du jour

    I dropped into PCC Market this afternoon to get a loaf of bread and saw they had some sort of motto board in the little cafe area. I was curious to see what the current deepity was so I looked. It goes like this:

    The future is coming this way.

    Let us go out to meet it.

    And then the author’s name, which I didn’t write down and don’t remember.

    But: what??? That’s such wisdom it’s worth finding the alphabet blocks and pinning them on the board?

    The future is the future; you don’t say!

    Let’s go out to meet it??? I don’t want to be harsh but there’s no need to summon or advise us to meet it, because we have zero choice in the matter. Tomorrow is tomorrow whether we “go out to meet it” or stay in bed with pillows over our faces.

    And if we did have choice in the matter – well hey, maybe going out to meet it is a shit idea. It will be just more Trump, and global warming, and children dying of measles, and pangolins gone forever. Let’s not go out to meet it, let’s go back and fix our mistakes.

  • Perfectly normal

    There it is – there’s that giveaway. He tells Kaitlan Collins to go ahead then interrupts himself to shout insults at her.

    “You are the worst reporter – no wonder CN – CNN has no ratings because of people like you – [looks to his left] you know she’s a young woman – [looks to his right] I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile, I’ve known you for [grimaces] ten years, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile on your face.” [Collins tries to speak, he shouts over her.] You know why yerr not smiling? Coz ya know yer not tellin the trueth.”

    He can launch the nukes.

  • Purge

    I somehow missed this at the time, but Trump got very busy erasing women from all the things too. I knew about the big picture “get rid of all DEI blah blah blah” but I’m not sure I knew women were included in the purge.

    As President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI agenda comes to bear on NASA, we’re getting a revealing look at what his administration considers to be too woke: women.

    In a directive sent out just days after Trump’s inauguration, NASA personnel were commanded to excise all mentions of anything “specifically targeting” women on the space agency’s public websites, 404 Media reports.

    And by “targeting” they don’t mean harassing or mocking, they mean mentioning.

    “Per NASA HQ direction, we are required to scrub mentions of the following terms from our public sites by 5pm ET today,” the directive reads. “This is a drop everything and reprioritize your day request.”

    The list of verboten terms includes “DEIA,” “accessibility,” “indigenous people,” “environmental justice,” and finally: “anything specifically targeting women,” such as “women in leadership, etc.”

    Yeah that’s a very eccentric use of the word “targeting” – a more normal way of saying it would be “specifically mentioning/singling out/promoting” and the like.

    To lead the agency down this path, Trump hand picked Janet Petro as the space agency’s acting head — a nomination that’s reportedly surprised even NASA officials — which makes her the first woman to serve as the agency’s adminstrator.

    “These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination,” Petro wrote in a memo about the agency’s termination of diversity programs.

    Huh. So Trump “targeted” Petro by making her the head of NASA, but it’s not ok for NASA to “target” women by mentioning their leadership roles. Totally makes sense.

    That’s funny, because when Petro was the director of the Kennedy Space Center, she said this in a 2021 interview: “At NASA and Kennedy Space Center, our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility has been paramount to mission success. The entire NASA leadership team stands behind this commitment,” Petro said.  “KSC has embraced the link between diverse teams and innovation,” she added.

    You could argue that Petro’s hand was forced, but the fact that she accepted the job knowing full well what Trump’s agenda was, not to mention her about-face on the issue, suggests she’s doing it all with mercenary intent.

    Or at least promotionary intent.

    H/t iknklast

  • Whitewash in every sense

    Take down that information!

    A week after taking down signs at Independence National Historical Park referencing George Washington’s ownership of slaves, the National Park Service has been ordered to remove signs and displays pertaining to climate change and Native Americans at a handful of national parks in the West.

    “The moves are the latest actions by the Trump administration to whitewash and sanitize history at National Park Service sites by removing or changing signage about slavery, climate change, Native Americans, transgender rights, and other issues,” the Sierra Club said Tuesday in a statement.

    [How did “transgender rights” get in there? What can such undefined rights have to do with national parks?]

    “The Trump administration continues to politicize our national parks by censoring facts to sell a sanitized version of history. Removing signage about slavery, climate change, and Native Americans doesn’t change history,” said Gerry James, deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Outdoors for All campaign.

    No random mention of “trans rights” – was that just thrown in at the top because it’s Forbidden to not mention trans something?

    The administration shortly after taking office a year ago ordered a review of signage and displays in the National Park System to ensure they were in line with President Donald Trump’s bid to ensure that “interpretive materials … ensure accuracy, honesty, and alignment with shared national values,”

    Nope nope nope. Not accuracy, not honesty. Vanity, hostility, alignment with trumpian politics.

    Signage and displays reportedly targeted in this order include information pertaining to the slowly disappearing glaciers in Glacier National Park in Montana due to climate change and interpretive panels at Grand Canyon National Park explaining how Native Americans were displaced from the area.

    Maybe Trump should go pay a long visit in Germany, and while there he should urge Merz to get rid of any and all interpretive panels at the death camps.

    The display removed last week from the President’s House at Independence National Historical Park depicted individuals who had been enslaved by George Washington, along with a timeline detailing the history of slavery in America. Washington and John Adams both resided at the site during their presidencies.

    John Adams on the other hand did not enslave anyone. The fact that Washington (and Jefferson and others) did is important and of interest. Yes it’s a downer, but it’s a necessary downer.