Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on More bags.

The trouble with Western democracies is that the people who stand for political office are commonly not themselves democrats. They prefer their own wills to prevail rather than those of the population-at-large. Some prize examples of elected anti-democrats spring readily to mind.

I always wondered what the purpose of a divided government was, why didn’t the founders set up a parliamentary system where the majority party holds the executive? The way it is, the executive branch can be hamstrung as it is about to be when the next U.S. government shutdown battle comes along (and Johnson will not make a deal like McCarthy did). But, when someone like Trump or … Read the rest

That sounds like a brilliant parody:

I wasn't impressed with the first book of the series. Will this one be any better?https://t.co/nGPleYOKdq pic.twitter.com/AoQNHuyJCe

— Miroslav Imbrisevic (@Miroandrej) October 29, 2023

The trans “struggle for justice” hahahahahahahaha hilarious.

Let’s have a look.

Acknowledging the formidable hurdles trans and nonbinary athletes face in their struggles for inclusion, acceptance, and freedom, this book documents and analyses their resistance across a range of social-cultural and geopolitical contexts, from community sport to high-performance competition.

It looks like a parody but apparently isn’t.

So let’s talk about this “struggle” for “inclusion, acceptance, and freedom.”

Inclusion. We’ve been over this. We’ve been over this a billion times by now. Athletic competitions have categories and qualifications. … Read the rest

The list includes Mein Kampf and gender critical books…and nothing else.

Works by authors including Helen Joyce and Prof Kathleen Stock were hidden from view by a library service of the Labour-run Calderdale council, and are now barred from being promoted in displays in order to protect the public from offence.

The only other book similarly censored by the library service by being hidden was Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

So, it seems, the Calderdale library system considers gender-skeptical feminism to be on a level with genocidal Nazism.

That’s puzzling for a number of reasons. Like, for instance, the fact that gender-skeptical feminism is not genocidal or genocidal-adjacent or remotely in any way similar to or connected to genocide. … Read the rest

Sorry but this is too hilarious to pass up.

Fred to Willoughby:

“The less you say now the better”

If only Fred could take his own advice we wouldn’t have to listen to his drunken incoherent misogynist and homophobic drivel… pic.twitter.com/EUW3y82jD5

— The Women Exist Society (@WomensSocIre) October 28, 2023

Like the fact that there were five men and one woman discussing an issue about women? No, of course not that, that’s fine. Fred’s choices on the other hand…… Read the rest

Oh no, Inja and Fred are quarreling!

Take your time, boys. Be thorough.… Read the rest

They killed the patient trying to save her.

An Iranian girl, 16, has died after she was allegedly beaten by morality police for not wearing a hijab.

Why is it so important for women to wear bags on their heads that it’s necessary to beat them to death for not doing it?

It’s not to protect them from anything, especially not from the sexual violence of godbothering men. It’s to make a big fuss about the “honor” of men, which is besmirched by the existence of those horrible oozing sluts known as “women.” If they’re not tightly wrapped like a supermarket cheese, they flop down in the street and spread their legs, so that explains why the “morality” police … Read the rest

Aw yeah, solidarity forever. Islamists and sex workers, unite and fight!

Our statement of solidarity with Palestine: pic.twitter.com/3ax9LcQODE

— Sex Workers’ Union (@swunion_uk) October 26, 2023

… Read the rest

The Guardian reports there is conflict over the revamped NHS gender idenniny development service.

The opening of the hubs has been delayed by more than a year amid difficulties in recruiting staff, and tensions over how to train employees in caring for young people with gender dysphoria. Meanwhile, the waiting list of young people seeking help has grown to 5,766.

As delays to the openings continue, NHS England (NHSE) has started to divert thousands of 17-year-olds, and 16-year-olds who turn 17 before next March, towards the adult waiting list, where they are likely to receive a different, less exploratory form of treatment.

This development so concerned the mothers of two 17-year-olds that they launched a judicial review challenging the stark

Originally a comment by Holms on We know that something is being waved in our faces.

The claim that using someone’s pronouns of demand is a mere ‘kindness’ is belied by the fact that they are also claimed to be non-optional. Kindness is not mandatory, and mandates are by their nature not kind as there is the implication of enforcement, punishment, for failure to comply. It is further undermined by the revisionism we see at play with trans identities. When someone declares they have a gender identity, name, and/or pronouns at odds with their sex, it is immediately forbidden to mention even obliquely that the person ever had anything other than those even in the past. This is especially … Read the rest

The CBC is shocked, shocked to have discovered that Buffy Sainte-Marie invented an indigenous identity for herself.

When Buffy Sainte-Marie strolled onto Sesame Street in 1975, she was making history.

The Dec. 9 episode was the launch of the program’s efforts to present Indigenous culture to millions of viewers.

…

From the early days of her career, Sainte-Marie has claimed to be a Cree woman, born in Canada. She has also allowed herself to be celebrated as an Indigenous icon and success story.

In 2022, CBC broadcast a concert that was held in her honour at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, where Anishinabe musician ShoShona Kish told the audience: “Buffy Sainte-Marie has led the way for Indigenous music

Brilliant and enraging: Helen Joyce dissects the intense deliberate sustained suppression of women’s views on Magic Gender.

There’s the double bind, for one thing – you get mostly silenced but if you manage to utter a peep that means you haven’t been silenced.

This is the logic of witch-ducking. If a woman drowns, she isn’t a witch; if she floats, she is, and must be dispatched some other way. Either way, she ends up dead.

Most of the stifling is secret and carefully hidden, but occasionally a bit of the curtain gets caught in someone’s zipper. Helen gives enraging examples – Intelligence Squared, the Irish Times, the BBC, ABC [the Australian one], Sky News.

All that Sky

Joan Smith is. not. having. it.

Referring to Izzard or any other trans-identified man as “she” is profoundly insulting to women. In this instance, it happens to be the Guardian talking to Izzard “ahead of the release of her new film”. The word “her” has no place in that sentence, creating an immediate sense of cognitive dissonance. We know that something is being waved in our faces, challenging us to object to our own erasure. 

What’s being waved in our faces is the [implicit] dick along with the explicit dick move of ordering us to ignore the dick as we are forced to submit to it.

For years we were told that using someone’s preferred pronouns was a matter

Princess doesn’t want to testify. Princess loses appeal.

Ivanka Trump will have to testify in a business fraud case against her father and brothers, a New York judge ruled. She had previously sought not to take the stand, arguing that she had moved out of the city and had stepped away from the Trump Organization. But Judge Arthur Engoron said she still maintains ties to Trump businesses and real estate in New York.

Wull can’t she just pocket the money without any of the consequences? She’s a princess!

Prosecutors have argued that Ms Trump has important information to share about the case. In his ruling on Friday, Judge Engoron sided with the prosecutors, writing: “Ms Trump has clearly availed

So women don’t get to have unions any more.

This one goes out to the LGB Alliance, who want to know why we will never support their attempts to marginalise trans and gender-diverse people. Transphobia is not welcome in a union movement that seeks to support and lift up all workers. pic.twitter.com/cPMGqfQyBO

— Victorian Trades Hall Council (@VicUnions) October 26, 2023

What an absolutely disgusting way to treat workers who have the bad taste to be women.

First there’s the stupid lie that the LGB Alliance “attempts to marginalise trans and gender-diverse people.” No it doesn’t! Saying men are not women is not an attempt to marginalize men. It’s simply the truth that men are not women. If anyone is … Read the rest

Blood Knight alerted us to Kessler syndrome so I found When Elephants Fight in Space:

When spacecraft collide with other objects conducting routine space activity or are intentionally destroyed via anti-satellite tests, this creates orbital debris and risks creating a cascading chain reaction of collisions and debris propagation. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) explains that “collisions with orbital debris can pit or damage spacecraft in the best case scenario and cause catastrophic failures in the worst.” Collisional cascading, also known as the Kessler Syndrome, is a dangerous phenomenon because it renders orbits less accessible for all states to reap the scientific, technological, and economic benefits. For these reasons, NASA maintains that the top threat to spacecraft,

Peter Tatchell says oh yes there is too so such a thing as a “gender identity.” What’s more, we all have one. What’s more, we can all tell what everyone’s “gender identity” is by looking at what everyone IS WEARING. So neat, so easy, so simple. Why didn’t anyone tell us this before???

For once I’m not indulging in hyperbole. He really does say that, and after the whole room squawks and shouts and says no, he says it all over again.

Allow me to join all the women in the audience saying “No I don’t!!” The only sense in which I can be said to wear “women’s clothes” is that I wear colors – red, purple, orange, yellow, … Read the rest

What actual girls get:

A woman has been found guilty of taking a three-year-old British child to Kenya for female genital mutilation (FGM). Amina Noor, 39, is the first person to be convicted of assisting a non-UK person to perform FGM. Noor, from Harrow in north-west London, took the child to a private house for the procedure in 2006.

…

It was only in 2015 that the girl – who is now aged 21 and who cannot be identified – confided to a schoolteacher that she had suffered FGM and police were informed.

Following an examination at University College Hospital in 2019 it was found that the girl’s clitoris had been completely removed.

That’s right: make sex a tiresome … Read the rest

Many are sharing this little gem.

@IndiaWilloughby, Not a frump and still not a woman. pic.twitter.com/KJn7BTWlLr

— Jeremy Williams (@jeremy020264) October 26, 2023

Again – he’s a 57-year-old man doing an impersonation of a particularly silly 13-year-old girl. A 57-year-old man playing dressup for the edification of Twitter. A 57-year-old man saying “Haha you’re ugly.” A 57-year-old man smirking and pouting at the same time while taking selfies in the world’s stupidest hat. A 57-year-old man doing this. Not 15, not 20, not 22, but FIFTY SEVEN. Aren’t most people embarrassed to do silly teenage look-at-me shit in public once they’re, I don’t know, 35 or so?

But hey, being incloosive of trans laydeez is the most pressing issue … Read the rest

The points are tipping.

Humanity is moving dangerously close to irreversible tipping points that would drastically damage our ability to cope with disasters, UN researchers have warned, including the withdrawal of home insurance from flood-hit areas and the drying up of the groundwater that is vital for ensuring food supplies.

These “risk tipping points” also include the loss of the mountain glaciers that are essential for water supplies in many parts of the world and accumulating space debris knocking out satellites that provide early warnings of extreme weather.

I didn’t know that about the space debris.

The risk tipping points are different from the climate tipping points the world is on the brink of, including the collapse of Amazon

First, the statement from NYU:

“We’re aware of the photos from the demonstration in Washington Square Park.  These signs are antisemitic, repugnant, and a disgrace. We don’t know the identity of the people pictured, or if they are members of the NYU community, but we take this seriously and will be looking into it. To be clear, antisemitism violates the University’s rules and violators are subject to university conduct proceedings.” 

—NYU Spokesperson John Beckman

Now the photos:

NYU happening now – students are spotted holding up a Nazi era antisemitic signs wanting to rid the world of the Jews.

We have no words. pic.twitter.com/Asg9PKGCrE

— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) October 25, 2023

https://twitter.com/Bad_bureaucrat/status/1715812554625171676

This trope that a certain set of people=dirt … Read the rest