The Philadelphia Inquirer screams

Hershey Canada Women’s Day campaign sparks transphobic vitriol on Twitter

Or to put it another way: Hershey hijacking of Canada Women’s Day sparks protests from women on Twitter.

The subhead is almost as stupid and dishonest as the headline:

For International Women’s Day, Hershey Canada launched a campaign spotlighting young women trailblazers on its chocolate bars. Their inclusion of transgender woman Fae Johnstone sparked Twitter hate.

It’s not “hate” to say that events for women should not feature men, just as events for workers should not include bosses.

The lede is also stupid and dishonest; three for three.

An ad campaign from Hershey Canada intended to highlight women trailblazers is being met online with transphobic hate.

The tits guy is on paid leave. So that’s how to get an extra vacation!

A Canadian high school teacher has been put on leave after reportedly wearing prosthetic breasts in class.

Not just “reportedly”; there are photos.

Parents of students at Oakville Trafalgar High School southwest of Toronto, where Kayla Lemieux taught shop class, grew frustrated after months of debate regarding her appearance.

No, that’s not exactly right either. One, it’s his appearance, and two, it’s not so much his appearance as the obvious, in your face, insulting fakery of it. It looks not so much like identifying as a woman but rather insulting women in general. Plus it looks childish, or else kinky, or a weird mashup … Read the rest

Women-hating men who just can’t believe their luck that they get to throw bricks at women and collect virtue stamps for doing so.

Do women get a free pass to say whatever they want when discussing their rights? Would you oppose an anti-abortionist woman if she came to your town to argue that women should have fewer rights?

— Billy Bragg (@billybragg) March 3, 2023

Do we get a free pass to say whatever we want when discussing our rights…gee, that’s a tough one. I don’t know. Probably to be on the safe side we should get Billy Bragg’s permission before we say anything.

Billy Bragg is just having fun though. Wot larks Pip!

Thanks Katy, but I’m just trying

Newsweek pretends to be surprised that women don’t particularly like seeing something called International Women’s Day being incloooosive of men. Being incloooosive can be good some of the time, but when it’s a matter of celebrating the half of humanity that gets shoved aside and ignored when it’s not being mocked and belittled and raped, you kind of miss the whole point by inclooooding people who are not part of that shoved aside disparaged half.

Things that are supposed to be for everyone should be inclusive. Definitely. That’s what “for everyone” means. But things that are supposed to be for a specific set of people? Being inclusive of people not in that set? No. That just misses the whole point. … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Insult # eleventy billion seventeen.

I know I shouldn’t be surprised anymore by this sort of thing, but I find it odd that a company would do this. It’s one thing letting the proverbial intern with insufficient adult supervision fire off an overzealous tweet or two, but unleashing this campaign took time, effort, and money. I’m trying to decide if the people at Hershey’s who did this are True Believers, or if they’ve simply mistaken Twitter for the real world. Who did they consult before they put this together? Was this an internal project, or did someone from outside suggest this?

It’s one thing to stir debate and controversy when … Read the rest

Fox “News” and Trump and Dominion and a puppy.

Former President Donald Trump has been hit with a “soft ban” at Fox News, the Republican propaganda outlet that helped put him in the White House, several members of his orbit told Semafor in a piece published Wednesday. Indeed, while the network has lavished other 2024 GOP presidential candidates with interviews and airtime, Trump has not appeared since launching his campaign in November — even as the network’s own polling has him leading the primary. 

It always depresses me to think about this. One evil guy – Rupert Murdoch – is why we’re in this hideous ever-worsening mess. It’s Murdoch’s world and we’re just the fleas.

Airtime on Fox — the 

The sixth annual Women’s Writes marathon via Robin Buckallew.

Links to previous years at

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018… Read the rest

Yay another win for men invading women’s sports.

For Minnesota powerlifter JayCee Cooper, a trans woman who has been one of the prominent faces in an ongoing debate over inclusion and participation in sports, a four-year fight yielded a victory in court Monday.

Inclusion and participation in sports should not be interpreted as meaning inclusion and participation of men in women’s sports.

A Ramsey County, Minn., District Court judge ruled that USA Powerlifting violated portions of the Minnesota Human Rights Act through continued efforts to keep Cooper and other transgender competitors out of their events.

It isn’t about “transgender competitors,” it’s about male competitors invading women’s sports.

“Trans athletes across the country deserve the same rights and protections as

Mary Wakefield on the gender birthrate:

It was announced last week that another gender has been added to the list: nominalgender. Most news sites reported this in the sort of proud way a zoo might announce the birth of an exciting animal, a baby Komodo dragon maybe – as if the gender had somehow hatched and was waiting to be adopted. You are nominalgender ‘if your gender is so much just you that no one else can even experience it’, I read.

In fact no news sites reported this at all, so Wakefield is apparently doing satire. (There are a few mentions of “nominal gender” – two words, not one – but they’re not new and the meaning is … Read the rest

Amanda Marcotte wonders why Murdoch is not trying to settle the Dominion case when settling is what he usually does.

I suspect the reason Murdoch and Fox News seem determined to stick this out is that they are just that worried about what impact an admission of wrongdoing would have on their reputation with their audience. The possibility of a jury ruling in their favor, which they could spin as a total exoneration of their tactics, is so important to them that they’re willing to take a big risk that the opposite could happen. A settlement, however, would remove all doubt about who was in the wrong. 

…

[A]s the Dominion filings showed, internal machinations at Fox News were precisely

Woohoo International Women’s Day, let’s celebrate –

By promoting a man.

He shouldn’t be honored to be featured in this campaign, he should be horrified at the invitation, and telling them to feature a WOMAN for International Woman’s Day.… Read the rest

Pink News is SHOCKED AND APPALLED by the misgendering crime spree in Newham Monday. The very reasonable and informative headline conveys PN’s shock and appallment.

Non-binary councillor storms out of chamber after being shamefully misgendered

Oh how shamefully shameful. Also how adult of a councillor to storm out because a colleague forgot to pretend he has a luxury gender identity with luxury pronouns to match.

The incident happened when Newham councillor Danny Keeling, who uses they/them pronouns, was speaking against Labour’s budget plans at a full council meeting on Monday (February 27) at Stratford Olympic Park.

There’s no such thing as “using” X pronouns—everyone has to use them. Your using eccentric pronouns about yourself does not repeat DOES NOT … Read the rest

A whole entire line of Trump corruption I for one didn’t know about:

Donald Trump made more than a billion dollars while serving as president, including $14 million in income from his business interests in Indonesia from 2015 to 2019, according to a CREW analysis of his tax returns. During that same period, he earned $234 million in total from businesses in foreign countries with interests in U.S. foreign policy. 

That’s so interesting because the normal thing to do on achieving political office is to divest oneself of business interests, by at minimum handing them over to other people to manage and maintaining complete separation between self and those other people. The idea is to get rid of all … Read the rest

When they force you to say the words:

A professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio will be paid $400,000 after he was disciplined four years ago for refusing to use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns. 

Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee State, was reprimanded in 2018 after he would not refer to a transgender student by her preferred pronouns. He had a warning placed in his file and was told to change the way he addresses transgender students “to avoid further corrective actions.” 

So a university – a place with, one would hope, some concept of respect for truth – ordered a professor to pretend a male student was a female student by calling him “her.” Not urged, … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Night Crow on Wasting time.

Part of the issue is that in the moment, anger feels good; it feels like the thing to do. It overrides all other moral and rational brakes in the brain because it originates from our primordial, original limbic system: the brain center of our most automatic emotions like fear and desire.…

What happens is that anger can lead to similar “rushes” as thrill-seeking activities where danger triggers dopamine reward receptors in the brain, or like other forms of addiction such as gambling, extreme sports, or even drugs like cocaine and methamphetamines. Anger can become its own reward …

There is also the psychological aspect of ego fragility and injury, often

So what did David Paisley actually accuse Ceri Black of? Everything he could think of, it seems, some of it repeatedly.

Just one tiny sample:

Defaming Paisley by stating facts about his actions.

Defaming Paisley by reading out his own tweets.

Defaming Paisley by wishing him a happy Christmas, a soft pillow and a life full of love, as I wish for everybody.

Funny way to defame someone.

Causing significant “distress and anxiety” by reporting publicly that Paisley had reported me to the police.

Oh that’s a good one. Sparky takes a baseball bat to my knee, and I cause Sparky significant distress and anxiety by reporting publicly that Sparky took a baseball bat to my knee.

There’s much, much … Read the rest

What Rupert Murdoch did for Trump:

According to a new court filing from Dominion Voting Systems—which is currently suing Fox News for $1.6 billion—in 2020, Murdoch gave Jared Kushner, then the first son-in-law and an adviser to the president, “confidential information about [President Joe] Biden’s ads, along with debate strategy…providing Kushner a preview of Biden’s ads before they were public.” 

…

Given the way Fox treated Trump while he was in office—like he was the network’s lord and savior, and like its pundits had pledged a blood oath to him in the basement of its Sixth Avenue offices—the company’s owner having shared confidential information with Kushner probably seems neither shocking nor even that bad on the scale of

Well I’ll just have to give you the whole sequence. It’s too maddening and too illustrative to condense.

That Newham Council clip in full:
“I’ve been informed that I’ve been misrepresenting the councillor's name. I should have said ‘them’ rather than ‘he’. So I do apologise for that. And I think that’s what affected him, is it? Them, sorry. So my apologies to him. To them. Sorry.” pic.twitter.com/QGMXdBNGyA

— Laurie Wastell (@L_Wastell) February 28, 2023

The woman at the end on the right gets up and talks to The Misgendering Criminal to explain where he went so very wrong. Many silent seconds elapse while she informs him of this utter bullshit. He then says he’s been informed, but in doing … Read the rest

A local government meeting interrupted so that one narcissist can make a long-winded repetitive tedious speech about making sure to use the wrong pronouns for The People of Special so that everything anyone says will become more confusing, and not just making sure to do it but making sure to do it INSTANTLY so that the poor overworked narcissist doesn’t have to do it himself.

It keeps going.

After one council member urges the chair to "make this a safe space for trans and nonbinary members", a second says, "I do apologise, and I'll personally apologise to him when he comes back." pic.twitter.com/4muNMSNpm7

— Laurie Wastell (@L_Wastell) February 28, 2023

“You have the power to make this a safe space … Read the rest

Charles Pierce on Murdochs and Foxes:

If I had to guess, I’d say that the lawyers having the most fun these days are the ones handling the defamation suit against the Fox News Channel and the extended Murdoch clan. Every now and then (most recently on Monday), they get to release another tranche of documents related to the case that make Fox look like the malevolent entity it always has been; that make the elite political journalists who have stood up for them over the years look like unusually useful idiots; and that make the Murdochs look like the invasive predatory species they are. This is a public service of immeasurable value. The lawyers must be convulsing with laughter