Just one thing about that…
A woman has become the first transgender inmate to be executed in the US, after stabbing her ex-girlfriend to death with a steak knife and dumping her body in a riverhttps://t.co/D9nuPHVytZ
— LBC (@LBC) January 4, 2023
NOT A WOMAN.… Read the rest
Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican congressman-elect who rose to prominence under former President Donald Trump’s wing, went rogue after the former president endorsed GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy of California for House speaker.
Gaetz told Fox News Digital that Trump’s endorsement of McCarthy for speaker has not changed the congressman’s view on the former president or GOP leader, nor has swayed his vote.
“Sad!” Gaetz said in a Wednesday statement. “This changes neither my view of McCarthy, nor Trump, nor my vote.”
What happened to loyalty? What happened to payback? Where would Matt Gaetz be without Trump??
Gaetz wants the shirtsleeves molester guy.
… Read the restGaetz has led the House Freedom Caucus charge against the GOP leader’s speakership bid,
All the despised groups should have euphemisms, all of them. Murderers should be re-branded as population controllers and rapists should be called admirers of women. Jo Bartosch at spiked:
Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Police Scotland were blasted for referring to those who abuse children as ‘minor-attracted people’, or ‘MAP’, in a report for a European Commission project.
As euphemisms go, that’s a pretty terrible one, because of course the issue isn’t attraction, it’s abuse. The issue with rapists isn’t attraction, it’s rape, and it works the same way with the rape or molestation of children.
… Read the restAfter an online backlash, Police Scotland were quick to point out that the phrase ‘minor-attracted people’ was a quote from
Early in 2020, an Indigenous artist urged the owners of a new music venue in [Madison] to change its name.
It was called The Winnebago, after the street on which it stands. Many Indigenous people and allies let the owners know that wasn’t the best name for a white-owned music venue. One of them was nibiiwakamigkwe, also known as Kay LeClaire, a founding member and co-owner of the queer Indigenous artists’ collective giige, and budding leader of Madison’s Indigenous arts community.
I don’t think it’s all that clear that using indigenous names is bad if you’re not indigenous. You could be promoting awareness of indigenous culture, which could be not bad, it seems to me.
Anyway … Read the rest
Originally a comment by Holms on Marjorie.
For the last twenty years or so, there has been a strong push for movies, tv shows, theatrical productions (etc.) to have more widely representative characters and casts. Fewer male characters, more female; fewer white, more of every other ethnicity; fewer straight, more of other sexualities. It was emphasised that these characters were not to be reductive cliches. Further, this popular push emphasised that this was especially applicable to the lead role.
The reasoning was simple, and well understood by the left. People of demographic combinations other than ‘white male’ deserve to see themselves represented in movies, and not as insulting caricatures. Kids especially deserve to see their sex and/or skin colour … Read the rest
Originally a comment by latsot on Where are the skeptics?
Harald Hanche-Olsen@22ish
Your point reminds me of the characterisation of social media as Skinner Boxes, which I’ve written about here before. The re-enforcement mechanism is very clear and obviously designed to encourage people to take increasingly outspoken positions in the everlasting hunt for likes as returns diminish.
And of course once you’ve gone down one trouser leg of validation, it’s rather hard to come back. I don’t think the sunk cost fallacy is quite up to describing this effect because the increasing apparent conviction is based on diminishing returns for increasingly wild claims.
This is the only explanation I can come up with for the constant over-reaching of gender identity … Read the rest
Robert Reich points out that the Republican party veered into incoherence when it tried to combine libertarianism with cultural conservatism.
That kind of incoherence is inevitable though, when you have on the one hand two political parties and on the other hand more than two political philosophies or orientations or whatever you want to call them. It applies just as much to the Dems – they’re way too conservative on most issues for my liking, but they’re all there is.
The party line became confused, its message garbled, its purpose unclear. It thereby created an opening for a third and far angrier phase, centering on resentment and authoritarianism.
Or centering on whatever exactly it was that they saw in Trump. … Read the rest
… Read the restIn 2007, I spent time in Blackpool investigating the disappearance of Charlene Downes, a 14-year-old whose body has never been found. She was one of hundreds of girls in the town targeted by sexual predators who would groom and then rape their victims before pimping them to multiple men in exchange for alcohol, cigarettes and food.
…
Blackpool, one of the most deprived parts of England, is rife with child abuse and home to a higher number of convicted child sex offenders than anywhere else in the country. It is thought that predatory men gravitate there to seek out vulnerable children. They don’t have to look far — there are three times the national
The Guardian heralds another first:
Missouri set to become first state to execute an openly transgender person
Progress! No, wait, that’s not what we mean. What do we mean? Uhh………..
Amber McLaughlin is facing the fate on Tuesday of becoming the first openly transgender person to be executed in the US – unless Missouri’s governor, Mike Parson, grants clemency and puts a stop to the planned lethal injection.
First transgender person but not first man.
Punishment by execution is a bad thing, but it doesn’t become worse because the executed person is a man who claims to be a woman.
… Read the restThere are no further court appeals pending. The clemency request focuses on several issues, including McLaughlin’s severely traumatic childhood and
Gee, I wonder why women get so angry about this kind of thing; I just can’t understand it.
Marjorie Roome is an extraordinary but real example of what happens to women's sport when men are allowed to compete in women's categories.
Marjorie is a man who says he 'identifies' as a woman. He took up indoor rowing and has been allowed to compete in women's championships 1/4 pic.twitter.com/foZI32LWBU— ripx4nutmeg (@ripx4nutmeg) January 1, 2023
… Read the restHe won the 65-69 women's world championships every year and is now in his 70s. In 2022 he broke the British record for the 70-74 age category. However, most women now refuse to compete against him and Marjorie, a man, is typically the only competitor in
Paul Fidalgo has an interesting piece in Free Inquiry (where he is now the editor-in-chief).
Tim Minchin Reaches across the Algorithmic Chasm
Nice title, too.
In a “lecture” portion of his show recently posted online, which is introduced as being a “TED Talk” on confirmation bias, Minchin (winner of CFI’s 2021 Richard Dawkins Award) teases apart what he sees as the worsening phenomenon of tribalism, wherein the political right has come to hold bewilderingly absolutist, contradictory, nonsensical, and bigoted beliefs, while progressives have turned on themselves, creating an endless fractal of mini-tribes that are constantly ejecting their members over increasingly minor ideological infractions.
Also over what I would consider not infractions at all. Progressives have lost their grip on … Read the rest
Now we get to read the texts and phone logs and such from Trump’s Big Day.
The Jan. 6 select committee has unloaded a vast database of its underlying evidence — emails between Trump attorneys, text messages among horrified White House aides and outside advisers, internal communications among security and intelligence officials — all coming to grips with Donald Trump’s last-ditch effort to subvert the 2020 election and its disastrous consequences.
The panel posted thousands of pages of evidence late Sunday in a public database that provide the clearest glimpse yet at the well-coordinated effort by some Trump allies to help Trump seize a second term he didn’t win.
This will keep us busy for weeks.
Hope Hicks, to … Read the rest
In case anyone’s feeling like shedding a tear for Pope Benny (unlikely, I know), here’s a reminder from 2009:
The Catholic Church (and Pope Benedict XVI) were presented with a public-relations powder keg in March when news broke that a 9-year-old Brazilian girl underwent an abortion after she’d been raped and impregnated with twins by her stepfather. Catholics from São Paulo to Paris were outraged by the swift public declaration of the local Archbishop, José Cardoso Sobrinho, that the girl’s family as well as the doctors who performed the abortion were automatically excommunicated.
What, just because the local archbishop valued the “life” of the process inside the 9-year-old girl more than the very actual life of the girl herself? … Read the rest
Jordan Peterson is notoriously a stupid person’s idea of a smart person.
Example:
The idea that neighborhoods should be walkable is lovely. The idea that idiot tyrannical bureaucrats can decide by fiat where you're "allowed" to drive is perhaps the worst imaginable perversion of that idea–and, make no mistake, it's part of a well-documented plan. https://t.co/QRrjVF615q
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) December 31, 2022
Ah yes, we live in that utopia where nobody decides were anybody can drive, so there are no freeways or highways or roads.… Read the rest
Oh ffs.
'So a woman can have a penis?'
Nick Ferrari puts Sir Keir Starmer on the spot amid a row over trans athletes.#LBCBestof2022 @NickFerrariLBC pic.twitter.com/Jh6AGy95Wg
— LBC (@LBC) January 1, 2023
And Sir Keir whines and gesticulates and flails like an idiot. He finally manages to utter the complete sentence “I don’t think discussing the issue in this way helps anyone.”
It helps women you fucking fool. This exciting new fad for pretending men can become women by saying so is bad for women, and men in power brushing that off is also bad for women. It does help us to keep reminding men in power like you that letting men pretend to be women and … Read the rest
Yet another one of these.
“Tiffany Newell” new Canadian Record in Masters Women Indoor 5000m run for the age group 45-49.
More than a stolen award from women athletes, this is a record that's been ratified because “Tiffany” apparently has “met all the World Athletics requirements to compete as a woman” pic.twitter.com/aCUCi7NPpr
— Amy E. Sousa (@KnownHeretic) December 30, 2022
“Tiffany” of course is not a woman.
This is Paula James, who held the Canadian F45 record before Newell. https://t.co/e76VOAshaa pic.twitter.com/AHSgaUWszH
— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) December 31, 2022
Sucks for Paula James, doesn’t it.
… Read the restWe know that female athletes lose performance between the ages of 45-55. We know that this is the effect of peri/menopause.
I know how hard it
I could find only one headline that doesn’t lie about the murder of Carlo Secondino. Even the New York Post says “woman” in the headline. Newsweek is the one truth-teller.
Who Is Nikki Secondino? Trans Woman Accused of Murdering Father
A New York transgender woman has been arrested by police and is accused of killing her father and critically injuring her sister, according to reports.
Why don’t they all report it that way? Why do they say “woman” and “daughter” in the headlines?… Read the rest
Actual literal journalists lying about the news. That’s useful. Reporter for CBS News:
At a Brooklyn diner, employees put up a tribute to Carlo Secondino—a delivery driver killed this morning.
His daughter told police burglars at their home stabbed her, her sister, and Carlo.
Now police say that’s false. She is under arrest, facing a murder charge. @CBSNewYork pic.twitter.com/SwBZmouYHN
— Tim McNicholas (@TimMcNicholas) December 30, 2022
That’s all lies. His SON told police that. His SON is under arrest on suspicion of murdering his father and stabbing his sister.
The hashtag is NotOurCrimes. It gets used a lot.… Read the rest
Ah, I didn’t realize there was a Welsh publisher of women writers. Gwasg Honno Press: “Vibrant fiction, auto/biography, short stories, anthologies & Classics (@Honno_Clas) from Welsh women writers. Longest running UK independent women’s press.” (I still miss Virago.)
But, it turns out…
Are you thinking about a good new year's resolution? Have you always wanted to publish a story? Make 2023 the start of your writing career…#NewYearResolution #Writers #CallOut #Submissions #AuthorLife pic.twitter.com/rgZEN5a5DC
— Gwasg Honno Press (@honno) December 30, 2022
Never mind then, it’s not a women’s press after all.
Mind you, they’ll get in trouble for that “or.” It’s not “if you’re a woman or you identify as a woman” because that implies that if … Read the rest
Bolsonaro has urgent business up north.
… Read the restLuiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been sworn in as the new president of Brazil – the third time he has held the country’s highest office.
…
Lula and incoming Vice-President Geraldo Alckmin paraded through the city on an open-top convertible before proceeding to the Senate – at the start of the formal inauguration ceremony. The men have spent the past days selecting their cabinet and appointing supporters to key state owned businesses.
In a noted change of policy from the Bolsonaro administration, Marina Silva – one of Brazil’s best known climate activists – was re-appointed to head the environment and climate ministry. She will be expected to achieve Lula’s pledge to reach
