More from the Let’s everybody shun JK Rowling file:

The real-life sport of quidditch will be known as something to be determined once it changes its name and distances itself from author J.K. Rowling, who created the game in her best-selling Harry Potter book series.

Because she has cooties.

US Quidditch and Major League Quidditch announced on Thursday that they have started the process of changing their names because of financial limitations and because they want to “distance” themselves from Rowling “who has increasingly come under scrutiny for her anti-trans positions in recent years.”

And by “distance themselves” they mean “show off how sensitive and correct we are.” There’s no objective need to “distance themselves” and no objective … Read the rest

It turns out porn isn’t good for girls.

Speaking on the Howard Stern Show on Sirius XM radio on Monday, [Billie]Eilish, who turned 20 on Saturday, said viewing porn at a young age had caused her emotional damage.

“I think porn is a disgrace. I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. I started watching porn when I was, like, 11,” the top-selling US singer said, adding that it helped her feel as if she were cool and “one of the guys”.

“I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn,” she said, adding that she suffered nightmares because some of the content she

President of the Human Rights Campaign. A woman. Throwing away women’s rights and opportunities for the sake of a hulking man with long hair who is smashing women’s rights and opportunities.

Attacking young trans people like this is absolutely unacceptable.

Lia, I am here for you. I support you. And I will keep up the fight every day to make the world a safe space for young trans people to thrive. https://t.co/KqLlmJgxNe

— Kelley Robinson (@HRC_President) December 17, 2021

That hulking young man doesn’t need a “safe space” to thrive. It’s the women he’s shoved aside who need that.

Replies are scathing.… Read the rest

Yes but this all misses the point.

Scottish ministers are facing a massive public backlash over their planned gender recognition reforms, according to a poll.

A Panelbase survey suggests the vast majority of voters in Scotland (71 per cent) oppose their plan to let people officially change gender quickly without providing medical evidence of gender dysphoria. Ministers plan to allow trans people to apply for a gender recognition certificate after declaring that they have lived in their acquired gender for three months, and then wait just three months for the certificate to be granted.

The plan follows complaints that current procedures, which can mean transgender people wait for two years for formal recognition, are bureaucratic, invasive and humiliating. This

Originally a comment by Sastra on Imagining way too many possibilities.

If someone claims to be sexually attracted to members of their own sex and behaves accordingly — demonstrates romantic attachments and physical intimacy with members of their own sex— that’s pretty damn straightforward (so to speak.) We don’t have to question whether sex exists, wonder what a man or woman is, rewrite evolutionary biology, or exercise huge amounts of trust in their subjective reliability in “knowing their own sexual orientation.” Catch a couple of teens canoodling under the bleachers and there’s the objective diagnosis. Sexual attraction isn’t complicated.

Someone claiming to be the opposite sex in their mind would be equally straightforward, if all we were looking at … Read the rest

Sarah Phillimore on grooming in the schools:

On 16 December 2021 I saw a very distressing video of a mother, Jessica Konen, speaking at a school board meeting in Salinas, California, objecting to the school going behind her back to counsel her suicidal 12-year-old daughter about her claimed “transgender status”. The anger, pain and misery in her voice was evident.

Local press reported that two teachers at the Buena Vista Middle School in Salinas were recorded coaching other teachers how to conceal the nature of LGTBQ clubs from parents.

The teachers led a workshop about how to run a “Gay-Straight Alliance” club in “conservative communities” at a California Teachers Association conference held in October, called “Beyond the Binary: Identity

Another way to get rid of female people:

TikTok is flooding teen users with videos of rapid-weight-loss competitions and ways to purge food that health professionals say contribute to a wave of eating-disorder cases spreading across the country.

A Wall Street Journal investigation involving the creation of a dozen automated accounts on TikTok, registered as 13-year-olds, found that the popular video-sharing app’s algorithm served them tens of thousands of weight-loss videos within a few weeks of joining the platform.

Some included tips about taking in fewer than 300 calories a day, several recommended consuming only water some days, another suggested taking laxatives after overeating.

Others suggested walking in front of speeding trains, jumping off tall buildings, swimming with sharks.… Read the rest

Speaking of amateurs who refuse to trust professionals –

Guests invited to a holiday party at the home of the leading anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr were urged to be vaccinated or tested for Covid-19 because, Kennedy said, he is “not always the boss at my own house”.

The what?

Why would he be “the boss” at “his own” house? He’s married, so it’s not exclusively his house, is it, and he’s not “the boss,” is he. What a stupid, piggy, ugly way to talk, even assuming he was sort of joking. That kind of joke rests on a lot of piggy assumptions. All that and he’s an anti-vaxxer.

Speaking to Politico, which reported the request before the party

Edzard Ernst informs us:

Yesterday, it was reported that one of Austria’s best-known opponents of vaccination has died as a result of coronavirus infection. He vehemently refused treatment in hospital. Instead, he insisted on treating himself – and tragically, he is not an isolated case.

“Miracle Mineral Solution” (MMS) is being promoted as a treatment for all kinds of diseases – including, of course, the coronavirus. But MMS is nothing more than the bleach and disinfectant chlorine dioxide, or CDL for short. It made headlines when Donald Trump suggested it as a remedy against Covid-19. Subsequently, CDL became highly popular amongst the anti-vax brigade.

Johann Biacsics was one of the leading figures of the anti-vaccination scene in

Wisey the Pretty having a snit.

Now that you know, you can't feign ignorance.
And yes, that goes for that shiny new video game too. And yes, that goes for second-hand items. Anything that reinforces her cultural importance and hegemony strengthens her stance against the lives of trans people. pic.twitter.com/hNUsjcn9WK

— Serious trans vibes Comics (@AssignedMale) December 14, 2021

… Read the rest

The replies are many and scorching.

Not in solidarity with female athletes then. This is unfair, this is cheating. This is a travesty.

— WomanbornKPSS (@Womanborn1) December 17, 2021

I’ll just quote others, so as not to keep repeating the original.

Men have been allowed to be “powerful” over women for centuries. Society is male dominated. And here you are celebrating yet another example of that dominance, pretending that the power to strip women of their rights and categories is something new. Cowards. @therestofus5

So you’re totally fine with girls being told they need their heads examined because they object to a man cheating them out of their places and records. Not so much Human Rights as Man Rights. @carolinmcmillan

I guess human rights don’t include women.

Living your truth is an incredible and powerful feeling. We're in solidarity with Lia and all athletes who compete in the sports they love and on teams consistent with their gender identity. https://t.co/fCjYQU47xl

— Human Rights Campaign (@HRC) December 12, 2021

Where to begin. One, “living your truth” is a soppy empty slogan more suitable for advertising than human rights discourse.

Two, truth is universal or it’s not truth. Truth isn’t subjective, truth isn’t personal, truth doesn’t need possessive pronouns.

Three, it’s not his truth, is it, it’s his lie.

Four, what about when “living your truth” is a matter of trampling all over other people, people who are at a major physical … Read the rest

This is why we can’t do anything.

The [Bureau of Land Management] hasn’t had a permanent, Senate-confirmed director in 5 years. [In other words Trump never bothered.] And Stone-Manning’s tenure begins as the Biden administration is under intense pressure to end all fossil fuel development on federal land in the West. Environmentalists see that as a key component to fighting the climate crisis. But the oil and gas industry still expects the US government to afford it new drilling opportunities.

It’s that “But” – that’s why. On the one hand: we need to “fight” the climate crisis because it’s an existential threat to the planet, to humans, to everything that depends on the planet. On the other hand, an … Read the rest

On a BBC story:

GirlsDoPorn victims win rights to their videos

Hundreds of people tricked into making explicit videos for porn websites have been awarded the rights to the videos and millions of dollars in damages.

Hundreds of people? Wasn’t that scam perpetrated on women? It’s not PeopleDoPorn it’s GIRLSDoPorn.

The sites, GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys, had been the subject of a long-running legal battle.

The US Department of Justice has ruled that rights to videos and images produced by the now-defunct sites belong to the women.

More than 400 victims can now ask for the online footage to be removed.

They belong to the women, so it’s women, so why people? Has the BBC or at least some of … Read the rest

John Cleese decided not to continue with a gotcha interview.

“I just did an interview with BBC World Asia. It was to talk about the shows I’m doing in Singapore and Bangkok,” he wrote in a Twitter thread.

“Instead, the interviewer, whose name was, I think, Karishma, started by asking me questions about Cancel Culture.”

I replied courteously and in full I explained that if parents were over protective, it did not prepare children well when they entered the real and often not-very-nice world.

“She then asked a disjointed question, clearly trying to portray me as old-fashioned, uncaring and basically harmful.”

The clip is here:

Judge says Not so fast.

A federal judge on Thursday evening unraveled a painstakingly negotiated settlement between Purdue Pharma and thousands of state, local and tribal governments that had sued the maker of the prescription painkiller OxyContin for the company’s role in the opioid epidemic, saying that the plan was flawed in one critical area.

The judge, Colleen McMahon of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said that the settlement, part of a restructuring plan for Purdue approved in September by a bankruptcy judge, should not go forward because it releases the company’s owners, members of the billionaire Sackler family, from liability in civil opioid-related cases.

Although the Sacklers did not file for personal

Yes, and?

This was the moment Professor Kathleen Stock told this transwoman that she was 'genetically male'.@Docstockk | @IainDale pic.twitter.com/LhCGuFzwJA

— LBC (@LBC) December 16, 2021

Trans women are, by definition, men who “identify as” women or call themselves women or whatever formula you like for a man who wants to roleplay womanitude. Of course they’re men. If they were women they wouldn’t be trans women, would they. It’s only women who are women. Men who pretend to be women are men who pretend to be women; they’re not women.

Yo, people, climate change is going to eat our lunch so how about devoting all this energy to sabotaging all the cruise ships or something instead of all this … Read the rest

Science News on the Thwaites Glacier ice shelf:

The demise of a West Antarctic glacier poses the world’s biggest threat to raise sea levels before 2100 — and an ice shelf that’s holding it back from the sea could collapse within three to five years, scientists reported December 13 at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in New Orleans.

Thwaites Glacier is “one of the largest, highest glaciers in Antarctica — it’s huge,” Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the Boulder, Colo.–based Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, told reporters. Spanning 120 kilometers across, the glacier is roughly the size of Florida, and were the whole thing to fall into the ocean, it would raise sea levels by 65

Workers are expendable.

Why did eight workers at a Kentucky candle factory and six workers at an Illinois Amazon warehouse die this week? They were killed when a powerful tornado destroyed their workplaces, but it wasn’t really the storm that killed them, any more than a sailor forced to walk the plank is killed only by the waves. They were not random victims. They were sacrificed. We here in the most advanced nation on earth offered them up to the gods that we actually worship.

Why did they die? They died because they were inside their workplaces in the path of the storm. They died because they did not leave work before disaster struck. And they did not leave

Some parents of Penn swimmers have written a letter.

Parents of the University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team are demanding the NCAA change rules that have permitted transgender swimmer Lia Thomas to dominate the competition, declaring ‘at stake here is the integrity of women’s sports,’ DailyMail.com has learned.

The parents of about 10 swimmers sent a letter last week to the NCAA and forwarded it to the Ivy League and University of Pennsylvania officials.’

At stake here is the integrity of women’s sports,’ they wrote in the letter obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com. ‘The precedent being set – one in which women do not have a protected and equitable space to compete – is a direct threat to female athletes