Students outraged, onlookers concerned, words exchanged.

AN urgent investigation is underway at Durham University after students walked out of an event at which controversial journalist Rod Liddle was a guest speaker – and were later branded “pathetic” by a college principal.

Well, Rod Liddle – he lives to irritate people. Making a fuss just amplifies him.

This is the bit that interests me:

Durham’s Intersectional Feminist Society launched an open letter condemning Liddle’s remarks and the decision to invite him.

Durham’s what?

Does Durham have other “intersectional” societies or is it just women who are expected to be inclooosive and to enforce that inclooosivity on each other?

The society doesn’t seem to have its own website or space on … Read the rest

Dud analogy time.

If a lecturer publicly expressed the view that people with red hair should never eat sauerkraut would you call that humane?… Read the rest

He’s on fire today.

3/ Professor Dawkins laments the openly homophobic campaign against Professor Stock, and yes it was openly homophobic because lesbians more often than not tend to be pro-reality / GC. Nothing else explains the vigour or assiduousness of that persecution. I recognise it.

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) December 7, 2021

Lesbians are women, so you get your homophobia and your misogyny and pretty soon things start getting really ugly.

5/ We are in the grip of stage 2 homophobia and, as in Scream, the call is coming from within the house. Our own movement is fatally corrupted and compromised by a religion so stupid it says boy=blue and pink=girl. We are openly abused on social

Journalism: stop doing this. Don’t EVER do this. Don’t report that a woman sexually assaulted a woman when it was a man who did the assaulting.

Headline:

Lisa Jones sexually assaulted female stranger she followed in Melbourne

Subhead:

A woman has been thrown behind bars after sexually assaulting a stranger she followed down a Melbourne street before issuing a shocking demand.

First three paragraphs:

A Melbourne woman was walking home when another woman grabbed her and told her to “lie down and have sex with me” in a shocking attack.

Lisa Jones pleaded guilty to assault with intent to commit a sexual offence and sexual assault.

She was jailed for three years and three months in the County Court of

Oops.

When woke Language Reform turns out to be not so much a reform as a mistake:

As Democrats seek to reach out to Latino voters in a more gender-neutral way, they’ve increasingly begun using the word Latinx, a term that first began to get traction among academics and activists on the left.

That is, non-Hispanic academics and activists, apparently.

But that very effort could be counterproductive in courting those of Latin American descent, according to a new nationwide poll of Hispanic voters.

Only 2 percent of those polled refer to themselves as Latinx, while 68 percent call themselves “Hispanic” and 21 percent favored “Latino” or “Latina” to describe their ethnic background, according to the survey from Bendixen &

Disgusting narcissistic pig.

No we fucking don’t. We have to keep working for women to be able to talk about violence against us, not violence against men in lipstick.

And it’s violence against women – it’s not “GBV.” Men in red dresses don’t get to rename it GBV so that they can pretend it happens to them too. Get your self-obsessed kicks somewhere else you creep.… Read the rest

This just in (well, an hour ago) –

Breaking: Justice Department files suit challenging extreme gerrymandered Texas redistricting maps

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) December 6, 2021

It’s not great that it takes extreme gerrymandering to get the DoJ involved.

95% of population growth in Texas from communities of color during last decade but gerrymandered GOP maps increase # of majority white districts & decrease # of majority Latino/Black districts. Incredibly brazen racial gerrymandering https://t.co/KD981rML6A

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) December 6, 2021

If only we could go back to reserving voting for white men of property.… Read the rest

Please, CBC, tell us more about this insulting and offensive move.

A transgender woman in Prince Edward Island has been invited to speak at a Montreal Massacre memorial service being held today by the P.E.I. Advisory Council on the Status of Women.

Monday marks 32 years since 14 women were killed at École Polytechnique.

Since 14 women were killed for being women, by a man who said that was why they were being killed. It was an explicitly, avowedly misogynist massacre of women.

“I was deeply touched,” said Anastasia Preston. “It is a huge honour for myself and it’s a huge honour as a trans woman to be included in an event like this.”

But there shouldn’t be… Read the rest

Talk about adding insult to injury…

P.E.I trans woman to speak at Montreal Massacre memorial service https://t.co/sTVa71gaEP #pei pic.twitter.com/mnq0pEmPk2

— CBC P.E.I. (@CBCPEI) December 6, 2021

What does a man who says he’s a woman have to do with the Montreal massacre? Those women were slaughtered by a misogynist man because they were women and he was a misogynist man. Men who say they are women have nothing to do with this subject.

CBC P.E.I. is more concerned about the man than it is about the massacre or the misogyny.

We have closed comments on this Twitter post to try to reduce harm to the subjects of our content, our staff and the audience. You can visit https://t.co/l75gTsMFic to join

Piggy as ever.

In remarks to diners at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Saturday night, Donald Trump called the American media “crooked bastards” and Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, a “fucking idiot”.

The meandering, foul-mouthed speech to Turning Point USA, a group for young conservatives, was streamed by Jack Posobiec, a rightwing blogger and provocateur.

…

“The country is at a very important, dangerous place,” Trump said, amid familiar lies about his defeat in the 2020 election, which he says was the result of electoral fraud.

“We have no press. The press is so corrupt. We don’t have a press. If there is a good story about us, a good story about

I wonder if Zuckerberg ever lies awake at night thinking about the Rohingya. They think about him.

Facebook’s negligence facilitated the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar after the social media network’s algorithms amplified hate speech and the platform failed to take down inflammatory posts, according to legal action launched in the US and the UK.

The platform faces compensation claims worth more than £150bn under the coordinated move on both sides of the Atlantic.

A class action complaint lodged with the northern district court in San Francisco says Facebook was “willing to trade the lives of the Rohingya people for better market penetration in a small country in south-east Asia.”

It adds: “In the end, there was so

About that “Moms for Liberty” complaint:

A Tennessee chapter of the right-wing group Moms for Liberty has tried to use the state’s new law aimed at banning “critical race theory” in school to ban a book about Martin Luther King Jr.

I have a feeling the “Moms” for liberty are for liberty for themselves but not so much for other people – people who teach history that isn’t all We Have Always Been Awesome, for instance.

Tennessee Republicans earlier this year passed a law in response to the conservative panic about “critical race theory,” barring the teaching of certain concepts in classrooms including “teaching that one race or sex is inherently superior to another; ascribing character traits, values, moral

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on A different story.

Several Sussex colleagues publicly denounced her on social media, although strangely, she says, not to her face. “No peer ever said to me: ‘Look, I really object to what you’re saying and I’d like to discuss it with you.’ They immediately went to Defcon 1: ‘She’s a bigot… arguing for single-sex spaces is like the Jim Crow laws [that historically enforced racial segregation in the American south].’” She remains fascinated by the performative aspects of social media debate. “The important thing is to show your tribe that you have the right morals and you could show that by saying, ‘I’m not with her.’”

Performative indeed. Just like … Read the rest

Live free or die.

Under the bill, New Hampshire teachers who discuss the history of slavery without adding that EVERYONE WAS DOING IT, would be subject to discipline

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) December 4, 2021

Well not free to teach about slavery OBVIOUSLY. Other free. Good free.

The Washington Post last July:

A majority of New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu’s diversity council has quit after he signed new restrictions into law that affect educators as well as public employees.

Language in the state budget Sununu signed in late June implicitly rejects the idea of systemic racism by directly prohibiting teachers and anyone leading diversity training for public employees from saying that any group is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive,

ALL genders get pregnant, all of them, ALL OF THEM I tell you.

Gaby Hinsliff at the Guardian chatted with Kathleen Stock. Some interesting points came up.

“I’m excited in a weird way, excited about my future,” she says. There is relief, too, at escaping what she felt was an “aggressive, intimidating environment” at her workplace of 18 years. Interestingly, while some blamed the Sussex standoff on a generation of students unable to tolerate views they dislike, Stock tells a different story. “Most of the students I encounter are completely open-minded and even if they disagree with me, which I’m sure a lot of them do, they wouldn’t hold it against me as a personal character flaw.” The problem, she says, was her peers.

Who are older, and thus, you might think, … Read the rest

Festive.

On one level it’s obvious enough: it’s a big fuck you to everyone who doesn’t want to live in a weaponized social world.

Ok, noted, message received, but going beyond that – it’s a very odd piece of iconography. The massive guns don’t harmonize well with the big cheery grins. What are those people so happy about? They’re apparently at war with someone (or perhaps everyone), and that’s not a situation that generally causes people to sit down wreathed in smiles to get a photo taken.

What are all these guns for? Besides “fuck you”? Rep Thomas Massie is a Rep, i.e. a member of the House of Representatives, for a district in Kentucky. Does that translate … Read the rest

They just can’t get it right.

We feel this is positive step in the right direction in identifying and investigating these types of incidents and ensuring that victims voices are heard, and their cases are investigated with the full picture to hand.

Find out more at: https://t.co/2FLA49xSCx pic.twitter.com/Lx3w99xqyi

— West Yorkshire Police (@WestYorksPolice) December 1, 2021

“Misandry” ffs. Have they been hanging out on shock jock Twitter or what? Women get killed by abusive husbands or partners. Women get raped with impunity because the rates of arrest are abysmal, of prosecution worse, of conviction worse again. Women get bullied and assaulted, women have their sports and prizes taken away, women are told to obey or be punished. “Misandry” is not … Read the rest

This was a Facebook post yesterday because it’s just personal and kind of chit-chatty, but actually the subject matter is of broader interest so what the hell, I’m reposting it here. Everybody should know about Chuck Pilling.

For a few years in the late 80s and early 90s I lived in north Seattle, and in my neighborhood lived a guy I knew of from working at the zoo, a self-taught bird man, who had a pond with all kinds of ducks on his property. It was about a 20 minute walk from me and I went there often to admire the ducks and the world he’d made for them. Then I moved, and that was that.

Today I took Cooper … Read the rest

Add billions and egomania and what do you get? Egomaniacal billionaire paying part of the cost for a student dormitory in which most of the rooms have no windows.

The 11-story, 159-foot-tall Munger Hall dormitory was designed by 97-year-old billionaire Charles Munger, who donated $200 million toward the approximately $1.4 billion project under the condition that his designs would be followed exactly.

He’s not an architect. He’s not a designer.

Cramming thousands of students into a residence hall where only 6% of the rooms have windows to some seems like a social experiment, but a similar concept has been executed at the University of Michigan with the Munger Graduate Residences.

Munger Graduate Residences opened in 2015 at the University