Ah yes both sides. Thank god there is someone to wade in at this late date to bemoan the “cruelty” on “both sides.”

I’ve been attacked for not having the courage to wade in on the trans debate. Well time to fess up! I was & am terrified because the voices can be so cruel on both sides. Here are some thoughts on the need for more moderate voices. If you need me, I’ll be hiding all afternoon. https://t.co/lxpYooxZ3v

— Ayesha Hazarika (@ayeshahazarika) June 16, 2021

She’s a columnist for the Evening Standard and a board member of the Fawcett Society.

And right on cue… https://t.co/aFJwwUshPD

— Ayesha Hazarika (@ayeshahazarika) June 16, 2021

Right on cue what? Disagreement? Is that … Read the rest

No you’re the ones who are weak on Russia.

President Joe Biden sat down in Geneva this morning with Russian President Vladimir Putin, as part of an important summit that’s expected to last several hours. As the meeting got underway, the Republican National Committee issued a press statement, letting reporters know the party’s takeaway from the international gathering.

“Giving Putin a meeting is just the latest win that Joe Biden has handed Russia,” the RNC said.

It is? So what was it when Trump gave Putin a meeting? And when he left his own table and went to hang with Putin with no US officials present that one time? And when he met with Putin in Helsinki alone … Read the rest

Biden and Putin have been having their chat.

Biden gave Putin a list of Don’t You Dares.

A reporter asked Joe Biden if he outlined for Vladimir Putin how his administration would respond if there were a Russian cyberattack on critical US infrastructure.

“I pointed out to him that we have significant cyber capability, and he knows it,” Biden said. “I pointed out, if they violate basic norms, we will respond.”

Biden noted he gave the Russian president a list of 16 critical infrastructure entities that should be off limits for attacks, whether cyber or otherwise.

So he’s saying everything else is fair game. Okaaaaaaay…

Putin went the “you’re just as bad” route.

Joe Biden was asked

… Read the rest

Come on now. Don’t be silly.

https://twitter.com/KatyMontgomerie/status/1405080248564211712 https://twitter.com/KatyMontgomerie/status/1405219215347486722

Silly. Just plain silly. “Trans” means “not” in this context, which “tall” and similar descriptive adjectives of course don’t. A trans man is a woman who identifies as a man, so the word “trans” in this context is not comparable to “tall.” Obviously. It’s just silly to attempt such a feeble ploy. I know it’s an old favorite, but it’s still silly.

https://twitter.com/KatyMontgomerie/status/1404873195405066243

He says, a man telling women what to think.

You couldn’t make it up.… Read the rest

It’s interesting when legislators make laws to ban things without knowing what the things are.

There’s been a lot of talk about critical race theory lately, and I’ve felt at a loss. I’ve heard so many conflicting things about critical race theory, I’ve gotten more and more confused.

So I did what middle-aged white men are prone to do — I asked another middle-aged white man. But not just any. I called an Alabama lawmaker, state Rep. Chris Pringle, R-Mobile, who wants to make it illegal to teach critical race theory in Alabama.

Pringle recently pre-filed a bill for the next legislative session (eight months away…) and he’s been bragging about it on talk radio. Please tell us what … Read the rest

Trump is pretending he’s being besieged with offers from top-class publishers longing to publish his “memoir” but publishers aren’t doing any besieging.

Their reluctance is driven by several factors, though the underlying fear is that whatever Trump would write wouldn’t be truthful.

“[I]t would be too hard to get a book that was factually accurate, actually,” said one major figure in the book publishing industry, explaining their reluctance to publish Trump. “That would be the problem. If he can’t even admit that he lost the election, then how do you publish that?”

By labeling it a novel?

Trump has insisted that he has suitors for a book too. In a statement last Friday, he said he had received two offers

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Tough times for Scarlett.

In connexion with Iknklast’s remark at #1 about ‘systemic racism’, I wrote the following e-mail to Andrew Sullivan, who in one of his blog-posts had, while invoking Orwell, presented a case for plain writing, quoted a horrid example of bad writing (which was genuinely horrid) and listed a number of terms that he considered pretentious, ambiguous & obfuscating, amongst which was ‘systemic racism’:

Dear Mr Sullivan,

It did not, alas, altogether surprise me when you listed ‘systemic racism’ in your collection of ‘horrid examples’ of obfuscating terms. I honestly feel it is disingenuous of you to do so. The term really is not difficult to understand. It derives … Read the rest

I don’t even know this guy.

You mean "women." Women get pregnant. "Women" is not a dirty or blasphemous word. Don't erase the word "women." https://t.co/a4JpxQuNy0

— Ophelia Benson (@OpheliaBenson) June 14, 2021

https://twitter.com/KTKeith/status/1404587169562365953

I don’t even know him. Have never talked to him before – but he marches right up and calls me a bigot. For saying that women get pregnant.

Then he calls me idiotic…while he pretends that “only women get pregnant” is “all women get pregnant” and then says it’s “simple observational fact” that men get pregnant.

https://twitter.com/KTKeith/status/1404835625753366533 https://twitter.com/KTKeith/status/1404911254754541575

Loudly? Wishes? Bigoted?

I don’t even know this guy.

Updating to add: I guess it’s all over between us. I still have no idea who he is or … Read the rest

Stonewall is doing what now?

https://twitter.com/ATraschel186/status/1404796882182979595

It turns out NHS Rainbow Badge is not NHS but…Stonewall.

https://twitter.com/ATraschel186/status/1404878926304972806 Tweets by RainbowNHSBadge

Why does Stonewall have this kind of power and authority in the NHS?

Never mind, I’m sure people trapped in NHS hospitals are thrilled to have Rainbow Badge people asking what their pronouns are and chastising them for not wearing Rainbow pins on their johnnies.… Read the rest

From George Eliot’s “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” courtesy of Project Gutenberg:

Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them—the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic.  But it is a mixture of all these—a composite order of feminine fatuity—that produces the largest class of such novels, which we shall distinguish as the mind-and-millinery species.  The heroine is usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle distance, and a crowd of

… Read the rest

Berkeley News headline:

Truly changing sex is possible, says Berkeley trans scholar Grace Lavery

No it isn’t. Next?

An associate professor of Victorian literature, Lavery first became interested in trans studies after reading the work of George Eliot, a 19th-century writer — born Mary Ann Evans, who went by a masculine pseudonym.

“There was this thread that I couldn’t stop pulling on,” said Lavery. “We know that Eliot was read as a male writer by many, many people and wanted to be read as a male writer. Those things are interesting and important. It was something that I thought very deeply about.”

She didn’t “want to be read as a male writer” as such, she wanted not to be … Read the rest

The Times defends Nikole Hannah-Jones’s work again.

"Legislation that attempts to censor school curricula violates principles of free thought and free expression and is at its core un-American."
— American Society of Magazine Editors statement about The 1619 Project and @nhannahjones https://t.co/jRaX7aIZOg pic.twitter.com/rXOA4J2yLF

— Cliff Levy (@cliffordlevy) June 15, 2021

I don’t actually agree with the principle as they state it. I don’t think schools should be free to teach, say, that Emmett Till deserved what he got. Is the 1619 Project the obverse of that? I don’t think so.… Read the rest

More on that:

A legal red light district is set to be scrapped after a “significant” reduction of sex workers in the area.

Why is it called a “red light district”? That’s a euphemism. Who is shielded by that euphemism? The men who pay to rape women. “Red light district” conveys zero information. It’s a district where men pay women to be sexual toilets for them.

The Managed Approach (MA) area in Holbeck, Leeds, allowed sex workers to operate without fear of prosecution, but was paused in March 2020.

Ah yes it was all about compassion for the “sex workers,” wasn’t it, nothing to do with compassion for the johns. There’s another way to spare “sex workers” the fear … Read the rest

One piece of good news, which is actually just a piece of bad news undone.

related pause and the stranglehold of certain health-funded projects, that have pushed for 'sex work is work' policy and sticking plaster solutions for the women being abused on the zone will end. I hope the disgraced Leeds City Council that have long defended this approach,

— Julie Bindel (@bindelj) June 15, 2021

for this dereliction of duty and catastrophic failure in tacking grotesque abuse of women in the sex trade. LCC enabled and encouraged men to pay for sex with the most vulnerable women as though it was a 'right'. Shame on them all: https://t.co/3RRQuPhAtk

— Julie Bindel (@bindelj) June 15, 2021

Once more for … Read the rest

That guy who calls himself Wisey the Pretty isn’t happy that Maya won her appeal.

You might have heard about Maya Forstater, who made being “gender critical” a protected belief in the UK last weekend. I made this comic to summarize the situation in case you weren’t following. We can’t let that embolden and radicalize TERFs all around the world.

Not your call, bro. You don’t get to decide what we’re allowed to think and say.

Sure, because before the ruling, we weren’t allowed to think these thoughts in private. Our thoughts were public property.… Read the rest

Peggy Orenstein has an op-ed in the NY Times on why porn literacy is needed.

Parents often say that if they try to have the sex talk with their teens, the kids plug their ears and hum or run screaming from the room. But late last month, those roles were reversed: After a workshop for high school juniors at the Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School promoting critical thinking about online pornography, it was parents who flipped out. Some took to the media — The New York Post, Fox News, The Federalist and other like-minded outlets jumped on the story — accusing the school of indoctrinating children.

That may be because it was unclear, at least in the source I … Read the rest

Critical Race Theory may be a mixed bag that includes some very silly or sinister ideas, but on the other hand there’s this kind of thing.

This is how it introduces Reconstruction: through the gosh-darn sticktoitiveness of Francis Tillou Nicholls, the ex-Confederate "redeemer" who crushed black political rights. pic.twitter.com/mOpWVJUZob

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) June 14, 2021

In other words “history” as presented by Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind.… Read the rest

The acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs:

https://twitter.com/DoDHealth/status/1404450901255987211

Pregnant women. The word for those people is women. Stop erasing us.… Read the rest

“All you Karens” and “panties in a bunch” right out of the gate. Top class doctoring.

https://twitter.com/TheM0dalice/status/1404120949323145219

… Read the rest

Areas with more people vaccinated are found to have lower rates of infection. I’m tempted to add “You don’t say!” but the Post reports that in fact that wasn’t true until now.

As recently as 10 days ago, vaccination rates did not predict a difference in coronavirus cases, but immunization rates have diverged, and case counts in the highly vaccinated states are dropping quickly.

…

But experts worry that unvaccinated people are falling into a false sense of security as more transmissible variants can rapidly spread in areas with a high concentration of unvaccinated people who have abandoned masking and social distancing.

…

Local public health officials fear the public is tuning out the danger as they see news reports

… Read the rest