Not just Ireland.

When Ann Keen gave birth, the midwives refused to give her anything for the pain. That way, they told her, she would remember it and learn not to be so wicked again. To be treated like an animal in labour, denied the most basic compassion and respect, was simply part of the punishment she had supposedly earned for getting pregnant out of wedlock aged 17. The hospital discharged her without any follow-up care, as if the birth had never happened. But the most grievous part of the story is that she also went home without her baby.

For Keen is one of a still unknown number of unmarried British women coerced into handing over their

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Not merely the product of individual bias in reply to my request for more background.

People like DiAngelo and Kendi are not aberrations or perversions of CRT. They’re extensions of a framework that traces right back to Derrick Bell at CRT’s beginning. I’ll try to sketch some of the essentials. Theorists really do only have a few basic principles and rhetorical moves. Once you familiarize yourself with them, it’s like a perversely easy game.

I suppose the first thing to note would be that CRT’s philosophical lineage is critical theory. I mean, it’s in the name, but it’s very easy to read it as the critical in “critical thinking” rather than in … Read the rest

Cashing in.

Were White Fragility to be adapted as reality TV, the result might look something like this: A collection of affluent white women, equipped with varying degrees of vanity and self-delusion, gather at a well-appointed dinner table. There, they face down a pair of unsparing judges prepared to see right through them. Who’s racist? Time to find out. White wine flows; white women admit shameful secrets. They get squirmy; they get angry; they turn on each other. If one of them starts to cry, she has to leave. She will find tissues in the designated crying room.

The Real Housewives of White Fragility?

The Bravo version of Robin DiAngelo, in other words, might look a bit like Race2Dinner

… Read the rest

It’s ok because women are Karens.

A former City bank worker took upskirt images of his female colleagues and covertly filmed them as they walked around the office, a court heard today.

Charles Sleilati, 53, made more than 300 videos of women he worked with at the leading bank, and also amassed around 1,000 images of random women in restaurants and on public transport.

Westminster magistrates court heard Sleilati was reported by whistleblowers within his Bishopsgate office, after concerns about his behaviour.

“The defendant was seen by other members of staff in an open-plan office taking pictures, filming up women’s skirts, and down their tops”, said prosecutor Komal Varsani.

He probably identifies as a porn producer. You have to … Read the rest

“Marion Millar’s” [not her real name, I gather] appointment with the Scottish Stasi was supposed to be in progress now but they have (cough cough) “postponed” it. I suspect that’s a cowardly way of saying they’re trying to figure out how to cancel the whole thing, and stalling while they try harder. This has the benefit (from their point of view) of prolonging their torment of Marion. From our point of view it has the benefit of underlining what chickenshit sadists they are.

https://twitter.com/millar_marion/status/1397599450911105024 https://twitter.com/millar_marion/status/1397878857693282306

What a shower.… Read the rest

Janel George at the American Bar Association on Critical Race Theory:

CRT is not a diversity and inclusion “training” but a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society that emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship. [ Kimberlé ] Crenshaw—who coined the term “CRT”—notes that CRT is not a noun, but a verb. It cannot be confined to a static and narrow definition but is considered to be an evolving and malleable practice. It critiques how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers. CRT also recognizes that race intersects with other identities, including sexuality, gender

… Read the rest

Why conservatives are so freaked out about Critical Race Theory, or what they say is Critical Race Theory.

Critical race theory is an academic concept, a form of analysis developed in the 1970s and ’80s by legal scholars including Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw. It suggests that our nation’s history of race and racism is embedded in law and public policy, still plays a role in shaping outcomes for Black Americans and other people of color, and should be taken into account when these issues are discussed.

Is any of that especially wack or even surprising?

According to Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and perhaps the foremost popularizer of critical race theory alarmism on

… Read the rest

That was the goal, after all.

Low-income immigrants in the US who struggled to afford basic needs during the coronavirus pandemic avoided seeking government benefits and other assistance because of immigration-related concerns, according to a new report by the Urban Institute.

Of course they did, and that’s exactly what Trump and his goons wanted them to do. Cunning plan succeeded.

Immigrants, and especially immigrant women, have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic-induced recession, enduring higher unemployment rates than workers born in the United States, the Migration Policy Institute reports.

While the economy sputtered, more than a quarter of adults in low-income immigrant families said they or their partner lost a job, the Urban Institute found. Roughly half said

… Read the rest

The British Journal of Medicine.

Yes, the British Journal of Medicine.

MEDICINE.

Questions about sex assigned at birth have the potential to harm patients when they are used as a proxy for the more specific questions about anatomy and hormonal levels required to determine someone’s health needs, say @ash_alpert and colleagues https://t.co/hGi7YW8v2c

— The BMJ (@bmj_latest) May 26, 2021

… Read the rest

Interesting.… Read the rest

If it has the word “critical” in it, it must be dangerous, is that the idea?

Across the United States, state legislatures are showing a newfound interest in — and aversion to — critical race theory, or CRT, an academic movement that systematically considers how even seemingly neutral laws, regulations and social norms can have different impacts on particular racial and ethnic groups. It examines how legislatures at times target racial minorities for adverse treatment — such as recent voter suppression laws in Arizona, Georgia and Iowa — and, at other times, are simply indifferent to how new laws will impact those outside the majority.

And this should be stamped out because…why, exactly?

CRT originated in U.S. law

… Read the rest

Oh yay, more gentle reminders! I love gentle reminders!!

https://twitter.com/TheFaerth/status/1396909342905888770 https://twitter.com/TheFaerth/status/1396909344839532547

…………………………………….Wut?

That’s not a reminder, it’s wholly new information, and it’s word salad.

https://twitter.com/TheFaerth/status/1396909347351908353 https://twitter.com/TheFaerth/status/1396909348413079556

It goes on and on like that.

It’s stupid, it’s boring, it’s incoherent. (And how do you “fall in any kind of umbrella”?)

Meanwhile, glaciers are melting and sea levels are rising and forests are vanishing while people spin out the doctrines of this trivial meaningless new religion.… Read the rest

The weather must be stormy in Florida right now.

Manhattan’s district attorney has convened the grand jury that is expected to decide whether to indict former president Donald Trump, other executives at his company or the business itself should prosecutors present the panel with criminal charges, according to two people familiar with the development.

…

The move indicates that District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr.’s investigation of the former president and his business has reached an advanced stage after more than two years. It suggests, too, that Vance believes he has found evidence of a crime — if not by Trump then by someone potentially close to him or by his company.

Vance’s investigation is expansive, according to people familiar

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on The pressure continues.

By “gender-affirming healthcare” he means puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and amputation of breasts or genitals. It’s at least debatable whether those items are healthcare at all.

TRA language games hide horrible nonsense behind a respectable veneer. There’s a difference between affirmative care and gender-affirmative “care”. The former is when the therapist affirms that the client/patient is, in fact, experiencing something. The latter is when the therapist affirms that the experience is veridical or that beliefs based on that experience are correct. Denying the patient’s phenomenological experience is unhelpful, while accepting it can build the trust required for progress.

Affirming the patient’s disordered belief structure, however, is not … Read the rest

Hey it was just rough sex, rough open-air sex, don’t kink-shame.

A teenager who killed an underage schoolgirl after buying her drink and abandoning her at a city beauty spot on a winter’s night was jailed today.

Ewan Fulton bit Mhari O’Neill on her breast and throttled her before leaving her in an intoxicated state on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill where her body was found by a dog walker.

Kink-shaming. So he choked her, so he bit her on the breast – so what? She probably loved it! Or was too drunk to notice. It’s nobody else’s business what kinksters get up to in the privacy of their own – er, in the privacy of Calton Hill.

I’ve been to … Read the rest

More on belligerent trans-promoter Doctor Jack Turban:

Jack Turban, insistent critic of Abigail Shrier’s book on transitioning of young girls, constantly claims puberty blockers are safe. He is paid by a firm that manufactures them.

Jack Turban, MD, fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford University School of medicine, bills himself as an Allopathic & Osteopathic Physician. But he’s famous for his advocacy for certain positions regarding transgender medicine – for advocating for the ‘Gender Affirming Care for Trans and ‘gender-diverse’ youth’ as part of his work on ‘Pediatric Gender Identity’ and vigorously advocating for, and downplaying the risks of medical transition, while selling books on the same.

…

Suitably inflammatory and triggering, Turban’s shown himself

… Read the rest

Scary Doctor Jack Turban again.

I had a series of phone calls with Alexandra Poolos and Collette Richards @60Minutes to explain this.

They did not care. https://t.co/4Dg7oJ9IeU

— Jack Turban MD (@jack_turban) May 25, 2021

Chase Strangio and Jack Turban are the ones causing harm.

When I spoke with @60Minutes about their “detransition” story and asked where they found the people to profile – they refused to tell me and became defensive.

We still don’t know if they searched for people on TERF forums, and transparency would be appreciated.

— Jack Turban MD (@jack_turban) May 25, 2021

Yes how dare they talk to radical feminists who don’t believe the new ideology of Magic Gender? How dare they not talk to … Read the rest

MTG is doing outrage theater again.

House Republican leaders have condemned incendiary remarks from GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene five days after she first publicly compared Capitol Hill mask rules to the Holocaust, amid a wave of criticism from Republican and conservative critics as well as Jewish groups aimed at the Georgia congresswoman and the party leaders’ silence.

I missed it; what did she say?

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, during an interview on a conservative podcast this week, compared House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to continue to require members of the House to wear masks on the chamber floor to steps the Nazis took to control the Jewish population during the Holocaust.

Let’s think about that. Is … Read the rest

Interesting – the Biden admin met with some secular groups.

Representatives of atheist and secular groups held their first meeting with White House officials last week, marking a willingness by the Biden administration to work with the growing networks of religiously unaffiliated Americans.

…

Leaders of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Secular Coalition for America, American Atheists, Center for Inquiry and Ex-Muslims of North America also attended the virtual gathering that included Josh Dickson, deputy director of the office, and program specialist Ben O’Dell.

…

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the FFRF, welcomed the first meeting with the new administration.

“With more than a quarter of the population identifying as a ‘None’ (no religion), it’s vital that our

… Read the rest

The Scottish Sun also reports on The Great Controversial Stickers Controversy.

POLICE Scotland faced anger and ridicule after a clampdown on stickers from a feminist group opposed to the relaxation of gender self-ID laws.

The national force was accused of a “chilling” attack on free speech after announcing it was probing the matter as a “hate” crime.

Officers in Kirkcaldy also urged members of the public to contact them or Fife Council if locals saw any more “controversial stickers”.

Without specifying the nature of the controversy.

The move came after cops were alerted to “Women won’t wheesht” stickers that had been placed on lampposts in Kirkcaldy, promoting activists For Women Scotland.

…

Following the backlash, Police Scotland deleted the

… Read the rest