The existential threat:

On Friday Republicans in the Senate torpedoed an effort to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the deadly insurrection by Donald Trump’s supporters at the US Capitol on 6 January, deploying the procedural move known as the filibuster to stop it even being debated.

The filibuster is bad and stupid and needs to go away.

Tellingly Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who previously condemned Trump’s role in the riot, reportedly asked senators to nix the commission as a “personal favour”. It was a sign that the rot now goes deeper than a cult of personality into the foundations of the Grand Old Party (GOP).

A personal favor ffs. This isn’t his living room we’re talking … Read the rest

It’s called “Woman’s Hour” for a reason.

BBC Woman's Hour today promoted a book by a male about what it's like growing up as a 'girl', just after doing a segment on men having sex in public toilets. Some women stated that the show is failing to cater to women, despite its name. This is the presenter's response https://t.co/qBVtu7jHxj

— ripx4nutmeg (@ripx4nutmeg) May 28, 2021

Ah yes the old space to discuss everything approach. We used to understand that woman’s meant woman’s, and that for women meant for women. Now instead we “understand” that woman’s means everyone’s, and for women means for everyone.

https://twitter.com/helensaxby11/status/1398279153149960196

Funny, isn't it. When Jenni Murray expressed an opinion on the trans issue, she was banned

… Read the rest

Once in every billion tweets or so, a man will go so much too far that it bites him in the ass.

Northern Ireland First Minister Arlene Foster has been awarded £125,000 in damages after a defamatory tweet by TV presenter Dr Christian Jessen. Dr Jessen tweeted an unfounded claim that the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader had been having an extra-marital affair on 23 December 2019. The post remained online until Dr Jessen deleted it on 7 January 2020.

A judge at the High Court in Belfast said it was an “outrageous libel” which was “grossly defamatory”.

…

He ordered Dr Jessen, who is best known for presenting Channel Four programme Embarrassing Bodies, to pay damages of £125,000

… Read the rest

Like corporate greenwashing only trans-color.

Parents should have a say in political messages targeted at our kids. #CancelKelloggs https://t.co/BYHMwQ9qUY

— Rachel Moran (@RachelRMoran) May 27, 2021

Oh look, a box of 98% sugar “cereal” that’s pushed on kids via cute animals and endless tv ads – but this one is different, because it’s about…um…telling kids to be trans inclusive.

They even put out a press release.

BATTLE CREEK, Mich., May 20, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Limited-edition Together With Pride cereal hits shelves across the country today, marking the latest collaboration between Kellogg Company and GLAAD. LGBTQ+ icons and friends of GLAAD will start their day with the new cereal to celebrate that no matter who you are or who

… Read the rest

Lovely words maybe, but she certainly doesn’t live up to them.

‘Being a humanist means always asking questions about the world around me… It means trying to make the most of the one life I know I have. And it means trying to support other people to do the same.’ Lovely words by @theAliceRoberts pic.twitter.com/f6WA3aTHgy

— Humanists UK (@Humanists_UK) May 27, 2021

She’s not always asking questions about the world around her, and she’s very hostile to women who asks questions about the world around us that she finds politically unacceptable, aka terfy.… Read the rest

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave – very very much free, top free, most free of any anywhere.

With just a week to go before the legislative session ends in Texas, a host of bills are making their way to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk.

One of the pieces of legislation still under consideration would require sports teams to play the national anthem at games.

So there! You have to stand up for this anthem if you go to a sports game, and the teams have to play this one song if they do a sports game. Have to, I tell you, it’s mandatory and required and a legal obligation. That’s FREEDOM. You there, … Read the rest

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