Voting rights are being attacked again. Ari Berman at Mother Jones:

Georgia Republicans have already introduced an avalanche of new laws that would radically limit voting options in the state. On Monday—the first day of Black History Month—Republicans in the state Senate introduced nine bills to restrict access to the ballot, including eliminating automatic voter registration, no-excuse absentee voting, and mail ballot drop boxes, as well as prohibiting third-party groups from sending mail ballot applications, and banning people who move to Georgia after the general election from voting in runoff elections. Many of the bills were sponsored by Republicans who backed Texas’ unsuccessful attempt to persuade the Supreme Court to throw out election results from Georgia and other states

… Read the rest

See also

So reporting a rapist is like 'Karen demanding to speak to the manager' and white women who get upset (cry white tears) when we are raped are white supremacists. Shame on her. Who needs men's rights activists?

— Julie Bindel (@bindelj) February 8, 2021

… Read the rest

But white tears when it’s Phipps telling us about them are a whole different story, it seems.

https://twitter.com/alisonphipps/status/1358735744769134593 https://twitter.com/alisonphipps/status/1358764000796938242

So…when she doesn’t feel safe she retreats, and that’s not white tears. Imagine how trans people feel! Don’t imagine how women feel, except me, but do imagine how trans people feel.

There are lots of flattering and sympathetic replies, and she doesn’t reject any of them as being too sympathetic and flattering to white tears.… Read the rest

Jane Clare Jones expresses the disgust at Alison Phipps’s sneers better.

I have so much cortisol in my brain I can't fucking concentrate on what I was supposed to be doing this afternoon now.

Guess that's me weaponising my trauma again.

— Dr. Jane Clare Jones (@janeclarejones) February 8, 2021

unwavering witness and compassion of my best friend, to even start to process… this abject fucking gaslighting of young women in the name of feminism….

This flagrant sneering at one of the greatest burdens of trauma carried by any population in history.

— Dr. Jane Clare Jones (@janeclarejones) February 8, 2021

That. Why is it now the done thing for a feminist academic to sneer at women who report sexual … Read the rest

From the new Glinner update week in the war on women –

THE TELEGRAPH: The psychotherapist blocked from researching detransition is taking his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

James Caspian is a psychotherapist who has specialised in counselling trans people for over 10 years. He has worked with numerous de-transitioners and had planned to conduct an academic study into this massively under-researched area. However, Bath Spa University rejected Caspian’s MA proposal. He was told, “Attacks on social media may not be confined to the researcher but may involve the university.” 

And the university is too fragile to cope with “attacks on social media”? So much too fragile that it vetoes research on something one … Read the rest

We get to read Alison Phipps’s “don’t hit me, hit those other white women” paper.

The actual title, lest we forget, is “White tears, white rage: Victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism.” It’s a white woman sneering at white women, specifically for talking thinking campaigning as feminists.

Speaking out can attract political dividends: in earlier work (Phipps, 2016, 2020) I have theorised experience, especially of the traumatic kind, as a form of investment capital in what Ahmed (2012 [2004]: 45) calls the ‘affective economies’ of testimonial culture. Trauma can be disclosed or ventriloquised to generate further capital in the form of feeling, creating political gain.

…

Most of the key figures in the viral iteration

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Someone is watching.

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1358183205740961792

I don’t want to brush off or belittle concerns about racism, but at the same time…I’ve seen too many self-righteous Letters of Outrage lately not to recognize this as another example. “Our community is outraged and in pain”? I doubt it. I bet their community was in a fever of righteous exhilaration.

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe McNeil really did fling around racist insults with cheerful abandon…but I doubt it. Jesse Singal doubts it.

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1358187089540624387

David Aaronovitch doubts it.

‘Respectfully, intent is irrelevant’. Idiots.

— David Aaronovitch (@DAaronovitch) February 6, 2021

There’s a fad in my neighborhood, and for all I know in all neighborhoods, to festoon one’s front garden with yard signs carrying little homilies and … Read the rest

This is one way we know trans women are not women.

…yes they are.

In fact, the more violent your threats…the more urgent the debate becomes.

(Image from 'Trans Army' FB page). pic.twitter.com/5uFP6ZLg8P

— gender is harmful (@genderisharmful) February 7, 2021

That’s not “activism.” It’s not struggle, it’s not consciousness raising, it’s not social justice. It’s just an image of an angry man brandishing a bat studded with nails, by way of telling us we are under orders to agree with him that he is a woman, and that refusal will be met with murderous violence.

I don’t want to be any kind of ally with men who threaten to smash women to death for failing to agree that the … Read the rest

Oh ffs.

Trump lawyer wants to suspend the trial during his “sabbath” because it’s “mandatory” for him.

David Schoen, 62, has written to senior figures of both main parties in the US Senate asking for an agreement that the trial [be] postponed from 5.24pm on Friday until Sunday so that he can observe the Sabbath. In the letter, reported by the New York Times, the lawyer apologises for any inconvenience, adding that “the practices and prohibitions are mandatory for me … so I have no choice.”

Blah blah blah. Mandatory according to whom? A particular version of the imagined sky daddy. He might as well say it’s mandatory for him to take two days off to say prayers to … Read the rest

Interesting. Liz Cheney is thinking about criminal investigation of Trump.

In extraordinary remarks on Fox News Sunday, Cheney made specific reference to the “massive criminal investigation” on the Capitol insurrection that is now sweeping the country. She said that the probe would cover “every aspect” of the events of 6 January and look at “everyone who was involved”.

But she reserved her most pointed words for Trump. “People will want to know what the president was doing,” she said. “They will want to know whether the tweet that he sent out calling Vice-President Mike Pence a coward while the attack was underway was a premeditated attempt to provoke violence.”

The impeachment trial in the Senate starts Tuesday.

Last

… Read the rest

This is a puzzler. I’m seeing people laughing at a column by Virginia Heffernan for its clueless entitled snobbery crossed with self-righteous “liberalism,” which sounded odd to me because when I first encountered her writing she was a libertarian with some modest leanings in a more leftish direction. Also, she was sharp, and the writing in this piece is very dim – so the piece must be a parody, right? Surely? Poe’s law?

Let’s see…

Oh, heck no. The Trumpites next door to our pandemic getaway, who seem as devoted to the ex-president as you can get without being Q fans, just plowed our driveway without being asked and did a great job.

How am I going to resist demands

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The Green Party is losing women:

Dozens of activists have quit the Green Party in protest at the election of a transgender campaigner as head of its women’s group.

That is, at the election of a trans woman as head of its women’s group. Quite a few women think that positions of that kind should be for women rather than trans women. We think that because women are still far from being equally represented in top jobs, let alone over-represented, so to make a man who identifies as a woman (which is not the same as just plain being one) the head of a party’s women’s group is insulting to women.

The exodus, involving at least 40 women, follows

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The misogynist hyperbole is out of hand.

The misogynist hyperbole on this topic is so out of hand that it's hard to know if/when/why to react (or ignore) but in case it means anything to @jk_rowling or anyone else that journalists like me speak up: I think Strangio's is an absolutely appalling, libellous remark https://t.co/hHPrKPOIEC

— Susanna Rustin (@SusannaRustin) February 6, 2021

https://twitter.com/oliverburkeman/status/1358158283249512453 … Read the rest

One small good thing:

Activists in Indonesia on Thursday lauded the government’s decision to ban public schools from making religious attire mandatory, a move that followed national outrage over non-Muslim students being forced to wear a hijab.

Muslim students shouldn’t be forced to wear it either, of course, not even by their parents.

The special autonomous province of Aceh, which enforces sharia law, is exempt from the decree, Education Minister Nadiem Makarim said.

So stay out of Aceh.

Andreas Harsono, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said schools in more than 20 provinces still make religious attire mandatory in their dress code, so the decree was a positive step.

“Many public schools require girls and female teachers to wear

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She’s still there though.

https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1293593435258093575… Read the rest

Interesting. You know all that $$$ Trump raised with the “stolen election!!!” claims? He’s taken a big chunk of it for himself. I’d have thought that was just plain fraud, but what do I know.

Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, which never received a cent from the former president, moved an estimated $2.8 million of donor money into the Trump Organization—including at least $81,000 since Trump lost the election.

Doesn’t that look like theft?

In addition, one of the campaign’s joint-fundraising committees, which collects money in partnership with the Republican Party, shifted about $4.3 million of donor money into Trump’s business from January 20, 2017, to December 31, 2020—at least $331,000 of which came after the election.

The money covered

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The charges are piling up.

All 56 FBI field offices are engaged in a huge investigation that ranks alongside the biggest the bureau has conducted. As Michael Sherwin, acting US attorney for Washington DC which is leading the hunt, has put it: “The scope and scale of this investigation are really unprecedented, not only in FBI history but probably DoJ history.”

…

Already the number of people who have been arrested, either by the FBI, Capitol police or local Washington DC officers has reached 235, spanning more than 40 states. As the investigation widens and deepens, the focus is tightening on anyone considered to have acted as a coordinator of the action in an attempt to take out

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Oh you mean if we tell thousands of damaging lies about you on our very popular “news” channel you’re going to sue us? For real???

Lou Dobbs is out at Fox Business, just a day after the voting machine company Smartmatic filed a $2.7 billion lawsuit against him, the cable news network and several purveyors of the debunked theory that its technology was used to commit massive voter fraud.

It wasn’t really a “theory,” bunked or debunked. It was a story. Trump wanted a story so they made a story for him.

After the initial threats were made, Fox News and Fox Business ran deposition-esque segments on the shows of the three anchors now sued by Smartmatic — Dobbs, Maria

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It just always has to be misrepresented. From a Guardian piece on the sacking of Joanna Cherry:

Some SNP MPs described a “palpable sense of relief” within the Westminster group this week, along with a degree of frustration that action had not been taken sooner. As one MP said: “The party has a hard-won reputation for being socially liberal, pro-equality, and any perception that our politicians are not has a terrible effect on younger supporters in particular, and with that comes the fear that they will go to the Greens at the next election.”

So the implication is that Cherry, and the rest of us pesky feminists who don’t agree that men can become women, is socially conservative and … Read the rest

Can that nice man who defiled Pelosi’s office go home if he promises to be good? No.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the detention of an Arkansas man photographed with his feet on the desk of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the Jan. 6 rioting at the U.S. Capitol, describing his behavior as “brazen” and “entitled” after excoriating his defense lawyer over “frivolous” claims of prosecutorial misconduct.

In ordering the detention of Richard Barnett, Chief Judge Beryl Howell said the charges he faces, including unlawfully entering the Capitol grounds with a weapon, are “in some ways, too benign sounding to fairly describe what happened.” The judge went on to describe the deadly events that took place at the Capitol

… Read the rest