I hate presidential debates. I think it’s a bad thing that they’re taken so seriously and given so much attention. Debating isn’t a key part of what a president does – presidents aren’t legislators, they’re executives.

Add to that a debate where Trump is one of the debaters…and just no.

I did watch a few minutes, just to see, and was disgusted, and stopped.

Our shame can be seen from space.

Only one man looked remotely presidential on the debate stage in Cleveland, Ohio, and it was not the incumbent. He interrupted, ranted, raged, spewed lies and interrupted some more. Oh, and he passed on an opportunity to condemn white supremacists, instead telling them to “stand back and stand

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Well anyway they’ve written a letter too so ha. They’ve written their own Big Important letter that repeats The Dogma so there. Take that, Bad People.

Days after a host of prominent literary names signed a letter defending JK Rowling “against hate”, more than 200 writers, publishers and journalists including Jeanette Winterson, Malorie Blackman and Joanne Harris have put their names to another stating their support for transgender and non-binary people.

In order to imply that The Enemy is undermining transgender and non-binary people.

The letter, which is described as “a message of love and solidarity for the trans and non-binary community”, was pulled together by acclaimed writers Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Daisy Johnson. With

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The Bookseller reports on Mslexia’s shunning of Amanda Craig:

Amanda Craig has been dropped as a competition judge by women’s writing magazine Mslexia over her signing of a letter to the Times in defence of J K Rowling.

…Craig has said she is “very disappointed” by the decision taken after her involvement protesting “relentless bullying and death threats to a fellow author”. She also called on professional bodies, including the Society of Authors and English PEN, to defend authors from such bullying.

…

Craig had been appointed a judge for the Mslexia Fiction & Memoir Competition 2020 alongside novelist Kiran Millwood Hargrave and literary agent Joanna Moult. Hargrave said on Twitter that she “wasn’t comfortable to sit on a

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Mslexia has issued a statement – a bad, stupid, smarmy, chickenshit statement.

pic.twitter.com/bWTKkWnWWT

— Mslexia ✨ (@Mslexia) September 30, 2020

All that plus difficult to read – but hey, tiny white print on a lavender background is so Feminine, amirite?

Mslexia exists to support all writers who identify as women, regardless of their prior background or current circumstances, including issues relating to their age, race, class, income, disability, sexual preference, location, health status, fertility, caring responsibilities and gender assignment. We stand against all forms of abuse and harassment.

Mslexia aims to foster a welcoming and inclusive environment that encourages women to express themselves across a wide range of literary genres in the knowledge that they, and their writing, will always

… Read the rest

I don’t understand.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell dismissed the suggestion that Amy Coney Barrett would vote to scrap the Affordable Care Act.

“This mother of seven, including multiple children who were born or adopted facing preexisting condition medical challenges, is just itching to block families like hers from accessing medical care. What a joke,” McConnell said, per an NBC News reporter.

I’m not being sarcastic, I really don’t understand. If Evil Mitch said that, it means that he gets why universal health care is necessary, and is willing to let us know that he gets it. But they hate universal health care. They want it to be health care for those who can afford it. He’s admitting that … Read the rest

They’ve made the letter a petition now, so the whole world can sign. Signatures are flooding in.

https://twitter.com/blablafishcakes/status/1311040711475765254… Read the rest

If you sign a letter or say a thing in support of JK Rowling you must be punished.

2. Retribution is instant. Mslexia magazine, which says it champions women's writing, tells her she is dropped as a judge on one of its competitions.

— Nick Cohen (@NickCohen4) September 29, 2020

4. Every honest person who reads the book knows it isn't true. Yet it's easier for cultural bureaucrats to go along with the lie than risk their careers by stating the truth. (If you want chapter and verse, I reviewed the novel here https://t.co/X21FXyl4Wk)

— Nick Cohen (@NickCohen4) September 29, 2020

Punish her. Never mind that she didn’t do anything wrong, punish her, just to be safe.… Read the rest

https://twitter.com/AlessandraAster/status/1311003013369208835 https://twitter.com/HJoyceGender/status/1311013827790725121

This is just plain wrong. A young trans identified male who wants to rape & assault women is placed in a women’s prison in Ireland. The needs of a male rape fantasist are given priority over women’s safety. The evidence is clear: Sex self ID is incompatible with women’s rights. https://t.co/LLpcf5rXnK

— Allison Bailey (@BluskyeAllison) September 29, 2020

… Read the rest

I started seeing stories on this about a week ago, and it was so…horror-movie like and gruesome I wasn’t sure what to do with it so decided to wait and see. New developments mean that waiting is over. Meet “Barbie Kardashian”:

Limerick, Munster. A teenager who was “born a male but identifies as a female” is facing four counts of making threats to kill or cause serious harm. The accused, who has demonstrated a pattern of criminal and extreme physical and sexual violence towards women, is eager to be held in female custody while awaiting trial.

So that he can have an abundance of new female victims. Well surely no one will go along with that plan.

Gardaí, the

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Gee, who could have guessed – it turns out that Trump is not a devout Christian after all. It was all an act!!! Are you amazed?

The president’s alliance with religious conservatives has long been premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats hold them in disdain. In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes praise on conservative Christians, casting himself as their champion. “My administration will never stop fighting for Americans of faith,” he declared at a rally for evangelicals earlier this year.

But it’s transparently a ploy, given that Trump had never given the slightest hint of religiosity until he decided to become king of Murka.

But in private, many of Trump’s comments about religion are

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Look at this stupid chain of “accused of”s and “previously criticized”s and “branded as”s all linked up to make a hearsay accusation of Wrongthink against…you’ll never guess…a woman. Funny how reliably it’s a woman these days.

A HISTORY professor accused of being transphobic will head a new women’s rights initiative at Oxford University.

Oh accused of; well what more do you need to know. It could be some random crackpot in the pub just before closing, but do let’s make it the basis for a story in the Oxford Mail because hey, it’s only a woman. Also why does she get to be a history professor when the inquisitors on Twitter don’t? What’s so great about her besides brains and … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on How DO we put up with it?

Most murdered? Come off it. One look at official homicide statistics should put that to rest, but activists are actively hostile to data. Just as with the religious, statistics and math and facts are not how they came by their beliefs in the first place. Remember, “If your original Hebrew disagrees with my original King James — your original Hebrew is wrong. If your original Hebrew agrees with my original King James, your original Hebrew is right.”

They’ve heard the idea that trans people are being murdered and denied basic rights at a terrifying rate. They’ve heard it a lot. As Daniel Kahneman … Read the rest

John Cleese is on a tear at the moment.

I've been disappointed for many years that some people
don't entirely agree with me about everything

Frankly, I don't know how I put up with it https://t.co/sAc0XAGjWt

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) September 28, 2020

This is not the way I see it

A lot of woke behaviours seem to me posturing ; striking attitudes that allow them to experience the lovely, warm glow of moral superiority, while justifying their own aggression by using denial-and-projection defences https://t.co/UdBT9FijWC

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) September 28, 2020

Oh, I didn't know that she supported hating vulnerable people.

I'll check it out with her

But the rest of your rambling suggests you are a bit 'vulnerable'

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It’s infuriating but it’s also depressing. The Trump campaign and Cambridge Analytica persuaded black voters in swing states that Trump would be preferable to Clinton. That’s worked out well.

Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential election campaign has been accused of actively seeking to deter 3.5 million black Americans in battleground states from voting by deliberately targeting them with negative Hillary Clinton ads on Facebook.

By “negative Hillary Clinton ads” they mean “dishonest disparaging” Clinton ads.

According to the investigation, the Trump campaign’s goal was to dissuade them from backing the Democrat entirely, by targeting them with “dark adverts” on their Facebook feeds, which heavily attacked Clinton and, in some cases, argued she lacked sympathy with African Americans.

Unlike Trump, … Read the rest

Bookstores have to be safe spaces!

Don’t they? Isn’t that the whole point of them? Or have I misundertood?

Rabble Books thinks they do.

An Australian bookstore will no longer stock J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, in order to make the shop a “safer space” for customers.

It’s a sad fact about the Harry Potter books that they tend to burst into flames after you’ve read a few pages. No, that’s not it, they’re laced with arsenic. No, wait, they’re contaminated with plutonium. No, I know, there are tigers and rattlesnakes between the pages.

Rabble Books and Games located in Maylands, a suburb of Perth, made the announcement on Facebook this week, saying that it would no longer

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Oh jeez.

That got sketchy fast. We followed the senior home bus out and #ShadyFire spotted probably more than mile ahead of flames on ridge. Fire on both sides of Highway 12. Bus did not stop and we made it through. Evacuated to Vet Auditorium. @sfchronicle pic.twitter.com/qBgq2xhLdv

— Matthias Gafni (@mgafni) September 28, 2020

Spoke to city bus driver who drove through the fire and embers to get the seniors to safety. She didn’t want to use her name or be photographed.

“I was just so happy to help.”#ShadyFire pic.twitter.com/ogttcptM2u

— Matthias Gafni (@mgafni) September 28, 2020

… Read the rest

Uh oh, it seems that billionaire Don hasn’t been paying a huge amount of income tax. You’d think the tariff on the income from all those billions would be quite a high figure, but…

Donald Trump, a self-proclaimed billionaire, paid only $750 in federal income taxes in the year he was elected US president, according to a stunning New York Times investigation that could shake up the presidential election.

My goodness. That’s a very small figure.

The president “paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency”, the paper reported, adding that “in his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

“He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the

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No, that’s you.

https://twitter.com/KatyMontgomerie/status/1310168171157106688

I know GC people believe that people are gifted with some kind of magic, unmeasurable, immutable sexed soul at conception, but there’s just no evidence for that mate

That’s so gaslighty. That is not what gender critical people believe, that is the exact, precise opposite of what gender critical people believe. That’s the whole point. We don’t believe the fairy tale of the magic gender that belies the body, it’s uncritical trans ideology that believes and promotes that silly idea. All we believe is the tautology that a female body is a female body, and there’s nothing magic or unmeasurable about it. We call people who have female bodies “women” and we don’t call people who … Read the rest

There’s an open letter supporting JK Rowling in the Sunday Times:

JK Rowling has been subjected to an onslaught of abuse that highlights an insidious, authoritarian and misogynistic trend in social media.

Rowling has consistently shown herself to be an honourable and compassionate person, and the appalling hashtag #RIPJKRowling is just the latest example of hate speech directed against her and other women that Twitter and other platforms enable and implicitly endorse.

We are signing this letter in the hope that, if more people stand up against the targeting of women online, we might at least make it less acceptable to engage in it or profit from it.

We wish JK Rowling well and stand in solidarity with her.

Signed … Read the rest

I never can figure out how this is supposed to work, this claim that a senator’s or justice’s religion makes no difference to what the senator or justice will do.

Much has been made of Amy Coney Barrett’s Catholic faith following her nomination for the supreme court. Some have speculated it may affect her rulings on matters such as abortion and LGBT rights, while others have expressed disquiet about her membership of the secretive People of Praise group.

Why is it “speculation” to think that “Catholic faith” will influence how Barrett rules on abortion? The “Catholic faith” is fanatically opposed to abortion, and correspondingly indifferent to the rights and needs of women, so if you hold “Catholic … Read the rest