Right???

What is a man? Why aren’t radio shows asking this & inviting only women to tell us? Why aren’t we talking about expanding male boundaries or questioning why men aren’t kinder men? The male rights movement aka trans lobby has everyone dissecting women while men remain untouched.

— Sonia Poulton (@SoniaPoulton) July 23, 2020

Funny how that works.

It's odd how women for you two are all 'cis women' or 'trans women' but men are just men

— ripx4nutmeg (@ripx4nutmeg) July 23, 2020

Notice Beauchamp’s “come on, man” – no pause to ask what is a man, no worries about whether men think having a male body makes men “more legitimately” men – just the bare word itself, taken … Read the rest

Media historian Aniko Bodroghkozy explains why the march on Selma got so much national attention.

On March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers beat and gassed John Lewis and hundreds of marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

…

Most Americans didn’t see the footage on the 6:30 nightly news. Instead, they saw it later Sunday night, which, like today, drew the biggest audiences of the week. That evening, ABC was premiering the first TV airing of “Judgment at Nuremberg.” An estimated 48 million people tuned in to watch the Academy Award-winning film, which dealt with the moral culpability of those who had participated in the Holocaust.

…

News programs never got those kinds of ratings.

This Zack Beauchamp guy – he’s a senior correspondent at Vox. He wrote a long piece on the Harper’s letter and cancel culture and all that. In that context he talked about The Trans Question – aka won’t someone please think of the trans ladies.

Kate Manne and Jason Stanley, philosophers at Cornell and Yale, respectively, put the point nicely in an essay on the free speech debate in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Kate Manne and Jason Stanley are both very hostile to feminist women who say that women are women and men are not.

“When oppressed people speak out — and up, toward those in power — their right to speak may be granted, yet their

Ummm…

Donald Trump, the president of the United States, has insisted that a cognitive test he took recently was “difficult”, using the example of a question in which the patient is asked to remember and repeat five words.

“Person, woman, man, camera, TV,” Trump explained, saying that listing the words in order was worth “extra points”, and that he found the task easy.

He said it to a man-person standing in front of him, facing a camera for a tv shoot. I don’t know if there was a woman within view – he may have come up with that one all by himself. “Man” and “person” are pretty broad hints though.

“They said nobody gets it in order, it’s

New development! Michael Cohen ordered released from prison.

A judge ordered the release from prison of President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer on Thursday, saying he believes the government retaliated against him for planning to release a book about Trump before November’s election.

Michael Cohen’s First Amendment rights were violated when he was ordered back to prison on July 9 after probation authorities said he refused to sign a form banning him from publishing the book or communicating publicly in other manners, U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said during a telephone conference.

The judge ordered him released by tomorrow afternoon.

“How can I take any other inference than that it’s retaliatory?” Hellerstein asked prosecutors, who insisted in court papers

Dude explains that it’s bigotry for women to think that women are people with female bodies.

I actually don't think that's the key question. I think the question is whether they think that makes them *more legitimately female* in some sense than trans women. That, I think, is bigotry.

— Zack Beauchamp (@zackbeauchamp) July 23, 2020

What a good thing it’s up to Zack Beauchamp to decide. We women are too stupid and too bigoted to decide or understand what women are.… Read the rest

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has responded to Yoho’s “I won’t apologize” yesterday.

“And I want to be clear that representative Yoho’s comments were not deeply hurtful or piercing to me,” she added. “Because I have worked a working-class job. I have waited tables and I have ridden the subway. I have walked the streets in New York City. And this kind of language is not new. I have encountered words uttered by Mr. Yoho and men uttering the same words as Mr. Yoho while I was being harassed in restaurants. I have tossed men out of bars that have used language like Mr. Yoho’s.”

In other words he talked to her the way drunk assholes in bars have talked to her. Not … Read the rest

It’s official.

Canada’s federal court has ruled that an asylum agreement the country has with the US is invalid because America violates the human rights of refugees.

The Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), in place since 2004, requires refugee claimants to request protection in the first safe country they reach.

But on Wednesday, a judge declared the deal unconstitutional due to the chance that the US will imprison the migrants.

In other words refugees who tried to go from the US to Canada were being turned back at the border on the grounds that they were already in that “first safe country.” Lawyers for refugees pointed out that what they were already in was not safe.

Nedira Jemal Mustefa,

Behold the violent anarchists!

A new ad for President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign used an image of pro-democracy protests in Ukraine from 2014 to show what it called “chaos & violence” in the US.

The ad, published on Tuesday, includes a photo of the president listening to police leaders next to another photo appearing to show a group of protesters attacking a police officer on the ground.

“Public safety vs chaos & violence,” the text underneath the photos says.

LOL

a new Trump ad warning of chaos & violence depicts a cop being attacked by protesters…

…only it's a pic from Kyiv in 2014, when Yanukovich's thugs fought to quash a democratic uprising.https://t.co/VfJujT50Lm pic.twitter.com/QBrlwauo6s

— Jesse Lehrich (@JesseLehrich) July

From Pliny:

Click to embiggen.… Read the rest

Trump’s ambassador to the UK is also being investigated for saying sexist and racist shit. What a surprise.

Diplomats told investigators that Johnson made remarks — often casually bandied about — that they found deeply offensive and demoralizing, sources said.

In 2018, ahead of an event for Black History Month — commonly marked at US embassies around the world — Johnson appeared agitated and asked if the audience would be “a whole bunch of Black people,” according to one source.

Three sources said Johnson questioned why the Black community would want a separate month to celebrate Black history and argued that Black fathers didn’t remain with their families and that was the “real challenge.” One source said an official

Biden thinks Trump is the first racist president.

Dude.

“We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed, they’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has,” Trump’s Democratic challenger said, the Washington Post reports.

No he’s not.

The “peculiar institution” loomed large over the first few decades of American presidential history. Not only did enslaved laborers help build the White House all of the earliest presidents (except for John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams) owned enslaved people. George Washington kept some 300 bondsmen at his Mount Vernon plantation. Thomas Jefferson—despite once calling slavery an “assemblage of horrors”—owned at least 175 enslaved workers at one time. James Madison, James Monroe and Andrew

Jane Clare Jones nailing things down:

This argument is not, therefore, an appeal for empathy with the damage done to us by male power and projection, by the immemorial and immovable demand that we efface ourselves before the needs of more important others. We know our pain doesn’t count in your economy, that it only registers on your balance books as a sly deceptive weapon or a vicious wilful harm to the interests of the only kind of people given credit. That you’re so certain of the justness of your accounting, you never seem to notice, that this one obvious fact, gives the lie to the ‘validity’ of your catechism. If you really thought that they were women, their

Trump did a coronavirus briefing yesterday.

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, thank you very much, and good afternoon.  Today, I want to provide an update on our response to the China virus and what my administration is doing to get the outbreak in the Sun Belt under control.  It seems largely in Sun Belt but could be spreading.

First sentence in and he goes with “China virus.” We should start calling him the Queens virus.

He says they’re all very sad about the virus.

My administration will stop at nothing to save lives and shield the vulnerable, which is so important. 

Oh? That will make a change. They’ve stopped at a fuck of a lot of thing up to now. They’ve … Read the rest

A couple of days ago a Republican congressional representative, John Yoho, called Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “disgusting” to her face and then as he was walking away said aloud “fucking bitch.”

Today he staged a…what to call it…a resentful “explanation,” a weepy self-justification, a passive-aggressive attack claiming to be an apology.

“I cannot apologize for my passion” — @RepTedYoho’s “apology” to AOC pic.twitter.com/Bh30Phu8zp

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 22, 2020

AOC said that was not any kind of apology.

In his floor speech, Yoho apologized for the “the abrupt manner of the conversation I had with my colleague from New York,” but he denied calling Ocasio-Cortez “disgusting” and a “fucking bitch,” as the Hill reported.

The “abrupt manner”? Abrupt? Dude, … Read the rest

Trump has been saying Biden wants to “abolish the suburbs” and Biden has been responding that that’s horseshit. (Possibly not his exact wording.)

Trump has largely focused on an Obama-era rule intended to combat historic racial discrimination in housing. The president has said he could be releasing his plan for replacing the rule any day now.

“Replacing” here means “reversing” or “nullifying.”

It’s another instance of Trump implicitly using race in his campaign pitch, which he’s also been doing explicitly on other issues. In this instance, the president appears to be using a policy to fight housing segregation in an attempt to scare white voters about outsiders coming into their neighborhoods. On Friday, he said that Democrats want

Dana Milbank points out an inconsistency in Trump’s Lawnorder ideology:

Trump said Sunday that federal police have been mobilized in Portland, Ore., (against the wishes of state and local authorities) to “protect Federal property” from “anarchists and agitators” — two years after Trump pardoned two men serving sentences for arson that burned 139 acres of federal property in Oregon in a case that inspired armed militias to seize federal land.

Oh yes, that pardon for destroying that federal property. Remember that?

Over and over during a 41-day armed standoff that terrified many locals, leader Ammon Bundy listed his demands: hand ownership of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge over to local ranchers and free two men convicted of starting fires that

Trump tried to get the fat cat he made ambassador to the UK to muscle the UK government to muscle the British Open to spend its money at Trump’s golf resort. That’s a lot of levels of trying to muscle people to send money his way for a vulgarian from Queens.

The American ambassador to Britain, Robert Wood Johnson IV, told multiple colleagues in February 2018 that President Trump had asked him to see if the British government could help steer the world-famous and lucrative British Open golf tournament to the Trump Turnberry resort in Scotland, according to three people with knowledge of the episode.

Why would the British government want to do anything so corrupt and sleazy and … Read the rest

Trump likes the fascist suppression of protests so much that he’s doing more of it.

Homeland Security officials said Monday they are making preparations to deploy federal agents to Chicago, while President Trump threatened to send U.S. law enforcement personnel to other Democratic-led cities experiencing spates of crime.

It’s up to governors to get medical supplies during a pandemic, but it’s up to the feds to police selected cities (the ones with too many black people and too many people who vote for the Democrats).

Trump made the pronouncement as he defended his administration’s use of force in Portland, Ore., where agents have clashed nightly with protesters and made arrests from unmarked cars. Calling the unrest there “worse than

This is so infuriating.

Lots of us, sometimes including me, could find @HillaryClinton’s exactitude and rigorously on-message presence to be not only annoying but suspect. Well, politics is about timing and context, and in #TrumpWorld chaos, it’s a tonic of good sense to hear her on @JoyAnnReid’s show.

— howardfineman (@howardfineman) July 20, 2020

Oh no, she’s too exact! She’s too good at talking about what she’s talking about and not something else! (Flowers? Babies? Baby flowers?) She’s too competent! Ewwwwwwwwwww. Women like that are gross, and we’re suspicious of them, because they might just find something better to do than flatter and placate us. In short they’re bitches.

When men do anger at work they’re seen … Read the rest