People who love feet is it?

Here's the video of Trump declining to say whether he believes in the lunatic and dangerous Qanon conspiracy theory that he is secretly working to dismantle a powerful underground global network of pedophiles. pic.twitter.com/rek2WhCC3i

— David Mack (@davidmackau) August 14, 2020

The what conspiracy theory?

CNN explains:

QAnon is a virtual cult that celebrates President Trump and casts Democratic politicians and other elites as evil child abusers. Aspects of the cult are downright delusional. Last year an FBI office warned that Q adherents are a domestic terrorism threat.

Plus it’s been gaining in popularity. Thousands of closed Facebook groups, with millions of members.

Numerous Republican congressional candidates “have embraced” QAnon, as CNN’s

… Read the rest

How we do political persuasion now.

Trans women are women, pass it on. https://t.co/cgfwfds5FN

— NCLR – National Center for Lesbian Rights (@NCLRights) August 10, 2020

That’s it! That’s all it takes. Just say these four words, and tell everyone else to say them too. Paradise on earth will ensue!… Read the rest

So, Don, do you regret all the lying? Well do you?

SV Dáte had waited five long years to ask Donald Trump one question: “Mr President, after three and a half years [of Trump’s presidency], do you regret at all, all the lying you’ve done to the American people?”

Confronted with Dáte’s question at Thursday’s White House briefing, Trump responded with a question of his own. “All the what?” he said.

Dáte: “All the lying, all the dishonesties.”

Trump: “That who has done?”

“You have done,” said Dáte, who is the Huffington Post’s White House correspondent.

It’s hilarious – best straight man ever. “That who has done?” “YOU. You, bro, we’re talking about you, you’re the one who has … Read the rest

The Guardian on the A-levels mess:

Pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds have been worst hit by the controversial standardisation process used to award A-level grades in England this year, while pupils at private schools benefited the most.

What are A-levels? They’re national exams in the UK that function like a turnstile for admission to higher education. They were canceled this year because of the virus, so instead teacher evaluations were used, but with the Authorities applying a “controversial standardisation process” to the evaluations with the result that a lot of students were downgraded, which amounts to saying “Soz no higher ed for you, off to the factory you go.” There’s a lot of anger.

Private schools increased the proportion of

… Read the rest

Oh fabulous, we get to have the birther thing all over again.

Holy shit. Trump pushes a baseless, birther-style theory about Kamala Harris that holds she's not a citizen because birthright citizenship isn't a thing.

"I just heard it today that she doesn't meet the requirements … I have no idea if that's right." pic.twitter.com/ZIXYrleuVf

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 13, 2020

Axios has more:

Trump campaign senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis on Thursday shared a Newsweek op-ed that baselessly claims Sen. Kamala Harris may be ineligible for the vice presidency because both of her parents were not naturalized citizens at her birth.

Harris was born in Oakland, Calif. She is an American citizen and is eligible for

… Read the rest

Trump is cheering himself up by talking sexist shit about women.

In an interview with Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo, Trump referred to Harris as “sort of a mad woman”, criticizing her questioning of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his heated confirmation hearing in September 2018. “She was the angriest of the group and they were all angry,” he said of the Democrats.

Earlier this morning, Trump tweeted that the media has given Harris a “free pass”, saying there was “nobody meaner or more condescending” to Biden during the primaries.

Trump’s tirade on Fox Business also including US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, saying that she “is not even a smart person” and that she “goes out and yaps”. Trump also

… Read the rest

About that “Whiteness” chart again…

One thing to note is that it was compiled by Judith Katz in 1990, and it’s copyrighted by a “consulting group.”

JudithH.Katz © 1990. The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The thing that’s so bizarre and stupid about it is that it’s not about “whiteness” at all, it’s just about a grab bag of tastes, habits, practices, beliefs, ideas, ideologies, fashions and the like, few if any of which are genuinely specific and exclusive to white people. It mixes up class, hierarchy, status, consumerism, and some just plain randomness.

For instance –

Rugged Individualism

Self-reliance

Individual is primary unit

Independence and autonomy highly valued and rewarded

Individuals assumed to be in

… Read the rest

But where are the … you know what? Never mind. https://t.co/7TOKjDrxrO

— Nope. (@JoyAnnReid) August 13, 2020

… Read the rest

Trump and co are openly moving to steal the election. This is a violation of several laws.

The head of the Iowa Postal Workers Union alleged Tuesday that mail sorting machines are “being removed” from Post Offices in her state due to new policies imposed by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major GOP donor to President Donald Trump whose operational changes have resulted in dramatic mail slowdowns across the nation.

Mail sorting machines are being removed. What will that do? Sabotage voting by mail, of course.

Asked by NPR‘s Noel King whether she has felt the impact of DeJoy’s changes, Iowa Postal Workers Union President Kimberly Karol—a 30-year Postal Service veteran—answered in the affirmative, saying “mail is beginning

… Read the rest

Stonewall wants us to know that oh yes it definitely does support the swift and easy prescription of puberty blockers.

https://twitter.com/stonewalluk/status/1293834612536496129

Sterility and arrested brain development, rock on!… Read the rest

Trump is telling us right out in the open that he’s carefully kneecapping our ability to vote by mail, i.e. rigging the election so that he can keep destroying everything while piling up more money for himself.

Speaking with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network on Thursday morning, Trump appeared to confirm that he opposes Democrats’ proposed funding for mail-in balloting and the U.S. Postal Service in order to make it more difficult to expand voting by mail.

“Now they need that money in order to make the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” he said. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in

… Read the rest

So of course we get this:

Tucker Carlson loses it when a guest corrects his pronunciation of Kamala Harris's name pic.twitter.com/1fHIrPGuwN

— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) August 12, 2020

Thanks What a Maroon for alerting us to that.

“So what?!” says Tucker Carlson in fake fox anger.

Margaret Sullivan in the Post:

Not only did Carlson mispronounce it, but when a guest went out of his way to politely correct him, Carlson had one of his trademark fits of pique.

The exchange went like this:

“Tucker, can I just say one thing?” said Richard Goodstein, an adviser to Democratic campaigns.

Carlson: “Of course.”

Goodstein: “Because this will serve you and your fellow hosts on Fox. Her name is pronounced

… Read the rest

Of course Trump is calling Kamala Harris the N word.

President Trump has called magazines, pharmaceutical advertisements and questions “nasty.” He has called rumors, numbers and one unnamed TV columnist who gave “The Apprentice” a bad review “nasty.” He has called men “nasty,” and he has called women “nasty.”

So of course he wasted no time in using it on a woman who is more intelligent and impressive than he is.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, the president described Harris’s questioning of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing as “extraordinarily nasty” — “nasty to a level that was just a horrible thing.” He also said she was “the meanest” and “the most horrible” in pressing Kavanaugh.

… Read the rest

Jonathan Chait wrote a thing in New York magazine last month, about anti-racism training and some eccentric ideas some such trainers (or entrepreneurs) have embraced. In Googling for more I saw that National Review and Don Junior were also interested, so keep that in mind – but even National Review and Don Junior aren’t wrong about everything. (Nearly everything, in Junior’s case, but not quite everything.)

The star of anti-racism training is Robin DiAngelo of White Fragility fame. What Chait focuses on is the whiteness studies part.

The African-American History Museum has a page on whiteness, which summarizes the ideas that the racism trainers have brought into relatively wide circulation. The museum’s page summarizes what it calls “white culture”

… Read the rest

Meanwhile we mustn’t lose sight of the filthy corruption of “senior adviser” Ivanka Trump. (Her brothers are just as filthy but they don’t have pretend jobs in the White House, they don’t insert themselves into conversations among heads of state at international meetings, they don’t take Daddy’s place at the table at international meetings, they don’t have pretend jobs in the White House.)

Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, earned at least $36 million in income outside their White House roles in 2019, according to financial disclosure forms released on Friday. 

The income, first reported by The Washington Post, is from the businesses, properties, and other assets owned by the couple.

“Conflicts of interest?” [giggle, simper] … Read the rest

Donnie Disaster has added a quack to his pandemic team. Donnie D introduced him yesterday at the “press briefing.”

The man Trump was pointing to was Dr. Scott Atlas, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who frequently appears on Fox News and has advised Republicans in the past. And crucially, unlike the government’s medical experts who have advised Trump until now, has adopted a public stance on the virus much closer to Trump’s — including decrying the idea that schools cannot reopen this fall as “hysteria” and pushing for the resumption of college sports.

Just what we need – even more murderous denialism about the pandemic.

“He’s working with us and will be working with us on the

… Read the rest

Mermaids? Mermaids who? I think you must have the wrong number.

https://twitter.com/suzanne_moore/status/1293508438903918592

Maybe the same reason the BBC did.

https://twitter.com/suzanne_moore/status/1293569715428884482

Along with the non-stop bullying of women.… Read the rest

Oh have they now.

The BBC has quietly dropped four LGBT+ charities from an information page for transgender people seeking support.

The LGBT Foundation, Mermaids, The Gender Trust, and The Gender Identity Research and Education Society (GIRES) are all registered British charities that provide vital support and advice for trans, non-binary and gender-questioning people.

“Support” in the form of eager encouragement of delusional thinking.

As recently as June 29, they were all listed on a page on the BBC website called “Information and Support: Gender Identity”.

Pages such as this are often linked to under BBC articles or videos covering topics people may need further support or information about, including gender identity, sexual or mental health, and addiction

… Read the rest

From The Australian:

Australia’s psychiatrists have been urged to be very cautious about giving official backing to gender clinic treatments for under-18s after an international scandal over false claims of mental health benefits for transgender surgery.

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists should be “extremely careful” before endorsing so-called “gender affirming” hormonal treatment and surgery for minors, according to Philip Morris, president of the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists whose members look after patients in the private and public sector.

In other words don’t cut crucial bits off people or give them dangerous hormones, or both, unless you’re very sure it will be beneficial. (Shorter: first, do no harm.) You’d think that would be self-evident, but … Read the rest

The Kamala Harris news has given me a second wind so I’ll go back to TERF wars an intro for a bit.

The next theme, after the “cis women and white fragility” bullshit, is “what do they mean it’s an ideology??”

The language of ‘gender ideology’ originates in anti-feminist and anti-trans discourses among right-wing Christians, with the Catholic Church acting as a major nucleating agent (Careaga-Pérez, 2016; Kuhar & Paternotte, 2017). In the last decade the concept has been increasingly adopted by far-right organisations and politicians in numerous American, European and African states. They position gender egalitarianism, sexual liberation and LGBTQ+ rights as an attack on traditional values by ‘global elites’, as represented by multinational corporations and

… Read the rest