Filia has the short talk that Selina Todd would have given this morning if she hadn’t been abruptly pushed out at the last minute.

I am delighted to be here today. I owe my life to Ruskin College and my career to feminism. My parents met at Ruskin in 1967. My mum was one of 6 children who grew up in a working-class family in Leeds. She was the only girl. Here’s something she wrote recently about her childhood: ‘As a five- or six-year-old I had refused to touch my parents’ birthday present of a doll with a pram, sensing the restriction such a role-defined toy would place on me. My brothers would never have been offered such a present.

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I’m now 14 minutes into the video.

The two women doing the explaining are getting increasingly frustrated that the audience won’t just say ok and settle down and keep their issues about Selina Todd’s exclusion for lunch and breaks, so that the event can proceed.

But the audience in turn is frustrated that the two women doing the explaining don’t seem to grasp the outrageousness of the last minute disinvitation of Selina Todd.

The “explanation” in part is that Todd wasn’t on a panel or giving a talk, she was simply doing a two-minute thank you for the history department. That’s all! Two minutes! A thank you! It doesn’t count! One of them actually says it’s not a no-platforming … Read the rest

So.

I will be at the conference tomorrow and I will be publicly denouncing their decision to bully Selina out of the event

— Julie Bindel (@bindelj) February 28, 2020

And she was and she did.

https://t.co/AT0PxUK3E5

— WorldGoneMad (@GenderfreeCamp) February 29, 2020

I’ve watched 7 minutes so far. It’s maddening to watch – maddening to see the women academics explaining to other women academics that they simply had to push Selina Todd aside because “people were pulling out.” Julie and others keep asking “But why were they pulling out, what explanation did they give?”

Julie is…magnificent, as always.… Read the rest

Yes, he really did say it. Here he is saying it.

Trump earlier today on coronavirus:

“It’s going to disappear one day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear. And from our shores, you know, it could get worse before it gets better, could maybe go away, we’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows.” pic.twitter.com/icBPCr71jP

— JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) February 28, 2020

CNN has more:

President Donald Trump is hoping for a “miracle” that will make the coronavirus disappear but tanking stock markets and signs the disease is stalking America are delivering their verdict on his scattershot management of the crisis.

…

“It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” Trump said at the

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None of this inspires confidence.

The briefing, led by CDC Director Robert Redfield and NIH infectious disease specialist Tony Fauci, was called to update members [of Congress] on the state of the coronavirus’ spread.

Redfield stressed that the risk to Americans remained low. But Fauci was more blunt, according to one person in the room, telling lawmakers that they need to accept there will be many more cases in the United States.

Fauci said the coronavirus is “unlikely to disappear” any time in the near future, according to the person. The remarks contradicted Trump’s declaration Thursday night that the disease was “going to disappear” one day “like a miracle.”

Siiiiigh.

Fauci also emphatically denied reports that the White House

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We cannot fight for #womensliberation and the end of #maleviolenceagainstwomen alone. We are extremely grateful for all the support we've received today and in the past few days – having you all join us, speaking in support, and writing into the #VancouverCityCouncil. #UntilWeWin

— VancouverRapeRelief (@VanRapeRelief) February 27, 2020

Sister Outrider is not submitting.

Solidarity with @VanRapeRelief. If you want to remove the need for single-sex shelters, work to challenge and end male violence against women and girls – don’t target the services that support women through the aftermath of that violence.

— Claire (@ClaireShrugged) February 27, 2020

Across Britain women’s refuges are systematically decimated by funding cuts from a right-wing government. Women are being turned away. And

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Late last night –

So, the Coronavirus, which started in China and spread to various countries throughout the world, but very slowly in the U.S. because President Trump closed our border, and ended flights, VERY EARLY, is now being blamed, by the Do Nothing Democrats, to be the fault of “Trump”.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 28, 2020

Why is he talking about himself in the third person? Why did he put his own name in quotation marks? Who knows. The important thing is, everything is all about him.

The WHO has other priorities.

The coronavirus outbreak has reached a “decisive point” and has “pandemic potential”, World Health Organization head Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus says.

…

For a second

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The WH continues to treat the coronavirus as a PR problem instead of a public health crisis. It is failing and flailing in the face of the first crisis it did not create. Its previously successful formula — stonewalling and lying — won’t work here. https://t.co/stbz3rCy0b

— Michael R. Bromwich (@mrbromwich) February 28, 2020

So Pence’s press secretary is filtering what we get to learn from the government about this potential pandemic. They’ll be sending it to Fox News for approval next.… Read the rest

Oh, man, here we go. The Trump gang is getting it wrong already. Very very wrong.

Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services sent more than a dozen workers to receive the first Americans evacuated from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, without proper training for infection control or appropriate protective gear, according to a whistleblower complaint.

The workers did not show symptoms of infection and were not tested for the virus, according to lawyers for the whistleblower, a senior HHS official based in Washington who oversees workers at the Administration for Children and Families, a unit within HHS.

The whistleblower is seeking federal protection, alleging she was unfairly and improperly reassigned after raising concerns

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Democracy Now has a brief but terrible report:

In Mexico, a radio broadcaster was shot to death Tuesday afternoon outside her home in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. She was known as Bárbara Greco on air. The 37-year-old had recently spoken out on violence against women and children in Mexico in response to the recent killing of a 7-year-old girl in Mexico City. Her friends and colleagues reported that her real name was Teresa Aracely Alcocer. Last December, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Mexico had suffered the second-highest number of journalist killings in 2019, after Syria.

The punishment for speaking out on violence against women and children is…death by violence.… Read the rest

The loathsome Morgane Oger is gloating about Vancouver’s withdrawal of education funding for Vancouver Rape Relief, because VRR is an all-women organization.

Tonight, a supremacist organization with a purity test on womanhood learned that cultivating exclusion and discrimination really does have a price.

I profoundly encourage Vancouver Rape Relief to reconsider its untenable policy to arbitrarily exclude some women.

— Morgane Oger (@MorganeOgerBC) February 27, 2020

A “purity test” he calls it. A man who pretends to be a woman calls a women’s organization for women who have been raped “a supremacist organization with a purity test on womanhood”…because it doesn’t agree with him that he is a woman. It’s as if Michael Bloomberg were a trans poor person and … Read the rest

Last summer Twitter permabanned Roger Dubar of Satiria. Of course it did.

A brand-new ideological view of “gender identity” has appeared, never before seen in history. It holds that the only difference between men and women is self-declared “gender identity”. It insists, regardless of their biological sex, that gender non-conforming people are the gender they say they are. It also insists that it is hate speech to even suggest that no one ever believed these ideas before.

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Biological sex has real-world implications, in medicine, women’s sports, women’s prisons, statistical reporting, criminology, sexual attraction and in many other areas. Sex remains a protected characteristic in human rights law, despite the best efforts of some trans rights activists to change

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What we need is more shouty honest tell it like it is guys, right?*

Bernie Sanders’s performance in the last debate before Super Tuesday was a bellowing, boorish mess. The Vermont senator’s signature response when challenged was to pump up the volume, as though persuasiveness were measured in decibels. It was particularly excruciating to watch Pete Buttigieg attempt to inject some facts and reason into the proceedings, only to be interrupted again and again by Sanders’s shouting.

When I expressed dismay to a Democratic friend, he assured me it was just “Bernie being Bernie.” At least Sanders, the argument goes, speaks his mind. He is not scripted. He is true to himself. He may not play

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There’s something hilarious (however depressing) about people announcing some stale wrong pejorative stereotype as if they’d discovered it themselves from their own personal experience and detached observation.

https://twitter.com/BenjaminABoyce/status/1232899704117088258

Aw how sweet – the old he thinks/she feels insult, offered with shy sincerity as if no one had ever said it before.

https://twitter.com/LaraAdamsMille1/status/1233046347391086595 https://twitter.com/SiouxsieAHF/status/1233075262675353602 https://twitter.com/NoToMisogyny/status/1233030502413717510

He’s the brains she’s the feefees. Never heard that before.… Read the rest

Is Pence a good choice to lead the US response to the new virus?

“Mike is not a czar,” Trump said. “I don’t view Mike as a czar.”

Pence is not a public health expert, either. Instead, as governor of Indiana, he slashed public health spending and delayed the introduction of needle exchanges, which led to the state’s worst outbreak of HIV.

So he’s not just not a good choice, he’s a specifically bad choice, one with a record of fucking up government response to a contagious disease. Swell.

Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves, who conducted the research linking the Indiana HIV outbreak to Pence’s policies, tweeted that the decision “speaks to a lack of seriousness by the White House.”

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