How does this work in actual life?

Requiring women to call men women “is justified to avoid harassment” of men who call themselves women. The harassment of women who are just women, and who just are women, comes in a very distant second to the harassment of men who say they are women.

This is a judge telling women we have to call men women if the men claim they are women. Not should, not could if we want to be especially kind, but have to.

It feels very churchy, very 16th century churchy, very swear the oath or we light the fires.… Read the rest

It seems Trump is not in a good mood.

Deeply aggrieved by the proceedings and mindful of how they will stain his legacy, Trump spent the 24 hours before the vote on the phone with top officials and Republican lawmakers, according to multiple people familiar with his calls, expressing outrage at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and looking ahead to what his trial in the Senate will look like.

As he watched conservative pundits on television bolster his views, Trump called for religious intervention.

“Send god to help!”

“This shoild never happen to another President again,” he wrote, the misspelling of “should” hardly masking his outrage. “Say a prayer!”

Ok. “Dear god, please let Trump be impeached and convicted, and … Read the rest

Virginia Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger issued a fine statement:

“As a former federal agent and CIA officer, I have spent my professional career in search of facts and evidence—the facts and evidence necessary to uphold the rule of law and protect our national security. Today, I am driven by facts and evidence to protect the integrity of our democracy.

“This week, the House of Representatives will vote on two articles of impeachment. In advance of casting my vote, I have read the articles and studied the evidence—including the majority and minority reports, deposition transcripts, and public testimony.

“The facts are not in dispute; witnesses, including those called by both parties, affirm these facts. The President has abused his power by

Reading The Letter again. Much of it is reworked by the grownups in an attempt to disguise quite how infantile and incapable Trumpbaby is, but he pops up like a jack in the box despite them. Like here:

President Zelensky has repeatedly declared that I did nothing wrong, and that there was No Pressure. 

The grownups would not have said No Pressure. The grownups know that we don’t use capital letters for emphasis in formal writing.

You are unwilling and unable to accept the verdict issued at the ballot box during the great Election of 2016.

The great Election of 2016? What was so great about it? Given the whole Russian interference problem, and the discrepancy between the popular vote … Read the rest

They are BOYS’ socks, dammit. They are masculine socks. They are woven from the finest grass-fed testosterone. They are in BOY COLORS.

They are in STRONG COLORS. Not a pastel among them. Those are MANLY colors. Girls can’t wear colors like that, they can’t carry the weight.

Besides, they have dinosaurs on them. Duh. Girls can’t wear dinosaur socks! What rock do you live under? Girls can wear flower socks, birdy socks, baby bunny socks – not dinosaur socks. Only boys can wear dinosaur socks, because boys can stand up to dinosaurs but girls get squashed by them.

Girls’ socks:

Boys’ socks:

I hope we’ve got all that clear now.… Read the rest

Trump has sent an idiotic “letter” to Speaker Pelosi, to underline how stupid and uncomprehending he really is.

Over six pages, on White House letterhead, the president piles adjectives like cords of wood, fires rhetorical fusillades in all directions and invokes the judgement of the American people, the nation’s founding fathers and history itself.

As if we hadn’t been judging him all along. He’s given us bales of evidence, and we’ve made our judgement: he’s a disaster in almost every category one can think of. (Possible exceptions: he’s probably not a literal pollutant; he hasn’t so far burned down the White House.)

Here are five choice lines from a president whose capacity for the extraordinary and unprecedented is ever-expanding.

Of course he does.

The Trump administration has said it does not consider the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 to be a genocide, contradicting a unanimous vote by the US Senate.

That is, Trump has, and his pathetic slaves are echoing him.

The historic vote last week incensed Turkey, which has always denied that the killings amounted to a genocide.

Turkey’s foreign ministry on Friday summoned the US ambassador to express its anger over the vote, accusing the US of “politicising history”.

Because saying it was a genocide is political while saying it wasn’t is totally not political.

There is general agreement that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died when the Ottoman Turks deported them en masse from

I’m not seeing the source of the puzzlement.

There are an enormous number of young US women in their mid 20s to mid 30s who don’t appear to be prioritizing motherhood. Many of their parents have assets while many of them do not. No massive transfer is seen.

I find the lack of major discussion on this biologically puzzling.

— Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein) December 16, 2019

In other words, some women are not having children. And?

Having children is like almost everything else (the exceptions being things like breathing, drinking, eating): some people like it and some don’t; some people want to and some don’t. Isn’t that fairly easy to understand?

Until extremely recently this fact (if I’m right that … Read the rest

It was all a mistake about the proletariat and the means of production and all that. It turns out it’s trans people who are the true proletariat and cis people who live off their exploited labor.

Transition is work. Transition is the labour that continually gives birth to gender, that produces liveably gendered lives under intolerable conditions. And the workplace of gender, like any workplace, cannot be borne except through self-abnegation, exhaustion, lies, glimpses of satisfaction strung out along the working week, alienation, and endless work.

I’m not clear on where we go to buy the gender that they produce with the labour of transition, but I’m deeply sympathetic about the endless work. (Most of that work is shouting … Read the rest

I did an errand this afternoon and then did some urban exploring after – not real exploring, but walking around places I don’t get to every day, so close enough. I walked along the canal in Fremont then under the beautiful Fremont Bridge.

A minute after I crossed under it the bell rang that means it’s about to go up, so I stopped to watch because it’s always fun to watch a bridge go up from below, especially a deep blue one with orange trim. Then I got to watch the Rachel Carson chug through.

Then I walked on a hundred yards or so to under the Aurora Bridge to look up at the engineering marvel.

Exploring is good, even … Read the rest

Take his wisdom to heart.

Lindsey Graham: "All I ask of the Senate is to take your oath, listen to the evidence in some way that will withstand historical scrutiny, that you'll have a record that will justify any decision you make…that whatever decision was made be based on evidence and the law." pic.twitter.com/QynbehB8Be

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 16, 2019

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by iknklast on Another scourge of White Feminism.

I definitely understand the “not wanting to start from zero” argument, because I face it so much myself in discussing global warming. I really don’t want to have to present the basics of the evidence over and over to people who have made up their mind. But I have to. The problem is, that takes time from actually doing what needs to be done, so it feels like we never progress.

I feel the same way about women’s issues. Even in groups of women, I sometimes have to start from zero to say, yes, there are women out there who do not make what their male counterparts make, … Read the rest

So Rudy the Gee has artlessly admitted – to The New Yorker, so not at all conspicuously or anything – that yes he needed to get Marie Yovanovitch out of the way of his cunning plan.

Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney to President Trump, has admitted that he saw former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch as an obstacle in his plan to find dirt on his client’s potential rival—former Vice President Joe Biden—in advance of the 2020 election, he said in an interview with The New Yorker. “I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way,” Giuliani is reported to have said, telling the magazine that he compiled a dossier on the former VP and his

Double back-flip with walnuts:

The chief executive of Hallmark Cards has apologised for its decision to withdraw television advertisements featuring same-sex couples.

The company’s cable network pulled the ads for wedding registry and planning site Zola under pressure from the conservative group One Million Moms.

The decision drew criticism on social media and calls for a boycott.

Hallmark said it would reinstate the adverts and attempt to re-establish its partnership with Zola.

Ok well next time just skip the part about doing what conservative groups tell you to do, especially ones that call themselves “moms” instead of “mothers” as if we were all six. No but seriously, just ignore people who whine about same-sex marriage. We’re past that.

The

Another one of those “being a man who identifies as a woman is such an excellent screen for misogyny” types:

That’s longstanding Pharyngula commenter abbeycadabra, who joined the populous but thin roster at Freethought Blogs a few days ago. That photo on the blog is captioned:

Abbey St. Brendan is five or six kinds of artist, maybe one kind of successful at it, a long-time FtB reader and grizzled veteran of the deadly TERF wars.

The opening of Cadabra’s hello world post:

Hi folks! I reckon most of you who might look at this post at least have seen my handle around, probably complaining bitterly at someone who is being a dicknostril, especially about trans issues. The plan here is

Apparently this Louis Staples guy went on shit-tweeting about Helen Lewis for hours after his first barrage, and then – uh oh – must have had a tap on the shoulder from a higher up at the Independent (where he is a columnist).

That was so wrong of me. I’m going to reflect on this and try to be better next time – I’m really sorry

[2/2]

— Louis Staples (@LouisStaples) December 15, 2019

Do we believe he’s sincere? No.

He plans to reflect on “this.” How much reflection does it take? How much does it take to grasp the complicated and subtle point that you don’t spend six hours shit-tweeting lies about people, and that a man doing … Read the rest

That whole piece about Casablanca by Meredith Hindley is interesting.

With few Americans knowing Casablanca was a city in French Morocco — let alone how to find it on a map — the studio banked on audiences’ love of wartime intrigue, along with the star power of Bogart and castmates Claude Rains and Paul Henreid, to sell the film.

But on November 8, reports began to trickle in that the Americans and British had launched Operation TORCH with the goal of seizing Algeria and French Morocco from Vichy France. The assault was a new phase in the war against Nazi Germany, one designed to help the Soviets, who fought a bloody battle against the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Over

Have just learned, chatting on Twitter, that a friend has never seen Casablanca. The tragedy of it!

Nearly all the bit players in that scene are refugees from the Nazis.

Casablanca made its debut two-and-half years after Germany marched into France, triggering a massive refugee exodus. As the Nazis advanced, the population of France fled south, hoping to avoid being swallowed up by Hitler’s burgeoning empire. Hungarians, Poles, Russians, Austrians, and Spanish Republicans who had fled their homelands to seek sanctuary in France before the war, once again found themselves on the run. Thousands would end up in Casablanca.

In July of 1940, more than two hundred ships arrived off the coast of Casablanca, the largest port in