There’s this idea that the truth is “exclusionary.”

Of course, that’s true, in a sense. Right answers exclude wrong ones; truth excludes falsehood. But it’s not true in the political sense of “exclusionary,” but many people think it is true. (Thus they exclude the claim that it’s false. Bigots!)

There’s a new comet in the sky of Facebook, called This Angry Inclusionist Enby Lesbian. Lets call him Taiel for short. Taiel explains:

You cannot exclude non-binary folks from identifying with whatever labels we choose.

That strikes me as a very odd way of putting it, but it fits with the overall interpretation of “exclusion” that has become fashionable.

Here’s the thing: it’s not “exclusion” the way saying “you can’t … Read the rest

Oh god. More of that cis privilege we rejoice in:

A schoolgirl in Kenya has taken her own life after allegedly being shamed in class for having her period and staining her uniform.

The 14-year-old’s mother said her daughter hanged herself after being humiliated by a teacher, Kenyan media reported.

Kenya passed a law a couple of years ago making sanitary pads free in schools, but not all schools have implemented it.

The girl’s mother said a teacher had called her “dirty” for soiling her uniform and ordered her to leave the class in Kabiangek, west of the capital Nairobi, last Friday.

“She had nothing to use as a pad. When the blood stained her clothes, she was told

C. S. Lewis once wrote a short story [pdf] hinting at how he viewed women. It’s a fantasy, in which an Oxford academic (which Lewis was) is visited by a former student – male of course – and, to the narrator’s annoyance, a woman the student is engaged to. Suddenly everything goes queer, and the narrator finds himself in an unfamiliar landscape.

My first idea was that something had gone wrong with my eyes. I was not in darkness, nor even in twilight, but everything seemed curiously blurred. There was a sort of daylight, but when I looked up I didn’t see anything that I could very confidently call a sky. It might, just possibly, be the sky of a

Now there’s a heartwarming story:

The Royal National Lifeboat Institute has been forced to defend its work saving lives overseas after an article on the Mail Online sparked an angry backlash on social media.

The story highlighted how the charity – famed for its distinctive orange lifeboats manned by volunteers – spends £3.3m a year on projects in Tanzania and Bangladesh yet has been forced to cut around 100 jobs in the UK.

And that “sparked a backlash” because…it’s so wrong to save the lives of people in Tanzania and Bangladesh? They really want to go there?

People need to get inoculated against trumpbrain, immediately. Infection with trumpbrain kills your compassion stone dead and you can never … Read the rest

Out of control:

The nation’s top intelligence official is illegally withholding a whistleblower complaint, possibly to protect President Donald Trump or senior White House officials, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff alleged Friday.

Schiff issued a subpoena for the complaint, accusing acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire of taking extraordinary steps to withhold the complaint from Congress, even after the intel community’s inspector general characterized the complaint as credible and of “urgent concern.”

They’re not allowed to do that.

Schiff indicated that he learned the matter involved “potentially privileged communications by persons outside the Intelligence Community,” raising the specter that it is “being withheld to protect the President or other Administration officials.” In addition, Schiff slammed Maguire for

The rapey bros are circling the wagons.

Donnie TwoScoops:

Now the Radical Left Democrats and their Partner, the LameStream Media, are after Brett Kavanaugh again, talking loudly of their favorite word, impeachment. He is an innocent man who has been treated HORRIBLY. Such lies about him. They want to scare him into turning Liberal!

Naturally a rapist says another rapist is “an innocent man” – the rapist thinks he’s entitled to rape, and that women who object are lying whores who should be set on fire.

Brett Kavanaugh should start suing people for libel, or the Justice Department should come to his rescue. The lies being told about him are unbelievable. False Accusations without recrimination. When does it stop?

Oh look, what do you know. Ronan Farrow an hour ago:

Two @nytimes reporters, @rpogrebin and @katekelly, spent months independently reporting out Deborah Ramirez’s allegation against Brett Kavanaugh and found it credible—and documented another serious claim of misconduct with an eyewitness

Raw Story:

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is facing a new allegation of sexual misconduct — that the FBI reportedly knew about, but did not investigate.

The new allegation was discovered during a 10-month investigation by New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly.

“During the winter of her freshman year, a drunken dormitory party unsettled her deeply. [Deborah Ramirez] and some classmates had been drinking heavily when, she says, a freshman named Brett Kavanaugh pulled

Bezos is a bajillionaire, and part-time workers at Whole Foods are having losing their health insurance. Hey that’s capitalism! Bajillionaires don’t get their bajillions by spending any percentage of said bajillions on their workers if they can possibly help it. But this is great, it teaches workers not to be dependent – on either the state or the employer – but to go out there and build their own healthcare out of the trees they cut down on their homesteaded farm, as our grandparents did.

(Remember that news item the other day about Charles Koch spending millions of his precious stash to keep workers from getting better pay or benefits, so that they wouldn’t be dependent? Yeah. That.)

Amazon.com Inc.

Jarvis Dupont at the American Spectator (kind of a National Review with jokes?) is also impressed that Sam Smith is now drum roll a person of plural.

This is of course the most amazingly positive news, and a fantastic leap forward for genderqueer progressiveness. Someone as famous as Sam [OK. Have to admit I’m still struggling here, was he on American Idol?] coming out as non-binary will inspire anyone else out there who may have heard of them and is battling under the weight of their own inflated ego, to embrace their narcissism as if it were a sexual orientation. After all if we are unable to love ourselves, how can we be expected to be able to tell everyone

I don’t think you can sue people for telling a true story.

Edward Dickinson Tayloe II is is the descendant of a “First Family of Virginia,” a euphemistic way of saying white, rich, socially prominent before the American Revolution and—through the Civil War—slaveholding.

The Tayloes’ legacy as one of the largest slaveowning families in the state is well-documented. Amidst nearly 30,000 historical papers donated to the Virginia Historical Society by the family itself are plantation ledgers detailing the expansion of the Tayloes’ enslaved work force over the 19th century, an evidentiary accounting of how the exploitation of free black labor allowed the family to amass wealth, land, and political power.

Which they passed down through the generations, which is … Read the rest

I think “Rachel” McKinnon may not quite understand the motivations here.

Transphobes are obsessed with me. They obsessively monitor everything I say and do. They lie about what I say. And they read stuff that isn’t there into what I do say.

Many feminists do take an interest in McKinnon; I do for one. I do check out his tweets sometimes – not daily or every other day, but still fairly often. But there are reasons for that, reasons that have to do not with how awesome he is or what magical powers he has, but with what a remarkably horrible person he is. We track him the way NOAA tracks hurricanes. We don’t need any Sharpie to draw additional … Read the rest

There’s an organization (or perhaps a person) called Gender Inclusive Schools. It has a Facebook page of the same name. I saw people passing around a post from last June:

“Biological sex” is a myth and
the term has no place in the classroom.
We need to be honest with students and teach them about the expansive and variable genders of people who exist in their communities.

People are leaving comments and Gender Inclusive Schools is hiding them all, calling them ignorant and in need of adapting their assumptions to new understandings. All this made me curious about what exactly this organization (or person) is and whether it has any clout and if so how much, and … Read the rest

Oh good lord will people ever get a grip?

Sam Smith, who, I read, is a celebrated singer:

Today is a good day so here goes. I’ve decided I am changing my pronouns to THEY/THEM ❤ after a lifetime of being at war with my gender I’ve decided to embrace myself for who I am, inside and out…

And who he am is “they/them.” Cue the trumpet fanfare!

Or to put it another way, who gives a fuck?

The “politics” of self-obsession is not a pretty sight. Embrace yourself all you like, but don’t be telling us about it!

But he does. He does tell us about it.

I’m so excited and privileged to be surrounded by people

Not a smart shopper.

At a mid-August fundraiser in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Ivanka Trump was asked to name the personality traits she inherited most from her parents.

Without much of a pause, Trump told the crowd of roughly 120 high-end donors that her mother gave her an example of how to be a powerful, successful woman.

Uh, no. Her mother was married to Donald Trump. Not powerful, not successful.

And her father? He passed onto her his moral compass, she said, according to two event attendees.

His…………

What could he possibly have shown her? What could it be, that she mistook for a “moral compass”?

Ivanka Trump‘s comment about the traits she inherited from her father echoed a similar

Arwa Mahdawi at the Guardian raises the burning question of pronouns.

Little attention used to be paid to pronouns. In recent years, however, they have become a cornerstone of the culture wars.

It’s all been such a mistake. It should have been prepositions that became a cornerstone of the culture wars. We could argue over whether “in” is patriarchal, whether “with” is heteronormative, whether “for” is socialist.

Pronoun preferences are a favourite joke among unimaginative reactionaries who use them as proof that “snowflake millennials” just want to feel special.

Meaning, people who make pronouns a cornerstone of the culture wars are imaginative? I don’t see it, myself. I think the pronoun wars are peculiarly dull and empty, and not … Read the rest

That’s no good.

A Republican state lawmaker from Texas has caused outcry for tweeting “My AR is ready for you Robert Francis” after Democratic presidential candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke pledged to ban and confiscate AR-15 military-style rifles.

That’s no good. People shouldn’t have military weapons if they’re not in the military, people shouldn’t threaten to kill people who want laws saying we can’t have military weapons if we’re not in the military. That’s no good at all.

Within hours, Twitter took down Briscoe Cain’s post, which O’Rourke’s campaign labeled a “death threat”. “It violates our rules for threats of violence,” a company spokesperson said late Thursday night.

…

Earlier, Cain, a 34-year-old “conservative Republican” lawyer who represents a