Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Freedom freedom freedom

    Well, if you make a rabid Fox News host the Secretary of Defense, this is what you get.

    A major flu outbreak has sickened nearly 160 troops at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas less than two months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that U.S. troops would no longer be required to be vaccinated for the flu, defense officials said.

    The outbreak at the base in San Antonio raced through an Air Force Basic Military Training wing, where new recruits sleep on bunk beds in open bays and share meals at large communal tables.

    …

    In the weeks since Mr. Hegseth’s vaccine policy took effect on April 21, only about 40 percent of Air Force trainees have opted to take the vaccine, which had previously been mandatory, an Air Force official said.

    In the aftermath of the outbreak, the Air Force issued an exception to the voluntary vaccine policy, requiring that all recruits at Lackland get flu shots — part of a broader effort to stem the virus’s spread.

    Mr. Hegseth cast his decision to make the flu vaccine optional as a matter of religious freedom and medical autonomy.

    Flu vaccines of course have nothing whatever to do with religion and so have nothing to do with religious freedom. Quack notions about vaccination are not “religious” except in the sense that both rely on just making shit up. People shouldn’t have “medical autonomy” because people don’t have “disease autonomy” or “death autonomy” or “contagion autonomy.”

    “Under the disastrous Biden administration, this Pentagon waged an unrelenting war on our warriors on many fronts, including when it came to denying them simple medical autonomy and the freedom to express their religious convictions,” he said in a video announcing his decision in April.

    Stupid putz. Religion is wholly irrelevant to disease control. It doesn’t matter what your religious convictions are when it’s a question of spreading a dangerous illness instead of getting vaccinated to prevent spreading illness. If Baby Jesus doesn’t want us to prevent the spread of disease he can go join Hegseth in the Asylum for Religious Lunatics.

  • Told to reopen the cases

    The grooming gangs horror goes on and on.

    Earlier this week, the National Crime Agency (NCA) announced that the first set of closed “grooming gang” cases, where viable lines of inquiry may have been missed, have been referred back to police from eight force areas.

    Those forces have been told to reopen the cases and consider what further investigation is needed.

    Why? Because apparently the police too swiftly and easily closed the cases on account of how hey these are working class girls so they must be lying because they’re racists.

    Operation Beaconport was launched last year in response to Baroness Casey’s recommendations into group-based sexual exploitation, otherwise known as “grooming gangs”.

    As part of this, the NCA asked all police forces in England and Wales to examine 15 years’ worth of records, and to identify and refer cases of group-based child sexual abuse and exploitation that were reported to police in that time, involved two or more suspects, and where a decision was made by police or the CPS to take no further action.

    …

    Initial reviews have indicated that potential lines of inquiry in some cases had been missed due to “human error.”

    Rape Crisis England & Wales welcomes this week’s announcement. We want justice for survivors.

    However, Casey’s findings were very clear: too many victims and survivors were not listened to, not believed, and not supported in the way they should be. Many were further traumatised by a criminal justice system that was meant to protect them. This must not be repeated, and police must learn from past mistakes, especially where police-initiated contact may be involved.

    Why were they not listened to, not believed, not supported? Because class, and immigration, and Islam. These nasty slutty girls must be racists and Islamophobes, so into the dead file their reports go.

  • Nobody even

    Trump wallowing in the sewer again.

    It’s real. I checked.

  • Houris

    I’ve gone down a bit of a rabbit hole, looking into the bilge about the afterlife according to Islam – except that it’s not the afterlife, it’s the afterlife for men. But it doesn’t say so. It just takes it for granted.

    You know the drill. 70 virgins blah blah. But what does that mean? Do women get 70 virgins?

    What can I possibly mean by asking that? What women?

    Women are so trivial and non-existent that it’s not even specified that the 70 virgins are female virgins that men get to fuck all day every day for eternity, let alone that there’s no parallel treat for women, or awareness that women wouldn’t want it if there were. Men are people and get decorative sex robots for eternity; women don’t exist so they don’t need any decorative sex robots, and anyway it would be an outrage to have male decorative sex robots – men are important!

    So who even are these virgins? And how are they virgins when the men are fucking them all day every day? Why is it so important and thrilling that the men get 70 virgins when the virgins won’t be virgins any more after the first 20 seconds or so? Except that’s never said, so do the virgins just re-virginize every 20 seconds or so?

    And what are women doing while all this is going on? Making snacks for the exhausted virgins-havers?

    It’s all very…peculiar.

  • Guest post: The false hope

    Originally a comment by Artymorty on It’s complex blah blah blah.

    For the purposes of trans, the definitions of man and woman are incredibly straightforward:

    A woman is the biological category of human that a heterosexual man is sexually aroused by. A man is the biological category of human that a heterosexual man is sexually averse to.

    A transwoman insists he is a woman because he wants his body to arouse heterosexual males (either himself in the case of AGPs, or other men in the case of gays who “go trans”).

    A transman insists she is a man because she does not want her body to be in the category that heterosexual males are aroused by. Either directly, because male sexual attention makes her uncomfortable, or indirectly, because she wants to socialize in the company of men and women without the burden of sexual objectification interfering with her social standing — she wants to be a “bro”, plain and simple.

    The entire trans phenomenon rests on the innate human ability to tell the sexes apart. It does the exact opposite of demonstrating that the boundaries between the sexes are complex. It just gives people the false hope that lots of expensive, experimental drugs and surgeries can fool other people’s innate sex detectors. They can’t, of course. Not for very long. Even the best-masked transwomen and transmen let slip their true sex after a little bit of in-person company. And certainly in intimate company, you can tell. In fact, in many jurisdictions it’s the law that you *have* to tell: in places like the UK and California, despite their rah-rah trans nonsense, you can still be charged as a sex offender if you misrepresent your sex to someone before having sex with them.

  • He just can’t catch a break

    Mary Trump is annoying the uncle from hell.

    Trump settled a $100 million lawsuit against his niece, Mary Trump, over accusations that she leaked information to The New York Times for an investigation into his finances.

    Mary Trump has garnered attention for her vocal critiques of her estranged uncle’s politics and administration and is a rare member of the Trump family to speak out against the president. The settlement ends one of the most personal legal battles in the president’s orbit, stemming from Mary Trump’s role in providing family tax documents to The New York Times.

    …

    “The parties are pleased to report they have reached a settlement and anticipate being able to stipulate to the dismissal of this action with prejudice in the ensuing weeks, following completion of certain conditions precedent,” the letter reads.

    I hope she humiliated him.

  • It’s complex blah blah blah

    Piffle.

    It’s easy to see what they’re doing here. They’re deploying the fact that all women are complex, because humans are complex, to pretend that the word itself is complex in the same way. It’s not.

    By the same token the definition of “oak tree” is not particularly complex, but oak trees themselves are complex. This simple comparison could be used for many many many specific examples.

    The British Museum is complex, but locating it on a map is not.

    The Great Wall of China is complex, but defining it is not.

    Oceans are complex, but a basic definition of the word is not.

    It should be a labeled fallacy of some kind to pretend that defining a word is like writing a biography or history or scientific paper about the word being defined.

  • Guest post: No not those, the other ones

    Originally a comment by What a Maroon on Much expert.

    “All the rights that a woman has.”

    Let’s see – the right to be paid 20% less than men.

    The right to be overlooked for promotions.

    The right to be ignored.

    The right to have men claim their good ideas.

    The right to be raped.

    The right to be forced to carry a pregnancy to term against their will, even at the risk of permanent injury or death.

    The right in some countries to be forced to wear a burqa.

    The right in some countries to be denied an education.

    The right in some countries to be allowed outside the house only in the presence of a male relative.

    So many rights they’re being denied.

  • Speaking of pressure groups…

    Liar liar liar liar.

    The effort is to ban men from the women’s pond. There are three ponds: one for men, one mixed, one for women. If the one for women stops being for women then men get all three ponds and women get zero.

  • In an expletive-laden rant

    Trump making us all proud.

    Trump insisted on Wednesday that the United States was not in effect paying Iran to agree to the recently negotiated peace agreement, and he angrily proclaimed that his deal was better than the one former President Barack Obama signed with Tehran in 2015.

    …

    In an expletive-laden rant on Wednesday, Mr. Trump repeated his claim that Mr. Obama had given Iran “$1.7 billion in cash,” and then he derided his predecessor.

    It’s always nice to see him swearing a blue streak when talking to journalists at the Group of 7 summit.

    “And you know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama, and they said, ‘He’s a stupid son of a bitch,’” Mr. Trump said in comments that indicated how determined he is to be seen as a superior negotiator to Mr. Obama.

    But not as a reasonable sensible thoughtful adult human being.

    Few issues animate Mr. Trump and other critics of the Obama-era deal as much as the U.S. shipment to Tehran of $1.7 billion in cash a few months after that nuclear deal was agreed upon. That payment was a debt owed to Iran, which bought military equipment from the United States that it never received.

    Debt, gift, whatever – Obama did it and Obama is more intelligent than he is therefore he is an epithet.

  • Much expert

    Yes sir, whatever you say sir, I’m sure you’re correct sir.

    Trans women are not men in dresses, he says very earnestly, somberly nodding his head along with his own assertions.

    “They’re certainly not predatory men,” he adds firmly.

    How the fuck would you know that, sir? How would you, for instance, know that no predatory men at all call themselves trans women? How could you know that? How could it be knowable?

    It couldn’t. You can’t know that. You can’t see into the minds of every single man on the planet who claims to be trans.

    “A trans woman is a woman, with all of the rights that a woman has,” he explains. Aha now we get to it. The point is, men who claim to be women get to claim all of the rights that a woman has, thus removing them from actual women.

    He then expresses weird naive shock-horror that some people don’t believe his dogma. Be patient with us, sir. Keep in mind that we have thought we knew that men are not women for a very long time now.

    UN experts just aren’t what they used to be.

  • Always put the T first

    Always reverse victim and offender on this subject.

    A judge ruled Tuesday that transgender people won’t face criminal charges for using Idaho public restrooms that match their gender identities.

    Aka public restrooms reserved for the sex they are not. Idaho men won’t face criminal charges for using women’s public restrooms, so women in Idaho will just have to fend for themselves, sorry laydeeez.

    “This ruling will allow transgender people throughout Idaho to find and use a public restroom,” Lambda Legal lawyer Kell Olson said in a statement Tuesday, “without the fear of arrest looming over them, while we continue the longer fight to permanently defeat this discriminatory law in court.”

    And it may prevent women throughout Idaho finding and using a public restroom that doesn’t have a man or two in it.

    People think they’re being KiNd, but they’re blithely ignoring the unkindness to women.

  • “Medical” treatments

    So now hospitals are being ordered to tamper with minors’ puberties.

    The Colorado Supreme Court has ordered Colorado’s largest provider of gender-affirming care for young people to resume medical treatments like puberty blockers and hormone therapy despite threats that providing the care could lead to losing federal funding.

    Puberty blockers are not medical treatments! Neither is “hormone therapy” if that means giving “young people” aka minors opposite-sex hormones in order to make them look more like the opposite sex.

    Such interventions may be psychological treatments in some sense – they may make the recipients feel more content or “validated” or similar. They may also or instead make them feel worse. But either way they’re not medical. Thinking you’re the other sex isn’t a medical issue.

    Children’s Hospital Colorado suspended medical treatments for transgender patients under 18 in January after it said the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services opened an investigation into its treatments following a series of clashes between President Donald Trump’s administration and advocates over transgender health care for children.

    But you see this is the problem – there’s no such thing as “transgender health care.” Trying to change people’s sex is not health care. It’s tampering.

    It may make some people happier. It may be justifiable for that reason. But it’s still not health care, let alone medical care. You kind of have to bite that bullet.

    Four transgender girls, ranging from age 10 to 17, sued the hospital, through their parents, alleging that the hospital was violating the state’s antidiscrimination law by refusing to provide them treatment both because of their gender identity and their disability, gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is the distress caused when someone’s gender expression doesn’t match their sex assigned at birth.

    They say that so solemnly, as if it’s true and well established as true.

    People can have all kinds of distress about various things about themselves; that doesn’t mean distress about the self is a medical issue.

    The girls said they feared not being able to get medication and monitoring to prevent them from undergoing puberty and developing male traits. And they cited mental health fallout, including depression and suicidal ideation.

    They’re not girls though. You said so yourself: they’re “transgender girls”. Also, think about the mental health fallout of tampering with people’s puberties when the people later regret the whole thing.

    It’s infuriating to see how entrenched this bullshit has become.

  • Still looking

    Euan Weddell blithely telling the world he’s not a woman, without even realizing he’s doing it.

    Also…I can’t help noticing the “still looking” part. Gee I wonder why that might be.

  • Talk about pride

    Well you have to admit, it doesn’t get much classier.

    A transgender woman who masturbated in front of shocked staff at a hospital has been locked up.

    See you’re not supposed to do it in hospitals or in front of adults. You’re supposed to do it on public transportation when there’s a little girl sitting opposite you.

    Former soldier Paula Stanton, aged 62, of Severn Avenue, Barry committed the sex act at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff.

    The Falklands War veteran had been taken there by ambulance for a mental health assessment over concerns over a threat to self-harm.

    Aha. Foolproof way to get yourself into a hospital and in the presence of staff.

    Lewis Ball, prosecuting, said: “The defendant put her hands down her leggings to the groin area. Staff could see that she had her penis in her hand and that her hand was moving up and down. This was happening on and off. He made eye contact with one nurse while he was doing it.”

    Winky winky.

  • Questioned by agents

    Trump is sending the Feds to pester people he doesn’t like.

    Federal agents have questioned friends and associates of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and his wife, Mr. Newsom said on Monday in a video in which he accused President Trump of using the Justice Department to punish a political enemy.

    The full scope of any investigation remains unclear. But Mr. Newsom’s aides say part of the federal investigation appears to focus on his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom. Former employees of the governor and people affiliated with his wife’s nonprofit groups are among those who have been questioned by agents, according to the governor’s office.

    A person familiar with the matter confirmed that multiple federal investigations were underway related to the governor, including one looking at his wife’s finances. But the person disputed Mr. Newsom’s assertion that the investigations were politically motivated, and said they had been initiated by federal law enforcement officials in California, not launched by officials in Washington.

    Pure coincidence, eh?

    I’m skeptical.

    Ms. Siebel Newsom, who calls herself California’s first partner, is a documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on the social impacts of sexism. She founded a nonprofit organization called the Representation Project that advocates for gender equity, in part by developing educational materials based on Ms. Siebel Newsom’s documentaries.

    Oh well no wonder MAGA is trying to stich her up. Gender equity!! It’s an outrage!!!

    Mr. Newsom, in his video address, mentioned that Mr. Trump had called for his arrest last year and he said he was proud to join the “hit list” of people standing up to the president. Among the wide range of Democrats who[m] Mr. Trump has aggressively targeted is Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat from Arizona, for saying that members of the military should not follow illegal orders from the president. Mr. Kelly is also a potential 2028 presidential candidate in a Democratic primary.

    So people are supposed to keep quiet about illegal orders from the president?

    I think not.

  • Not just a piece of cloth

    Maryam Namazie:

    The hijab is not simply a piece of cloth. It is one visible expression of a wider system through which women’s bodies become sites of authority, discipline and control.

    In this episode of Bread and Roses TV, Maryam Namazie and Fariborz Pooya ask why women’s bodies have become such a public issue. Why are women made responsible for honour, morality, religion, culture and national identity? Why are women expected to carry society on their shoulders?

    From compulsory hijab and child veiling to purity culture, abortion bans and sex apartheid, the programme examines how control is presented as protection, obedience as virtue and submission as choice. Looking at examples from Iran and Afghanistan, including the resistance of women confronting both the Islamic regime of Iran and the Taliban, it explores what interests are served when women are denied authority over their own lives. It also examines how attempts to regulate and control women are not confined to religious power, but can also be found within sections of the opposition, from the Mujahedin and monarchists to parts of the Left.

    Drawing on the work of Jo Spence and the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, the programme argues that the struggle over hijab is not fundamentally about a piece of cloth. It is about power. It is about who owns women’s bodies.

  • Feminist conference

    I would go to this if I were on that side of the planet.

  • Transforming the White House grounds

    Call me an elitist now and get it over with, because I am very extremely totally elitist about this thing of holding a trashy fight punch hit contest in the front yard of the White House. It’s intentionally trashy, it’s rub our noses in it trashy, it’s suck it up libtards trashy. The trashier the better in Trumpthink. Everything he touches turns to trash.

    Trump, who turned 80 today, will spend this evening hosting an Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the South Lawn of the White House. A mass media spectacle months in the making, it has transformed the White House grounds in ways that presidential historians say are unprecedented.

    Late last month, construction began on the towering superstructure known as the “Claw” that now sits complete on the South Lawn, taller than the White House itself. White House staff members were told to work from home on Friday while the U.F.C. put finishing touches on the production, which it and its affiliates have spent more than $60 million to put on. Fighters are expected to be filmed walking through the Oval Office, out onto the lawn and into the claw, where some 4,000 people will be waiting to watch a total of seven fights.

    It’s vulgar vulgar vulgar, and that’s why they’re doing it.

    Much of the White House real estate has been given over to the U.F.C. for this. A crew of motocross stunt riders performed backflips on the South Lawn on Saturday. Another place to watch the fight was set up on the Ellipse, just beyond the White House gates. That space can hold more than 75,000 people.

    This fight night is a marketeering extravaganza: The octagonal cage for the fights is plastered with the names of sponsors who paid for their brands to appear with the ultimate backdrop. It’s heavy on crypto and light beer.

    Ah yes light beer. On diets are they?

    Maybe there will be a miracle.

    The U.F.C. event on the White House’s South Lawn faces the threat of severe weather on Sunday evening. Bob Oravec, a meteorologist at the Weather Prediction Center, part of the National Weather Service, said storms were expected across much of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, including Washington, D.C., especially between 6 and 9 p.m., with damaging winds, lightning and heavy rain possible. Organizers have said lightning would be the main concern for the event, which is set to begin at 8 p.m.

    Send that lighting bolt right to the “Claw”.

  • Unrepentant assault

    I for one prefer the people who don’t defend “protest” that includes smashing someone’s spine with a sledgehammer.

    Premeditated destruction of property on a grand scale. Unrepentant assault against an officer of the law, taking a literal sledgehammer to the back of a police officer resulting in spinal injury & ongoing occupational health & psychological trauma, these are not acts that politicians should be condoning but condemning. Instead you are championing their violent conduct.

    Please don’t kid yourself, even as Leader of the Green Party, that you can act as a law unto yourself. Whether council tax liability or convictions for perpetrators of gratuitous harm, the law does apply to all citizens equally.

    Your continued betrayal & transgression of Green Party core values is concerning – as is your advocacy of violent tactics.

    His dim-wittedness is not much of a plus either.