A rabid opponent of federal land management has been put in charge of…federal land management. Of course he has.

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt on Monday signed an order making Wyoming native William Perry Pendley acting head of the Bureau of Land Management. The bureau’s holdings are sweeping, with nearly one out of every 10 acres nationally, and 30% of minerals, under its dominion, mostly across the U.S. West.

Pendley, a former midlevel Interior appointee in the Reagan administration, for decades has championed ranchers and others in standoffs with the federal government over grazing and other uses of public lands. He has written books accusing federal authorities and environmental advocates of “tyranny” and “waging war on the West.” He argued in

A reminder to consider the likely impacts:

The “unregulated roll-out” of gender self-identification in Scotland has taken place with weak or non-existent scrutiny which could be putting women and girls at risk, according to new research.

University of Edinburgh academics Dr Kath Murray and Lucy Hunter Blackburn argue that decision-making on sex and gender identity issues has been directed towards the interests of a specific group, “without due regard” for the wider population.

Published on Monday in the university’s journal Scottish Affairs, the study claims that policy makers have been over-influenced by those lobbying for the rights of trans people to the “detriment” of women and girls.

Why is that? Why has it been so quick and easy? I … Read the rest

Originally a comment by latsot at Miscellany Room 3.

Have we done this one yet? So many of these things turn up in my labyrinthine feeds that I sometimes have trouble keeping track.

[Answer: no, we haven’t. I saw it last week and made a couple of attempts to read it but found it way too long for purpose as well as excruciatingly annoying so I turned my back on it.]

Anyway, as the URL suggests, the title is Dear Philosophers, You Can Trust the Feminist Consensus: Gender-Critical Radical Feminism is Bogus

It seems to be all over the place and since today I reached peak procrastination, I finally started to read it.

It’s written by a … Read the rest

Oh good grief. I thought I was going to leave the subject for today but then I saw this piece at Inside Higher Ed, fatuously titled Taking Trans Lives Seriously. Because what, there are all these people making a big joke of trans lives? Are we supposed to take trans lives more seriously than any other kinds of lives? (Of course; stupid question.)

It is not permissible to debate in some academic parlor game the lives of people who are oppressed and murdered, writes Mark Lance.

“Some academic parlor game” says a professor of philosophy at Georgetown. Anyway people aren’t “debating the lives” of trans people in the way he wants us to think: debating whether they deserve to … Read the rest

Chase Strangio is a staffer at the ACLU:

Chase Strangio is a Staff Attorney with the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project and a nationally recognized expert on transgender rights.

Strangio is also a trans man.

Strangio makes a melodramatic claim:

We die because we are told we can’t live. We die because people oppose the premise of our existence. We die because you want us to. Call me dramatic. Mock me. Threaten me but I am going to fight for my people to live. NO matter what you do.

Obligingly, I did call that claim melodramatic. That’s because it is. Trans people don’t flop over and die because people tell them things, and they are not told they … Read the rest

More demands for more more more gender reform:

More than 100 LGBT organisations and celebrities are urging the government to reform UK gender identity laws, the BBC has learned.

But what if “gender identity” doesn’t actually mean anything?

But, in a letter addressed to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, LGBT groups said the UK was “lagging behind” other countries “in terms of legal equality for trans and non-binary people”.

Is it? How? In what way do trans and non-binary people not have legal equality? What does “legal equality” in that sentence mean?

Ashleigh Talbot, a transgender woman, says the current process to get legal recognition is too negative.

“It’s an extremely bureaucratic process,” said Ms Talbot.

…

Ms Talbot added

Stupidest possible reaction to Karen’s tweet about a woman murdered by a “sex toy” which is to say a spiked wheel shoved up her vagina:

A woman has been killed.

But the take here is that “Kink shaming is bullshit.”

That’s Grade ‘A’ bullshit if you ask me. pic.twitter.com/yJUln3q1Jv

— Dr Karen Ingala Smith (@K_IngalaSmith) July 29, 2019

Strangling women is “breath play” and shoving spiked wheels up women’s vagina’s is “sensation play.”

What is wrong with people?… Read the rest

Open Labour is a group or organization or faction or ______ that aims to make the Labour Party more wonderful. Or something. What they stand for:

We represent Labour’s open Left: a practical, open-minded and tolerant type of democratic socialism. Our ideas and campaigns are based on a simple strategy: creating broad and diverse alliances behind policies which transform society.

We are realistic about public opinion, but we believe that Labour’s democratic left must seek to lead it. This will only happen if our party is vibrant and democratic – if it can include a wide variety of views and groups without intolerance or bigotry keeping members away.

So I guess the rest of Labour is impractical, closed-minded, and … Read the rest

Great. Trump is replacing the Director of National Intelligence (Dan Coats) with a party hack.

President Donald Trump’s just-announced nominee to replace Dan Coats as director of national intelligence had already drawn national attention earlier this week, when he delivered an aggressive diatribe against former special counsel Robert Mueller.

…

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, called Ratcliffe’s questioning of Mueller “demagogic” and said the White House selected him for intelligence director because he “exhibited blind loyalty to President Trump.”

“It’s clear that Rep. Ratcliffe was selected because he exhibited blind loyalty to President Trump with his demagogic questioning of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller,” Schumer said in a press release Sunday. “If Senate Republicans elevate such a partisan

This is not a good argument.

Imagine for a moment how this allegation would read (and what the reaction would be) if the word "trans" was replaced with the name of any other minority group within our society: https://t.co/F2Dicb7zKC

— Stop Funding Hate (@StopFundingHate) July 28, 2019

It’s not a good argument because, first, any minority group? But that could be rapists, or psychopaths, or serial killers, or greedy landlords who don’t make repairs (hello Jared Kushner!), or members of the KKK. Being part of a minority group doesn’t automatically make people right about everything. And second because the trans lobby is in fact a special case, so swapping in for instance “feminist lobby pressure” wouldn’t do the work Stop … Read the rest

Guest post by Josh Slocum

Lesbians and gays had to ask, beg, plead, protest, and keep it all up for decades just to get:

• The right not to be fired for being gay
• The right not to be evicted for being gay
• The right to participate in the same tax incentive system that straight married people had

That’s all. That’s all we asked for. Nothing that took from, or imposed on, anyone else.

Trans comes along and is required to do exactly zero work. All they have to do is be a straight man in a wig and scream that they’re oppressed, and instantly laws are changed to make women’s space their legal property.

This is fucking obscene.… Read the rest