Spot the irony.

https://twitter.com/RKDasgupta/status/1144355197717831685

A man lost the LGBT Officer post because – oh no – a straight man stood against him.

Much dismay.

https://twitter.com/Lewis_ALee/status/1144521775776063488

Can’t believe this. What on Earth is going on. Ridiculous and appalling. https://t.co/ZZlpMBS709

— Chris Elmore MP (@CPJElmore) June 28, 2019

And yet…who is the Labour Students national women’s officer again? Oh yes, “Lily” Madigan, who identifies as a woman but is not literally a woman. It’s terribly wrong for a straight man to be elected a local LGBT Officer but it’s fabulous for a boy to be elected national student women’s officer. It’s bad to shove gay men aside but it’s good to shove women aside.

Why is that, again?… Read the rest

Funny idea of “entertainment” some people have.

An app that claimed to be able to digitally remove the clothes from pictures of women to create fake nudes has been taken offline by its creators.

…

The team said the app was created as “entertainment” a few months ago.

Why just women then? Why not men too? Wouldn’t that be just as entertaining?

The program reportedly uses AI-based neural networks to remove clothing from images of women to produce realistic naked shots.

The networks have been trained to work out where clothes are in an image, mask them by matching skin tone, lighting and shadows and then fill in estimated physical features.

So, you know, it’s like the crude stuff … Read the rest

Meanwhile the “sex binary” in India continues to flourish.

Two people have been arrested in India’s Bihar state after a group of men shaved the heads of two women as “punishment” for resisting rape.

The group, which included a local official, ambushed the mother and daughter in their home with the intent of raping them, police said.

When the women resisted, they assaulted them, shaved their heads and paraded them through the village.

Can’t win, can we. In France after the Occupation, women had their heads shaved and were paraded through the village for having sex with a German, in India they get it for saying no to unrequested sex. s there a rulebook for  all this?… Read the rest

Wait, wait, he’s explained it all! It’s totally clear now.

"Biological sex is not entirely restricted to male and female”; “Uncoupling sex and reproduction challenges the analysis of sex as an innate and universal practice.” Text and diagram from: Is Gender Fluid?: A Primer for the 21st Century, by Sally Hines, Thames and Hudson, 2018 pic.twitter.com/0SGYNuT98u

— ELLIS CASHMORE (@elliscashmore) June 28, 2019

Now, granted, it’s not at all clear what that “chart” is supposed to mean, because “philic” isn’t the same thing as sex nor is it the same thing as gender, but never mind that, it’s a chart. I’m sure we don’t need more than that.

Updating to add an even more scholarly visual aid:

As my

Trump is joking around with his buddy Vladimir. (He calls him Vladimir. They’re tight.)

Donald Trump joked with Vladimir Putin about getting rid of journalists and Russian meddling in US elections when the two leaders met at the G20 summit in Japan.

As they sat for photographs at the start of their first formal meeting in nearly a year, the US president lightheartedly sought common ground with Putin at the expense of the journalists around them in Osaka.

“Get rid of them. Fake news is a great term, isn’t it? You don’t have this problem in Russia but we do,” Trump said.

To which Putin responded, in English: “We also have. It’s the same.”

Ho ho ha ha.

Twenty-six

Quite a ratio on this one from yesterday.

Imagine: the world has a 10-second flash blackout and the Sex Binary is erased from everybody's minds. It disappears from their memories, advertisements, jobs, schools … everywhere. Would we face chaos? Or just organize ourselves differently, as we did before the Enlightenment?

— ELLIS CASHMORE (@elliscashmore) June 27, 2019

So…there was no Sex Binary before the Enlightenment? Is that right? Ellis Cashmore is a sociologist, so he must know.

But then how do we explain Queen Elizabeth’s speech to the troops at Tilbury?

I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king.

Looks like Sex Binary to me.… Read the rest

Jared Kushner is acting like a parallel Secretary of State, doing diplomacy all on his own.

Rex Tillerson, the former US secretary of state, has accused Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, of cutting top US diplomats out of meetings with powerful world leaders.

In a newly released transcript of a testimony to the House foreign affairs committee last May, Mr Tillerson outlined several instances in which he said Mr Kushner acted independently to meet foreign diplomats without informing Mr Tillerson or the state department.

The transcript reveals the level of influence that Mr Kushner, who serves as a Middle East adviser for his father-in-law, had over foreign policy at the start of Mr Trump’s time in

So the municipal pool in Grenoble has been closed.

According to a statement from the town hall, the lifeguards at the pools asked for the shutdown because “they are there to maintain safety and they can’t do that when they have to worry about the crowds”. It added: “We are working towards a positive solution.”

Meaning the protests were a distraction, I guess.

Seven burkini-clad women, accompanied by activists, went to the Grenoble pools on Sunday demanding the right to bathe despite the facility’s rules. They said the ban was discriminatory.

The women said they wanted the public pools, which currently require men to wear swim briefs and women to wear bikinis or one-piece swimsuits, to change their regulations

Have a feel-good item. We need one.

… Read the rest

This is game over – the Supreme Court giving the green light to Republican gerrymandering from here to eternity (or terminal global warming). The Republicans hold the power now and they have permission to gerrymander to their hearts’ content so they will never be out of power, because they won’t allow it.

In a pair of cases out of North Carolina and Maryland raising the question of whether extreme partisan political gerrymanders can ever violate the Constitution, the five-justice conservative majority finally answered a decades-old question: The federal courts will have no role to play in overseeing whether political lines were drawn for the gain of the majority in violation of the Constitution.

Short version: we’re fucked.

To be sure,

It turns out that what Louis CK did was a kink.

I am saying: #metoo has been weaponized against non-normative sex practices in some contexts.

I'm not sure what you mean by "express consent," but if you mean verbal only, then yes I am arguing against that requirement.

I'm saying: being an exhibitionist is a kink. https://t.co/ej70P24cVR

— Heidi Matthews (@Heidi__Matthews) June 26, 2019

It’s kink-shaming and mainstream (not in a good way) to say that a powerful man shouldn’t trap two less-powerful women in his hotel room and masturbate in front of them.

Kink shaming has absolutely fed the “he’s so creepy” mainstream take, which has fed the “he’s a harasser and/or assaulter” mainstream conclusion.

The law does not

Department of we can sell it but you can’t say it.

It’s real.

It’s another real-life joke! This is the story. This is part of the Billy Connolly routine. And this is a recent screenshot from Asda’s online store:

Go there to see the screenshot.

J and M on Patreon.… Read the rest

Holy shit.

Politico:

Mark Morgan, the White House choice to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said during a Fox News interview earlier this year that he can judge the likelihood that an unaccompanied minor will become a gang member by looking into that child’s eyes.

“I’ve been to detention facilities where I’ve walked up to these individuals that are so-called minors, 17 or under,” Morgan said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” in January. “I’ve looked at them and I’ve looked at their eyes, Tucker — and I’ve said that is a soon-to-be MS-13 gang member. It’s unequivocal.”

That knocked the breath out of me for a second. It’s staggering. It’s worthy of Göbbels.

The view that unaccompanied minors are more

All the tomboys are being converted into trans or enby.

Julie Bindel looks at a character of Enid Blyton’s who is getting the treatment:

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, I took pleasure in rejecting feminine frippery such as frilly pink frills and girly shoes. I refused to have bows and ribbons in my hair, and I was not the only one in my friendship group that preferred dungarees to dresses.

I kept good company in a character from Enid Blyton, who was also a hard-core tomboy. Wilhelmina, better known as Bill, was the girl in Malory Towers – a series of books based on a fictitious all-girls boarding school, which chronicled the adventures of

Shallow Princess Ivanka’s shallow husband Shallow Prince Jared has a Plan for Peace in the Middle East, gleaned from his several years of experience renting overpriced apartments.

The Middle East Economic Plan, dubbed “Peace to Prosperity” is the brainchild of Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of US President Donald Trump. Its 136-pages read like a glossy magazine, with photos of children walking to school and smiling farmers adorning the document.

But the images come from USAID development projects that were stopped due to massive cuts imposed on the agency’s funding in the West Bank and Gaza.

Well…yes, but…the photos are meant to be of future children walking to school and smiling farmers. They’re not supposed to be documentation, they’re supposed to … Read the rest

Princess Ivanka gives us commoners a glimpse into her rarefied royal life.

Great keynoting the Senate’s weekly policy lunch and discussing workforce development policy, Higher Ed Act reauthorization, childcare affordability, and paid family leave. https://t.co/4SkmGksBe8

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) June 25, 2019

Will you look at that? Can you imagine a single other “senior adviser” issuing a glam shot of Self Entering The Chamber?

And then there’s the whole “what the hell do you know about it?” problem. What is that spoiled vain shallow fashion model doing prancing into the Senate and giving a “keynote” on a grab bag of subjects she has zero expertise in?

Also, as Joyce Vance points out, how dare she.

Yesterday, Ivanka discussed “childcare affordability”