Today for the second day Charlottesville public (state) schools are closed because of threats.

Police said in a statement that the online threat was directed at Charlottesville High School .

Authorities declined to further describe the threat, but images circulating on Reddit and other social media sites referred to a post on 4chan, an anonymous online messaging board. The post included a racist meme, used slurs for blacks and Latinos, and threatened to attack students of color at Charlottesville High.

…

The threat was another jolt to a community still strained by the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017 that turned Charlottesville into the site of America’s largest white-supremacy gathering in decades.

This week’s online episode

Yesterday Trump signed an executive order to do with free inquiry at universities.

At a signing ceremony at the White House, Mr. Trump said he wanted to give notice to “professors and power structures” seeking to prevent conservatives “from challenging rigid, far-left ideology.”

In a background briefing call with reporters on Thursday morning, a senior administration official said grant-making agencies would work with the Office of Management and Budget to make sure that institutions receiving funding promote free speech rights within applicable law. The issue has become a cause célèbre among conservatives, who argue that their voices are being silenced on liberal campuses.

While their voices are being very loudened in government and on Fox News.

Mr. Trump was

More language creep.

Are you a playwright who identifies as female? Are you are Mum? We want your scripts for the Motherhood Plays.

We’re keen to programme a week of play(s) by the most brilliant mother playwrights from 2 – 6 July.

Here is how to submit :https://t.co/ODDPro3QIs#503Motherhood pic.twitter.com/ceixkzs0sS

— Theatre503 (@theatre503) March 21, 2019

Why “who identifies as”? Why not just ask “are you a mother?”?

We’re specifically looking for female identifying mothers. But, we have several other call outs that are live as well as this one, which we are welcoming male playwright submissions. ^J

— Theatre503 (@theatre503) March 21, 2019

Oh look, they gave it away completely there. Women are “female identifying” while men are … Read the rest

Devin Nunes in 2010:

BREAKING: Video of Devin Nunes defending protestors who yelled the "n-word" at US Rep John Lewis: "I think people have every right to say what they want. If they wanna smear someone, they can do it." Nunes is terrible. Dug up @TheDemCoalition. From 2010. pic.twitter.com/lk51mSSGW8

— Democratic Coalition (@TheDemCoalition) March 21, 2019

… Read the rest

Kimberly Nixon hopes it will send a message.

A transgender woman whose case against Canada’s oldest rape crisis centre was dismissed by the courts says she hopes the City of Vancouver’s decision to refuse the shelter funding will help change policies.

Kimberly Nixon, 61, filed a human rights complaint against Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter in 1995 after she was refused training to work as a volunteer peer counsellor on the basis she did not share the life experience of someone born female.

And lost the case, and was ordered to pay costs to Vancouver Rape Relief ten years ago, and still has not paid a cent.

Hilla Kerner, spokeswoman for Rape Relief, said women who are born

They’ve whatnow?

Tell @screenscots what you think of their female erasure. Womxn is an insult. We should be able to define ourselves on our own terms. #WarOnWomen https://t.co/Cd8JTbgMVF

— Joan McAlpine (@JoanMcAlpine) March 21, 2019

A platform for #films by womxn – meaning what? A platform for films by women and trans women? Then say that – or better, don’t do that. Don’t make women share everything with trans women. Have a platform for films by women and one for films by trans women or trans people. Above all, stop erasing women by using that stupid stupid stupid not-word.

Fool responds:

What in the name of god are you doing? Government is for all citizens. Show some responsibility. How

I don’t know…I see why they had this impulse, but I’m not sure it was a good idea. A university in Calgary canceled a talk by an ex-Muslim, though it said it would welcome him at a later time.

Armin Navabi, who lives in British Columbia, was being brought in by the Atheist Society of Calgary to share his journey and discuss the reasons he doesn’t believe the Islamic faith can be reformed.

But now he says he’s disappointed he won’t get a chance to engage in some passionate discussions with staff and students, including those who still practice Islam, because of MRU’s last-minute decision.

But it’s not even a week yet. Emotions are raw. I get that. I … Read the rest

Trump says the same damn thing three times in the first 23 seconds of this clip: he uses Twitter to get the word out because the news media are fake. Three times.

I didn’t listen to the rest of the seconds, which are Fox News.

pic.twitter.com/UhTjBuWY2h

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2019

… Read the rest

Now here’s a surprise: for once it’s the violence-threatener who has backed out.

The headline act of a transgender event in Dundee has pulled out after calling on people to “throat-punch” radical feminists.

Peyton Rose, a transgender singer-songwriter from Edinburgh who was to top the bill at the Trans Pride Scotland event in Dundee next week, posted the tweet last Friday.

Above an image of a leaflet distributed last summer by For Women Scotland, a women’s rights group, she wrote: “If you catch one of these assholes in the act, please undo their work or throat-punch them.”

She deactivated her Twitter account afterwards and has since withdrawn from performing at the event.

A spokeswoman at For Women Scotland said

If the Smithsonian declines to display your enormous lurid ugly painting, do you have a legal case against it for declining? My guess would be no, because there is no obligation in law to display all paintings that are offered. Just think what art museums and galleries would be like if there were.

An artist called Julian Raven thinks otherwise.

A Trump portraitist whose lawsuit against the Smithsonian Institution and National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet was thrown out in December is appealing the district court’s decision, arguing that his work deserves to be shown in the hallowed institution.

Yeah see I don’t think that’s something you can argue in a legal sense. I don’t think that’s a legal … Read the rest

Julie Bindel on why abused women need women-only shelters:

My first ever volunteer post was back in 1980, at a Women’s Aid refuge for victims of domestic violence. I will never forget the sight of those women coming in through the doors, crying with desperate relief at having escaped abusive husbands; finding comfort in the company of other women who had experienced the same.

Those services saved many lives, Julie says, but now, between the Right defunding them and the Left forcing them to serve trans women, they’re in peril.

This is not actually [a] new problem. It may be a new front in the transgender turf wars in the UK. But Vancouver Rape Relief (VRR) a

Some are more equal than others:

Green and other activists for transgender rights view it as deeply offensive to deliberately use the wrong pronoun for a trans person. Doing so could be an offence under the Malicious Communications Act, which makes it a crime to send messages that are indecent or grossly offensive, threatening, or contain information which is false or believed to be false, if the purpose for sending it is to cause distress or anxiety.

People can view anything as anything; that doesn’t make it true. People can “view” something as deeply offensive when it isn’t, or when reasonable people would agree it isn’t, or when reasonable people would disagree over whether it is or isn’t, … Read the rest

Meanwhile in another part of the forest…

The Open University was forced to cancel a conference on prison reform following threats from the transgender lobby, it has emerged.

Is there really such a thing as the transgender lobby? Not exactly, but there is a mandatory orthodoxy and a large group of people eager to enforce it, so maybe that’s an okay label for it.

The CCJS, an educational charity, has been accused of “transphobia” for its stance that transgender female prisoners should be incarcerated separately from female prisoners.

“The Open University faced quite significant pressure from transgender activists. They received a number of emails where some of the language was extraordinarily overheated,” a source told The Telegraph.

It’s odd … Read the rest

Justin Weinberg at Daily Nous, part 2:

There did not appear to be many such calls to pull the interview, though. This is not to suggest that a certain number of such calls, itself, is sufficient reason to pull an interview, but it does speak, perhaps, to concerns editor and owner Andrew Gallix might have about the survival of his publication.

Besides the feedback on social media, four of the magazine’s editorial board members resigned in protest of the publication of the interview. [Update: they are Eley Williams, David Winters, Hestia Peppe, and Joanna Walsh; for those curious, none of the four is an academic philosopher.]

So four members of the editorial board resigned in protest of the not-silencing … Read the rest

Justin Weinberg of Daily Nous was on it promptly:

Richard Marshall, who has conducted astonishingly rich interviews with hundreds of philosophers for 3:AM Magazine, has resigned from the publication over its editor’s decision to remove one of his interviews from public view.

He quotes Leiter then shares some tweets by the deeply unpleasant Christa Peterson (which poisons the well a good deal, in my view). Then:

There were also a handful of calls for the interview to be deleted, ranging from the thread that begins with

https://twitter.com/ofthesparrows/status/1107968733329395714

and ends expressing the hope that 3:AM “reconsiders this move”, to briefer responses such as

https://twitter.com/MadeOfBarges/status/1107984032883712000

I was naturally curious about this Nora made of barges so I looked and behold, … Read the rest

More of the same:

i've just woken up to the news that @3ammagazine has de-platformed me by removing my interview with richard marshall, because of the comments i made about gender. and even though the bulk of the interview was about my other work. h/t @BrianLeiter. https://t.co/HQa4tlOBsI

— A/Prof Holly Lawford-Smith (@aytchellesse) March 19, 2019

Leiter Reports:

3AM Magazine’s radical chic motto–“whatever it is, we’re against it”–turns out to be bollocks

Their real motto is “whatever right-thinking zealots in our little corner of the universe agree on, we’re for it.” The magazine has withdrawn Richard Marshall’s interview with philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith (Melbourne) because in the course of the interview she denied that trans women are women, and expressed

Michelle Goldberg asks a very good question: why don’t Princess Ivanka and Prince Jared have impostor syndrome when they are in fact impostors? Why indeed?

According to “Kushner, Inc.,” Gary Cohn, former director of the National Economic Council, has told people that Ivanka Trump thinks she could someday be president. “Her father’s reign in Washington, D.C., is, she believes, the beginning of a great American dynasty,” writes Ward. Kushner, whose pre-White House experience included owning a boutique newspaper and helming a catastrophically ill-timed real estate deal, has arrogated to himself substantial parts of American foreign policy. According to Ward, shortly after Rex Tillerson was confirmed as secretary of state, Kushner told him “to leave Mexico to him because he’d