https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1053334095114182657

Not a good analogy. Nobody is saying trans people shouldn’t compete in sport at all, some people are saying male-bodied people shouldn’t compete against women. Nobody is saying trans people are non-human animals. Nobody is saying trans people should be rounded up and sent to camps. Feminist women are not comparable to Nazis.

This impasse is one reason I can’t see most trans activism as genuinely progressive: it’s so resolutely blind and indifferent to the vulnerabilities and disadvantages of anyone else. Another way of putting it would be that it’s so unintersectional. A progressive trans activism would give a shit about any physical advantages trans women might have over women. It wouldn’t callously wave that off and carry … Read the rest

Talk about voter suppression…

At a time when many rural towns are slowly dying, the arrival of two massive meatpacking plants boosted Dodge City’s economy and transformed its demographics as immigrants from Mexico and other countries flooded in to fill those jobs.

Dodge City, Kansas, this is.

But the city located 160 miles (257 kilometers) west of Wichita has only one polling site for its 27,000 residents. Since 2002, the lone site was at the civic center just blocks from the local country club — in the wealthy, white part of town. For this November’s election, local officials have moved it outside the city limits to a facility more than a mile from the nearest bus stop, citing road

I saw a tweet from Nazir Afzal:

Restrictions lifted so you can learn about the latest grooming trials in Huddersfield
My interviews will be broadcast

This was not the work of Tommy Robinson & his cohorts, his lot nearly derailed it again

It was the bravery of victims & professionals

https://t.co/Vfn9KFQWig

— nazir afzal (@nazirafzal) October 19, 2018

So I read the BBC report.

Twenty men have been found guilty of being part of a grooming gang that raped and abused girls as young as 11 in Huddersfield.

The men were convicted of more than 120 offences against 15 girls.

Victims were plied with drink and drugs and then “used and abused at will” in a seven-year “campaign of

Jane Clare Jones on ontological totalitarianism:

When I first encountered trans ideology about six years ago, it never occurred to me in a million years that the academy would just roll over for this pile of cobbled-together, anti-materialist, life-denying, patriarchal, bullying bullshit and ask it to tickle its tummy. The whole thing is a reality distortion cognitive dissonance machine. It’s an exercise in mass gaslighting that relies on a concatenation of double-thinks. And I had supposed, naively it turns out, that the people who are paid to think about things, would, y’know, think. Quite why it has prompted not inquiry, but compliance, is complex. It has, in the first instance, a lot to do with a catastrophically clay-headed

Oh yes, if only we hadn’t internalized pesky “grievance studies” we’d be just fine with a president who calls women “Horseface” and “Pocahontas” and fat and ugly and all the rest of the bully-boy crap he vomits out.

The reason we are obsessing so much over Trump calling a woman "horseface," and all his other similar jibes against women and minorities, is because our culture has internalized an awful lot of grievance studies. It's a straight line from the scholarship.https://t.co/ZzjIIUgdMt

— James Lindsay, full varsity (@ConceptualJames) October 17, 2018

False dichotomy, chum. It’s not a choice between “language is everything” and “language doesn’t matter.” Trump’s venomous name-calling is not all there is to Trump, but it’s not nothing, either.… Read the rest

The what?

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/1052662266988883968

The actual MATERIAL violence that we as cis women pose to trans women? What the fuck is Zoé Samudzi talking about? Since when do women commit violence against people with male bodies? Her all-caps on MATERIAL make clear she doesn’t mean rhetorical or psychological violence but the real, physical, punch-kick variety. Women are not violent toward trans women. It’s some kind of wokeness or more radical than thou-ness that generates these ludicrous counter-factual panics, but that’s so radical it’s reactionary…as is so often the case when people start “standing with” their trans sisters.

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/1052663652891803648

Yes these terrible frightening women who say that women are women and men are not women – how very arrogant and playing-god-like.… Read the rest

I missed this one last week.

“I think Ivanka would be incredible,” POTUS says when asked about his daughter as UN Ambassador. He bemoans that it would cause accusations of nepotism. “I’m not sure there’s anyone more competent in the world.”

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) October 9, 2018

Trump thinks his daughter, who worked as a model for a time and then moved to selling clothes made by badly underpaid Chinese workers, is likely the most competent candidate for UN ambassador IN THE WORLD.… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on On both sides.

Science isn’t magic. It isn’t some innate sense that people are born with that is “science” – it isn’t natural and it isn’t instinctual. It requires quite rigorous training to get good at it.

And a lot of it is all about taking the shit you think you know, the stuff you think is just “common sense” and testing it.

Scientists don’t get stuff right by applying their gut-feels to it, part of the training they undergo is learning not to apply gut feels to things, to actually come at the evidence in as unbiased a manner as possible because their brains will screw with their perceptions.

This is … Read the rest

Trump made a particularly absurd claim in his interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday.

He added: “I have a natural instinct for science…”

No. No no no. Oh no, not at all.

He has the opposite of that. Without even delving into details of his ignorance, we can say with great confidence that he has no such thing, for the simple reason that he constantly claims to know things that he can’t possibly know. That’s a dead giveaway. No one with “a natural instinct for science” does that. People with a natural instinct for science know how limited human knowledge is, how provisional most of it is, how necessary caution is, and so on.

Ironically, he made … Read the rest

A couple of years ago the Georgia secretary of state – he who is now running for governor while remaining secretary of state even though the latter job involves supervision of elections – released a video on how to do early voting, which is still on the secretary of state website. There’s a funny thing about that video…

The video, produced in six different languages and still linked on the secretary of state’s website, shows a white boy arriving at his voting location, presenting his photo ID and successfully voting. The black girl who shows up to vote does not have the proper form of ID and is turned away from the poll.

The video—showing a white man being

Trump is doing a fascist rally in Missoula tonight, and his goons are issuing threats.

“For all the prospective attendees to the Trump event. Come early,” [Will] Deschamps, who chaired Republican state activities from 2009 to 2015, wrote Tuesday on Facebook. “Also all you protesters, show up as well. This is a concealed and open carry state and we know how to use em.”

In other words: if you show up, we will shoot you.

Deschamps, a Marine Corps veteran, signed off with “USMC trained,” an apparent reference to firearms expertise.

He said Thursday that the post was not to be taken as a directive for people to confront protesters or take weapons to the rally.

“I have genuine

There’s disagreement – highly charged disagreement – over whether the label “TERF” is a neutral descriptive label or a loaded pejorative one. The BBC has let us know what it thinks.

https://twitter.com/K_IngalaSmith/status/1052894983244668928

https://twitter.com/ThrupennyBit/status/1052895493242671104

Updating to add:

https://twitter.com/K_IngalaSmith/status/1053262037223137281

Result!… Read the rest

Oh please.

Facing scrutiny for cultivating close ties with Saudi Arabia’s powerful and domineering crown prince, Jared Kushner has remained intentionally in the background this week as West Wing officials feared a more public role would prompt backlash, multiple people familiar with the matter say.

A more public role as what? He’s just some guy, he’s not a foreign policy genius. He has no business being in the foreground at any time.

Kushner instead has been operating behind-the-scenes to mitigate the fallout but leaving public explanations to others as his father-in-law’s administration confronts a full-blown diplomatic crisis over the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi.

“Operating” how? That makes it sound as if he’s a diplomat or a state department civil … Read the rest