A 15-year-old boy has been charged after a mobile phone was discovered hidden in a girls’ toilet at a secondary school in Dundee.
The incident is understood to have come to light when a female pupil at the school discovered the device on Tuesday afternoon.
Police Scotland said the boy has been charged in connection, following a report of voyeurism.
A new Dominique Pelicot in the making.
Masha Gessen in the NYRB November 10, 2016 on the rules of survival in an autocracy:
[Obama] added, “The point, though, is that we all go forward with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens, because that presumption of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy.” As if Donald Trump had not conned his way into hours of free press coverage, as though he had released (and paid) his taxes, or not brazenly denigrated our system of government, from the courts and Congress, to the election process itself—as if, in other words, he had not won the election precisely by acting in bad faith.
Similar refrains were heard from various members of the liberal commentariat, with Tom Friedman vowing, “I am not going to try to make my president fail,” to Nick Kristof calling on “the approximately 52 percent majority of voters who supported someone other than Donald Trump” to “give president Trump a chance.” Even the politicians who have in the past appealed to the less-establishment part of the Democratic electorate sounded the conciliatory note. Senator Elizabeth Warren promised to “put aside our differences.” Senator Bernie Sanders was only slightly more cautious, vowing to try to find the good in Trump: “To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him.”
Blah blah blah, but he’s not that guy. He never has been, and he wasn’t then, and it was obvious he wasn’t. Then he spent four years demonstrating how thoroughly he isn’t that guy. He’s a bad man. Really bad. The kind of bad where there’s no good to leaven it a little. The kind of bad that prefers doing bad things to doing good ones. The kind of bad that enjoys watching people suffer. The kind we all hope never to encounter.
The second falsehood is the pretense that America is starting from scratch and its president-elect is a tabula rasa. Or we are: “we owe him an open mind.” It was as though Donald Trump had not, in the course of his campaign, promised to deport US citizens, promised to create a system of surveillance targeted specifically at Muslim Americans, promised to build a wall on the border with Mexico, advocated war crimes, endorsed torture, and repeatedly threatened to jail Hillary Clinton herself. It was as though those statements and many more could be written off as so much campaign hyperbole and now that the campaign was over, Trump would be eager to become a regular, rule-abiding politician of the pre-Trump era.
Eight years later, he’s eager to become the worst monster any of us have ever met in our nightmares.
Good to see that the bros are learning from the Pelicot trial.
That last sentence is a translation of “Allez les tricoteuses!” That’s a vintage sexist insult dating back to The Revolution: it labeled women on the left who supposedly sat around knitting while heads rolled. It was not well received.
Why women are paying attention:
As France digests the implications of its largest rape trial, which is due to end this week, it’s clear that many French women – and not just those at the courthouse in Avignon – are pondering two fundamental questions.
The first question is visceral. What might it say about French men – some would say all men – that 50 of them, in one small, rural neighbourhood, were apparently willing to accept a casual invitation to have sex with an unknown woman as she lay, unconscious, in a stranger’s bedroom?
The second question emerges from the first: how far will this trial go in helping to tackle an epidemic of sexual violence and of drug-facilitated rape, and in challenging deeply held prejudices and ignorance about shame and consent?
How far will anything go in helping to tackle the ancient, obstinate, immovable hatred of women that seems to be baked into human nature?
I’ve been wondering that my whole adult life. I’ve never really gotten over the shock of learning how obstinate and immovable it is.
Dominique Pelicot jailed for 20 years
A French court found Dominique Pelicot guilty of repeatedly drugging and raping his then wife Gisèle for almost a decade, and inviting dozens of strangers to rape her unconscious body in a case that horrified the world.
The 72-year-old, who was married to Gisèle for 50 years, was handed the maximum 20-year prison term. He had pleaded guilty to the charges. Gisele Pelicot, who waived her right to anonymity, thanked her supporters after the verdicts and said she respected the court’s decision.
“This trial was a very difficult ordeal,” she said in her first comments at the end of the sentencing.
Yes I should think it was.
She’s the “real sexist slur” [con, I assume]. She is. She’s in a deep sleep because her husband drugged her, and she’s the real sexist slur.
Humans are a mistake.
A King County Metro bus driver was fatally stabbed in Seattle’s University District early Wednesday, marking the first killing of a Metro driver on the job in 26 years and the latest example of violence that at times is shaking public confidence in the regional transit system.
No no no no no. I can’t stand it. Metro drivers are heroes (both sexes). It’s a very tough job, because there’s the driving but there are also the people. I’ve witnessed countless drivers being helpful, friendly, polite, all that good dealing-with-people stuff. They have to put up with a great many passengers who don’t reciprocate, who indeed start with aggression and go on from there. They of course have to put up with drunks, addicts, people who haven’t had a shower in years, people who make threats. They’re heroes, seriously.
Police said they determined an adult male passenger got into an altercation with Yim at 15th Avenue Northeast and Northeast 41st Street. Yim then walked a short distance from the bus and collapsed, according to police.
It was not made known Wednesday morning if other passengers were aboard the Route 70 bus, which was headed south.
I know that bus well. It’s the only downtown to the U District bus (there’s also light rail). It goes past Lake Union, so there are nice views. It’s the kind of route where drivers often have some people-managing to do. Being murdered should not be part of the package.
Metro and Sound Transit have struggled with violence, mainly against passengers, as incidents increased post-pandemic. In 2023, a man was stabbed 19 times at random on a light rail train at Othello Station, and a young man was shot to death in a targeted attack aboard a bus in White Center.
Wednesday’s stabbing comes two days after Metro closed four bus stops at the corner of 12th Avenue South and South Jackson Street in the Little Saigon area — where nine people were stabbed in November. The union pushed for those stops to be closed, Woodfill, the union president, said.
The union was not wrong.
It’s like living under some unpleasantly powerful and vindictive medieval royalty.
Republicans seem to be very serious about sending Liz Cheney to jail.
GOP Representative Barry Loudermilk, the chairman of the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, released his own findings on the House January 6 select committee. The report accused former Cheney, who sat on the committee, of witness tampering, alleging that she “colluded with ‘star witness’ Cassidy Hutchinson.” Hutchinson is the former Trump White House aide turned MAGA villain after she testified before the January 6 committee on the chaos surrounding the attack on the Capitol.
Everything must be turned to shit for the sake of protecting and encouraging the evil monster hell-bent on slaughtering the peasantry and subjugating everyone else.
Loudermilk’s findings also called for Cheney to be criminally investigated and repeatedly claimed the January 6 committee withheld or destroyed evidence.
Evidence that what? That Trump didn’t try to seize power by sending a mob to attack the legislature? It can’t be done; we all saw him sending the mob to the Capitol to attack the legislature, which it duly did.
What’s the problem with this argument?
Representative Nancy Mace is proudly embracing her George Wallace moment. It’s time for dissent.
When Vivian Malone and James Hood enrolled at the University of Alabama in 1963, Governor Wallace traveled to Tuscaloosa to stand defiantly in the doorway of the Foster Auditorium. In tailored suit and tie, the white southern governor, whom Dr Martin Luther King once called “perhaps the most dangerous racist in America today”, prevented the two Black students from attending class.
Wallace’s Stand in the Schoolhouse Door upheld the impassioned promise he made while delivering his inaugural address: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”. Mace has clearly studied this history and chosen to side with its least savory character.
When Sarah McBride became the first out transgender woman elected to Congress this past November, Mace swiftly introduced a House resolution to ban McBride from using the bathroom. This legislation, which has far-reaching implications, might as well be known as Mace’s Stand in the Bathroom Door.
What’s wrong is that the two are not comparable. The fact that a door was involved in Wallace’s disgusting intervention does not make Nancy Mace’s resolution similar to Wallace’s racist aggression.
Men are already barred from women’s bathrooms, and they always have been, not because they were considered subordinate or inferior but rather the contrary: men have the power, physical and social, so women don’t feel safe taking their pants down with men in the room. Wallace stood (literally and figuratively) for white power and oppression; women are not the powerful oppressive sex. Men pretending to be women are not comparable to the civil rights activists of Wallace’s day.
When cruel injustice becomes enshrined in law by politicians fueled by hate the only conscionable response is to dissent.
It’s not “cruel injustice” to tell men to stay out of the women’s toilets, even if the men say they are women. The cruel injustice would be to let them barge into the women’s toilets, because damn few women actually want men in there. Actually I don’t think anyone wants any kind of people in there – I think we’d all much prefer individual locked rooms. There’s an upscale shopping center in Seattle that provides those and my god the feeling of luxury – it’s like a tiny vacation.
That is why, in a commitment to affirm the basic human dignity and respect all people deserve, I helped lead a group of trans women, non-binary people, and cis allies in holding a sit-in in a women’s bathroom in Congress.
See the man boast about invading a women’s toilet in Congress. Yeah, bro, the Nashville sit-ins you’re not.
Queen’s University Belfast Trans Equality FAQ:
As part of its wider Equality and Diversity Policy, Queen’s University (“the University”) is committed to providing an inclusive and welcoming community where staff and students are enabled to meet their full potential and are treated as individuals.
This includes providing advice, support and understanding to those individuals who have transitioned, are transitioning, or are planning to transition, are non-binary, intersex or gender non-conforming.
That’s nice. Does it also include those individuals who are women?
It doesn’t seem to. On the Diversity and Inclusion page (which links to the Trans Equality page which links to the Trans Equality FAQ page) we get a link to Menopause, but we do not get a link to Women and Equality, and thus no link to the Women and Equality FAQ page. I take it there are no such pages. Why do trans people get a nice selection of sub pages while women get only…menopause?
There is a Gender Equality page, but it’s weirdly shy about what it means by Gender Equality. One gets the feeling that Queens thinks women have already won their fight and really don’t deserve or need any more attention from the equality squad. I, for one, get the feeling Queens thinks women are the establishment, while trans people are the exciting important fabulous people these days. Women are Mummy, trans people are glitter and sex and balloon-tits.
Buffoon of the ages talks to TIME magazine, with the usual result.
TRUMP: Well, I think we ran a flawless campaign. It was, it was really quite something. I called it 72 Days of Fury. There were no days off. There were no timeouts. If you made a mistake, it would be magnified at levels that nobody’s ever seen before. So you couldn’t make a mistake. And I think we just really ran well. It was a drive to go through it. It started 72 days out. For some reason, it just seemed to be it. And I worked very hard. I’ve been, I’ve been given credit by, actually, the reporters that followed me, because it was, you know, just, it just was all the time, every day, and we said the right things.
To pretend for a moment that he actually thought about what he was saying – I disagree that he won the election because he “said the right things.” I think it’s because he said the kind of things that many people like. It’s not his eloquence, or his style, or his perspicacity, or his insight, or his analytic skills. It’s more the opposite. He says dumb, vulgar, trashy things, and enough people like that about him that he got elected.
That has to be true at least to some extent, because it’s not as if anyone can ignore the way he talks. It’s not a hidden or subtle aspect of him. It’s front and center, and loud. I think he makes people feel good about being…no better than adequate.
Harsh thing to say, I know, but people who voted for Trump are people who voted for Trump, so I think some harsh is in order.
Will you commit to honoring the Senate’s authority to reject or confirm your nominees?
Well, sure, I want them to do that. I think—I don’t think there are too many. I don’t think that— look, everybody has, that’s why they have menus in restaurants. You have different choices. Some people love certain candidates. I’ll tell you, I put up some that I thought would be a little more controversial, and they turned out not to be necessarily the ones that are controversial.
One of them who is controversial, who I just want to ask you a quick question about, is RFK Jr, who is a noted vaccine skeptic. If he moves to end childhood vaccination programs, would you sign off on that?
We’re going to have a big discussion. The autism rate is at a level that nobody ever believed possible. If you look at things that are happening, there’s something causing it.
Yes, and the something causing it is knowing more about what autism is and how to diagnose it. It’s not more autism but more diagnosis of autism.
Do you think it’s linked to vaccines?
No, I’m going to be listening to Bobby, who I’ve really gotten along with great and I have a lot of respect for having to do with food, having to do with vaccinations. He does not disagree with vaccinations, all vaccinations. He disagrees probably with some. But we’ll have it. We’re going to do what’s good for the country.
So that could include getting rid of some vaccinations?
It could if I think it’s dangerous, if I think they are not beneficial, but I don’t think it’s going to be very controversial in the end.
If he thinks they’re dangerous, if he thinks they’re not beneficial – what does he know about it? Nothing, just like most of us. His random opinion on the subject is not relevant, and neither is Kennedy’s.
Do you agree with him about the connection between vaccines and autism?
I want to see the numbers. It’s going to be the numbers. We will be able to do—I think you’re going to feel very good about it at the end. We’re going to be able to do very serious testing, and we’ll see the numbers. A lot of people think a lot of different things. And at the end of the studies that we’re doing, and we’re going all out, we’re going to know what’s good and what’s not good. We will know for sure what’s good and what’s not good.
Shorter: I know absolutely nothing about it.
Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Nobody asked for this tragedy.
I’ve introduced several people to basic trap shooting. One thing that often happens is they’ll shoot once and then find that the shotgun won’t fire the second shot, no matter how hard they squeeze the trigger. Some of them even try to turn to me, and I have to physically hold the muzzle downrange. There’s nothing wrong with the gun or the ammunition—they simply were so overwhelmed by the pressure that they couldn’t release the trigger enough to allow it to reset for the second squeeze. This has even happened when it’s just me and one other person in a field out in the middle of nowhere. That’s how little pressure it takes to fluster an adult to the point of being unable to perform simple motor operations and almost pointed a loaded shotgun at a person three feet away with a finger squeezing the trigger. It’s not a scored competition, not a pheasant hunt, and certainly not a life-or-death defensive situation in which any action or inaction can be suddenly lethal. Nothing is hidden, nothing unknown, no need to worry about whether someone has a weapon that could kill you or someone else before you have time to fumble with your safety.
I’ve personally seen grown men wrestling and one not realize that he cut off the other’s breathing until a third party broke them up—because he saw the second man’s shorts go dark with urine.
One of the most common causes of car crashes is that drivers get flustered and put their feet on the wrong pedal. They try to stop, but instead of slamming the brakes, they floor the throttle. And they don’t even realize they’re doing it. The trap shooters are the same way. They aren’t even aware of what they’re doing. The stress of the moment shuts off the executive function required.
Stress impairs performance, awareness, and decision making much more easily, quickly, and severely than most people realize. Sure, we have the phrase “armchair quarterback”, but few really understand the depth of the advantage afforded by the armchair or why athletes (and police, and soldiers, and surgeons, and debaters, and on and on) train so much, repeat the same prescribed series of actions so often. You do on the field what you train in the gym. If your range training requires that you immediately raise your hand and set down your weapon whenever you have a misfire or some other mechanical failure, then that’s exactly what you’re going to do in an actual firefight—and you’re going to get shot. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face, which is why boxers have their coaches in their corners constantly reminding them of the plan.
Stop right there, bro.
So, the requirement was that you hadda check all the right boxes or they weren’t gonna let you in. So the requirement was that you had to say that you were ccccccccis gender born. So in other words, a transgender lesbian was not gunna be accepted into this group. [dramatic pause] Why not?? I’m just as much female as every other person on the planet at this point in my life.
So every other person on the planet is female. I did not know that.
Unless…does he mean “every other person” in the sense of alternating? So exactly half of all persons are female? No, because he doesn’t say it that way. And because he goes on to say, smirking –
I’ve made the proper adjustments, and all my parts are female, so [whiny child voice] why can’t I be part of this lesbian group, why do I hafta be born cisgender female in order to be part of their group? What gives them the right to say who’s female and who’s not female?
Which is a stupid question, because they’re not saying who is and who’s not, they’re asking applicants to say. This guy could just say he is.
I just found that totally rude and wrong on so many levels.
Well that’s women for you.
Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Reward.
Indeed, there is an awful lot of armchair generaling and Monday morning quarterbacking going on, not just in this thread but all over, almost all of it from people who have never been placed in mortal peril by another human being and who have no training in self-defense. I freely admit that I have relatively little experience with such peril, and have thus far only had the merest physical training, though I have read fairly extensively on the philosophy of self-defense and had discussions with people who’ve trained much more thoroughly than I have.
The first duty in any altercation where you believe your life or health to be in jeopardy is to retreat and escape. Running should always be your first resort, if it is at all possible to flee.
Failing that, the second duty is to de-escalate, to use any means of rhetoric and persuasion, or simple compliance (e.g., giving up your money or valuables without resistance to a mugger) to convince your assailant to back off or otherwise leave you in peace.
Failing that, the third duty is to intimidate your assailant; to present them with a counter-threat such that, if they are rational, they will think twice before pursuing an attack. This can include brandishing a weapon (with the caveat that you should never, ever, EVER draw a weapon you are not prepared to use), confidently squaring off against the assailant, or screaming and making a racket to intimidate them and hopefully draw some attention from passersby (though in crowded cities almost everyone ignores such rackets).
Failing that, however, your last duty is to survive a physical altercation with someone who is intent to do you harm. This generally means you have to subdue the assailant with overwhelming, sudden, decisive force. Most real physical fights are decided in seconds and by centimetres, with one wrong move dooming one of the participants to defeat.
In a real physical altercation, one can run through this four-part checklist in a fraction of a second. And if you are not being directly threatened yourself but are instead acting on behalf of others, people weaker and more vulnerable than you, retreat and flight become much more complicated still.
Life is not a video game; there are no do-overs, no power rankings or levels, no way to tell with certainty how strong or trained or be-weaponed an assailant is until it is quite probably too late and you wind up with a shank in your gut or a bullet in your skull. There are many martial arts such as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or Aikido which emphasise non-lethal detention of an assailant, but these arts require years of dedicated training to confidently employ.
Neely’s death is a tragedy, as was his life, and Penny is certainly no comic-book superhero. The fact that he is being fêted by the MAGA crowd, who are just using the both of them as cultur-war pawns, is moderately disgusting — Penny is himself just as much a victim of circumstance as was Neely, and I doubt he relishes or revels in having taken a human life…or, at least, I like to think he doesn’t.
Nevertheless, given a sober account of the facts of this case (not unlike a sober account of the facts of the Rittenhouse case a few years back), there is no other conclusion than that Penny acted in a legally (and morally) defensible manner when he intervened in an altercation between a raving lunatic and a terrified mother and child, and the death of the assailant was a tragic contingency of the altercation. It should not have happened, but the chain of causation and culpability stretches a long way back and does not deserve to fall squarely on Penny’s shoulders. Yes, Penny and his fellow intervening passengers might have been able to subdue Neely without killing him, but it is also quite possible that if any of them had relented, at least one of them could be dead. Nobody asked for this tragedy, not even really Neely — or at least, not a Neely who hadn’t been ravaged by homelessness and drugs and despair.
Both Penny and Neely are symptoms of a diseased society which is obviously mouldering from the inside, where technocrats craft algorithms into the future whilst living hand-to-mouth in shoebox apartments that should’ve been condemned decades ago, and walk through streets and ride on trains and buses evermore crowded with the cast-offs of this brave new world.
Yes, people are starting to get sick of mentally-ill homeless people turning their commutes and their recreation into harrowing affairs. They are sick of economists and politicians telling them they live in the best, richest, freest, most democratic societies the world has ever known even as the ostensible governing bodies of those societies seek to impoverish and perhaps even imprison their citizens if they dare to claim otherwise. They are sick of having to pay forty percent of their take-home pay on rent for a squalid tenement in neighbourhoods constantly reeking of human urine, where the likelihood of getting accosted or assaulted by a deranged drug-addict only seems to be going up, and where nobody seems to have any idea how to make any of it better but by God they’ll call you a fascist if you point out that this state of affairs is unacceptable.
Most of these people still consider themselves quite progressive, at least for now, and most of them probably hate Penny and Trump (and Rittenhouse and Musk and Rogan and all the other progresive bug-bears, past and present). But people can only take so much cognitive dissonance, and society can only take so much shrugging disdain for the very concept of order or the rule of law or the social contract. Eventually even these direct victims of the rot of modernity will not be able to square their ideology with the reality they must wade through on a daily basis, and they will demand that something be done.
We had better hope that liberalism can do that something, because we do not want to see what the other guys have in mind.
A man was taken into custody after five people were stabbed in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District Friday afternoon.
The stabbings happened near the intersection of 12th Avenue South and South Jackson Street around 2 p.m. Friday.
That intersection is a bus stop. I was at that stop a week or two ago, on an outing to I forget where, and it was off the charts horrible. It’s always horrible, and has been for years, but that day it was extra horrible, with too many ruined people performing their ruin in full public view. Have I mentioned that Seattle’s a mess? I have. It’s incredibly beautiful, and it’s a mess.
The Seattle Police Department confirmed four victims were transported to Harborview Medical Center for treatment and one other person was released at the scene. A Harborview spokesperson said the four victims were in “critical” condition as of 4:45 p.m. Friday.
…
Witnesses to Friday’s attack said the suspect walked up and stabbed the victims with no provocation or interaction.
Yes see that’s what I can’t be doing with. No random knife attacks at bus stops please.
So, that was November 8. An hour ago:
King County Metro has announced the immediate closure of the bus stops at the intersection of 12th Avenue and Jackson Street, citing illegal activity and safety concerns for riders and bus drivers.
The intersection has been a trouble spot for years and is known for open drug use, stolen goods sales, and recently was the scene of a mass stabbing.
It is, at the same time, a very busy bus stop, used by a lot of people with not much money, not much power, not much in the way of alternative transportation. It’s a sort of crossroads between two ghettos. Is there an approved euphemism for ghetto? If there is I don’t know it. 12th and Jackson is at the core of what’s called Chinatown/International District; part of CID is called Little Saigon. South of there is Rainier Valley which is where all those people who weren’t white enough were directed. It’s a vital bus stop – that’s why I was there: it’s the only way to get to vast swathes of the city. It’s vital but it’s a disaster zone.
I’ve been wondering for years why the people who run Seattle can’t make it safe.
End of today’s jeremiad on life in the big city.
The Guardian and Nicola Sturgeon get together to scowl at the stubborn women some more.
“Scotland is a country where, within our lifetimes, gay male relationships were still criminalised. So the significance of that journey is impossible to overstate.”
Although the legislation has had a profound impact – “there’s no doubt we are a much more equal and tolerant society than we were 10 years ago” – Sturgeon said the past few years had been a reminder of the need for vigilance. “When rights are under threat, whether it’s abortion rights in America or LGBT rights in other parts of the world, that’s when it really matters to stand up and be counted.”
Objection your honor.
There is no such thing as LGBT rights. The T is not the same thing as the LGB. We can’t have the most basic clarity on this subject if the Sturgeons of the world keep mashing them together.
She said she had noticed progressive voices “shying away … in the face of the sort of pushback that comes from rightwing media or some very loud populist voices in the political space”.
This was understandable, she said, given her own experience of advocating for the reform of transgender rights in Scotland: “I’ve got more abuse on the trans issue than I got on any other issue in my entire time in politics.”
That’s because “the trans issue” is its own thing, quite separate from the LGB one, and it much too often entails a bad-tempered intrusion on women’s rights, so of course she gets angry pushback when she keeps trying to force women to surrender.
After the success of same-sex marriage, equality campaigners argued that reform of gender recognition rules (GRR) for transgender people was the obvious next step…
Yes they did, and they were completely wrong, and that mistake has caused and is causing a new war on women.
…and Sturgeon pledged to champion the reform when she became SNP leader and first minister.
And in so doing, sold out women. That’s why we’re angry.
But the passage of the reforms – which were agreed by a cross-party majority in December 2022 before they were blocked by the UK’s Conservative government – resulted in one of the most acrimonious periods of her leadership , with some critics accusing her of betraying women.
This is the Guardian, so of course there is no explanation of why “her critics” say she betrayed women.
Sturgeon of course does not explain, let alone apologize.
Another bum-kissing paean to Judith Butler, this one from EL PAÍS.
Butler — a pioneering voice in feminism, gender studies, critical theory, and contemporary philosophy — registered as non-binary in California years ago. While their pronouns changed to they/them, they chose to keep their name, a decision, they say, [that] surprised the courthouse clerk at the time.
Really??? How fascinating. Can you tell us more? What was she wearing? What was the clerk wearing? What was the weather like? Were there refreshments?
To be fair, most of the interview is unsurprising and not terrible. Even Judith Butler can talk sense some of the time. But then we hit a bump.
Q. Do you understand the concerns of feminists who think that gender could result in the erasure of women?
A. Some feminists, I think unwittingly, have allied themselves in places like the U.K. and Spain with the far right when it comes to instigating this phantasm about gender. I understand those fears, but that doesn’t mean that I think they’re based on knowledge. Perhaps those feminists need a better understanding of who trans people are. Womanhood won’t be erased just because we open the category and invite some more people in.
Excuse me?
That amounts to saying the meaning of the word “woman” won’t change just because we open the category and invite some men in.
Sorry, Professor Butler, but yes of course it fucking will. Women will still exist, yes, but the meaning of the word that names them will be different. And that matters, for a million obvious reasons.
This is a moment for expanding alliances, not to have sectarian struggles about bathrooms. Women know what it’s like to be denied health care. They are currently being deprived of access to reproductive health in several parts of the world, including the U.S. Women know how difficult and necessary it is to struggle for autonomy. So why would they not support trans struggles for health care and to live free of the fear of violence?
One, “struggles for health care” means struggles for medical interventions to change the outward markers of sex/gender. That’s not health care, it’s something else. Nobody is objecting to actual health care for trans people. Obviously trans people should get care for illnesses and injuries and the like. Should the male ones be allowed to bunk with the women in the hospital? No, but that’s not “health care”; that’s logistics.
Two, women’s struggles for autonomy are not the same thing as trans people’s “struggles” to get everyone to pay attention to them all the time no matter what.
Three, the “violence” thing is just silly or bullying or both. Nobody is saying hooray for violence against trans people. Some trans activists, on the other hand, are shockingly enthusiastic about violence against feminist women who point out that men can’t be women.
But I’ll let her have the last word, because she can talk sense when she wants to.
I don’t agree with a lot of what she stands for — fracking, migration, Palestine — and I did not actively support her candidacy. But I did vote for her. We have a pernicious history of misogyny, which is being celebrated in the person of Trump. Guilty of sexual crimes, he has done more than any other American person to demean and degrade women as a class. The people who say, “Oh, I don’t like that part of his behavior, but I’m going to vote for him anyway because of the economy,” they’re admitting that they are willing to live with that misogyny and look away from his sexual violence. The more people who say that they can “live with” racism and misogyny in a candidate, even if they’re not enthusiastic racists, the more the enthusiastic racists and the fascists become stronger. I see a kind of restoration fantasy at play in many right-wing movements in the U.S. People want to go back to the idea of being a white country or the idea of the patriarchal family, the principle that marriages are for heterosexuals. I call it a nostalgic fury for an impossible past.
Not bad.
Golly gee, suddenly the Catholic church in Ireland is more progressive than those dreary old feminist women.
Well maybe not more progressive exactly, but more something. Adventurous? Excitable? Generous with other people’s rights?
It’s so fascinating, because the church has always treated women like rebellious stupid garbage, but women who pretend to be men are a whole other story.
You’d think someone had put a gun to her head to force her into long term binding.
Yes that’s a good idea, let’s eliminate the FDIC and all other protections from banking.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is exploring ways to significantly reduce, merge, or even eliminate the top bank regulators in Washington, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday citing people familiar with the matter.
Trump advisers and officials from the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) inquired about the possibility of abolishing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC), according to the newspaper.
Good good good so banks can lose all our money and we have no recourse. Fabulous plan.
Advisers have asked the nominees under consideration for the FDIC, as well as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, if deposit insurance could be absorbed into the Treasury Department, the Journal said, adding that any proposal to eliminate the FDIC or any agency would require congressional action.
And Congress is in Trump’s pocket so the action will be prompt and obedient.
Nick Fish at American Atheists tells us in AA’a latest newsletter:
American Atheists doesn’t always weigh in on presidential cabinet nominations, so when we do, you can trust enough evidence has mounted to warrant a response.
For example, we issued a statement last month regarding the selection of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. We received some flak for that, but as an organization that values reason and science, ignoring his long history of spreading dangerous misinformation is not an option.
Granted, atheism is not the same thing as reason & science, but they are related. Theism is a form of Big Lie, so it’s not surprising that atheists can be interested in other big lies. No doubt the flak they got was because talking about Kennedy is political, and atheism isn’t necessarily political. But that’s the thing about Trump and all his works: he’d be just as loathsome, or more so, if he were in that other party. Kennedy would be just as wrong and dangerous if he were in that other party.
Similarly, we cannot remain silent about the nomination of former Fox & Friends weekend co-host Pete Hegseth to head the Department of Defense. With an annual operating budget of $900 billion and over two million civilian workers and troops, it is the federal government’s largest agency. If confirmed, Hegseth would be the least experienced defense secretary in American history.
We’re compelled to oppose Hegseth’s nomination not because his résumé is short but because his reputation is long in religious extremism, and we have grave concerns about the consequences of elevating a person who unreservedly romanticizes Christian warfare.
Oh does he. Well that’s exciting.
Hegseth has several tattoos that have been flagged by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism for their adoption by far-right extremists, including mass murderers Mauricio Garcia and Anders Breivik. One of them, “Deus Vult,” is associated with militant white supremacist groups who, like Hegseth, revere the myth of a white Christian medieval past and romanticize the Christian slaughter of Jews and Muslims during the Crusades. One expert on religious violence said, “There is no version of ‘Deus Vult’ that means anything other than a call for violence.”
…
Last year, Hegseth and his family joined a school and church associated with Doug Wilson, a co-founder of CREC and founder of the Association of Classical Christian Schools. Wilson, an accused abuser and town tyrant, has defended slavery and believes women shouldn’t have the right to vote. He has said Christian dominance is a divine conflict in which women and children are legitimate military targets. Likewise, in The American Crusade, Hegseth calls for a “360-degree holy war” to “mock, humiliate, intimidate, and crush our leftist opponents.” He goes on to say, in the event of such a civil war, “The military and police… will be forced to make a choice.”
Fasten your seatbelts.
