It just gets nutser and nutser.

Three police forces called in to probe Allison Pearson tweet

Three of Britain’s biggest police forces were involved in the investigation into a Telegraph journalist’s social media post.

Allison Pearson, an award-winning writer, is being investigated by Essex Police for allegedly stirring up racial hatred in a social media post last November.

The force has refused to tell her any details about which post on X, formerly Twitter, is being investigated, or who made the complaint against her.

How do they get to refuse to tell her what they’re investigating?

Two police officers called at her home at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday to tell her she was under investigation and invited her to a voluntary interview. She was told, however, that the officers were not allowed to disclose the specific focus of the inquiry.

It gets worse with every iteration. “WAKE UP!! We’re here to tell you you’re under investigation and invite you to our place for a chat but we’re not going to tell you a damn thing about why you’re under investigation so yaboosucks can we eat your breakfast now?”

The Telegraph understands that the post was reported to the Metropolitan Police as a potential breach of the Malicious Communications Act in November last year. The case was then passed to Sussex Police, which marked it as a possible non-crime hate incident (NCHI) as well as a potential malicious communication.

Did none of them stop to ask what are we doing here, why are we freaking out over a single tweet, don’t we have anything more important to do?

I’m trying to catch up on the Essex case, but I have to interrupt myself for a minute to deal with one bit of incoherent drool. “CA” is a manager at the theatre in question.

Sarah: “There was a man in these toilets who refused to leave and shouted in my face “I AM A WOMAN”. This is a safeguarding issue and I want to complain.” CA: “It is not possible, or appropriate, for us to police the gender identity of those who access the toilets.. we want everyone to feel comfortable and use the toilets appropriate for them and for their circumstances.”

Me: NO YOU DON’T.

You don’t you don’t you don’t. Why do you say you do when you know you don’t?

That’s the whole fucking point.

Sarah was exiting the women’s room when a man came barging in and she told him he was in the wrong toilet. CA the manager here is trying to make him “feel comfortable” at the expense of the woman in the women’s room and of all other women who might want to use that women’s room at that time. She’s just lying when she says the theatre wants everyone to feel comfortable.

They need to stop getting away with that “We juss wann evereebuddy to be happeee” shit. It’s not true, they don’t mean it, it’s an insulting lie. Stamp on it whenever you see it.

If it’s a non-crime why are you banging on my door on a Sunday morning?

A Telegraph journalist is facing a “Kafkaesque” investigation for allegedly stirring up racial hatred in a social media post last year.

Allison Pearson, an award-winning writer, has described how two police officers called at her home at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday to tell her she was being investigated over the post on X, formerly Twitter, from a year ago.

Oh come on. Two cops. Unexpected. 9 fucking 40 in the morning on a weekend. Over a tweet from a year ago. Why on earth could that not have been a phone call or email or just plain mail? Even if the tweet deserved investigating, which I doubt.

When Pearson asked what she had allegedly said in the tweet, the officer said he was not allowed to disclose it.

Then what the hell did he and his colleague bang on the door for?

However, at this time last year, she was frequently tweeting about the October 7 attacks on Israel and controversial pro-Palestinian protests on the streets of London.

The officer also refused to reveal the accuser’s name. Pearson recalled: “‘It’s not the accuser,’ the PC said, looking down at his notes. ‘They’re called the victim.’”

Unless they’re women, of course. Women are always the perps.

Last year, Suella Braverman, then the home secretary, raised the threshold for police recording non-crime hate incidents over a perceived threat that laws posed to freedom of expression.

It was amended following a Court of Appeal ruling in favour of Harry Miller, a former police officer, who successfully challenged the previous national policy for forces to record gender-critical views as non-crime hate incidents.

Judges said the policy had had a “chilling” effect on his freedom of speech.

Under the change, officers are only allowed to record a non-crime hate incidents if the incident is “clearly motivated by intentional hostility” and where there is a “real risk of escalation causing significant harm or a criminal offence”.

And who decides when the criteria are met? The police, of course.

Um………..man up?

Being inclooosive is all very well, but you can’t be inclooosive of everything all the time for the simple reason that sometimes you need to be specific. Specificity requires exclusion.

A trustee and PR director of Britain’s oldest breastfeeding charity has resigned after it introduced an inclusivity policy that allowed men to attend support groups.

This is one of those times. Breastfeeding is inherently “exclusionary” in the blunt factual sense that men can’t do it. It’s not that spiteful bitchy women decided to make it exclusionary, it’s that men can’t breastfeed.

Given the fact that men can’t do it, what can possibly be the point of being inclooosive of men in breastfeeding support groups? What can a man’s motive for attending be other than creepy prurient intrusion? Why do women have to be inclooosive of leering men in breastfeeding support groups?

Miriam Main is leaving La Leche League GB (LLLGB) after a diktat from the global organisation elicited fears that volunteers would have to give advice to transgender women.

Directors at the charity’s British arm have already requested that the Charity Commission intervene over the inclusivity policy, which permits biological males to seek support from the organisation.

Main resigned on Monday, saying that she refused to help biological men “perform a poor imitation of breastfeeding”, which she said put babies’ safety at risk.

Documents produced by LLLGB on transgender and non-binary parents stated that it “supports everyone who wants to breastfeed or chestfeed in reaching their goals”. It said: “We do not discriminate based on sex, gender or gender identity.”

There again – just as with exclooosion, sometimes you have to “discriminate.” Men can’t breastfeed, end of story. The demand to be allowed to “chestfeed” a chemical soup to an infant is trump-level disgusting.

Zion Tankard, executive director of La Leche League International, said: “We respect Marian’s decision regarding La Leche League International. Her contributions and legacy are highly valued as a founder. We will continue to uphold the values of empathy and understanding that are central to La Leche League.”

If “empathy” here means encouraging men to feed infants a chemical soup, then it’s an empathy too far.

The Justice Department is a tad irked by the Matt Gaetz nomination.

Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Rep. Matt Gaetz for attorney general has Justice Department veterans petrified and warning of a crisis in the department marked by chaos and revenge.

…

“There’s no conceivable justification for nominating somebody this smarmy and this offensive for a position of such significance in this democracy other than to have a puppet and somebody who, as Gaetz has demonstrated, will do anything Trump asks,” said Ty Cobb, a former Trump White House lawyer.

[Aside: I do wish Americans would stop using the word “smarmy” without bothering to know what it means.]

In the weeks leading up to the election and days since, Gaetz had not been seen as a contender for attorney general. The choice suggests that Trump may have passed over some of the conventional-wisdom candidates, like Utah Sen. Mike Lee (a former federal prosecutor and a Supreme Court clerk) and business-friendly former regulator Jay Clayton.

Well obviously he passed over everyone who isn’t Matt Gaetz.

“If there were any people left who were sort of holding on to the idea that it’ll basically be like Trump’s first term, where the people who are really in charge of the department are more or less these sort of old guard Republican stalwarts … they’ve now been disabused of that notion,” former federal prosecutor Jonathan Kravis said. “Because even if it’s not Matt Gaetz, even if he doesn’t get confirmed, it’s going to be someone else like him.”

One former Trump DOJ official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, called the Gaetz nomination “fucking appalling.”

“The attorney general should not be a provocateur,” the former official added. “The problem with a person like that is he derives too much enjoyment from chaos and burning the place down, and those just would be the last traits you’d want in someone in charge of federal law enforcement.”

It’s going to be all burning the place down all the time.

Um…

What I wonder is what reason Dawkins has to think Musk has the welfare of the world at heart.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That’s an old saying, i.e. there’s no one author. Anyway is it true?

I don’t know. The most obvious answer is that it depends. Is the enemy of your enemy otherwise a fine upstanding person? Then by all means make friends with her. Is the enemy of your enemy a bad person who has never done a kind or generous thing in his life and is intent on destroying as much of the world as he can before he stops having a pulse? Then no, he’s not your friend, no matter how profoundly he hates your enemy.

There are some gc feminists who should be paying more attention to that distinction.

The AP reports:

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz [has] resigned from Congress, ending an ethics probe into allegations of sex trafficking, sexual misconduct and drug use, after President-elect Donald Trump nominated him for attorney general.

…

Gaetz submitted his resignation from Congress, effective immediately, launching an eight-week clock to fill his seat, Johnson said, possibly in time for the start of the new Congress on Jan. 3. It also ends a long-running ethics investigation into the Florida congressman.

Johnson framed the stunning move by Gaetz to resign early and before confirmation as a way to help the majority fill his vacancy much [faster] than if he were to wait until his Senate confirmation as attorney general.

Nothing like an Attorney General who was under investigation for perving on a child among other vomitous activities.

How bizarre.

Of what now?

Human sexual dimorphism.

It’s a thing.

Men can’t get pregnant. Women can’t swim faster than “Lia” Thomas.

Public Notice on Trump’s swift move to demand the powers of a dictator:

But the process of staffing up every new administration has slowed to a crawl because Republicans spent the last 25 years weaponizing Senate procedure to obstruct Democrats. Democrats have certainly returned fire, but no one has done more to ratchet up the temperature — and the gridlock — than Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.

“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” he crowed back in 2010. And one of the ways McConnell ensured that Obama couldn’t enact his agenda, despite having a majority in the House for his first two years and in the Senate for six, was to filibuster literally everything, including Obama’s executive branch nominations.

…

It’s not difficult to see why Trump would like to avoid putting his preferred appointees through the wringer of confirmation, even after McConnell did him a solid and changed the rules in 2019 to cut debate time for lower-level nominees from 30 hours down to just two.

The last time around, Trump’s appointees took quite a beating from congressional Democrats, most notably Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who stammered through an interrogation by his former colleague, then-Sen. Kamala Harris. And Sessions was, on paper at least, a rational choice for the office. This time Trump is threatening to make shitposter Kash Patel head of the FBI. Even assuming Patel could get confirmed, Democrats would surely take advantage of confirmation hearings to draw attention to his promise to weaponize law enforcement to attack the media and embark on a revenge tour against everyone who ever tried to bring Trump to justice.

…

In short, Trump is demanding, as the price of his support, that the incoming Senate majority leader promise to let him skip checks and balances and stack his administration with every unconfirmable ghoul he can find.

Naturally he’s got a whole cadre of Republican spinmeisters willing to dress up this naked extortion and gross assault on the separation of powers as a measured response to Democratic obstruction. Former White House Counsel Don McGahn took to the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page on Monday to tut-tut that “recess appointments are a tradition worth restoring, and Mr. Trump deserves to have the power that all his predecessors had.” This ignores the reality that Biden’s confirmations also took forever, and no president has ever had the power to simply staff his entire administration without the bother of confirmation hearings.

…

So now Trump is currently naming a cadre of offensively unqualified sycophants to staff every government agency, safe in the knowledge that his congressional allies will roll over and cede their constitutional authority to him and three Supreme Court justices will execute an about face and discover that recess appointments are very cool and very legal after all.

In short: no checks, no balances.

Suzanne Moore is not enormously impressed by Alastair Campbell.

Post-Blair, Campbell has made a career as some sort of management consultant, banging on about leadership. His thuggishness has never been toned down. Not even in his diaries. Him physically fighting Peter Mandelson during an argument over what the leader should wear while canvassing has always stuck in my head. He has no time for women except the “totty” him and his Westminster cronies rated. On Clare Short, for instance, he wrote “God she does turn my stomach”.

…

He was disastrous and bullying as a leader of the Remainers trying to get a second referendum, again shouting over distinguished female journalists.

Now he is reincarnated alongside Rory Stewart in a podcast for centrist dads: The Rest is Politics. They are meant to be opposites: it’s just that Rory also once ran a bit of Iraq as a gap year hobby or something and his arrogance is more patrician.

Both of them belong to the (adopts caveman voice) “Funny chaps… Women” brigade, who regard women as a lesser species. In the most recent podcast, Campbell explains that the fact that trans issues played a part in the Democrat loss was relayed to him by his US pal, the former diplomat and journalist James Rubin. A man told him something, so Campbell listened.

Rubin apparently told Campbell: “You guys don’t get just how big this woke thing is but you haven’t got it nearly as big…” Campbell then muses: “The $25 million spent on ads about trans, Trump talking about kids going in as boys in the morning and coming back as girls in the afternoon, the dressing room stuff and all that. I think we underestimated how much that was getting through to people.”

The fact that for 10 years women have been campaigning, losing their jobs and have been vilified for refusing an extreme trans agenda has passed him by. All of this was presumably, in his eyes, a Right-wing plot, or a silly culture issue – until it caught his attention this week.

It caught his attention so he chatted with another man about it.

Oh how exciting, another first.

Delaware state Sen. Sarah McBride won the state’s only House seat Tuesday, NBC News projects, making her the first openly transgender person elected to Congress. 

But so very much not the first man elected to Congress.

There are a lot of available firsts in this kind of thing. The first person from an obscure small town in Iowa; the first person who failed algebra in 9th grade; the first person who has a cat named Ronald Krump – one could go on in this vein forever.

Meanwhile, McBride is a guy elected to Congress and women continue to be both ignored and mocked.

And here we go: Even Worse Than Last Time in action. The Beast appoints a Fox News jock Secretary of Defense.

President-elect Donald Trump stunned the Pentagon and the broader defense world by nominating Fox News host Pete Hegseth to serve as his defense secretary, tapping someone largely inexperienced and untested on the global stage to take over the world’s largest and most powerful military.

The news was met with bewilderment and worry among many in Washington as Trump passed on a number of established national security heavy-hitters and chose an Army National Guard captain well known in conservative circles as a co-host of Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends Weekend.”

Of course he did. He considers himself qualified to be president, so why wouldn’t another tv personality be qualified to take over the world’s largest and most powerful military?

Hegseth’s choice could bring sweeping changes to the military. He has made it clear on his show and in interviews that, like Trump, he is opposed to “woke” programs that promote equity and inclusion. He also has questioned the role of women in combat and advocated pardoning service members charged with war crimes.

Because war crimes are a good thing and we’re proud of them.

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Often struggling.

This reminds me of the Arch Bishop of MPLS-St. Paul, John Nienstedt, who vigorously defended the Church against charges of priestly abuse (including moving notorious priests around without warning the new parishes.) He had sent a sermon around the state for priests to read on the Sunday before the vote on a state amendment banning same-sex marriage that reminded Catholic voters about the canonical position on the issue (gays must remain celibate to avoid sinning.) I heard him defend the position on a radio call-in on Minnesota Public Radio, about how the law can be painful to follow sometimes but there you go.

Shortly after, there were photos showing him in compromising positions with young men, and he was forced to resign. The church declared bankruptcy in order to avoid paying claims.

There’s something about granting heavenly authority over humans that encourages them to commit heinous acts, isn’t there?

I’ve been thinking about this 10 Stupid Goddy Rules in the Classroom thing, and what would be better in classrooms. I don’t necessarily think any homilies or bits of moral advice should be on the walls of classrooms, but I’m not adamant about it. Maybe it’s useful to have them. So what kind of thing should they be?

My hunch is some form of “don’t be shitty.” Maybe a bulletin board that could have posters that change every few days, with small manageable iterations of “don’t be shitty.” Help each other; don’t make fun of anyone; share; remember what it feels like to be teased or bullied. Blah blah; that kind of thing. Tiny chapters from the large book of Remember Everyone Has Feelings Just As You Do. Basically trying to coax children to be decent to each other – trying to nudge children into being not like a trump.

It annoys the bejeezus out of me that legislators think it’s a good idea to plaster walls with God shouting “ME ME ME ME OBEY ME” rather than mild advice on how not to be one of the mean kids.

Last June we were talking about Louisiana’s plan to force “the 10 commandments” on school children.

The AP version:

Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom under a bill Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law Wednesday.

The GOP-drafted legislation mandates that a poster-size display of the Ten Commandments in a “large, easily readable font” be in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities.

Opponents question the law’s constitutionality, warning that lawsuits would be likely to follow. Proponents say that the purpose of the measure is not solely religious but that it has historical significance. In the law’s language, the Ten Commandments are described as “foundational documents of our state and national government.”

Nonsense. Let’s not forget: the first four – 40% of the total – are purely goddy. Of course the measure is religious; it can’t not be.

The first four: no gods other than me, no idols, no blasphemy, remember the sabbath. Nearly half the vital foundation of morality is about pampering the bossy prickly vain jealous put me first goddy figure. Nearly half is not morality at all but the terms the new dictator imposes.

Of course that dreck has no business in schools, let alone being mandated in schools.

Today the bill hit a speed bump.

A coalition of parents attempting to block a state law that would require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in public school classrooms by next year have won a legal battle in federal court.

U.S. District Judge John deGravelles issued an order Tuesday granting the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction, which means the state can’t begin its plan to promote and create rules surrounding the law as soon as Friday while the litigation plays out.

The judge wrote that the law is “facially unconstitutional” and “in all applications,” barring Louisiana from enforcing it and adopting rules around it that obligate all public K-12 schools and colleges to exhibit posters of the Ten Commandments.

It’s hard to see how the libertarian wing of the Republicans could stomach such a law.

Gov. Jeff Landry signed the GOP-backed legislation in June, part of his conservative agenda that has reshaped Louisiana’s cultural landscape, from abortion rights to criminal justice to education.

The move prompted a coalition of parents — Jewish, Christian, Unitarian Universalist and nonreligious — to sue the state in federal court. They argued that the law “substantially interferes with and burdens” their First Amendment right to raise their children with whatever religious doctrine they want.

Including zero.

Receive HOW much in grant money for writing fatuous speculative anti-woman blather????

Nearly two million pounds, that’s how much.

Welby has resigned.

Justin Welby spent his 11 years as Archbishop of Canterbury trying to prevent the global Anglican communion from fracturing, often struggling to please liberals or conservatives as they fought over homosexual rights and women clergy.

But in the end he was brought down by an issue from the church’s past rather than its future: the failure to investigate an abuse scandal that dated back decades…Welby said he had had “no idea or suspicion” of the allegations before 2013, the year he became archbishop. But the independent Makin Report, published on Nov. 7, concluded it was unlikely he would have had no knowledge of the concerns regarding Smyth’s behaviour in the 1980s.

That’s unclear. Is it unlikely that Welby, in the 1980s, had no knowledge? Or is it unlikely that Welby now had no knowledge of Smyth’s “behaviour” aka violent child abuse in the 1980s?

Educated at Britain’s most prestigious private school, Eton, Welby worked in the oil industry for more than a decade before being ordained in 1992. He was made the senior prelate of the Church of England in 2013, becoming the spiritual head of 85 million Anglicans in 165 countries.

Interesting career-life move – oil industry to priesthood. Each somewhat demonic, but in different ways.

His time at the head of the Anglican communion was turbulent as he was forced to navigate a schism that erupted as he enabled women to become bishops and allowed churches to bless same-sex couples. He said he had decided not to carry out such blessings himself, out of responsibility for the wider church, adding: “This is where you have to be a politician.”

But the move angered the conservative branch of the global communion, most notably African churches where homosexuality is taboo, and a conservative group of Anglican church leaders said last year it had no confidence in him.

Too liberal one minute, not liberal enough the next.

“Liberal” may not be the right word for opposing and exposing child abuse, but it is a conservative impulse to side with the institution rather than its victims, and to conceal the harms perpetrated by the institution on its vastly less powerful victims.

Archbish urged to get out.

The archbishop of Canterbury has been urged to stand in solidarity with abuse victims by resigning after a report into a cover-up in the Church of England. A petition started by three members of the General Synod – the church’s parliament – calling for Justin Welby to quit has reached more than 10,000 signatures.

An independent review published last week concluded John Smyth [might] have been brought to justice had Welby formally reported the abuse to police a decade ago.

But he didn’t, so Smyth went elsewhere to torture more boys. It seems Welby’s god hates children and loves their torturers. Beware of people who think they have a pipeline to Mister God.

Over five decades between the 1970s until his death, Smyth is said to have subjected as many as 130 boys and young men in the UK and Africa to traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks, permanently marking their lives.

But improving their souls?

No, of course not.

More on Smyth from the Guardian last week:

John Smyth, a powerful and charismatic barrister, sadistically abused private schoolboys who attended evangelical Christian holiday camps in the late 1970s and early 80s. When the abuse was discovered, Smyth was allowed to move abroad with the full knowledge of church officials, where he continued to act with impunity.

And “abroad” as we just saw meant Africa. “Tut tut John, you can’t do that sort of thing here; off you go to Africa, where children need to be tortured.”

Smyth, who died in 2018, was chair of the Iwerne Trust, which funded the Christian camps in Dorset. A secret review carried out by the trust in 1982 described “horrific” beatings of teenage boys, mostly carried out in Smyth’s shed at his Winchester home.

So that’s more than 36 years (more because the abuse has to have started well before the secret review) that Smyth was allowed to torture children. Isn’t religion wonderful?

Winchester college, one of the UK’s leading private schools, whose pupils were among the alleged victims, was informed of the allegations but neither the college nor the trust reported Smyth to the police. Instead, the headteacher asked Smyth never again to enter the college or contact its pupils.

Smyth moved to Zimbabwe, where in 1992 he faced charges of killing a 16-year-old boy who was found dead in a swimming pool at a holiday camp in 1992. The case was dismissed and he later moved to Cape Town.

Nice for him, not so nice for the children of Cape Town.

From July 2013, “the Church of England knew at the highest level about the abuse that took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s. John Smyth should have been properly and effectively reported to the police in the UK and to relevant authorities in South Africa,” the report said.

It identified several “thematic concerns”, including abuse of positions of trust and power, excessive deference to senior clergy, failures of leadership and a cover-up over an extended period.

Because that’s how religion works. It’s hierarchical, with an imaginary god at the top and the fictional god’s putative representatives at the next level, above other humans. Of course they abuse such trust and power; who wouldn’t?

In a statement, Joanne Grenfell, the C of E’s lead safeguarding bishop, and Alexander Kubeyinje, its national director of safeguarding, said: “We are deeply sorry for the horrific abuse inflicted by the late John Smyth and its lifelong effects, already spanning more than 40 years.

Now that it’s been exposed. What were you doing before that?