The Society for

May 13th, 2025 11:06 am | By

The Society for Women in Philosophy UK is not for women in philosophy. It’s for that other thing – the opposite.

It offers a “statement of solidarity and support in response to the recent UK Supreme Court ruling and EHRC guidance” which is not a statement of solidarity with women but rather a statement of solidarity with men who call themselves women.

(There’s no link to the statement because apparently they don’t do links; just scroll down – there’s not much on the page.)

What’s their philosophical take?

The Society for Women In Philosophy UK (SWIP UK) condemns the recent Supreme Court ruling on 16 April 2025 determining that the term ‘woman’ in the Equality Act 2010 refers to a binary and biological notion of ‘sex’, and the subsequent interim guidance published by the EHRC on 25 April 2025. 

Ah yes a “notion” – a peculiar eccentric addle-pated notion that sex refers to sex. Silly Supreme Court; if only they studied the works of professional trans ideologues like “India” Willoughby instead of relying on sexual dimorphism for their definition.

This ruling and the guidance undermine the human rights and safety of trans, non-binary, and intersex people and are also detrimental to cis women. Trans women are women, and belong in feminist organisations. There is no fight against sexism and misogyny separate from the fight against cissexism and transmisogyny.

In what way is it detrimental to women to know what women are? In what way is it not detrimental to women to pretend that men can be women? Deep philosophical questions which the Gang for Women in Philosophy don’t bother to answer, or even ask.

SWIP UK membership, in line with our recognitions and aims, has for many years been open to trans women and to other trans and/or non-binary people who feel the category of ‘woman’ is relevant to their experiences, and this will not change under any circumstances. 

Oh. Really? So it’s not the Society for Women in Philosophy. Why do they call themselves that while they disavow it? If it’s not for women why do they say it’s for women?

Ironically, that’s about the most obvious contradiction one could come up with, and philosophers are supposed to be alert to contradictions, and avoid them. It seems kind of cringey to feature and underline one right there on their website.



Invisible women

May 13th, 2025 9:59 am | By

If you’re a woman and a teacher in the UK you don’t have a union that looks out for your interests.

Britain’s largest teaching union has voted to campaign against the Supreme Court ruling on gender, insisting trans women in schools must be allowed to use ladies’ toilets.

The Left-wing National Education Union (NEU) resolved on Saturday to advocate for trans teachers to continue to choose toilets according to ‘gender identity’.

Which is a massive “fuck you” to women.

The judgement, which states a woman is defined by biological sex, effectively means a male-born trans person can be excluded from female-only spaces.

However, the NEU’s resolution means it may now intervene to provide legal assistance for trans teachers if they are banned from female toilets or girls’ changing rooms.

Not legal assistance for women who don’t want to take their clothes off with men in the room, but legal assistance for men who want to take their clothes off with women in the room. Solidarity Forever eh what?

Daniel Kebede, General Secretary, said: ‘The NEU is looking carefully at the Supreme Court ruling and its implications for employment. A toxic climate has been created in recent years in which trans people, a small community, are treated as if they are a risk or threat to others.’

Go to hell, Mr Kebede. Men are a threat to women if they’re insisting on invading women’s spaces and watching them take their clothes off. Men who are not a threat to women don’t want to do that. Do you get it now? The adamant insistence on intruding on women is a guy thing, and it’s revolting to see men lining up to defend it and encourage it.

The 52 executive members, mostly regional reps, voted in favour of a motion called ‘trans rights are human rights’.

The motion says the ruling ‘contradicts human rights and dignity of trans and other gender-diverse staff and encourages discrimination, harassment and hate crimes’.

What about the human rights and dignity of women?

It’s so interesting how they simply take for granted that “trans rights” get to cancel women’s rights.



How to make a right

May 13th, 2025 9:37 am | By
How to make a right

Wrong.

That little nugget of wisdom is floating around on social meeja. It’s idiotic.

There is no erosion of the human rights of trans people, i.e. the human rights that everyone has. There is no such thing as specifically “trans” rights. There can’t be, because “trans” is a fiction, and because making that particular fiction a basis for rights would obliterate women’s rights as well as lesbian and gay rights. It’s unworkable to make it a “right” for men who pretend to be women to force everyone else to agree. It’s unworkable because it’s not true and it drives a tank through women’s rights.

Imagine if trans ideology faded out, to be replaced by an ideology that claims people are whatever military rank they say they are. If I say I’m an admiral, I’m an admiral. Would that be workable? No. How about an ideology that claims people can fly if they say they can? I suppose we could shrug and say “Ok whatever” because it would harm only the roof jumpers, but what if they started taking babies up onto that roof? So, no again.

The slogan sounds cute to people unaccustomed to thinking, but it’s not workable.



Expedited reviews

May 13th, 2025 3:27 am | By

Welcome to Racism Import Theater.

The first group of White South African refugees arrived in the U.S. on Monday under President Trump’s executive order mandating they be prioritized for resettlement — even as the broader refugee program remains largely on hold.

The 59 Afrikaners, descendants of mainly Dutch colonists, underwent expedited reviews that took months, were brought to the U.S. on a government-chartered flight, and were greeted at Dulles International Airport by federal officials — all unconventional steps for the refugee resettlement program, which can take years to process.

In other words, refugees don’t normally get expedited reviews, they don’t normally get here on a government-chartered plane, and they are not normally greeted at Dulles by federal officials. It seems fair to assume that the “unconventional steps” are a way to rub our noses in the fact that the Trump regime welcomes white racists and has contempt for their victims.

Nose duly rubbed. We get it. You hate us and you love racists. You’re going to do all the harm you can in the next four years, and that will be a lot of harm. We can’t do a damn thing about it. We get it.

Among his first executive actions, Trump temporarily paused the refugee resettlement program. Various agencies including the State Department have also paused disbursing funding for critical services such as the home, job and school assistance the Afrikaners are poised to receive.

The pause sent the refugee resettlement agencies into turmoil as refugees already cleared to arrive in the U.S. received notice their flights had been cancelled.

Among those left in limbo were Afghans who worked with the U.S. military, a move that some Republicans have criticized. Judges have ordered the government to at least resume the refugee program for those who had already been approved to travel, but the administration is fighting the court order.

Fighting the court order while ostentatiously parading Afrikaner “refugees” from post-apartheid South Africa. Noses rubbed.



No YOUR crusade is ugly

May 12th, 2025 5:52 pm | By

Just shameless lies in the Guardian.

The article is a toe-curling pile of flattery of a fantasy writer called Jessica Townsend, so of course it has to fling some sewer scrapings at Rowling in the process.

Townsend is going into her press tour for Silverborn at a time when the world’s most famous children’s author, JK Rowling, is publicly railing against the rights of trans people.

Liars liars liars. No she is not. She is publicly railing at attacks on the rights of female people, and explaining how trans ideology is incompatible with women’s rights.

“I’m very happy to be quite blunt about it: I’m gutted. It is so upsetting and it’s so perplexing, and I will never understand it,” she says. But Rowling’s ugly crusade has only reinforced Townsend’s innate sense of duty towards the “tiny brains and hearts” in her audience.

The tiny brains and hearts that are all in the wrong bodies, no doubt.



Men must be allowed to barge in

May 12th, 2025 5:12 pm | By

Solidarity for…whatever, but for sure not women.

Britain’s largest teaching union has voted to campaign against the Supreme Court ruling on gender, insisting trans women in schools must be allowed to use ladies’ toilets.

In other words insisting that women must lose their rights to privacy and safety. For the union makes men strong.

Daniel Kebede, General Secretary, said: ‘The NEU is looking carefully at the Supreme Court ruling and its implications for employment. A toxic climate has been created in recent years in which trans people, a small community, are treated as if they are a risk or threat to others.’

No, men are acknowledged to be a potential threat to women in small enclosed spaces with their pants down. It is the case that some men – far too many men – do take advantage of settings like toilets to spy on or photograph or assault women. The NEU should look carefully at that.

The court ruling, on April 16, came too late to be debated at the NEU annual conference – so it was instead discussed at a meeting of the National Executive at the weekend.

The 52 executive members, mostly regional reps, voted in favour of a motion called ‘trans rights are human rights’.

The motion says the ruling ‘contradicts human rights and dignity of trans and other gender-diverse staff and encourages discrimination, harassment and hate crimes’.

And what about women?

Pffff. Obviously the union doesn’t give two shits.



Captive audience

May 12th, 2025 4:55 pm | By

Oh has he now.

That teacher is in the wrong job then. The very very very wrong job. Teachers are not there to teach the children how to focus all their attention on the teachers’ idenninies. That’s not what school is for. Teachers are conduits for learning, not the subjects of learning. Nobody should be burdened with having to remember someone’s luxury idenniny, and that goes triple for children in school.

And that’s true times a billion when what the teachers are trying to force the children to learn is a pack of lies, and personal narcissistic look-at-me lies at that. Teachers should no more be telling children about their idenninies than they should be telling them about their sex lives or their cocaine habits or their grudges against their parents. Grade school is not a theater, it’s school.

And no, the child should not be gently reminded of the preferred idenniny of this adult; the subject should never come up at all.



Sure seems like an emolument

May 12th, 2025 11:08 am | By
Sure seems like an emolument

Bill Kristol on Trump and emoluments:

I’m old enough to remember when this was a republic. A proud republic. We were proud to be different from the principalities and powers of the old world. We were confident of our superiority to the hereditary aristocracies and monarchies that had dominated political life everywhere on the globe, and that still did in many places.

Now, the president of the United States is boasting of receiving as a gift a luxury Boeing 747-8 plane from the Qatari royal family. The plane will be upgraded to serve not as the Air Force One but as his Air Force One, since it will only be available for use by the government of the United States during his time in office. It will then revert to him—well, nominally to his presidential library, but it will of course be totally at his disposal—after he leaves office.

This sure seems like a “present” or “emolument” to a person holding “an office of trust” from “a King, Prince, or foreign state.”

But not to worry. Attorney General Pam Bondi—once a registered lobbyist for Qatar, as it happens—has concluded that the transaction is permissible under U.S. law and the Constitution.

Interesting. Are we to conclude that AG Pam Bondi nudged Qatar into bestowing this tiny negligible blink and you’ve missed it bribe on Trump?

Trump can’t really conceal his contempt for the old republican ways. Last night, he posted this on social media:

So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE, of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. 

Note that he even points out that the “gift” to the Defense Department is only temporary. He doesn’t point out that it’s actually a permanent gift to him, which the DD gets to use only while he’s squatting in the Filthy House.

This is the voice of old-world autocracy. Those who take seriously the constraints and requirements of republican government are fools. Those who care that our republican government not be dependent on foreign states, that our elected leaders not take favors from foreign princes, they are losers.

It’s the voice of the old-world autocracy stripped of any semblance of nobility or basic dinner-table manners. It’s the voice of old-world autocracy quacked out by a psychotic puppet.



Let them speak

May 12th, 2025 8:35 am | By

BBC Woman’s Hour today talked to trans “woman” Robin Moira White about the Supreme Court ruling on whatisawoman. The chat is the first in what it says will be a series of such chats. I have to wonder why the Beeb starts this series with a man who pretends to be a woman. Why is he at the head of the queue? Why not talk to women first and men last? Or indeed why talk to men at all?

So anyway, obviously I’ll have to listen to the whole annoying thing and share the worst bits.

First question – what’s his opinion on the Supreme Court ruling that woman means woman?

Well – I don’t think the Supreme Court ruling will survive a trip to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. … What we have is a situation now where that recognition is not effective and will need to be corrected

Nuala McGovern: But on what grounds would the court on human rights potentially overrule the judgement?

White: Well if you are a trans person that acknowledgement of your changed gender has to allow you to live appropriately and with dignity and if you go to the cinemar or the supermarket and you are forced to use facilities that are not appropriate to your gender, then firstly

Ok wait. Before we hear what happens “firstly” let’s interrogate this issue of being forced to use facilities that are not appropriate to your gender. Here’s the problem with that: if the Robin Moira Whites get to use what they consider facilities appropriate to their magic notional fictitious gender, then actual women are forced to use facilities that are NOT appropriate to their actual sex. Men in dresses win, women lose. Why should men in dresses get to win??? Why does his “appropriate” matter more than ours?

He goes on:

Your rights to privacy are compromised, and your rights to live in dignity are compromised.

See above. What about our rights to privacy and dignity, you oblivious selfish shit?

McGovern sort of hints at this little problem and they go back and forth a bit. RMW sums up:

The problem is, that it’s all very well having fundamental human rights, but if in your workplace you’re forced to go – you’ve very specifically rejected your birth gender, and now you’re forced into facilities that reflect that, that is devastating.

Slightly muddled, as live conversations can be, but he means forced into facilities that reflect that other wrong rejected gender. So anyway – it’s the same thing again. Yes, and if you’re not forced into those facilities, then women are forced to put up with you in their facilities. Why does your distress matter more than theirs? There’s one of you and more than one of them, and also, you’re a man and they’re women. Why does your distress matter more than theirs???

Cheeringly, McGovern does make this point.

I mean – there are people who would say it is devastating to have to share facilities – same sex facilities – with a biological man.

His response is frankly incoherent. The solution is additional accommodations, he drones. Yes that will work: all those “additional accommodations” will just spring into being, at no expense or inconvenience or loss of space needed for other things. That’s why this has been happening all along oh wait no it hasn’t.

Then he goes on to bleat about people being “unpleasant” by which he means calling a man a man. He sounds quite…dim. Pompous, because he has the voice for it [a male attribute by the way, and he deploys it without apparent shyness], but fatuous.

Then he calls Stephen Whittle and someone else “eminences grises” pronounced “eminence greezez”. Hahahahahasorryhahahahaha

Then McGovern asks him about calling Sex Matters “evil” and he squirms a bit and that’s the end. He has a little talent in the department of talking slowly in a gravelly voice so that he sounds thoughtful (and deeply male, to underline the point), but he wasn’t even slightly persuasive.



It’s not personal

May 11th, 2025 4:37 pm | By

Completely normal. Not corrupt at all. No risk of favors in exchange for a tiny gifty. Just a kind gesture from a dear friend. Clean as a whistle.

Trump to accept luxury jet from Qatar to use as Air Force One

Sure; why not? Heads of state accept little prezzies from other countries all the time. A huge luxury airplane isn’t worth much at all – not as much as a nice dinner at the local Chipotle.

Given the massive value of a Boeing 747-8, the move is unprecedented and raises substantial ethical and legal questions. A Qatari official said the plane is technically being gifted from the Qatari Ministry of Defense to the Pentagon, describing it more as a government-to-government transaction instead of a personal one. The Defense Department will then retrofit the plane for the president’s use with security features and modifications.

All totally impersonal. It’s about like donating some concrete slabs to the Pentagon to patch a sidewalk.

The plan is for the plane to be donated to Trump’s presidential library after he leaves office, ensuring he can continue to use it, according to a person familiar.

You what? He gets to keep it?

Stone the crows. That’s a bribe.

Democrats quickly condemned the news Sunday, with the Democratic National Committee describing it in a news release as “Trump’s latest grift.”

“Nothing says ‘America First’ like Air Force One, brought to you by Qatar,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote in a statement. “It’s not just bribery, it’s premium foreign influence with extra legroom.”

And solid gold plating.

Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the potential move is a sharp departure from the playbook presidents have followed to ensure they stay in line with the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause, which bans foreign payments to a sitting US president.

“We’ve never seen something on the level of a $400 million plane,” he said. “It is a scale well beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.”

That’s Trump for ya. From nothing to a luxury jumbo jet in one jump. Tentative he is not.



But how would Rose feel?

May 11th, 2025 10:35 am | By

Enough.

Same, except not so much every so often as multiple times every day.



As naked and/or uncomfortable as possible

May 11th, 2025 10:09 am | By

It seems there’s a thing called the Met Gala. The two words together are very slightly familiar, but I can’t say I’ve ever paid much attention to it. Hadley Freeman was caught in Manhattan last week while the Gala was galaing.

What was once a low-key fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in Manhattan has become an annual warning about the dangers of being too rich, too thin and too obsessed with Instagram. Every year there’s a jaunty dress code “theme” — shudder — but most of the female celebrities simply do what they always do at these things, which is look as naked and/or uncomfortable as possible.

Ya. That’s a thing that’s been bugging me forever – as in, the whole of my adult life. Why do women still do that? Feminism is a thing, and has been for decades. Why, then, do women’s clothes just get more and more insultingly impractical and torturous and sex-focused? Why do women’s clothes look as if they’re designed by pimps while men’s clothes don’t? Why don’t women refuse?

What I couldn’t cope with was the homogeneity of the bodies and faces. Even in a year that was ostensibly meant to celebrate “diversity”, the women at the Met Ball were all shrinking to a vanishing point, their faces so smooth it’s impossible to tell anyone’s age any more. Is Kylie Jenner, the youngest of the Kardashian Klan, 20 years old? Fifty? I’d believe either. Anne Hathaway looked as if she’d been drawn by AI. Demi Moore’s clavicles were more prominent than her facial features. And yet, it’s considered “body-shaming” to notice what is being thrust in front of our faces, and so, in the name of diversity, we all have to pretend we are blind and that it’s totally normal that twentysomethings are full of fillers and fiftysomethings have no body fat. 

And we all have to pretend it’s fine that women must represent Sex while men get to represent Work or Cultivated Leisure. We all have to pretend not to notice that that divides the sexes into the consumer and the consumed, the subject and the object. Women have to dress for the male gaze, men have to dress as the sturdy male gazer. Women’s clothes might fall off at any moment, men’s clothes are firmly secured. Who agreed to this arrangement? Why didn’t it get canceled at least half a century ago?

It’s a branch of anthropology I find peculiarly irritating.

Once artists rebelled against old-fashioned ideas about masculinity and femininity, like Boy George, KD Lang and Madonna. Now those who don’t fit into today’s Kardashianised mould of celebrity beauty, such as Ramsey, Sam Smith, Emma Corrin and so on, describe themselves as “non-binary”, as if not having pumped-up breasts or biceps de-sexes them. The irony of the “non-binary” term is it reinforces today’s binary ideas about how women and men should look and behave.

So women have two choices: torture-clothes or trendy bullshit.



More steps

May 10th, 2025 5:53 pm | By

The arrests have begun.

It all went down on Friday afternoon when Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark and Democratic candidate for New Jersey governor, was arrested outside an ICE facility alongside three members of Congress.

While the congresspeople—New Jersey Democratic Reps. Rob Menendez, Bonnie Watson Coleman, and LaMonica McIver—were inside the Delaney Hall detention facility waiting to be given a tour, Baraka waited outside in a fenced-in parking lot as protestors gathered on the other side of the fence. He was told to leave the fenced-in part of the parking lot and, despite complying with the request, was then detained by ICE agents.

Interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey and Trump advisor Alina Habba said on X of the arrest, “The Mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”

Oh really? Trump has broken multiple laws, as has Musk.

In her own statement, Rep. Watson Coleman explained that she and her fellow members of Congress were exercising their legal oversight function as they have previously done at the Elizabeth Detention Center “without incident,” she noted.

A city mayor doesn’t have that legal oversight function, I suppose, but arresting this one still looks like massive overkill.

Tricia McLaughlin, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs in the Department of Homeland Security, called the protest a “bizarre political stunt” and described the politicians as having stormed the gate of the center.

Oh we’re the ones who are bizarre. Not Trump’s gang of sadists but the people trying to monitor their sadism and report it to the citizenry.

Appearing on Fox News, McLaughlin said that the people detained at Delaney Hall were “the worst of the worst” and included members of the MS-13 gang. She described the claim that the group were exercising their legal oversight rights as “laughable.”

How is it laughable? Trump is not an emperor; Congress does have the power to monitor what he’s doing. Checks & balances.

In a statement shared to social media, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said that he was outraged by Baraka’s arrest and called for his immediate release. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) described the scenes outside Delaney Hall as an “absolute outrage” and also called for Baraka’s immediate release.

New Jersey Democratic Senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim both released statements on Baraka’s arrest, with Booker also calling for Baraka’s release and describing his arrest as, “disturbing, unnecessary, and indicative of tactics that are undermining the safety and security of our communities.”

Trump’s people are acting as if he already is an absolute dictator.



The blushing cheat

May 10th, 2025 10:33 am | By

Sweet.

There’s just one small problem.



People and their experiences

May 10th, 2025 10:08 am | By

Forced teaming and Vatican rags:

In the eyes of many LGBTQ Catholics

I have to stop you right there. Seven words in and you’re lying already. There are no LGBTQ Catholics. There can’t be. It’s not a thing. LGB is sexual orientation, Q means nothing, T is genner idenniny which is 1. bullshit and 2. incompatible with LG.

NBC of course found someone to explain with all due ponderous verbiageification what the new pope means to him her them us you insert chosen pronoun somewhere.

Jason Steidl Jack, a gay Catholic and an assistant teaching professor of religious studies at St. Joseph’s University, New York, described his reaction to the election of Pope Leo, the first-ever American to lead the Holy See, as “cautiously optimistic.”

“I do see him continuing Pope Francis’ legacy, especially of dialogue and synodality,” Steidl Jack said, describing synodality as “this idea of journeying together” and “listening to one another.” However, he said the new pope’s election “doesn’t assuage all of the fears that I have as an LGBTQ Catholic.”

“The church’s teaching, even under Pope Francis, remains incredibly homophobic, and the church goes on inventing new ways of being transphobic as it really avoids learning about trans people and their experiences,” he said, adding, however, that the new pontiff seems “open to dialogue and inclusion” given his remarks on Thursday.

Learning what “about trans people and their experiences”? That people continue to know the differences between women and men? That not everyone is eager or willing to change the definitions of “woman” and “man” such that they mean their own opposites? That most people still understand why women don’t want men taking over everything that used to belong to women?



Corrections

May 10th, 2025 5:02 am | By

I see I’m not the only one who wonders.

…while also respecting the rights of trans women.”

Of course.

Plenty of irritated women were on hand to say no, you damn fool, that’s not the ruling.

https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1912455646487683190

https://twitter.com/Wommando/status/1912454524691689509



But only where necessary

May 10th, 2025 4:48 am | By

Ok what does this mean?

Meanwhile Labour peer and former women and equalities minister Harriet Harman, also chair of the Fawcett Society, said the verdict “correctly interprets” current legislation and ministers’ intentions when it was drafted under the last Labour government. ”

She added: “Single sex spaces for women are important and can exclude trans women but only where necessary. The Act, and ruling, protects rights of women while also respecting the rights of trans women.”

It’s at the end of a piece about a “trans Labour councillor” who “has resigned from the party, accusing it of having ‘“thrown transgender people under the bus.'” It’s the usual nonsense, but what I want to know is what does “but only where necessary” mean?

I suppose it means what it appears to mean. I suppose it means “women are whiny bitches so all right they can have their precious single sex spaces but only when it’s really truly necessary and the rest of the time they just have to put up with unwanted uninvited men invading their book groups and feminist meetups.”



Actively looking

May 9th, 2025 5:47 pm | By

Of course it is.

White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller said Friday that the Trump administration is “actively looking at” suspending the writ of habeas corpus — the constitutional right to challenge in court the legality of a person’s detention by the government — for migrants.

Miller’s comment came in response to a White House reporter who asked about President Donald Trump entertaining the idea of suspending the writ to deal with the problem of illegal immigration into the United States.

Asked when that might happen, Miller responded: “The Constitution is clear, and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in time of invasion.”

“So, I would say that’s an option we’re actively looking at,” he said.

A number of pending civil cases challenging the Trump administration’s deportation of undocumented immigrants in the United States are based on habeas claims.

People challenge the Trump administration because the people have rights, so the Trump administration gets to work making sure the people stop having rights. Of course it does.

The writ has been suspended only four times since the U.S. Constitution was ratified. And in all but one of those instances, Congress first authorized the suspension.

The idea of habeas corpus originated in English common law. “No man shall be arrested or imprisoned…except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land,” a provision in the Magna Carta, signed by King John in the early 13th Century, says.

The U.S. Constitution, in Article 1, section 9, says, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

Miller’s use of the word “invasion” reflects the Trump administration’s argument that the U.S. faces an “invasion” of undocumented migrants.

And the Trump administration’s eagerness to lock up and punish migrants.



Rolling out the red carpet

May 9th, 2025 3:35 pm | By

Sigh. Of course he is.

The first group of white South Africans who[m] the Trump administration is classifying as refugees are expected to arrive in the United States on Monday.

President Donald Trump suspended refugee admissions from most other nations when he took office. But in a February executive order, Trump said the U.S. would establish a plan to resettle “Afrikaners” and their families as refugees in the United States.

Afrikaners are mainly of Dutch descent. The Trump administration has accused the South African “government-sponsored race-based discrimination” and pledged to cut off all aid and assistance.

Other refugees can fuck off, but the racist ones with the loathsome history are more than welcome.

According to the New York Times, a group of 54 Afrikaners were due to depart from Johannesburg on Sunday. The Washington Post reported that a group of 60 Afrikaners would be arriving on a State Department plane on Monday to an airport just outside of Washington.

The State Department declined in an email to confirm the reports or say how many South Africans would be coming and when they would arrive.

Don’t even think about giving me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The hell with them. But your uncomfortable racists? The doors are wide open!

A spokesperson said in response to a request for comment that the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa had been conducting interviews and processing applications of individuals who have expressed interest in moving to the United States. The State Department said in its statement that it is prioritizing Afrikaners in South Africa who[m] it views as victims of unjust racial discrimination.

Does USA Today have a rule against ever using “whom”?



Only the best

May 9th, 2025 10:51 am | By

Trump has given yet another Fox News “personality” an important government job.

Trump has appointed Fox News host and former New York prosecutor Jeanine Pirro as interim US attorney for Washington DC. The announcement comes after Trump withdrew his first pick for the job after he lost key Republican support in the Senate, which votes on such positions.

After Trump’s 2020 loss to Joe Biden, Pirro made false statements about the election that were part of a lawsuit against Fox News by a company that makes voting machines. The case was settled for more than $787m (£594m). Trump called Pirro “a powerful crusader for victims of crime” in a social media post announcing his selection. Meanwhile, critics described her as unqualified.

Well sure but Trump doesn’t want qualified, he wants in the bag. He wants people who like what he’s selling.

In the Truth Social post on Thursday night, Trump noted that she previously served as a Republican district attorney in Westchester, New York, as well as a judge. He also touted her roles on various shows on Fox News, including on The Five, which he called “one of the Highest Rated Shows on Television”.

Yup that’s the important thing. TV fame is what matters.

Democrats were quick to criticise the appointment of Pirro, the second Fox News host with to receive a high-profile federal job after Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, raising questions about her credentials for the role and about her career outside of broadcasting.

“Which Fox News host will get the next federal appointment,” Jimmy Gomez, a Democrat representative from California, wrote on X.

The Democratic National Committee wrote in a statement: “Jeanine Pirro is yet another unqualified TV personality with a history of putting Trump and violent insurrectionists above the rule of law.”

Democrats are so boring that way, expecting government hires to be qualified and experienced and good at what they do. Pffffffff.