Saeedullah Safi in the Irish Times on the demolition of women’s rights in Afghanistan:

“My voice is now a crime,” says Mariam, a teacher from Kabul province. Speaking over a shaky WhatsApp connection, Mariam (whose name has been changed for her safety) describes her life as a woman under new Taliban rules. “I am terrified to leave my house,” she says. “Not because I fear the violence in the streets, but because I fear my own voice might betray me.”

Last week, the Taliban’s supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, approved new “vice and virtue” laws, which include a total ban on women’s voices in public and further restrictions on their presence outside the home.

Because, you see, if a man hears a woman’s voice it makes him think about fucking, while if he doesn’t hear a woman’s voice he will be able to keep his thoughts fixed on The Prophet. Or cricket. Or something that’s not fucking.

Women are no longer allowed to work in most sectors, attend secondary school, or visit public parks. Following the new decrees, they are now also forbidden from showing their faces or being heard in public. The Taliban’s justification: women’s voices and faces are potential instruments of vice, leading men into temptation.

Because women’s voices make men think about fucking. What’s so hard to understand?

This silence is not just a metaphorical one. The Taliban have made it literal, with new rules that ban women from singing, reading aloud or even speaking in their own homes if their voices can be heard by men outside. The consequences for disobedience are severe – women who violate these rules can be detained and punished at the discretion of Taliban officials.

It has to be this way, because women make men think about fucking.

Speaking up for the women of Afghanistan.

Wow, what a funny joke.

Trump issues threats:

Former President Donald Trump, who makes frequent false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen through rampant fraud, warned Saturday that he would attempt to imprison anyone who engages in “unscrupulous behavior” during the 2024 race results.

No he didn’t threaten to attempt to imprison, he said he would imprison. Trump never tempers what he says with an awareness of limitations on his power, he just issues the threatyest threats he can come up with.

The threat was issued in a post on Truth Social, his social media website, and repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, accusing Democrats of “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery.”

“The 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” he wrote.

See? Nothing about attempting there, just will be prosecuted. Pure strongman.

He continued, “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

Will be will be will be, because he will be will be will be the dictator who will order it to happen.

Also note the idiotic “unfortunately” placed, as always, in the wrong place so that the meaning is rendered ambiguous. He always does that. Why is it unfortunate that such “levels” have never been seen before in “our Country”?

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Trump began making baseless warnings of election interference that grew louder after he lost and culminated in a mob attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in an attempt to block certification of Biden’s election. He’s begun making similar statements ahead of the 2024 election.

Because he intends to steal it and he’s laying the groundwork. Subtle he’s not.

How sweet.

Notice anyone missing?

Urrgghh I did not know this – Trump has been campaigning in sundown towns.

Howell, Michigan. LaCrosse, Wisconsin. Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Mosinee, Wisconsin.

These relatively small cities — spread across midwestern swing states and far from dense metropolitan areas — all have one thing in common: They are former “sundown” towns, where threats of Jim Crow-era violence enforced racial segregation.

After a series of rallies in major cities to kick off his general election campaign, the Republican presidential candidate zeroed in on a handful of cities with familiar pasts.

That’s really really really disgusting.

Viral criticism across social media has argued that Trump’s latest campaign stretch isn’t a coincidence but a “dogwhistle” to racist supporters. Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign accused the former president of deliberately campaigning in the former “KKK capital of Michigan.”

His campaign denies it, but then why did they go to obscure backwater cities instead of the big obvious ones?

The town of Howell has long been associated with the Ku Klux Klan’s presence in Michigan, thanks to the state’s former “Grand Dragon” Robert Miles, who recruited auto workers into the KKK and staged hate rallies and cross burnings in the majority-white county.

“This is where Donald Trump is choosing to hold his rallies,” said a TikTok user whose video linking the former president’s “troubling pattern” of campaign rally sites to “sundown” histories has been shared widely across social media.

“You got a presidential candidate for the GOP doing a sundown town tour around the country, not looking for political gain,” he added. “He’s fucking rallying the troops.”

Oliver Brown being sly in the Telegraph:

Valentina Petrillo, the Italian father-of-two who qualified on Friday for a second semi-final of these Paris Paralympics in women’s sprinting, has hit back at being called an “out-and-proud cheat” by author JK Rowling, saying: “I’ve never even read Harry Potter.”

Nicely done. The father-of-two in women’s sprinting, who retorts to criticism with a fatuous irrelevance.

Despite the backlash, Petrillo claimed: “There is so much transphobia in all this. The most important word in Olympic and Paralympic sports is inclusion.”

No it isn’t. Of course it isn’t. How could it be? Sports are about competition, which means there are losers along with winners, and in fact there are far more losers than winners. At any rate what he means by “inclusion” is, of course, allowing men like him to compete against women…but only one or two at a time. He doesn’t want inclusion of all the men, of course, because then he would lose. He wants “inclusion” of a very small number of cheaters like him so that he can win. For now, he’s getting exactly what he wants, to the dismay and disgust of people who have any sense.

Trump zeroes in on the real cheating in elections.

He’s tall. That definitely means he should win.

Originally a comment by Acolyte of Sagan on The most important word.

Two incidents from last week at the Paralympics.

Partially-sighted Australian runner, Jaryd Clifford, accidentally let go of the tether linking him to his guide 4998 metres into the 5000 metres final. He was the only runner in that race to use guides, i.e. the ‘most’ blind runner in the field, finished in third place but was disqualified from recieving the bronze. Essentially, letting go of the tether at any point in the race, whether intentionally or not, suggests that the guide isn’t really needed and therefore the runner is gaining an unfair advantage. Clifford was disqualified because he broke the rules, and cheats don’t deserve medals, right?

Polish athlete, Roza Kozakowska, who competes in the class for the most severely disabled in her category, made a world record hammer throw, tearing her shoulder so severely in doing so that she had to withdraw from further attempts. Still, it was a gold-winning throw…until she was disqualified because the neck support pillow on her wheelchair was slightly above regulation size. Granted, it was a matter of just a few millimeters, but it gave her neck a tiny amount of extra support that her similarly-disabled rivals didn’t have. Apparently, when you lack the ability to properly coordinate your muscles over your entire body, a couple of millimeters extra support makes a difference. Kozakowska was disqualified for breaking the rules, and cheats don’t deserve medals, right?

And yet the very people who disqualified two genuine competitors from medal-winning positions for very minor and almost certainly inadvertent breaches of the regulations are cheering on a man who is openly, nay, proudly cheating his way through the competition. It’s utterly fucking insane.

The march of stupidity continues.

A Victorian breastfeeding expert is facing legal action over a series of social media posts denying that transgender women can breastfeed.

Jasmine Sussex is being taken to Queensland’s Civil and Administrative Tribunal by a trans mother after labelling attempts by transwomen to breastfeed their children “experimental’’ and calling it a “dangerous fetish”.

Ms Sussex raised concerns about Queensland trans mother Jennifer Buckley – who was born male but later transitioned into a woman – taking hormones to grow breasts and induce lactation to breastfeed her newborn baby.

No he didn’t “transition into a woman” – there is no such thing. He later started to pretend to be a woman.

The Victorian woman is preparing to be called before the Tribunal after Ms Buckley alleged that she had vilified her online, calling her statements “hurtful”.

Hurtful shmurtful. Try thinking about the wellbeing of the baby instead of your revolting fetish, dude.

Ms Buckley said she had begun transitioning but was able to conceive using IVF, meaning she is the biological father.

Imagine being a journalist and writing that ridiculous sentence.

She began taking hormones to stimulate milk production as her wife prepared to give birth because she wanted to breastfeed as well.

“For the past 6 weeks I have been taking a drug called domperidone to increase prolactin in an attempt to be able to produce breast milk so that I can have the experience of breastfeeding,” she wrote in a Facebook post. The drug domperidone is traditionally an anti-nausea medication.

And it’s just a brilliant idea to feed a baby superfluous medications so that its selfish piggy father can pretend to be a mommy.

Ms Buckley, who described herself as a “loving mother of a beautiful little boy”, told the Saturday Herald Sun her wife had encouraged her to try breastfeeding following advice from her endocrinologist. She said she was told it was “no different to inducing lactation in non-pregnant mothers or those mothers who are not producing enough milk”.

The people who told him that are insane. Of course it’s different from inducing lactation in women. Women can lactate; men cannot lactate. Inducing artificial “lactation” passes the artifice on to the baby, which is not a good idea. Primum non nocere, remember?

They’ve all lost their damn minds.

The Irish Times:

A transgender woman, who was referred for gender-affirmation surgery in Germany, says she was unable to receive “basic healthcare” on her return to a Dublin hospital.

It wasn’t “basic” healthcare though. It was very specialized.

Paige Behan (26) from Ballyfermot, Dublin, felt “humiliated” and “devastated” when neither the urology, gynaecology nor plastics teams would treat her at St James’s Hospital – the largest acute academic teaching hospital in the State – last month, despite her being referred by her GP for a worsening wound infection at the site of her surgery.

What was his surgery? A “neo-vagina” – which is not basic healthcare, and is arguably not healthcare at all.

Instead she was advised to travel late at night, while distressed and bleeding, to the National Maternity Hospital (NMH) at Holles Street, which St James’s Hospital said was “more equipped to deal with neo-vaginal complaints”.

Which seems surprising for a maternity hospital.

Ms Behan says she knew she was female since she was 12. From age 18 she was prescribed hormone therapy though she felt despair at being unable to access timely gender-affirmation surgery. She was hospitalised for several suicide attempts.

She was diagnosed with gender dysphoria following psychiatric evaluations that she found gruelling. Last year she was referred for “life-saving” surgery at the Rotkreuzklinikum München hospital in Munich, by the HSE at St Colmcille’s Hospital, Loughlinstown. This surgery is not available in Ireland.

Surgery to create a vagina was performed by plastic surgeons at the Munich hospital on July 14th. A hospital-contracted infection delayed her return home and she travelled back on August 9th.

There’s no such thing as “surgery to create a vagina.” The surgery creates an imitation vagina, which is not the same thing. At all.

Anyway, he got his name in the papers.

Janice Turner on the Taliban’s gender apartheid:

The Afghan men’s cricket team is one of 12 Test match sides. The limited-overs team competed in last year’s World Cup — with prestigious victories over Pakistan and England — and on Monday in India the Test side will play New Zealand. Why? The only possible answer is that the international community cares not a damn for Afghan women.

Why isn’t there a global boycott?

The Taliban is certainly thorough. First it stopped girls attending school and university, removed women from most jobs and demanded they cover themselves in chadors head to toe. Then it pondered other female pleasures, barring women from gyms, beauty salons, hairdressers and public parks, and making shopping trips, eating out, even buying a coffee illegal without a male chaperone. But a few chinks of happiness remained, so last month it banned the female voice from singing, reciting and speaking in public.

…

Later this month, in the UAE, the Afghan men’s cricket team will play South Africa. A bitter irony. Throughout the apartheid years, sporting boycotts were used to pressure Pretoria to end violent white supremacist rule and to punish its bar on black cricketers. The world took a moral stand: we refused to fill stadiums with cheering fans for a racist state.

Without wishing to diminish that evil regime, the Taliban is a far more meticulous oppressor. Black children received an inferior education but could still attend school. Black people were barred from many jobs and received pitiful pay yet could still earn a living. Those corralled into black townships kept the most basic human freedoms: to play music and sport, to dance, sing, laugh and chat with friends, or simply feel the breeze in their hair.

…

Campaigners are enraged to hear that female advances in every sphere of life, from law to sport, were a mere blip. They say the Taliban’s edicts are neither social “norms” nor Islamic law but mechanisms of social control (and of men, too, who are brutally punished for not keeping “wayward” womenfolk in check). What they endure needs a name and in October the UN legal committee will debate codifying a new crime against humanity into international law: gender apartheid. Existing laws address abuse of women but campaigners, from Nobel laureates to Amnesty, believe none fully capture the codified, systemic abuse of Afghan women.

…

Like many women observing an unfolding dystopia that exceeds even the The Handmaid’s Tale, I’ve despaired that there is anything we can do for Afghan women. But there is: it starts with regarding their human rights as no more negotiable than those of black South Africans and treating the Taliban as what it is, the ruler of an apartheid state.

This has to happen.

Liz Cheney endorsed Harris for president the other day. She also had some thoughts on the other candidate.

The former Republican Wyoming representative spoke with Atlantic writer Mark Leibovich in Texas on Friday, following her endorsement of Harris for president this week. In her conversation, she shared words of wisdom for Harris—and a brutally honest condemnation of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.

Well there’s no point in being gently dishonest about those two, is there. They want to destroy everything. They’re bad men. They have to be stopped.

When asked how Harris should approach Tuesday’s presidential debate against Trump, Cheney responded by saying that Harris should relish the fact that this is an “opportunity [where] Donald Trump gets to show the American people who he is.” And who he is, in her words, is a “misogynistic pig.”

“This is my diplomatic way of saying it: They’re misogynistic pigs,” Cheney said, speaking of Vance and Trump as the audience erupted in applause. “I think that will become clear.”

She’s not wrong.

Trump is throwing hissy fits.

Former President Donald Trump, frustrated by the state of the race and his continued legal troubles, on Friday sought to claim the spotlight for himself.

Wedging a hastily called press conference into an otherwise packed day of campaign events and court-related issues, he angrily complained to reporters inside the lobby of Trump Tower about his appeal in a sex abuse and defamation case. He criticized his legal team’s performance. Trump accused the moderators of the upcoming ABC debate of being unfair — and slammed Harris for not addressing reporters as often as he has.

In other words, wah wah wah wah wah wah wah.

Very edifying.

“This is a disgraceful case and disgraceful, in particular, because it is about a former president of the United States who is now leading in the polls to be the president again,” Trump said, before proceeding to voluntarily rehash salacious details of the sexual assault allegations he has denied.

He isn’t leading in the polls. Also, he shouldn’t be a former president of the US because he should never have been president of the US. He’s not competent and he’s a terrible human being.

After saying he would be discussing Friday’s jobs report, which was weaker than expected, Trump only briefly mentioned the topic after speaking for 45 minutes, then quickly touching on migration and migrant crime before ending his remarks. Most of his comments centered on the civil and criminal cases against him. 

In other words he’s only interested in himself. He doesn’t care about “migration” or “migrant crime” except as a pretext to bully people who aren’t Donald Trump.

Trump’s 50-minute, often rambling speech — billed as a “press conference,” though he took no questions from reporters — was the latest of several media events he has held in recent weeks as he has worked to reclaim his lead in the race, and to steal the spotlight back from Harris. The vice president has enjoyed favorable polling, a fundraising windfall and large, energetic crowds even as she has largely avoided speaking to the news media.

He’s not going to be able to steal the spotlight back. He’ll still get some spotlight, but he won’t get it by subtracting from hers. He’s going to get more and more furious…and this time, thankyoubabyjesus, he can’t do much with his fury other than wave his tiny fists around.

It turns out you have to have expertise in “gender” to be able to say that men are not women.

It’s a very complicated, difficult, technical subject. You can’t just rock up and say that man is not a woman. You need to have, at least, read a book by Sally Hines first.

Vance thinks mass shootings are just a fact of life, like the weather. Nothing we can do about it, folks!

Vance’s comments – in the wake of the latest deadly shooting, at Apalachee High School in Georgia – ignited a political row after Democrats depicted them as evidence of a lack of empathy while Republicans claimed the remarks had been taken out of context.

Vance called for more security measures in schools without mentioning gun control, while Democrats including Kamala Harris and the US president, Joe Biden, want a ban on assault-style rifles, more background checks, and other gun safety action.

Asked about the Georgia shooting while speaking at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, on Thursday evening, Vance said: “I don’t like this. I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realise that our schools are soft targets.”

Well it’s not a “fact of life” that any damn fool can go into a gun shop and come out armed as if for war. It’s a decision, an insistence, that it’s a human right to stroll around in public with an assault rifle.

Vance continued: “We’ve got to bolster security at our schools so that a person who walks through the front door … and wants to kill a bunch of children – they’re not able to. As a parent, do I want my kids’ school to have additional security? No, of course I don’t. But that is increasingly the reality that we live in.”

The remarks, which were prefaced by an attack on the pro-gun control stance of Harris, the Democratic nominee for president in this November’s election, were immediately seized on by the Harris campaign.

Yeah gee why would we not want to turn schools into armed camps rather than having laws against weapons of mass murder?

Trump, responding to a question on the Georgia shootings at a Fox News town hall meeting from the Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday, said: “It’s a sick and angry world for a lot of reasons and we’re going to make it better, and we’re going to heal our world.”

Is there anyone less likely to make the world less sick and angry than Donald Trump? He feeds on sick anger, he fosters sick anger, he whips up sick anger, he loves sick anger as long as it’s not directed at him.

Aw yeah, Donald Trump as the guy who “isn’t stodgy, who likes to have some fun, and likes to tell some jokes” about women and other inferiors.

It’s telling that Vance’s notion of a freewheeling, lighthearted campaign involves disparaging political opponents with baseless slander and sexist screeds.

For example, Vance took a typically cheap shot at Harris prior to her interview with CNN’s Dana Bash. He posted a 2007 clip of Miss South Carolina Teen USA Caitlin Upton bombing an answer to a question about why Americans couldn’t find their own country on a map. He wrote: “BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview.”

Vance’s “joke” was lousy politics that distracted from any actual gaffes Harris might’ve made. (You’ll note that the Harris social media team consistently hangs Vance with his own awful words.) When Berman later reminded Vance that Upton is a real person, who was so humiliated by the 2007 incident that she contemplated suicide, Vance expressed zero remorse and refused to apologize.

“Look, I’ve said a lot of things on camera; I’ve said a lot of stupid things on camera,” he said. “Sometimes when you’re in the public eye, you make mistakes. And again, I think the best way to deal with it is to laugh at ourselves, laugh at this stuff and try to have some fun in politics.”

Laugh at ourselves, sure, but he isn’t doing that, and Trump never does that. What Trump does, constantly and often and with sadistic enthusiasm, is laugh at other people, especially women and other weaklings. He’s not a good guy who laughs at himself and is trying to have some fun in politics, he’s a sadistic bully who has jeered at other people his entire life.

It’s in telling contrast to the collective MAGA freakout when Tim Walz joked in a video about his limited spice palate and affection for “white guy tacos.” Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Megyn Kelly and other right-wingers accused Walz of “self-loathing” anti-white bigotry. These are people who don’t appreciate or even comprehend self-deprecating humor, because for them, humor is solely another form of exerting dominance over people who are more vulnerable.

Exerting dominance plus casual sadism. Don’t ever forget about the casual sadism, because it matters.

Massive collective cringe.

Daily Kos sweetly transcribed the incoherent jabber, but for the full effect it’s necessary to watch him jabbering. It’s as if he’s been wound up like a clock and has to make a noise until he winds down. His only concern is to keep saying words, so he does keep saying words, without any meaning or connection to each other at all.

Question: If you win in November, can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable?

And if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?

Trump’s Answer:

Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down, you know, I was somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue, it’s a very important issue, but I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that because the child care is child care, it’s something you have to have it.

And so on. Daily Kos punctuated it as if it were a series of sentences but I de-corrected the excerpt back to the punctuation-free sustained babble it really was.

What no leprechauns?

The schoolbook publisher, The Educational Company of Ireland (Edco), has apologised for some content in one of its Junior Cycle curriculum books, adding that upon “closer inspection”, it will remove it.

In a section entitled “All Different, All Equal”, an Aran-jumper wearing Irish family is described as eating bacon, cabbage and potatoes every day and not liking change or difference, while a mixed-race family is depicted as eating more varied foods and travelling internationally.

In other words the Irish family are boring bigoted hicks while the “mixed-race” family are fascinating and cosmopolitan. No doubt there are plenty of families who fit both descriptions, but didactic tales about them can…shall we say, go wrong.

The publisher issued a statement to RTÉ News in response to queries around the book’s depictions, which had led to widespread calls for the book to be pulled.

In the statement, Edco said: “Firstly, we would like to say that we welcome the public’s interest in this issue and the whole area of SPHE.

“By means of background and context, the main function of this activity (‘Looking at Difference’) is designed to help students understand the importance of diversity in our lives, to introduce students to the Equal Status Acts and to highlight the types of discrimination they cover.

“Following the students’ introduction to the Equal Status Acts, the activity uses exaggeration and hyperbole to convey the nature and effects of inclusion and bias.” However, it said that “on closer inspection, we now appreciate that our approach should have been different”.

Well, yeah. Assigning kids in Irish schools a book that portrays Irish people as boring bigoted hicks is probably not the best way to go.