Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Yet again.

Ya uh huh.

Shakespeare’s plays were written by a woman and the clues are there in Romeo and Juliet and Othello, according to US author Jodi Picoult.

…

She believes there is plenty of evidence that Shakespeare did not write the works – most damningly, she says, a man who did not secure education for his daughters could not possibly have written “proto-feminist” characters.

Secure education for his daughters how? Send them to Oxford?

Moreover, Picoult says Shakespeare’s contemporaries knew that he was not the real author.

On the contrary, they knew that he was. Ben Jonson had always felt rivalrous toward him, and scornful of his lack of erudition or classical education…until he read the Folio and realized how wrong he’d been.

“I think that, back then, people in theatre knew that William Shakespeare was a catch-all name for a lot of different types of authors. I think they expected it to be a joke that everyone would get. And we’ve all lost the punchline over 400 years,” she told an audience at the Hay Festival as she launched the novel, By Any Other Name.

Huh. Well I think he was really the child of Cleopatra and J. Edgar Hoover, and we’ve all laughed that off over 400 years.

English people are resistant to the theory, she added. “Shakespeare has gone beyond being a playwright – sometimes I think he’s a religion. And if you talk to people who are religious and you push hard enough, eventually the answer is, ‘Because that’s what it is!’ There is this blind faith in Shakespeare.”

There’s a reason for the status of Shakespeare. What is that reason? It’s because he was good at what he did. Really really extraordinarily good. Unusually good. Better than even very clever people routinely are. He was out of the ordinary that way. People noticed. It’s not blind faith; the evidence is right there for anyone to see.

“When he died, he was not buried in Westminster Abbey, although a lot of playwrights you don’t even know were buried in Westminster Abbey. And when he died, no other playwrights of the time seemed to mourn him publicly or talk about his legacy.

Wrong. As I said: Ben Jonson.

Also, we wouldn’t know about the mourning or the talk, because it wasn’t recorded. Very few things were recorded. It’s not clever sleuthing to decide that people weren’t saying X when we have so few records of people saying anything. There were no obits in the Times or the Guardian, no discussions on the BBC, no 500 page biographies in every Waterstones, but that doesn’t mean nobody talked about his legacy. They just didn’t tell us about it, because they didn’t have the technology or the habits that go with the technology.

The Daily Mail takes a cold hard look at the career of Mridul Wadhwa…while still, very unfortunately, using the deceptive pronouns. I realize that use is compelled in some way, but it needs to stop. It weakens any reporting on the subject that does it.

It was a post which was expressly advertised as being for women only but, three years ago this month, a biological male was installed in it. It required a compassionate figure to lead a charity providing a ‘safe space’ to help rape victims get through the worst experience of their lives.

The successful candidate was bullish and strident. Mridul Wadhwa labelled rape victims bigots and transphobes if they doubted whether a man identifying as a woman should run a centre helping women recover from male violence.

As for any members of staff who harboured such notions, Ms Wadhwa is on record as saying: ‘Fire them.’

All this was known within months of the 46-year-old taking up the post of CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC). What was not fully understood until much more recently was the wrathful extremes to which she would go to rid her workplace of those who did not share her views on gender politics.

A damning employment tribunal judgment this week made that crystal clear. Here was a biological male working in a women-only space who, according to the tribunal, was on a mission to ‘cleanse the organisation of those who did not follow her beliefs’.

We knew he was bad but he was worse than we knew.

Yet the eight-day hearing earlier this year presented a chilling reality. A government-funded charity was doling out doctrine where it once offered comfort.

Simply, people were being asked to accept that politics – Ms Wadhwa’s politics – took precedence over a woman’s rape ordeal.

A man’s fantasies about himself matter more than a woman’s needs after being raped.

An exceptionally shameless lie:

Federal prosecutors on Friday asked the judge in Florida overseeing the classified documents case against Donald Trump to bar the former president from public statements that “pose a significant, imminent and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents” participating in the prosecution.

The request was made to the federal district judge in the case, Aileen Cannon. It follows a distorted claim by Trump earlier this week that the FBI agents who searched his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, in August 2022 were “authorized to shoot me” and were “locked and loaded ready to take me out and put my family in danger”.

Not distorted so much as flagrantly untrue.

Trump was referring to the disclosure in a court document that the FBI, during the search, had followed a standard use-of-force policy that prohibits the use of deadly force except when the officer conducting the search has a reasonable belief that the “subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person”.

Trump and his family were not at Mar-a-Lago when the FBI searched the premises. Prosecutors said that the search had been planned that way, so that the Trumps would be out of state, and it was coordinated in advance with the US secret service, which guards former and sitting presidents. No force was used in the raid.

Trump wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the state. The FBI planned it that way.

It’s an absolute brazen lie to say they were ready to “take him out.”

The Times on that thing Literary Alliance Scotland had on its website for weeks but now says is “inappropriate” and they don’t know how it got there:

A briefing document on providing safety for trans people published by the Literary Alliance Scotland (LAS) said that “Terfs” — trans-exclusionary radical feminists, a derogatory term for women considered hostile to trans people — were joining forces with “fascists”.

It said this was a “societal issue” and urged bookshop owners not to “stay out of it”. It added: “This rise in transphobia signals a danger to all LGBTQ+ people, to reproductive rights, etc.”

Good old “etc” yeah? That can mean anything you like. Very professional, very literary.

The alliance, formed in 2015, is Scotland’s largest literary network with a membership “committed to advancing the interests of literature and languages at home and abroad”, according to its website. It says it is a “trusted, strong, collective voice” that brings together writers, publishers, educators, librarians, literature organisations and national cultural bodies.

But not women who know that men are not women.

The guidance was written for LAS by Eris Young, a “queer, transgender writer of speculative fiction and non-fiction”. It was removed from the LAS website on Friday after details emerged online.

Wait what? They’re a literary alliance but they can’t manage to write their own “guidance”? They have to outsource it to an idiot? They then fail to notice how vituperative and misogynist it is?

Young asked: “How do organisations promote safety for trans people in their spaces?” In a section titled “for bookshops”, it said: “Don’t sell Terf books/platform Terf authors. Don’t expect trans booksellers to sell them. Trans people who see Terf books or ‘gender criticism’ in a bookshop will understand that the bookshop doesn’t want them there.”

That’s embarrassing. It’s also stupid and dishonest and malevolent, but for this Scotland Literary Alliance thingy it’s acutely embarrassing. It’s childish stupid sloganeering, not writing, and certainly a million miles from “Literary.”

The guidance adds: “Terfs are actively joining forces with fascists. For example, see BRAVE books, which seeks to ‘Bring Real American Values that Endure into the hearts and minds of children and their families’.”

Pssst. This is Scotland.

Other sections gave guidance for literary festival organisers and suggested that organisers “allocate resources and opportunities to trans writers in proportion to the attacks they are facing”.

Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn, co-authors of The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, a book about grassroots women’s rights movements, said: “We are shocked and saddened at the tone and substance of the guidance issued by the LAS. It is akin to a heresy hunt and the assertion that women are joining forces with fascists is defamatory. The alliance should withdraw the guidance immediately and apologise unreservedly.”

It should do more than that. An apology is the bare minimum.

Magi Gibson on Literary Alliance of Scotland and the blacklisting of feminist women:

Let’s start with this piece, which seems not so much guidance or advice, but an uncompromising imperative. (Screenshot from the guidance document)

This is extremely worrying. How can an organisation purportedly committed to inclusion and diversity endorse a call which not only uses a derogatory term about women, and is essentially a call to blacklist certain books from bookshops, and to no-platform certain authors?

By imitating all the other organizations and institutions that do so.

The truth is that this guidance sanctions the blacklisting of books of any woman who has written or expressed a view on the reality of biological sex.

This is not a healthy state of affairs, and certainly not one that Literature Alliance Scotland, an organisation funded to ‘encourage awareness of contemporary literature… in all sectors of society’ should have any involvement with.

Literature Alliance Scotland is now claiming it was all a mistake, but that is frankly not very credible.

We just want to square the circle, that’s all.

I want to see it easier and more humane for how trans people can access a gender recognition certificate, but I also want to make sure we’re protecting single sex spaces based on biological sex

Well you CAN’T, because those two items cancel each other. The whole nonsensical idea of a “gender recognition certificate” renders women’s rights an absurdity. If men can get “certificates” that say they are women then women can’t have women-specific rights. You can’t do both.

Oh really?

A rape crisis centre that gleefully taunts women:

From Woman’s Place UK a couple of years ago:

For the International Women’s Day episode of BBC Woman’s Hour, Emma Barnett interviewed Anneliese Dodds, the Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities, and asked her for a clear definition of ‘what a woman is’.

And didn’t get one. Of course.

Anneliese Dodds: Well, I have to say that there are different definitions legally around what a woman actually is. I mean, you look at the definition within the Equality Act, and I think it just says someone who is adult and female, I think, but then doesn’t see how you define either of those things. I mean, obviously, that’s then you’ve got the biological definition, legal definition…

Emma Barnett: With respect, I didn’t ask for that. What’s the Labour definition?

Anneliese Dodds: Oh, I think with respect, Emma, I think it does depend what the context is surely. I mean surely that is important here. You know, there are people who have decided that they have to make that transition. You know, I’ve spoken with many of them. It’s been a very difficult process for many of those people. And you know, understandably because they live as a woman, you know, they want to be defined as a woman. That’s what the gender recognition act…again a Labour…is brought into place.

And on it goes, waffle waffle waffle.

The BBC solemnly informs us that a teenager is going to “become a saint.”

Carlo Acutis died in 2006, at the age of 15, meaning he would be the first millennial – a person born in the early 1980s to late 1990s – to be canonised. It follows Pope Francis attributing a second miracle to him. It involved the healing of [a] university student in Florence who had bleeding on the brain after suffering head trauma.

So why did Carlo Acutis die? If he can heal a university student in Florence why can’t he cure himself?

Carlo Acutis had been beatified – the first step towards sainthood – in 2020, after he was attributed with his first miracle – healing a Brazilian child of a congenital disease affecting his pancreas.

Two! He’s a two-miracles guy! So why couldn’t he heal himself, if only so that he could heal more people? Seems only sensible.

The second miracle was approved by the Pope following a meeting with the Vatican’s saint-making department.

Ah yes the saint-making department, right next door to the water into wine department and across from the covering up priestly child abuse department.

Miracles are typically investigated and assessed over a period of several months, with a person being eligible for sainthood after they have two to their name.

Oh good. Good good. That’s very reassuring. No rushing into things here, it’s all very deliberate and careful. I’m impressed.

H/t Acolyte of Sagan

Yeah. Same.

The ACLU three weeks ago:

Anti-abortion politicians brought this case all the way up to the Supreme Court to deny pregnant people access to emergency abortion care that is necessary to prevent severe and potentially life-altering health consequences, and even death.

The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in Idaho v. United States and Moyle v. United States, which will determine whether politicians can put doctors in jail for treating pregnant patients experiencing medical emergencies. The ultimate decision in the case — which is expected by the summer — could have severe consequences on the health and lives of people across the country facing emergency pregnancy complications.

Etc etc etc. The ACLU doesn’t say “women” or “woman” even once in the entire piece.

It’s like writing a piece about lynching without ever mentioning race.

The fact that women are the half of humanity that creates and pushes out all of humanity is why they are treated as inferior and subordinate. It’s not some irrelevant detail, it’s central.

The ACLU would not in a million years do a piece on racism while carefully never mentioning the people who are the targets of racism. Why is it so comfortable omitting women from discussions of abortion?

Perfect. The Supreme Court says yay racial gerrymandering; let the fun begin.

The Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision along party lines on Thursday, which represented its fullest endorsement of partisan gerrymandering to date. 

In the past, legal restrictions on racial gerrymandering — maps drawn to minimize the voting power of a particular racial group, rather than the power of a political party — had the side effect of also limiting attempts to draw maps that benefitted one party or another. While the Court largely tolerated gerrymanders that were designed to lock one party into power, those maps sometimes failed because they also targeted racial minorities.

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, however, is written explicitly to permit political parties to draw rigged maps, even when those maps maximize the power of white voters and minimize the power of voters of color. Indeed, Alito says that one of the purposes of his opinion is to prevent litigants from “repackag[ing] a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim by exploiting the tight link between race and political preference.”

Exploiting it, he says. Exploiting the ugly fact that one of the two major political parties is friendly to racial gerrymandering.

Alexander achieves another one of Alito’s longtime goals. Alito frequently disdains any allegation that a white lawmaker might have been motivated by racism, and he’s long sought to write a presumption of white racial innocence into the law. His dismissive attitude toward any allegation that racism might exist in American government is on full display in his opinion. “When a federal court finds that race drove a legislature’s districting decisions, it is declaring that the legislature engaged in ‘offensive and demeaning conduct,’” Alito writes, before proclaiming that “we should not be quick to hurl such accusations at the political branches.”

Except the ones that try to avoid racist gerrymandering of course.

Keir Starmer is still pretending Rosie Duffield doesn’t exist.

Rosie Duffield was snubbed from Sir Keir Starmer’s election launch event in Kent on Thursday – even though she is the only elected Labour MP in the county. The MP for Canterbury – who has angered many in her party for her stance on women’s rights – only found out about the event on social media. No Labour leader had visited Kent for years after Ms Duffield was elected in a shock 2017 victory.

He’s so determined to exclude her that he ignores the opportunity to big up his own launch event for the sake of blacklisting her.

The Labour leader was joined by Angela Rayner, his deputy, Naushabah Khan, the party’s local candidate, and several councillors from the area. It is believed Ms Duffield only found out about the event on X, formerly Twitter, after people messaged her to ask why she was not there.

She must have done something really terrible, yeah?

The Canterbury MP has angered many in her party for supporting the right of women to same-sex spaces such as toilets, changing rooms and rape crisis centres. She was also vilified by some for saying that only women have a cervix and that transwomen are not women. Ms Duffield was subject to an internal investigation after she was accused of anti-Semitism and transphobia, after which she was exonerated. However, Sir Keir never apologised to her about the ordeal. For years he refused to meet her, but then did so for the first time in Westminster earlier this month.

And now he’s conspicuously snubbing her yet again. Misogynist much?

Oh come ON.

Meaning what, their foot slipped and they typed “gender critical” instead of “transphobic”?

Come on. It wasn’t a fumble or a blunder or a pratfall or a “genuine mistake.” It was an iteration of the trans dogma that the two are the same thing, and equally evil and deserving of punishment and exile. It was yet another instance of the hatred of women that saturates this boneheaded ideology.

Get out of here with that smarmy “genuine mistake” crap. Nobody is fooled.

Unbelievable.

Bad enough yet?

He’s still hasn’t been fired.

It’s all just a game to some of them.

As Democrats lauded the White House’s 200th judicial confirmation, though, a partisan firestorm raged in the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Republicans ground proceedings to a halt during a confirmation hearing for the latest slate of court nominees.

Among the appointees who faced questioning Wednesday morning was Sarah Netburn, tapped by the Biden administration to join the bench on the Southern District of New York.

GOP lawmakers on the committee dialed in on a 2022 case she presided over as a magistrate judge in the same district, in which she granted the request of an incarcerated transgender woman who asked to move to a women’s prison from a men’s prison. The petitioner was a registered sex offender serving a sentence for distributing child pornography.

And a man. Men should not be in women’s prisons, because it’s not safe for the women.

Republicans, pointing out that the petitioner had previously served an 18-year sentence for sexually assaulting both an underage boy and girl, framed Netburn’s decision to allow the prison transfer as a political act which put other incarcerated women at risk.

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy labeled the nominee a “political activist,” a charge which she denied.

Netburn argued that she allowed the petitioner to be transferred because she had “serious medical needs,” adding that the petitioner “had engaged in no physical violence and no acts of sexual violence whatsoever” in the years since she had completed her initial sentence.

Of course all the women in that prison had serious safety needs, but apparently that doesn’t matter.

Oops. Turns out it wasn’t the neighbors after all.

If you’re going to write a book about the Church and its hatred of women, don’t accept a glammed-up tits-out cover. Like this one:

This is how you do it:

Cover by Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin