As a controlled explosion rocked the Dali on Monday, nearly two dozen sailors remained on board, below deck in the massive ship’s hull. The simultaneous blasts sent pieces of Baltimore’s once iconic Francis Scott Key Bridge into the dark waters of Maryland’s Patapsco River, seven weeks after its collapse left six people on the bridge dead and the Dali marooned.
Authorities – and the crew – hope that the demolition will mark the beginning of the end of a long process that has left the 21 men on board trapped and cut off from the world, thousands of miles from their homes.
They’re bound to be used to being trapped on the ship for long periods, but not that long, and not with nothing to do but wait. Makes me claustrophobic just thinking about it.
The crew, made up of 20 Indians and a Sri Lankan national, has been unable to disembark because of visa restrictions, a lack of required shore passes and parallel ongoing investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and FBI.
Jeez. You’d think officialdom could come up with some way to keep track of them but still let them off the ship.
Among those who have been in touch with the crew is Joshua Messick, executive director of the Baltimore International Seafarers’ Center, a non-profit organisation that works to protect the rights of mariners. According to Mr Messick, the crew has been left largely without communication with the outside world for “a couple of weeks” after their mobile phones were confiscated by the FBI as part of the investigation.
“They can’t do any online banking. They can’t pay their bills at home. They don’t have any of their data or anyone’s contact information, so they’re really isolated right now,” Mr Messick said. “They just can’t reach out to the folks they need to, or even look at pictures of their children before they go to sleep. It’s really a sad situation.”
The owners and bosses of course remain free and comfortable.
He’s not a “transgender golfer” – he’s a transgender man, aka a man who claims to be a woman. “Golfer” is not a gender.
This careful evasiveness seems to be universal in mainstream journalism, which is maddening. It’s not the job of news outlets to protect men who are working 24/7 to destroy the rights of women.
The caption under the photo at the top of the story is even more evasive:
Hailey Davidson, a winner earlier this year on the NXXT Tour, missed qualifying for the U.S. Women’s Open by one spot.
Nothing even hints that he’s not a woman.
The lede:
Transgender golfer Hailey Davidson missed qualifying for the U.S. Women’s Open on Monday by one stroke. Davidson finished in a three-way tie for third in the 36-hole qualifier at Bradenton (Fla.) Country Club with rounds of 70-73, emerging as the first alternate from the event. She tied two-time LPGA Tour winner Jasmine Suwannapura and Louis Olsson Campbell of Sweden. Suwannapura is the second alternate.
People who don’t pay attention to the Trans Wars could easily read that without realizing that Davidson is a man who claims to be a woman. “Transgender golfer” doesn’t mean anything, and the entire rest of the paragraph simply reads as if he’s a woman.
It’s not until the third paragraph that Golf Digest admits he’s a man.
We’ll be seeking an explanation from Anneliese’s office, as well as reassurances on the Labour leadership’s policy commitments to LGBT+ people – including Trans people – on hate crime, healthcare, conversion therapy, gender recognition reform and more. (2/2)
I’m just catching up on the news about a teacher who was abruptly fired, apparently for teaching critical thinking. It seems the school also seized his personal laptop and is keeping it, which…how is that legal? It’s either that or he was writing a book on a school computer and not backing it up on a computer of his own, which…why tf would he do that?
7 days ago I was fired from my school after 4 years of teaching. I recorded this the following day in order to share my perspective – honestly & in good faith – in order to move forward and put this experience behind me. I have no desire to cause complications or bring unwanted… pic.twitter.com/Bf61VC2dD1
I’m only halfway through because I stopped to look for background information so that I could make sense of what he says. So. That quest led to this video and, starting at 1:25, the core of this whole shitshow – not the one around this teacher but the one around the ideology. You know the one.
Student to Smith: It was deemed transphobic – ok – like, I myself –
Smith to student: Do you find that transphobic yourself?
Student: Uhhhhh – I don’t really have an opinion on it, but, I’m just going with what a lot of other people have said
BAM!
Slam down on that stop button, suspend all search for background on this story, in order to shout as loudly as possible YES, EXACTLY, YOU AND EVERYONE ELSE, AND THAT IS HOW WE GOT HERE.
Imagine everyone’s surprise when all the questions are asked and it finally becomes too obvious to deny that that’s what EVERYONE is doing AND THAT’S WHY THIS IS SUCH A GARBAGE FIRE of a movement and an ideology and an attempt at “liberation” or “inclusion” or “equity” or whateverthefuck these robotic goons think they’re doing.
“I’m just going with what a lot of other people have said” – yes and guess what, sonny, so are they. It turns out that’s all ANYONE is doing. You all think someone somewhere must have gotten hold of the right end of the stick somehow, so there’s no need to think further. Well you are WRONG about that. No one did. There is no right end of this stick. It’s a crock of shit from top to bottom.
Now back to learning more about Warren Smith…now that the outlines are pathetically clear.
The NY Times reported several weeks ago that Republicans are hard at work purging voters.
A network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald J. Trump is quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states, an all-but-unnoticed effort that could have an impact in a close or contentious election.
Calling themselves election investigators, the activists have pressed local officials in Michigan, Nevada and Georgia to drop voters from the rolls en masse. They have at times targeted Democratic areas, relying on new data programs and novel legal theories to justify their push.
…
The groups have made mass voter challenges a top priority this election year, spurred on by a former Trump lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and True the Vote, a vote-monitoring group with a long history of spreading misinformation.
Their mission, they say, is to maintain accurate voting records and remove voters who have moved to another jurisdiction. Democrats, they claim, use these “excess registrations” to stuff ballot boxes and steal elections.
The theory has no grounding in fact. Investigations into voter fraud have found that it is exceedingly rare and that when it occurs, it is typically isolated or even accidental. Election officials say that there is no reason to think that the systems in place for keeping voter lists up-to-date are failing.
The bigger risk, they note, is disenfranchising voters.
The even bigger risk is electing that monstrosity again.
He reported directly to Mr Trump, on “whatever concerned him, whatever he wanted”, Cohen said, calling his ex-boss a micromanager. “Everything required Mr Trump’s sign-off,” he said.
At the same time, Mr Trump was careful about paper trails, Cohen said. The Trump Organization founder never had an email address, telling Cohen that “emails are like written papers”.
“There are too many people who have gone down as a direct result of having emails that prosecutors can use in a case,” Cohen said Mr Trump once told him.
Gone down, eh? As in, been exposed as criminals? If Trump did say that it tells us he knows he’s a crook and takes steps to hide his crookery. Granted, that’s a no shit Sherlock, but it’s interesting to see it spelled out like that. “We don’t use email here, because it could be useful to the cops.”
Many many people, especially women, are asking why the BBC keeps promoting drag and why it doesn’t equally promote blackface. It’s a fair question.
Amir Dean, also known as Lady Bushra, is one of the UK's most well-known British Asian drag artists.
Since debuting Lady Bushra four years ago, Amir has travelled the world performing with the hope of encouraging people to "be more like Bushra" pic.twitter.com/KL7lZjRSOJ
— BBC World Service (@bbcworldservice) May 14, 2024
His “true self” being the woman he is not. His fake true self, his pretend true self, his fantasy true self. Back in the before times a true self meant something along the lines of a self not repressed and stifled by convention. It didn’t mean childish fantasy. Adults didn’t prance around saying their true selves were birds or race cars or space travelers or Nobel laureates or ponies. Fantasy and delusion are now what’s real, so I guess truth and sanity are fake.
How are we supposed to even try to show compassion for people who may or may not have debilitating dysphoria when so many of the most vocal claimants spout endless “true self” cultspeak bullshit? The conditions we’re being asked to accept aren’t just slowly creeping up, they’re exploding in our faces like a joke can of nuts filled with spring-loaded snakes.
Part of the problem with gender dysphoria — or any identity disorder, I guess — is that it’s a disorder relating to one’s relationship with their social environment, as in everyone else, as in their relationship with us — a kind of social contract that we were at one time merely asked to sign up to. At first this new social contract that the trans rights movement was establishing, with the help of the fields of psychiatry/psychology, seemed like a much more modest ask. Something like, if someone has this debilitating disorder, they’re doing the best they can to manage it, and that might entail some unconventional appearance and behaviour… and that point is where you and I and the rest of society come in: a humble request that people be understanding and compassionate and offer some leeway towards their unconventionality because of this rare condition which creates a difficult situation.
And that fits fairly well generally with liberalism: not unlike feminism, it involves chafing against social norms. Not unlike homosexuality, it involves an atypical set of behavioural preferences that others might not understand but they’re merely being asked to tolerate and to open up space for a modest footprint in the social space to go about their business in; and not unlike mental and physical disabilities, we’re being asked to apply some of our collective capital towards better accommodating those whose needs are greater than ours. It’s not unlike economic egalitarianism, too.
Not that that ideal of a functional kind of transgender rights ever worked so well in practice. It was always unstable. Because of the disorder part of the equation, and because many of the people who purported to have gender dysphoria were not being honest at all about their innermost motives. (Not honest to themselves or to others.)
The transgender social contract is no longer voluntary — we’re not being politely asked to play along but forcefully commanded, and on top of that, it’s been rewritten so that it puts 100% of the onus on us, the rest of society, and requires no work at all on the part of the patients themselves — in fact they’re not even supposed to be understood as patients anymore! Anyone can declare a transgender identity. Once you do, you’re free to make up whatever fantasy story you like about yourself, and everyone else is obligated to bend over backwards to make your fantasy seem as real as possible to you. You are automatically the boss of everyone. (Come to think of it, I’m rather surprised more men with trans identities don’t sign up to be referees. All that power to order everyone around, and you even get a whistle! Seems a natural fit.) It’s that Twilight Zone episode where the bratty kid obtains omnipotent powers and terrorizes the townsfolk, only we’re giving that power to every single fucked up, narcissistic man (and more than a few women). What were we thinking?
The field of psychiatry and psychology bears some of the blame for this: they set the ball rolling on the idea that if we ask everyone else (women especially) to carve out more and more exceptions for these patients, they’ll be better off. They didn’t see that the cost to everyone else in society was rapidly climbing, and that the sense of entitlement they engendered among many unstable people would prove too alluring to resist.
That’s embarrassing. She’s a lawyer and a journalist and that’s her reading comprehension level?
Probably not, most of the time. Probably it’s an excess of anger that caused her to miss the point so thoroughly. Let that be a lesson to us all: when in a rage, slow down and read carefully before you rush to denounce. Otherwise you’re gonna look like a damn fool in front of all those sages and wits on social meeja.
Motown and cornrows. That’s what this dizzy bitch thinks being Black is about.
« Une TERF, une balle, justice sociale » : des appels au meurtre envers @Margueritestern et moi, en plein paris, devant la police, devant l’université ASSAS à Paris où l’on s’apprêtait à donner une conférence sur notre livre #TRANSMANIA.
Cohen, a lawyer, didn’t work for Trump because he was a deft attorney, a skillful accountant or a brilliant money manager. He worked for him because he knew just enough about the law, accounting and greed to help Trump engineer end runs and cover-ups. “I know where the skeletons are buried because I was the one who buried them,” Cohen wrote in Disloyal, a memoir of his Trump years. “I wasn’t just a witness to the President’s rise — I was an active and eager participant.”
“Apart from his wife and children, I knew Trump better than anyone else did,” Cohen wrote. “In some ways, I knew him better than even his family did, because I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.”
I don’t know. Trump’s universe is full of people — employees, acquaintances, hangers-on, family members and reporters, for example — who all claim to have the most intimate understanding of what makes him tick. Having said that, I have spent more than 30 years covering Trump and spending lots of time with him as a reporter and biographer. I would also describe him as a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, and a con man.
So JK, Posie, Glinner and the rest of you out there hating on my community and myself guess what IDGAF…you keep hating and I will keep on smiling and living my best life. Maybe you should all give it a try eh
Dude. It’s not about you the person. It’s about this ridiculous destructive ideology, and the myriad ways it harms women (and children, and lesbians and gay men, and confused people). We don’t want you to live your worst life, we just don’t want you demolishing our rights.
February is LGBT History Month and Wembley Stadium hosted the Just A Ball Game #StrongerTogether conference on Tuesday 5 February. One of the guest speakers was Lucy Clark, who became English football’s first transgender referee at the start of the 2018-19 season. Here, she tells her story and how the campaign has gone so far…
Notice how they avoid spelling it out, as the media and organizations so regularly do. Just “transgender,” not trans which gender.
The game has always been my outlet throughout life. As a child, a teenager and an adult, my life always revolved around football, whether I was a player, a manager or a referee. But my plan was to give up football this season, as I didn’t think I’d be able to referee as my true self.
His “true self” being the woman he is not. His fake true self, his pretend true self, his fantasy true self. Back in the before times a true self meant something along the lines of a self not repressed and stifled by convention. It didn’t mean childish fantasy. Adults didn’t prance around saying their true selves were birds or race cars or space travelers or Nobel laureates or ponies. Fantasy and delusion are now what’s real, so I guess truth and sanity are fake.
It’s been my first season as the real me, Lucy, and it’s gone well. It’s been really good and positive.
I’ve refereed around 50 games since my news broke last summer, and considering some of the grounds that I’m going to are places I’d been going to for years as the person I actually wasn’t, everyone has been really, really good.
Iss like magic, innit. You say your name is Lucy and bang, you’re a whole different person.
I’ve refereed around 50 games since my news broke last summer, and considering some of the grounds that I’m going to are places I’d been going to for years as the person I actually wasn’t, everyone has been really, really good.
There’s been the odd time that people have got my gender wrong and things like that, but I can understand that and I’m not someone who will be precious about it as no-one has done it maliciously.
So it’s “malicious” to know that an obvious man is a man?
Oh what do you know, it turns out that “Lucy” Clark, who is being hailed as the first “trans football referee,” is not some random fella who just happened to be the star of this story, he’s a Celebrity Personality with multiple masks.
The Victoria Derbyshire chat was March 2019. This guy didn’t just fall off the turnip truck yesterday.
It’s ironic how you changed your gender (RG) to sell your books while someone who goes through a traumatic process to make their lives a bit better are the problem for you.
Yet another guy tries to tell JKR how to bee nither to the nithe men thtealing all our thtuff.
By me for @spectator: "The quote-Tweet is possibly the most brutal weapon that exists on social media … Anything an opponent says can be captured and broadcast to your audience. Sarcasm, ridicule, or downright abuse then set the tone for the mob"https://t.co/NDVMoxcsOJ
Whether you agree with Rowling or not, her tone is remarkably different to the essay she wrote in 2020 when she set out her reasons for speaking out on sex and gender
For the record, I’ve been pen-pals with half a dozen federal inmates going back something like 15 years, and I volunteered in a state prison for ten years. I’ve also been active in a local prisoner support group for three years. In all of that, I’ve never heard any first-hand report of rape in prisons. I don’t question that things were very bad in the past, and may remain so in some locations, but it seems to me that today prisons are very, very motivated to avoid rape. Indeed as a volunteer I had to take an anti-rape class mandated by federal law, and re-qualify every year.
What I have heard about is soi-disant trans prisoners. There are apparently a fair number of them. I asked one of my correspondents about that, and what annoys him is that they get cosmetics sold through the prison commissary, clothing options not available to everybody, and yes, “gender-affirming healthcare”. He says they’re generally treated quite well, but he resents that they get extra privileges. Not that my friend is particularly in need of cosmetics, but it’s the principle of the thing — why do they get extra stuff and the rest of them don’t?
The first tweet is cut off, so I’ll just quote it.
The @ACLU hates women and is led by a gay man: a thread. One of the most powerful lobby groups in the United States pushing “gender identity” policies is the ACLU. Currently, the organization is leading the legal fight to place violent men, including sadistic killers and rapists, into women’s prisons. The executive director since 2001 is Anthony Romero. In the past the organization defended NAMBLA, asserted that child pornography is free speech, defended child marriage, took money from pornographers, and argued that sex trafficking is “work.”
The ACLU mourned the execution of a convicted child rapist who murdered a 14-year-old girl and a single mother of two.
Duane Owen, who the ACLU referred to using "she/her" pronouns, said he raped women in order to harvest their hormones and souls.https://t.co/KOEsnvpZSY
As a result of the @ACLU victory in New Jersey, one of the first trans-identified inmates moved to the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women was a Satanist named Perry Cerf who tortured and murdered a prostituted woman before drinking her blood.https://t.co/SWfsO8VipS
The ACLU launched a legal complaint against the Indiana Department of Corrections on behalf of a transgender inmate they say was denied "gender affirming" surgeries.
Jonathan Richardson, also known as Autumn Cordellioné, murdered a baby.https://t.co/nVwnj29mk4
In 2022, the @ACLU filed to dismiss a lawsuit seeking to halt the transfer of male inmates to women’s prisons. In the brief, the ACLU claimed that denying male sex offenders transfer to women’s prisons was “discriminatory” and “unconstitutional.”https://t.co/oyDJvhsacs
The Belgian Parliament voted for the law on May 3, with 93 in favor, zero opposed, and 33 abstentions.
The legislation is being touted as a win by UTSOPI, the Belgium Union of Sex Workers, which had lobbied extensively for the legislation. The law outlines that prostitutes will receive health insurance, a pension, maternity and holiday leave, and unemployment benefits. Their pimps will be forced to provide them with a “safety button” to use for emergencies.
Their website claims that the law “is a historic step in the battle for sex workers’ rights” and will create a “respectful, fair relationship” between prostitutes and their pimps, with UTSOPI spokesperson Daan Bauwens telling media that he believes “Belgium is really demonstrating that it aims to protect sex workers, regardless of any moral judgements about the profession people may have.”
Prostitutes are to be granted “rights” to refuse sexual acts, stop sexual acts, perform sexual acts in the manner they prefer, and refuse to sit behind Amsterdam-style windows (public facing windows where prostitutes are on display). However, should a prostitute use these “rights” 10 times within six months, their pimp can then call on a government mediator to intervene.
Oh. So…not really much of a right then. 10 times in six months is not a whole hell of a lot. Compare the right to a 15 minute break morning and afternoon – that’s every working day. It’s not ten times in six months. That would be an occasional treat, not a right.
