Wisconsin steps up.

Democrats were tasting unfamiliar triumphalism on Wednesday after the election for a vacant Wisconsin supreme court seat turned into an emphatic repudiation of Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s richest supporter and key ally.

Musk endured a wave of gloating on Twitter/X, his own social media platform, after Brad Schimel, a Trump-endorsed judge that he spent $25m supporting, lost by 10 percentage points to Susan Crawford, whose victory sustained a 4-3 liberal majority on the court.

On a day that Trump has earmarked as “liberation day” to mark his long-awaited roll out of trade tariffs, Democrats seized on the result as a referendum on Musk – who has spearheaded the president’s slashing of federal government workers and spending programmes – while casting it as a platform for a recovery in next year’s congressional midterm elections.

…

The result is politically significant because the court is due to issue abortion rulings while also deciding on electoral redistricting questions which now have the potential to help Democrats in future elections in a state where contests are traditionally close.

Let’s not get carried away here. Expect nothing, avoid disappointment.

Lots of hedging here so don’t get too hopeful yet…

Trump has indicated to top advisers that Elon Musk could be taking a step back from his current role in the administration, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

Musk is employed by the government as a “special government employee” — meaning his appointment is not to exceed 130 days. His term would be up around the end of May, but it was widely rumored that the White House could take steps to keep him on or extend his employment status in some way.

As ABC News has previously reported, Musk’s decision-making has divided Trump’s top aides and at times has sparked rifts among those closest to the president. Some of Musk’s defenders in the White House caution reporting that Musk is being pushed out is overblown, sources said.

So, who knows.

ABC News previously reported that some White House officials who had grown frustrated with Musk had resigned themselves that the billionaire is unlikely to be reined in anytime soon and had instead focused on managing the situation as best they can until his special government contract comes to an end in May.

Oh, how funny, because that’s what the rest of us have to do too.

Headline:

Sandy Stone is the first transgender woman inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame

Should of course be “Sandy Stone is the first man inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.”

They just can’t get enough of insulting us, can they. Without rubbing women’s noses in male contempt what would “trans women” even mean?

Bupkis. Insulting women is the entire point; there’s nothing left over.

The Advocate really relishes the work.

Stone, credited with starting the academic field of transgender studies, is also a recording engineer, an artist, and the first known trans woman in the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Around the end of this year, her story will be told in a documentary film.

The first known trans woman – geddit? There are lots of secret men in the women’s hall of fame already, teehee.

Stone was inducted into the hall last year along with several other prominent women, such as civil rights icon Ruby Bridges, tennis champion Serena Williams, and scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Notice the care taken to name only Black women, nudging us to accept the trans ideology truism that “transphobia” is racism by another name.

“It’s a great honor and a great responsibility,” Stone says of her induction. “Somebody has to go first.”

Go first? Go where first? What somebody? Has to why? Does the first white person have to be inducted into the African-American Hall of Fame? Why does somebody have to be the first man inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame? Please explain – really explain, not just assert.

“Obviously this was an incredibly historic induction,” says Jennifer Gabriel, CEO of the hall. 

Yeah obviously it’s massively historic when men are invited to take women’s awards.

Of inducting a trans woman, Gabriel says, “Of course there’s going to be backlash and pushback — but it’s really beautiful that we didn’t experience a lot of that.”

Why? Why is it of course? Could it be because it’s so insulting to give a man an award that’s specifically for women? If so why do you think it’s rilly byootiful that you got away with it easily?

On the transphobia coming out of the White House and elsewhere, Stone says, “Our side has been preparing for this for years, but our response will necessarily be tactical and slow, which gets no click-throughs at all. But still it will happen, and it’s just as real as what the transphobes are doing. My game, going forward, is to help people learn to turn fear into rage and defense into attack.”

Transphobes have an “unwholesome focus on other people’s genitalia,” she adds, and there’s no point in talking to them.

“There is nothing you can say to them,” she says. “Living your life is the best revenge. The best way to fight is to just be your authentic self.”

Yes, the best way to fight is to be your authentic fake self.

Originally a comment by Mosnae on No no not the chair, the person.

Gender is a [social] construct. But so is sex. So is money. We work with [social] constructs all of the time.

The point appears to be that it’s not bad for gender identity to be a social construct because the authors can come up with examples of social constructs that aren’t bad. Leaving aside the highly dubious claim about sex, there are a few issues with this. For starters, why not throw in some undesirable social constructs, too? Why not point out that God is a social construct, as well as racism and homophobia and honor killings and forced marriages and slurs?

Then there’s also the matter that money is very different from gender. Consider the following attributes:

Concreteness

Sure, money is a social construct. But it also has a very clear physical manifestation. I can point to a twenty-dollar bill and tell you: “There, that’s money.” Maybe you don’t attach value to it like I do. But you know there’s a specific thing in the real world that stands for my concept, and you can observe it and examine it and tell it apart from other things (the one exception being well-made counterfeit $20 bills). And although the broader concept of money might only exist in the mind, this particular money isn’t just in my mind; if you take the bill away from me, I don’t have those twenty bucks anymore. You can’t really do any of that with gender identity. (Of course, you can do it with gender to some extent, but it’s a limited extent, and anyway I don’t think that’s what the article wants to get at.)

In addition, though this is not a necessary feature of money, it is quite often defined, created and regulated by governments with great precision. I don’t think I need to explain how this clashes with gender and gender identity; the latter pretty much just consists of random people going around saying they have gender identities, with no particular coordination.

Mutuality

Money as a social construct only works because its users agree on it. I’m not going to convince you to trade twenty dollars’ worth of food for a worthless piece of paper. You need to regard that piece of paper as money, or no transaction will take place.

This is exactly why money has a physical instantiation. It’s not feasible to have a monetary system without any concrete token to stand for it. Alice can’t just go up to Bea and tell her that she has $20 in her mind and that she’ll transfer them over to Bea in exchange for food. How would Bea know that Alic is saying the truth? Even if she did agree to go through with the transaction, how would she use those $20? If Bea wants to buy something from Clara with the money Alice gave her, then Clara finds herself in a situation in which both Alice or Bea could be making stuff up. It just doesn’t work. Even without accusing Bea of being a liar, Clara should be able to say, “Listen, I have no way to know whether you’re saying the truth or not. No offense, but I can’t acknowledge your money nor go through with this transaction.”

With gender identity, however, people are the “experts of themselves” and if they say they have a gender identity then they do and that’s that and everyone should just take their word for it.

Utility

As far as I’m concerned, this is the big issue. Money has a clear function and purpose. We don’t just run around believing in it and telling each other about it without having any reason for doing so.

On the other hand, there isn’t an evident reason for which it would be useful to tell others about your gender identity and have them believe you. I don’t see what purpose there is in getting your gender identity acknowledged through proper pronominalization. Gender identity doesn’t impact interactions between humans in any obvious way. Or at least, there isn’t anything that’s obvious to me.

Maybe it would be fairer to put it this way: I can easily make up many scenarios in which Alice, Bea and Clara are communicating and need to have information about money. But when it comes to gender identity, I’m drawing a blank.

It’s also worth mentioning that you can reject social constructs. Granted, doing so might put you at odds with society, or prevent you from living within it. But you don’t have to use money or to adhere to a monetary system; not everyone does. And a given society can change; it’s possible for entire social constructs to disappear. Yet, despite claiming that “gender is a [presumably social] construct,” the authors appear to treat it like it’s some kind of weird absolute that is intrinsic to human beings.

Oh look, it’s Alok Vaid-Menon again. It’s been a long time.

To paraphrase somewhat liberally, he says the reason people think trans ideology is bullshit is because we’re so miserable and unfree. “It’s easier to romanticize the unfreedom,” he says emphatically, “decorate and accessorize it” –

Wait wait wait. He’s the guy recording himself in a colorful abstract-patterned shirt and dangly earrings and bright pink hair and heavy eye makeup and lipstick. Who is decorating and accessorizing here?

Another deepity: “People are made to destroy their own creativity, their own simultaneity – “

Our what now? Simultaneity? No we’re not. Look at me: typing and breathing with all the simultaneity in the world.

Aw, sad. Trump thought he could lead Putin around like a little toy donkey on wheels, and it turns out to be not that easy. Who could have known?

Russia cannot accept U.S. proposals to end the war in Ukraine in their current form because they do not address problems Moscow regards as having caused the conflict, a senior Russian diplomat said, suggesting U.S.-Russia talks on the subject had stalled.

The comments by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov suggest Moscow and Washington have so far been unable to bridge differences which President Vladimir Putin raised more than two weeks ago when he said U.S. proposals needed reworking.

They come as U.S. President Donald Trump appears to be growing increasingly impatient with what he has suggested might be foot-dragging over a wider deal by Moscow.

Trump in recent days has said he is “pissed off” with Putin and has spoken of imposing sanctions on countries that buy Russian oil if he feels Moscow is blocking a deal.

I guess Trump is the kind of guy who has to drive his car at 90 miles an hour into a brick wall before he’ll believe that’s risky behavior.

Before the weekend, Trump had taken a more conciliatory stance towards Russia that has unnerved the United States’ European allies as he tries to broker an end to the conflict in Ukraine, now in its fourth year.

But in recent days, and amid lobbying by Europeans such as Finland’s president urging him to hold Russia to account, he has adopted a tougher tone.

“Ohhhhhhh, now I get it,” said the large noisy fool. “You mean Russia has been the aggressor this whole time. Who knew?”

(Just kidding about the “aggressor” part. His vocabulary doesn’t stretch that far.)

Who knew people are required to endorse trans ideology when they don’t even know how to tie their shoelaces yet?

A toddler was suspended from nursery after being accused of being transphobic or homophobic, The Telegraph can reveal.

Department for Education (DfE) data show the child, aged either three or four, was suspended from a state school in the 2022-23 academic year for “abuse against sexual orientation and gender identity”.

Age three or four. Children that age don’t know what “sexual orientation” even is – they don’t know what “sexual” means. Nobody knows what “gender identity” is. And anyway since when are children, let alone very young children, being kicked out of school for ideological reasons?

I could see it in the case of intractable bullying of other children – boys bullying girls, white toddlers bullying brown toddlers, that kind of thing. But how could gender identity even come up? How would any toddler be motivated to bully another toddler because of “sexual orientation and gender identity”? How would any toddler know what either of those labels meant?

Maybe because they’ve watched too much BBC programming?

Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, said: “Every once in a while, the extremes of gender ideology throw up a story that seems too crazy to believe, and a toddler being suspended from nursery for so-called ‘transphobia’ or homophobia is one such example.

“Worse still, this is not an isolated case. Apparently 13 four and five-year-olds were suspended or permanently excluded from school for the same reason. Teachers and school leaders involved in this insanity should be ashamed of themselves for projecting adult concepts and beliefs onto such young children.”

The teachers must be entrapping the toddlers. They must be teaching them the silly ideological vocabulary and then punishing them for using words the way toddlers do use words. “Poopyhead” becomes “tranny” or similar.

Welp, get them young. Maybe in a generation or two trans ideology will have replaced reality.

Large strides into the new hellscape.

Employees across the massive U.S. Health and Human Services Department began receiving notices of dismissal on Tuesday in an overhaul ultimately expected to lay off up to 10,000 people. The notices came just days after President Donald Trump moved to strip workers of their collective bargaining rights at HHS and other agencies throughout the government.

A twofer – union busting and making people sick.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a plan last week to remake the department, which, through its agencies, is responsible for tracking health trends and disease outbreaks, conducting and funding medical research, and monitoring the safety of food and medicine, as well as for administering health insurance programs for nearly half of the country.

Well who needs any of that, right? Who needs disease outbreaks tracked? Who needs medical research? Who needs safe food and medicine? Who needs health insurance in a privatized health system?

At the FDA, dozens of staffers who regulate drugs and tobacco products received notices, including the entire office responsible for drafting new regulations for electronic cigarettes and other tobacco products. The notices came as the FDA’s tobacco chief was removed from his position.

Regulation is bad. The market should be free to add nicotine to cookies and candy. Get the people hooked early: $$$.

At the CDC, most employees have not been unionized, but interest rose sharply this year as the Trump administration took steps to reduce the federal workforce. Roughly 2,000 CDC employees in Atlanta belonged to the American Federation of Government Employees local bargaining unit, with hundreds more who had petitioned to join in recent days being added.

But on Thursday night, Trump, a Republican, signed an executive order that would end collective bargaining for a large number of federal agencies, including the CDC and other health agencies.

Haha! Fuck you, federal workers: the big boss says you can’t have unions at all!

Via James Esses – A person-centred approach is antithetical to gender critical beliefs.

Approach to what? That’s just the title, and already we’re in the presence of mushy thinking. Also they mean the other way around – gender-critical beliefs are antithetical to their “person-centred” approach. Approach to what? Therapy. So naturally you have to wonder what other kind of therapy there is – therapy centered on chairs and buttons and spoons?

But, believe it or not, it gets steadily worse.

Recently, we were struck, on finding a register of ‘gender critical’ therapists, by the fact that some of those therapists list themselves as person-centred, and so we start this piece with this statement.

One cannot both be ‘gender critical’ and ‘person-centred’.

Like hell one cannot.

Unless of course by “person-centred” they mean something so twisted and arcane that it actually has nothing to do with therapy that focuses on the person getting the therapy, which the naive outsider might think means all therapy.

Person-centred: a non-directive approach that believes that fundamentally the client is the expert of themself.

Ah. But what if the client is too profoundly mentally ill to have a clear view of her/his self? What if the whole point of therapy is to get help from someone outside one’s self? In other words it sounds way too touchy-feely and pro-narcissism to be useful therapy. But I know nothing about it so I could be completely wrong about the type of therapy. These particular writers though – their intellectual shortcomings are hard to miss.

Gender is a construct. But so is sex. So is money. We work with constructs all of the time.

Oops! Sex is real! If it weren’t you wouldn’t be here!

I don’t think I would recommend these particular therapists.

Civil liberties.

Always with the framing. So. much. framing.

Top Republicans on Capitol Hill poured cold water on President Donald Trump‘s talk of a potential third term, downplaying the prospect that he would pursue it.

Several lawmakers insisted that Trump wasn’t serious about it, even though he told NBC News on Sunday that he’s “not joking” about wanting another term, which is barred under the 22nd Amendment, and that “there are methods” to being able to run again.

What makes them so confident that he doesn’t mean it? It’s not as if he doesn’t say shocking horrifying appalling things all the fucking time. Why should anyone assume he’s not serious about this one?

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said Monday when asked if he believes Trump, 78, can serve a third term: “Not without a change in the Constitution.” He added that Trump doesn’t appear serious about that.

“I think that you guys keep asking the question and I think he’s probably having some fun with it, probably messing with you,” Thune told reporters.

Oh hahahaheeheehee he’s so hilarious. It’s always a riot when a demonstrably lawless evil greedy monster makes yet another grotesque threat. I mean it’s not as if Trump tried to steal the last election by means of a violent insurrection. No no, he’s just a funny guy, that’s all; everybody kick back and enjoy the hilarity.

Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., a close Trump ally, said that the president is being “tongue in cheek” about a third term.

“He can say he’s not joking, but it’s tongue in cheek of the president,” Mullin told NBC News. “I’ve known him for a long time, and I consider him a friend.”

So you’re a moral monster, so we know to ignore anything you say.

Across the Capitol in the House, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., dismissed the idea of Trump actively pursuing a third term, suggesting that Trump floats ideas and concepts not necessarily with the hope of achieving those goals but in an effort to get a discussion going on the topic.

“I don’t know what he was referring to. I never saw it,” Scalise said when asked about Trump’s comments. “But, you know, you see it like with Greenland, like with Panama Canal.”

Why yes, he’s made other grotesque lawless threats which he is currently working to bring to fruition, so that doesn’t tell us he’s “joking” about the third term (at which time he will be 82).

It turns out that giving the green light to corporate spending on elections does have consequences. Who could have known?

Fifteen years ago, Justice Anthony Kennedy made a prediction. Writing for the majority in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, in which the court struck down key guardrails against corporate spending in American elections, Kennedy rejected the allegation that the court’s ruling would have deleterious effects on how Americans perceived their republic.

“The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy,” he wrote. Kennedy’s reasoning was stilted and formulaic: Because corporations were “willing to spend money to try to persuade voters,” he argued, that dynamic “presupposes that the people have the ultimate influence over elected officials.”

Hmm. Because the money bags pay for our vote, we are flattered by their deference to our “ultimate” influence. That is some twisted reasoning right there.

The last two months have proven him disastrously incorrect. Elon Musk, a South African billionaire who is considered to be the world’s wealthiest man, spent $288 million to reelect President Donald Trump last year. In return for his contributions, he has been given more power over the federal government than any other private individual since the founding.

With that power, Musk and his henchmen have dismantled entire federal agencies and directed the dismissals of thousands of civil servants. He has gained access to private data on millions of Americans from the Social Security Administration, the IRS, and other bedrock components of the federal government. He has used the Treasury’s payment system to cut off funds to congressionally authorized programs and disfavored recipients of federal funds.

The entire federal government now seems to bend to one man’s personal interests. Trump personally took part in a private car show for Tesla, Musk’s ailing electric car company, on the White House lawn. Attorney General Pam Bondi recently announced that the Justice Department would treat vandalism of Tesla cars and dealerships as “domestic terrorism.” Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick told Fox News viewers this month that Tesla’s stock price slide was a historic buying opportunity and urged them to take part in it.

Corrupt enough yet? No? Seriously, you’re going with no?

The court’s liberal members, for their part, were unpersuaded by Kennedy’s reasoning. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the dissenters, criticized the conservative majority for its dangerous nonchalance toward the corrosive effects of corruption. “The majority declares by fiat that the appearance of undue influence by high-spending corporations ‘will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy,’” he noted. “The electorate itself has consistently indicated otherwise, both in opinion polls and in the laws its representatives have passed, and our colleagues have no basis for elevating their own optimism into a tenet of constitutional law.”

It’s almost as if bribery works, you know?

When Trump says he’s considering it, BELIEVE HIM, no matter what the “it” is.

Donald Trump’s suggestion that there are “methods” by which he could run for a third term as US president has been met with scorn – but also warnings that he could seriously attempt it, despite being explicitly barred from doing so by the US constitution.

There it is right there, even in the very act of warning against it. It’s not a “suggestion”! Calling it a suggestion weakens it, which is exactly what we should not be doing, journalism very much included. He’s not fucking suggesting, he’s shouting as loudly as possible.

“The biggest mistake of the last eight years is that we somehow failed to give credibility to Donald Trump’s whims and impulses, but we know it’s true,” David Jolly, a former Republican member of Congress, told MSNBC.

“January 6 was a perfect example. If he says he’s not ruling it out, then he’s not ruling it out, and we should consider it a constitutional threat.”

The second-biggest mistake is that journalists and pundits and talking heads kept translating Trump’s shouting into “suggestions.”

On Sunday Trump was asked on NBC’s Meet the Press about if there were plans for him to stay on in a third term as president. “Well, there are plans,” Trump said. “There are – not plans. There are methods – there are methods which you could do it, as you know.”

No they don’t know, and neither does anyone else, because it’s not true. It’s a flagrant lie.

Democrats have attacked Trump for his rhetoric, claiming it follows a pattern of authoritarian posturing by the president.

Another tricksy word. His authoritarianism isn’t posturing, it’s much much much too real. And yet a third: “rhetoric” – it’s not just rhetoric: he means it.

The Let Criminals Run Everything party is fuming.

Elon Musk lambasted the French court verdict that blocked Marine Le Pen from a 2027 presidential run after she was found guilty of embezzlement.

“When the radical left can’t win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents,” Musk said on Monday afternoon. “This is their standard playbook throughout the world.”

Or to put it another way, some criminals are prosecuted. What a shock!

The White House has become increasingly critical of democracy in Europe, with Vice President JD Vance delivering a withering speech in Munich in February in which he attacked European governments for their approach to a series of hot-button cultural issues.

Le Pen and 24 other codefendants were accused of illicitly siphoning European Parliament funds to pay for party employees who seldom or never dealt with affairs in Brussels or Strasbourg. The court estimated that the accused had over 12 years embezzled more than €4 million, €474,000 of which Le Pen was held personally responsible for as an MEP. 

Not a trivial amount. Not like charging a few lunches to the government.

The European right-wing also united in outrage — from the Netherlands to Spain to Hungary to Italy — over the verdict, with British anti-migration champion Nigel Farage describing it as what “looks to me like a very trumped-up charge.”

Oh well if it looks that way to him that settles the matter.

Jaw-dropping. The Sussex University Vice Chancellor bleating about the right and indeed the need of universities to create respectful and inclusive communninies when that is exactly and precisely the very thing Sussex University entirely failed and indeed refused to do for Kathleen Stock and thus implicitly for all staff and students who are aware that humans can’t change sex.

The self-admiration of people like this is breathtaking.

Trump is breezily telling major news outlets that he plans to be dictator for life.

Trump did not rule out the possibility of seeking a third term in the White House, which is prohibited by the Constitution under the 22nd Amendment, saying in an exclusive interview with NBC News that there were methods for doing so and clarifying that he was “not joking.”

“A lot of people want me to do it,” Trump said in a Sunday-morning phone call with NBC News, referring to his allies. “But, I mean, I basically tell them we have a long way to go, you know, it’s very early in the administration.”

It’s not about “people want him to do it.” It’s about the law. He can’t do it. He’s officially constitutionally limited to two terms.

“I’m not joking,” Trump said, when asked to clarify. “But I’m not — it is far too early to think about it.”

No; it’s never the right time to think about it.

Amending the Constitution to abolish the two-term limit would be exceedingly difficult, requiring either a two-thirds vote of Congress or two-thirds of the states agreeing to call a constitutional convention to propose changes. Either route would then require ratification from three-quarters of the states.

Yeah that’s not happening.

Also by then he would be 82 and he would have used up the world supply of brown makeup.

The president pointed to his poll numbers, saying that “a lot of people would like me to” hold office for a third term.

His poll numbers don’t translate to people wanting him to serve an illegal third term.

Ok, classic. Absolutely classic.

Do you see it? The two paragraphs after “Mate I really don’t wanna get involved or argue” –

We are all “pro-women”. Birdy, you, me, all of us. All of our little festival family are. Of course we are. Great!

But when Birdy uses the word “woman”, she only means people who were born with biologically female genitalia. The vast majority of our festival family (including me) think that other types of women exist too, and that Birdy is denying their identity and rights.

The stupidity just overwhelms. The stupidity and the blank obstinate deranged absurdity of it. Imagine saying that about other familiar nouns – daffodil, brick, dog, airplane, house, lion, banana, moon, bicycle, garlic, rain, hat, fire, walnut. Imagine blathering away like that about a word that people have understood for centuries to mean “people who were born with biologically female genitalia” and then saying that we the cool ones think it means other things too and that’s why we can’t be friends with you any more.

What are these other types of women? Men who claim or pretend to be women remain men, because claiming and pretending doesn’t change anyone’s sex. What are the other types? He said types, plural, as if there were a whole bouquet of types of women. Well what’s in that bouquet?

The word “women” still means women, and it would be stupid to make it mean men who claim to be women too, because then we would need a new word for “women” and when we introduced such a word, goons like this would just steal it too.

Get your own god damn word for men who pretend to be women. If you don’t like “trans women” come up with something else. That would be good, in fact, because men are not any kind of women, so “trans women” just confuses people.

But don’t go around trying to force people to agree that there are lots of “types” of women who are not the kind of women who have female genitalia. It’s stupid, it’s a lie, it’s an insult. Stop it.

Musk expects everyone to sympathize with him because Tim Walz was not sad that Tesla’s stock fell.

Tesla’s stock price had fallen by half and “he was overjoyed.” Pause. “What an evil thing to do.”

Ah yes – evil. Evil is not Musk abruptly shutting down USAID with the result that thousands of people in poor countries were plunged into illness and misery, no no no, that’s not evil at all, what’s evil is to be pleased that the man who shut down USAID lost some of his billions.

His whine continues. “What a creep. What a jerk.”

Seriously, this shit is mind-boggling. He’s thrown thousands of civil servants out of useful jobs and here he is whining because an actual human being expresses dislike for him. Walz is the creep and jerk in this scenario??

Mind entirely boggled.

Not a bug but a feature.

Human rights organizations on Thursday denounced the visit by the US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, to the notorious prison in El Salvador that is holding hundreds of Venezuelans deported from the US earlier this month without a hearing, calling her actions “political theater”.

Critics condemned Noem’s visit as just the latest example of the Trump administration’s aim to spread fear among immigrant communities, as the cabinet member stood in a baseball hat in front of a line of caged men bare from the waist up.

Noem visited the so-called Cecot, or Terrorism Confinement Center, an infamous maximum-security prison. The prison, built in 2022 during a brutal government crackdown on organized crime, is where nearly 300 migrants, previously in US custody, were recently expelled and are currently detained.

Trying to immigrate without permission is not organized crime and it’s not brutal crime either. Most white Americans, in fact, are Americans because their great-grandparents immigrated without permission. Nobody sent engraved invitations to Ireland and Italy and Poland, but people made the trip anyway. On the other hand America violently abducted thousands of people to “immigrate” here in a condition of enslavement. We don’t have the moral high ground on this issue.

Noem’s visit to the prison “was a typical gross and cruel display of political theater that we have come to expect from the Trump administration,” Vicki Gass said. Gass is the executive director of the Latin America Working Group (LAWG), a human rights organization based in Washington DC. “That the Trump administration is flouting judicial orders and denying due process to people within the US borders is outrageous and frightening.”

Earlier this month, Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime provision that allows the executive to detain and deport people coming from an “enemy” nation. Despite a federal judge blocking the invocation of the act, shortly after, planes from the US landed in El Salvador, filled with men and women in immigration custody. More than 250 men, mostly from Venezuela, were quickly and forcibly shuffled into the Cecot, where officials shaved their heads and placed them in cells.

Trump and his administration have repeatedly claimed that the men were members of transnational gangs. When invoking the Alien Enemies Act, Trump – without proof – accused the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua of having “infiltrated” the US at the behest of the Venezuelan government. US intelligence agencies contradict Trump’s claims about ties between the gang and the Venezuelan government, the New York Times has reported, and the Venezuelan government has also denied it is connected.

Well if the Venezuelan government did have such ties I don’t suppose it would say so, but one has to wonder why it would want a criminal gang to “infiltrate” the US in the first place. Step one, get criminals to infilatrate; step two…….uh……..

“I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you can face,” Noem said in a video posted on X from the Cecot prison. “Know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”

The use of another country’s vast, maximum-security prison to detain immigrants from a third country is unprecedented, especially considering the grave allegations of abuses at this and other Salvadorian prisons.

“Amnesty International has extensively documented the inhumane conditions within detentions centers in El Salvador, including the Cecot, where those removed are now being held,” the organization said in a statement on Wednesday. “Reports indicate extreme overcrowding, lack of access to adequate medical care, and widespread ill-treatment amounting to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.”

In other words the US is violating human rights on a massive scale. Right now.

When unions lose the plot:

The academics behind a gender-critical documentary have launched a discrimination claim against their own union after officials branded the film “transphobic” and campaigned against screenings at Edinburgh University.

Deirdre O’Neill, a lecturer at Hertfordshire University, and Michael Wayne, a professor at Brunel University, directed Adult Human Female, which they described as the “first UK documentary feature to look at the clash between women’s rights and trans ideology”.

It defines sex as being determined by biology and says women’s rights have been damaged by aspects of the trans movement.

Well it’s not that the film defines sex that way, it’s that that is the definition. A person’s sex is what it is, and playing Let’s Pretend can’t change that. Humans can’t change sex any more than they can change species.

The film-makers claim the University and College Union (UCU) treated them “detrimentally” to other members and non-members who hold opposing views on sex and gender.

Detrimentally compared to others, surely?

In 2023, screenings of the documentary at Edinburgh University caused a furore when pro-trans activists twice blocked access to the venue, forcing their cancellation.

Well…who or what really caused the furore? Was it really the screenings? Or was it the fatuous set of people who think we can change sex just as we change clothes.

The UCU opposed screenings of the film at Edinburgh University in December 2022, describing it as “hate speech”.

…

O’Neill said: “Although UCU claims to uphold academic freedom, it only upholds that freedom for those who agree with their views on gender identity, namely that a man can identify as a woman and thereby should be treated as a woman in law and policy.

“We respectfully disagree with that view and think it is bad news for women. But apparently, our film is ‘hateful’ for making that point.”

Trump identifies as a genius; is it hateful for sane people to point out that his intellect is not all that impressive?

After the second cancellation of the Edinburgh screening, the film-makers wrote to Jo Grady, UCU’s general secretary, requesting clarification on the union’s stance towards members who hold “gender-critical” beliefs.

Grady defended the Edinburgh branch’s right to block the screening.

Wayne said the film is “not hate speech nor punching down”.

“The only way that UCU can try and justify its stance, is to claim that our film is outside the boundaries of acceptable speech,” he said. “The problem is that for UCU, it is simply not possible to call into question the mantra that trans women are women.”

And that’s awkward, because universities and university unions should not be dealing in mantras.