They cannot be serious.

Bristol city council has been accused of offending women with “virtue-signalling madness” after claiming that legally defining sex as biological “misgenders trans people” and could lead to discrimination.

…

The comments were made in a 39-page response to a consultation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) on updates to its guidance, following the Supreme Court ruling in April this year that sex in equality laws refers to biological sex.

The guidance, which is waiting final approval by ministers, is understood to state that trans women cannot be admitted to women’s single sex spaces.

…

Bristol city council, whose Green Party leader Tony Dyer has criticised the Supreme Court ruling, raised a number of objections, including urging the EHRC to drop gendered language when referring to pregnancy, maternity and breastfeeding.

They wrote that “not all pregnant individuals would use the pronouns ‘she/her’” and so it could add “emotional and psychological distress” for “trans men, non-binary, gender diverse or intersex individuals”.

Maybe, but then it could add emotional and psychological distress for women to pretend that women don’t exist. There are far more women than there are trans men, non-binary, gender diverse or intersex individuals. Arguably there are zero trans men, non-binary, gender diverse or intersex individuals, since none of those labels name anything but invented labels for eccentric opinions about sex and idenniny. Either way women are in the majority by a huge margin, so why is this Green Tony Dyer fella so concerned about the feelings of a handful at the expense of the feelings of billions?

“We strongly advise the use of more inclusive language such as using ‘they/them’ to refer to all individuals, or include other identities to reflect the diversity of individuals who access maternity or paternity services,” officials argued.

“This could include ‘people with ovaries’ or the term ‘people who use paternity services’. We also recognise that individuals may not identify with the word maternity and prefer paternity as it is gender neutral.

WHAT?????

Like fucking hell it is. Mater: Latin for mother. Pater: Latin for father. The word father is not one atom more “gender neutral” than the word mother is.

“Additionally, it is unclear what support will be available to trans people who chestfeed to ensure they are protected from discrimination.”

The word is “breastfeed” and what does it have to do with trans people and discrimination? Women can breastfeed, men cannot; end of discussion.

Protections based on biological sex are “too vague”, the response added, as: “It is unclear whether it refers to anyone capable of pregnancy, or only those who were assigned female at birth.”

If you look closely you will find that those are the same thing. Male people are not capable of pregnancy; end of discussion.

Council officials complain that the new guidance implies that “trans women are not ‘really’ women” and risks “creating a hostile environment in public services”.

Oh blah blah blah. Go do something useful.

Derrick Jensen on making excuses for murder:

Peter Boghossian is right. This is much of what is wrong with postmodernism, academia, and the postmodern left.

Edit:

I know this is facebook, so my expectations are low already, but Jesus, the responses disappoint me. I’ll make this clear: The point is that NOBODY DESERVES TO BE MURDERED FOR THEIR IDEAS. And more than half the fucking people responding to this post seem pretty clearly to be more appalled by his words than by the fact that he was MURDERED FOR SPEAKING. As a writer of controversial materials who has received boatloads of death-threats by the postmodern left, a postmodern left who calls ME a nazi and a fascist for not believing that men can become women, I have a strong objection to people in any way rationalizing or seeming to rationalize the murder of people for expressing opinions that some people consider fascist. In fact, even if I weren’t the recipient of death threats, I would still object to someone being murdered because people don’t like what he says. I grew up believing, “I may not agree with you (and I may have no interest in listening to you), but I will defend to the death your right to express your opinion (to others).” Now, Jesus, I just read that something like half of all college students feel it’s okay to stop those you disagree with from expressing their opinions. I’m absolutely horrified by the response to the murder of a speaker. And I’m especially horrified by the response to the murder of a speaker by some radical feminists: if you (or JK Rowling) were murdered, do you really think they wouldn’t be calling you a fascist? And in any case, what the hell is wrong with us that for so many of us, our primary public response to the murder of a speaker is to be more appalled by his words than his murder for those words.

I can’t stand Judith Butler, but if she were murdered by people who also can’t stand her words, I would IMMEDIATELY disavow the murder of a writer. If you can’t see the horror of the murder of writers, and if the left can’t see the horror of the murder of writers, then you yourself are authoritarian, and the left is authoritarian. If you don’t like some writer, write a better goddamn fucking book. Do a better job. That’s a writer’s JOB.

I think that is relevant to the dispute we had here last week. I think I agree with it, and I also think I think that we can still talk about the writer’s work without endorsing the writer’s murder. Maybe I’m wrong? Maybe that’s hypocritical? Maybe I’m kidding myself?

Doctor Genius Trump explained about Tylenol and gestation today.

President Donald Trump announced Monday that the US Food and Drug Administration will be notifying physicians that the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy “can be associated with a very increased risk of autism,” despite decades of evidence that it’s safe.

“They are strongly recommending that women limit Tylenol use during pregnancy unless medically necessary,” such as to treat fever, “if you can’t tough it out,” Trump said.

Yeah you whiny weakling cowardly bitches, and by the way never mind that maternal fever isn’t all that good for the future baby either.

Experts say autism is caused by multiple factors, and the science concerning the connection between Tylenol use during pregnancy and autism is not settled.

Well it is now! Because Trump said so!

Acetaminophen has been considered the only safe over-the-counter option for pain or fever for pregnant people. Other common pain relief options like ibuprofen or regular-dose aspirin can increase the risk of serious complications during pregnancy. Not treating a fever can also be dangerous for both the fetus and the pregnant person.

Oh go to hell CNN – “women” is not a dirty word.

Speaking from the Oval Office alongside US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, US National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump did not keep his remarks to Tylenol during pregnancy. He advocated for breaking up childhood vaccinations and even pushing back the hepatitis B shot for newborns — a public health strategy that brought the infection in children to the brink of elimination — to age 12.

It’s “too much liquid, too many different things are going into that baby,” Trump said, without providing further evidence.

Ah yes that’s it, too much liquid. Make it into a tiny brick, that will be much better for that baby.

Trump thanked Kennedy for bringing autism to the “forefront of American politics, along with me.” Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist, has promoted discredited theories that vaccines cause autism. “We understood a lot more than a lot of people who studied it,” Trump said.

No. No you didn’t. That’s where you go so very wrong. You’re not a genius who understands things without studying them or even finding out what they are. Nope nope nope. You’re a stupid and ignorant blowhard with a conceit the size of Jupiter.

The descent is going faster and faster by the day.

Trump has spent months chipping away at the barriers that have longprotected the Justice Department from political interference. But now federal prosecutors and legal observers are bracing for what comes next as he escalates that effort rapidly.

Veteran lawyers in a Virginia U.S. attorney’s office fear that the ouster of their bosslast week — after a White House push to prosecute two of the president’s political foes — could portend even more overt efforts by Trump to dictate the outcome of investigations.

…

“I just want people to act. They have to act,” Trump told reporters outside the White House Saturday evening, adding, “We have to act fast.”

Did he say they have to act? Did he mention anything about acting?

Former Justice Department officials said they are stunned by what they see as the acceleration and increasing audacity of Trump’s demands.

Or in other words the acceleration of Trump’s dictatorship.

Just in the past week,the president and members of his administration threatened to prosecute critics for what they described as “hate speech,” which is itself not illegal under federal law. They floated the notion of charging Democratic donors and organizers under federal racketeering statutes. And on Friday, they forced out Erik S. Siebert, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, after he opted not to pursue indictments against New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) and former FBI director James B. Comey, citing alack of evidence that they had committed crimes.

Dictator behavior. Not a dress rehearsal but the thing itself.

On Saturday, Trump capped off those rapid-fire developments with an extraordinary directive, delivered publicly over social media, instructing Attorney General Pam Bondi to swiftly prosecute Comey, James and other political rivals and back U.S. attorneys willing to get that job done.

…

“This is unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” Schiff told MSNBC on Sunday. “Nixon had his enemies list, but it wasn’t so exhaustive and blatant as this, where he was ordering in front of the whole country, the Justice Department to go after his enemies.”

Those were innocent times.

Pretending men are women isn’t feminist.

I’m curious about why “Sophie Molly” does this.

People mostly don’t bare their teeth like that when smiling, and they even more mostly don’t grit them like that. In other primates a gritted teeth grin like that is a threat response.

Maybe he thinks it makes him look more womany.

The metamorphosis of the Washington Post:

Longtime Washington Post writer Karen Attiah says she has been fired from the publication’s Opinions department for “speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns.”

The Post, which has been overhauling the entire department, declined to comment on personnel matters. But Attiah’s Post biography has been revised to say she “was” a columnist, indicating she is no longer employed.

…

Attiah posted a string of messages about political violence in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week. She criticized what she called “empty rhetoric” denouncing violence that hasn’t been matched by actions.

One of her posts asserted that “part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence.”

Attiah didn’t reference Kirk by name, but she also said to a commenter that “refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is… not the same as violence.”

Did he in fact espouse violence though? I haven’t researched the subject but the impression I have via the reporting is that he didn’t. He espoused hierarchies, but that’s not the same thing. I know one can go all rhetorical and point out how (silently, passively) hierarchies are in fact violent, but it does matter what people actually say and what they don’t say.

Attiah wrote in a Monday blog post that “my commentary received thoughtful engagement across platforms, support, and virtually no public backlash.”

But her assertion that Kirk “espoused violence” may have been flagged by Post management.

Two Post staffers told CNN that management also took issue with Attiah misquoting a Kirk remark on affirmative action from 2023.

…

The Opinion department has been in turmoil for months, driven by Post owner Jeff Bezos and his desire to change the direction of the editorial board.

Bezos said in February that “we are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Over the summer the Post hired a new Opinion editor, Adam O’Neal, who said he would reorient the department accordingly.

I notice some missing pillars. Equality, justice, compassion – the stuff that can sometimes get in the way of absolute “personal liberties.”

Trump speaks up for hatred.

Trump told a crowd of tens of thousands at a memorial for Charlie Kirk that he “hates” his opponents, despite Kirk’s widow saying she forgives the man charged with fatally shooting her husband.

The president gave the last of more than two dozen speeches at a public event that reflected on Kirk’s impact within the Make America Great Again movement. He said Kirk told a staff member he was not afraid of students who disagreed with him in the crowd at Utah Valley University. “I’m not here to fight them – I want them to know them and love them,” Trump quoted Kirk as saying.

But Trump said he felt differently to the rightwing activist, adding: “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents and I don’t want the best for them, I’m sorry.”

And by “I’m sorry” of course he means sorry not sorry.

You gotta hand it to him, he is good at saying things in public that most adults with functioning brains know better than to say in public.

It sounds familiar…

Illinois congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh said she was injured Friday as a result of getting knocked to the ground by a U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement agent.

The incident took place during a demonstration outside of the Broadview ICE detention facility near Chicago. Abughazaleh, a Democrat seeking to represent Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, posted a video on X, writing: “This is what it looks like when ICE violates our First Amendment rights.”

“This escalation isn’t surprising,” she said. “We shouldn’t be shocked that ICE agents that are allowed to operate outside the law operate outside the law. This should be a processing facility, meaning people should not be held there for more than 12 hours at a time, but they are being held there for days, even weeks.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement to MSNBC, “These fame hungry, sanctuary politicians are so desperate for their 15-minutes of fame that they will go so far as to put our law enforcement at risk and obstruct justice.”

Except they’re not putting “our law enforcement” at risk, and they’re not obstructing justice. You on the other hand…

H/t Mostly Cloudy

The road to dictatorship:

Democrats on Sunday framed President Trump’s public demand that Attorney General Pam Bondi not “delay” in prosecutions of political enemies as a threat to American democracy.

I don’t think “framed” is the right word there. “Described” or “characterized” would be better. It’s not really all that controversial or debatable that a president leaning on an AG to prosecute people the president doesn’t like is not kosher. Is “not kosher” equivalent to “threat to democracy”? Good enough for government work, I’d say.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) argued on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday that Trump is turning the DOJ “into an instrument that goes after his enemies, whether they’re guilty or not” and “that helps his friends.”

Schumer warned, “This is the path to a dictatorship.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) framed the current moment “one of the most dangerous” the country has faced, saying on ABC’s “This Week,” “We are quickly turning into a banana republic.”

He’s not wrong. I wish we could say he’s wrong, but he’s not. Trump publicly telling the AG to go after his enemies is very banana. It wouldn’t be any better if he’d done it privately, but the fact that he did it publicly is a sign that norms and public opinion are not a deterrent. That’s scary. It’s all scary, and that’s scary too.

So is Pam Bondi willing to be another John Mitchell?

Trump is worried that Attorney General Pam Bondi is moving too slowly to prosecute his political adversaries on fake charges. Trump has good reason to be concerned. He is carrying out his project to consolidate authoritarian power against the trend of declining public support for his administration and himself…

Autocracies are headed by one man but require the cooperation of many others. Some collaborators may sincerely share the autocrat’s goals, but opportunists provide a crucial margin of support. In the United States, such people now have to make a difficult calculation: Do the present benefits of submitting to Trump’s will outweigh the future hazards?

As Bondi makes her daily decisions about whether to abuse her powers to please Trump, she has to begin with one big political assessment: Will Trump ultimately retain the power to reward and punish her? It’s not just about keeping her present job. On the one hand, people in Trump’s favor can make a lot of money from their proximity to power. On the other, Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, served 19 months in prison for his crimes during Watergate. If Trump’s hold on power loosens, Bondi could share Mitchell’s fate.

Fingers crossed!

Shortly after MSNBC reported that Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, had accepted $50,000 in cash from FBI agents posing as businessmen last year, allegedly in exchange for a promise to help secure government contracts, the pro-Trump podcaster Megyn Kelly posted “We DO NOT CARE.” This kind of acquiescence to corruption has been one of Trump’s most important resources. But the American people become a lot less tolerant of corruption in their leaders when they feel themselves under economic pressure.

Well, that’s all very nice. The “border czar” takes bribes. Prominent journalists tells us we do not care. This “go right ahead, we don’t mind” approach is why we’re stuck with Trump. It starts to wobble only when it hits our own wallets. What lovely people we must be.

Trump has a shrewd instinct for survival. He must sense that if he does not act now to prevent free-and-fair elections in 2026, he will lose much of his power—and all of his impunity. That’s why he is squeezing Bondi. But for her, the thought process must be very different. Trump is hoping to offload culpability for his misconduct onto her. She’s the one most directly at risk if she gives orders later shown to be unethical or illegal.

The survival of American rights and liberties may now turn less on the question of whether Pam Bondi is a person of integrity—which we already know the dismal answer to—than whether she is willing to risk her career and maybe even her personal freedom for a president on his way to repudiation unless he can fully pervert the U.S. legal system and the 2026 elections.

It’s gonna be a bumpy 14 months.

Trump wants his Attorney General to do something, so he yells at her in public on his personal social media toy.

He’s stupid but he can’t be so extremely stupid that he thinks this is normal and president-like and not at all cringe-worthy. So why does he do it? I suppose it’s because he doesn’t care about being cringe-worthy because we can’t get rid of him so why should he? So the libs think he’s childish and embarrassing and idiotic, so what?

CNN:

President Donald Trump increased pressure on Attorney General Pam Bondi to bring criminal charges against several political foes, calling her out by name Saturday as he noted he had reviewed statements critical over what he says is a lack of action in the investigations. Just over an hour later, however, he expressed support for the nation’s top law enforcement official.

In his remarkable first post to social media Saturday, Trump essentially called on Bondi to use the power of the Justice Department more aggressively.

Remarkably flagrant and remarkably mindless. The combination of brutality and cluelessness is a weird thing to watch.

Trump went on to rail against former US Attorney Erik Siebert, who announced Friday he would step down after facing intense pressure from the president to charge James with mortgage fraud. CNN has previously reported that Justice Department prosecutors in Virginia believed they have not gathered enough evidence to indict James.

This is what you get when you have a shameless crook in the top job. He wants to harm Letitia James because she prosecuted him, and he demonstrates this desire in public, by browbeating his own Attorney General and his own former US Attorney. It’s all so dignified and not corrupt.

It’s complicated.

Trump continued his sweeping crackdown on immigration on Friday, turning his focus to a visa program for skilled foreign workers. He signed a proclamation that adds a $100,000 fee for new applicants for H-1B visas that allow foreign workers like software engineers a chance to be employed in the United States.

The H-1B visa is designed to help companies fill openings for which American workers with similar abilities cannot be found. But immigration hard-liners and far-right activists have long argued that the visa allows companies to replace American workers with foreign ones.

And, the Times inexplicably neglects to say, pay them less. It could be said that the H-1B visa is designed to help companies fill openings for which American workers with similar abilities who are willing to work as cheaply cannot be found.

To obtain an H-1B visa, employers must attest that they have searched for qualified domestic candidates first, and that an H-1B worker will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of American workers.

There have been episodes in which the program has been used to bring immigrants for jobs that American workers had held. In 2015, about 250 technology workers at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla., were told that they were being laid off, and that they would have to train their replacements — H-1B visa holders who had been brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Similar episodes that year affected employees of Toys “R” Us and the New York Life Insurance Company.

The quest for cheaper labor never ends.

The program requires employers to pay H-1B workers, at a minimum, either the average wage for the job and the city where it is based, or the average wage of American-born workers doing the same job. Companies are prohibited from paying H-1B workers less than other workers with similar skills and qualifications. Still, about 60 percent of the positions paid “well below” the local median wage for the occupation in 2019, according to the Economic Policy Institute, which cited the Labor Department’s “broad discretion” to set H-1B wage levels.

In other words they’re “prohibited” from paying less but they do it anyway. What a surprise.

No. This is one of the items they get so entirely wrong.

Starting at 1:07:

…and I think that recognizing that people know best who they themselves are and recognizing and taking at face value who someone says that they are is important and is the decent way to interact with other people.

In ordinary circumstances, yes, but it takes only a few seconds of thought to come up with exceptions.

These days, though, it doesn’t really even need a few seconds: trans ideology is the looming leering unmistakable exception to this pseudo-rule. People don’t always know best who they themselves are, especially when they’ve been trained to think that a manufactured idenniny is “who they really are” in any dispute with the physical reality of who they really are.

Oh come on.

Mandatory sanctification of maga hero.

Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma introduced legislation this week that would require every public university in the state to construct “a Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza”, with a statue of the assassinated Republican activist and a sign calling him a “modern civil rights leader”, or pay monthly fines.

Just stop. He wasn’t any kind of civil rights leader. He was a talker, an advocate, an activist of sorts, but not a civil rights leader. Civil rights leaders don’t tell some kinds of people they are subordinate to other kinds of people. That’s the opposite of civil rights leadership.

And then making it mandatory to throw up a statue of him on every public university campus – that is ludicrous. It borders on inquisitorial. You will worship our guy or else; refusal is not permitted.

And he wasn’t important enough for that. Being killed didn’t make him that important.

Let’s hope it was just a stunt, which won’t get many votes and will disappear quietly.

The Oklahoma bill, sponsored by state senators Shane Jett and Dana Prieto, specifies that the memorial site must be in “a prominent area” on the main campus of every institution of higher education in the state system, and must include “a statue of Charlie Kirk sitting at a table with an empty seat across from him” or one of Kirk and his wife holding their children. Designs for the statue must be approved by the legislature.

Well don’t stop there. Why not a statue of Charlie Kirk watching Trump on tv? Cleaning out the kitchen sink trap? Opening a can of dog food? Putting gas in the car? Taking a shower?

Each plaza must also include “permanent signage commemorating Charlie Kirk’s courage and faith and explaining the significance of Charlie Kirk as a voice of a generation, modern civil rights leader, vocal Christian, martyr for truth and faith, and free speech advocate”.

Anything else? Smarter than Obama? Taller than Comey? Meaner than Trump? Deader than Martin Luther King?

After everyone from a Georgia representative to a deputy chief of the New York police department made the comparison with MLK, the slain civil rights leader’s son, Martin Luther King III, took time this week to reject it, noting that Kirk had accused prominent Black women of lacking “the brain processing power to be taken seriously”, while his father “was about bringing people together”.

And he told a woman to submit to her husband. He wasn’t a pro-rights monument.

If the Oklahoma measure becomes law, every school would be required to submit plans for its memorial plaza and statue to the legislature for approval. Failure to comply with the required memorial to Kirk would be punishable by a monthly fine of 1% of the school’s appropriated budget.

The bill also mandates that the schools take measures to protect their memorials from vandalism and automatically expel any students caught defacing them.

Anything else? The students have to contribute $10k a year for upkeep? The students have to pray to Saint Charlie every morning and evening on pain of expulsion? The students have to think what he thought and say what he said or be thrown off the university’s highest roof?

As the Oklahoman reports, both lawmakers behind the bill are members of the Oklahoma freedom caucus, an affiliate of the national far-right Republican group formed in 2015 by members of Congress.

One of the lawmakers, Jett, praised Kirk in explicitly religious terms, calling him “a faithful servant of Christ”. Last year, Jett criticized a bipartisan bill to restrict corporal punishment against students with disabilities by citing the Old Testament proverb, “Whoever spares the rod hates their child”, during a debate in the state house.

Oh gawd. These people are a nightmare. Any form of kindness or forbearance is evil, and dominance is the first virtue.

So very liberal and democratic.

The Lib Dem party conference has descended into a transgender row after members shut down a vote on biological men taking women’s roles.

Gender-critical activists had intended to force Sir Ed Davey into banning trans women from taking female positions with a debate and then vote on the issue. However, it was struck off the agenda after a rival campaigner warned it would be used to “legitimise bigotry”, calling the proponents an “extremist faction”.

Oh we’re the extremists. It’s extremist to know that men are not women, and not at all extremist to insist that men are women if they say they are and that women have no right to defend our own rapidly vanishing rights. Also it’s bigotry to know that men are not women.

The internal spat will pile pressure on the Lib Dem leader to clarify his stance on gender-based definitions after he repeatedly refused to say that a woman cannot have a penis.

Did he also refuse to say that Santa Claus is not a real person with miraculous powers to descend the chimney of everyone on the planet? How did we get to a place where adult political bosses pretend that magic is real?

Instead, Sir Ed insisted “the vast majority of people identify with the same gender they had at birth, but there are a few who do not” during an interview with Piers Morgan.

Blah blah blah. Childish drivel. People are whatever sex they are. They don’t have to “identify with” it, but they can’t choose not to be it, any more than they can choose what species to be.

He later described transgender rights as “a difficult issue” amid division in his party between pro-trans and women’s rights groups.

But he also, of course, came down on the side that tells women to fuck off. He’s a liberal and a democrat, and women are bad worthless people who must not be allowed to protect our rights.

Liberal Voice for Women, a group of gender-critical campaigners, was due to use the party’s annual conference to call for a vote on changing party rules that would bring the Lib Dems in line with April’s Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman. The current rules allow those who “self-identify as women” to stand for party posts set aside for women, which activists argue dilutes biological women’s chances of reaching the top of the party.

Sigh. It’s not just “activists” who “argue” that. Of course letting men take women’s posts dilutes women’s chances of reaching the top of the party; what else would it do? Men taking women’s posts=fewer women with posts=fewer chances to proceed in an upward direction. That’s a necessary consequence of letting men take women’s posts. And don’t call us “biological” women as if there’s some other kind.

But the Supreme Court ruled that the word “sex” in the Equality Act referred to “biological sex”, meaning that if a job is set aside for a woman, it must be a biological woman and not someone who identifies as such.

And the LibDems are ignoring the ruling, thus harming and oppressing women. So lib. So dem.

Rival activists succeeded in having the vote on Saturday morning struck off on the basis it would be “transphobic”.

This is despite a YouGov poll showing that three-quarters of Lib Dem members do not support the party’s stance on allowing gender self-identification.

Oh who cares what they think. They’re not liberal and democratic enough.

Here’s the smug prat who made it happen:

Some Good Law Project blither from Jolyon:

A dangerous narrative that frames trans people as a threat to women has solidified its grip on public discourse in recent months. It’s a narrative built on fear, not facts, and it’s having devastating effects on the trans community.

It’s not a “narrative.” It’s trendy to sweep all the words into the category of “narrative” (except one’s own words of course) but it’s stupid and inaccurate and manipulative. It’s also not “framing.” Calling it “framing” implies manipulation at best, lying at worst.

We’re not telling a story when we point out that trans women are men and that men are barred from some women’s spaces for reasons of safety as well as privacy. We are stating some obvious facts. If anyone’s telling stories around here it’s the men who insist that they really really are women in every sense so shut up.

The NY Times reported a couple of weeks ago that rescuers in Afghanistan don’t rescue women.

The first rescue workers reached Bibi Aysha’s village more than 36 hours after an earthquake devastated settlements across eastern Afghanistan’s mountainous areas on Sunday. But instead of bringing relief, the sight of them heightened her fears; not a single woman was among them.

Afghan cultural norms, enforced even in emergencies by the ruling Taliban, forbid physical contact between men and women who are not family members. In the village of Andarluckak, in Kunar Province, the emergency team hurriedly carried out wounded men and children, and treated their wounds, said Ms. Aysha, 19. But she and other women and adolescent girls, some of them bleeding, were pushed aside, she said.

It’s interesting that the Times translates “evil religious rules that punish women” to “Afghan cultural norms.” Yes, sure, they are cultural norms, but those cultural norms are specifically religious norms, enforced by the viciously theocratic and misogynistic Taliban. “Cultural norms” sounds so benign – eating certain foods on certain days of the week, charity, prayer, holidays – way too benign to encompass leaving women to suffer and die because men must not touch women but also women must not go outside or do any public work so hooray hooray we have a catch-22 that means women suffer and die. Don’t call it cultural norms, call it what it is: misogynistic theocratic rules laid down 16 centuries ago by a man who despised women.

Tahzeebullah Muhazeb, a male volunteer who traveled to Mazar Dara, also in Kunar Province, said that members of the all-male medical team there were hesitant to pull women out from under the rubble of collapsed buildings. Trapped and injured women were left under stones, waiting for women from other villages to reach the site and dig them out.

“It felt like women were invisible,” said Mr. Muhazeb, 33. He added, “The men and children were treated first, but the women were sitting apart, waiting for care.”

Because they’re so worthless and such whores, despite being the source of all those men and children who were treated first.

Though the Taliban have not released a gender breakdown of the casualties, women have faced an especially harsh ordeal, made worse by neglect and isolation, more than half a dozen doctors, rescue workers and women in areas hit by the quake said in interviews.

Afghanistan faces a critical shortage of health care workers and, in particular, of women in that field. Last year, the Taliban imposed a ban on women’s enrollment in medical education. The dearth of female doctors and rescue workers has been all too evident in the wake of the earthquake.

Brilliant. Just brilliant. Men must not touch women, but women must not get medical education, so hey presto the result is that women cannot get any kind of trained medical care at any time for any reason. The very best they can hope for is amateur care from the few women who are allowed to step outside.

Are we seeing a pattern or no?

A top House Democrat on Tuesday accused Donald Trump of “systematically dismantling” efforts to prosecute sex crimes and hunt down traffickers, as the president faces continued pressure to make public investigative files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The memo from House judiciary committee ranking member Jamie Raskin and his staff, shared exclusively with the Guardian, said that beyond refusing the demands for transparency around Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, Trump has also undercut efforts to hold people accused of similar crimes accountable by “systematically dismantling the offices and programs we rely on to combat human trafficking and prosecute sex crimes”.

Are we sure it’s systematically as opposed to being Trump smashing everything that pops into his distractable brain?

Raskin’s memo to Democratic members of the judiciary committee comes in advance of testimony scheduled for Wednesday by FBI director Kash Patel, at which Democrats are expected to press him for details on the bureau’s handling of its investigation into Epstein.

Appearing before the Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday, Patel acknowledged shortcomings in how an investigation into Epstein was handled that led to the financier pleading guilty in 2008 to a charge related to procuring a child for sex . However, Patel insisted court orders prevented him acceding to Democrats demands to release more files related to Epstein.

Yeah see Patel wasn’t the FBI boss in 2008 and Trump wasn’t president then so it’s no skin off his ass to acknowledge shortcomings that are nothing to do with him. More recent stuff on the other hand…

“By diverting extraordinary amounts of money and personnel to its immigration crackdown, the Trump administration has undermined the investigation and prosecution of nearly every other law enforcement priority, including human trafficking and child exploitation,” Raskin wrote.

Trump has also cancelled hundreds of grants to local law enforcement agencies and non-profits that were used to help victims of such crimes, according to the memo. Federal funds are no longer flowing to trainings of sexual assault nurse examiners in disadvantaged areas or victim advocates employed at rape crisis centers, nor to American Sign Language interpretation for survivors of domestic violence.

Because none of that is important; all that matters is keeping brown people out of the white US of A.

[Raskin] also noted that several top officials, including defense secretary Pete Hegseth and health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, have been accused of inappropriate conduct, while the Trump administration acted to facilitate the return of “misogynist influencer” Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan from Romania, where they faced charges including rape.

Well rape is not a crime so…

Look, this isn’t complicated. Either you do what Trump tells you to do, or ya fiyad. It’s that simple.

The U.S. attorney investigating New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey said he had resigned on Friday, hours after President Trump called for his ouster.

Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had recently told senior Justice Department officials that investigators found insufficient evidence to bring charges against Ms. James and had also raised concerns about a potential case against Mr. Comey, according to officials familiar with the situation. Mr. Trump has long viewed Ms. James and Mr. Comey as adversaries and has repeatedly pledged retribution against law enforcement officials who pursued him.

Understood? It doesn’t matter that investigators found insufficient evidence to bring charges or raised concerns about bringing charges; their job is to bring charges when they’re told to bring charges. End of story.

Mr. Siebert informed prosecutors in his office of his resignation through an email hours after the president, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, said he wanted him removed because two Democratic senators from Virginia had approved of his nomination.

“When I saw that he got two senators, two gentlemen that are bad news as far as I’m concerned — when I saw that he got approved by those two men, I said, pull it, because he can’t be any good,” Mr. Trump said.

Obviously not. If The Enemy says you’re good at your job, you’re bad at your job. It’s like 2 + 2=4.

When asked if he would fire Mr. Siebert, Mr. Trump responded, “Yeah, I want him out.”

Ms. James, he told reporters, was “very guilty of something.”

Mr. Trump later disputed that Mr. Siebert had resigned, saying in a late-night social media post, “He didn’t quit, I fired him!”

Yes you did, Donnie, you’re a very big boy, everybody says so.

A lawyer for Ms. James, Abbe D. Lowell, called Mr. Siebert’s removal “a brazen attack on the rule of law.”

“The prosecutor did exactly what justice required by following the facts and the evidence, which didn’t support charges against Attorney General James,” he said. “Firing people until he finds someone who will bend the law to carry out his revenge has been President Trump’s pattern — and it’s illegal.”

Normally, yes, but under Trump, no.

The threat against Mr. Siebert was perhaps the most glaring example yet of the Trump administration’s efforts to exercise direct control over personnel and policy decisions at U.S. attorney’s offices around the country. Those moves have badly eroded the traditional distance between the White House and the Justice Department.

Eroded, no; nuked, yes.