“One such powerful individual that Epstein forced then-minor Jane Doe #3 to have sexual relations with was former Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, a close friend of Epstein’s and well-known criminal defense attorney. Epstein required Jane Doe #3 to have sexual relations with Dershowitz on numerous occasions while she was a minor, not only in Florida but also on private planes, in New York, New Mexico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.” (Attachment 9)
“Dershowitz came “pretty often” to Epstein’s Florida mansion and got massages while he was there” (Attachment 18, sworn testimony from Epstein’s housekeeper Juan Alessi)
The Times in June 2020 on this business of making moral judgements about the past, in particular with regard to slavery and the ways of thinking that made it possible:
Before that of course it was The Birth of a Nation, as we talked about the other day. Both are disasters as shapers of popular understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction. You might as well let Hitler’s favorite niece tell the story of the Holocaust. [Hitler had no niece. Hold the phone calls.]
The book was a surprise best-seller of massive proportions, and the movie broke all records. The thing mattered.
But even as white Americans embraced the moonlight and magnolias, African-Americans were registering objections. Soon after the producer David O. Selznick bought the rights, there were complaints that a movie version would incite violence, spread bigotry and even derail a proposed federal anti-lynching bill.
Something else it did, in my view, is plant and entrench an idea of Black people as born servants – as a kind of separate sub-species of human that is there to tighten the corsets and pick the cotton. Not bad, not necessarily officially inferior, just…destined. Destined to work for the white folks, and nothing else. All those movies and tv shows with a Mammy-equivalent in the kitchen and the nursery. She may even get some good lines, she may be shrewd or witty or both, but she is and always will be in service to the white folks. She won’t be doing the math for John Glenn, she won’t be Fanny Lou Hamer, she won’t be a doctor or lawyer or historian. She has her Place.
In 1936, Walter White, the secretary of the NAACP, wrote to [Selznick] expressing concern, and suggesting he hire someone, preferably an African-American, to check “possible errors” of fact and interpretation. “The writing of history of the Reconstruction period has been so completely confederatized during the last two or three generations that we naturally are somewhat anxious,” he wrote.
Selznick initially floated the name of one potential African-American adviser, but ultimately hired two whites, including a journalist friend of Mitchell’s, tasked with keeping the Southern speech authentic (a matter of great concern to some white fans of the novel who wrote to Selznick) and avoiding missteps on details like the appropriateness of Scarlett’s headgear at an evening party.
Point entirely missed.
[T]he film put the nostalgic Lost Cause mythology — by that point, the dominant national view of the Civil War — front and center, starting with the opening title cards paying tribute to “a land of Cavaliers and Cotton fields,” a “pretty world where Gallantry took its last bow.”
Are you able to hold on to your lunch? It’s a struggle here.
Among those who saw it around this time was a teenage Malcolm X. “I was the only Negro in the theater, and when Butterfly McQueen went into her act, I felt like crawling under the rug,” he wrote in his autobiography.
It is very very very cringe.
So. Sure, you can say that quarreling with GWTW is “virtue signaling” but you can also, or better yet instead, notice that the movie and the novel are full of racism signaling. Your call.
About this idea (or taunt) that discussion of slavery or colonial conquest and plunder or similar injustices in the past is mere “virtue signaling.” One, there is the fact that it is a taunt, and depending on the context can be a very snide one, but two there is the fact that there are other ways of looking at it, one of which is the “I could have been part of that” awareness.
That is to say, when we discuss the awful things that some people did to other people in the past, we’re not necessarily patting ourselves on the back; we can just as well be cringing at how easily we could have done the same depending on time and place of birth.
I can’t possibly be the only one who thinks about that in such discussions. Surely most people do! People who think enough to read about it, that is. People like Trump don’t, of course, but people who give a rat’s ass do.
It’s not “virtue signaling” so much as it is “thank fuck we didn’t live there at that time or we could have been doing what everyone else was doing.”
The inverse of that thought is “why wasn’t it as obvious to them as it is to us?” That question was a live one in the Congresses that preceded the Civil War. How did Preston Brooks manage to be so confident of his righteousness that he nearly killed Charles Sumner on the Senate floor? What wrongs are we overlooking that will be blindingly obvious 100 years from now?
I think that’s part of the reason trans ideology has such a firm grip: its fans are convinced it’s one of those revolutions that all decent people will approve of 100 years from now.
Fun fact: when people are asked what they would have done if they had been subjects in the Milgram experiment, the vast majority say they would have stopped pushing the button. That can’t be right, because in reality the vast majority did not stop. That’s a useful thing to remember, in my view. Maybe we wouldn’t have been abolitionists, maybe we wouldn’t have been anti-fascists. Maybe we wouldn’t have been on the less evil side. We don’t know, we can’t know.
Trump has referred to his opponents as “vermin” who are trying to “destroy America and to destroy the American dream,” and claimed that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our nation.” The Hitlerian overtones have notgoneunnoticed. And yet, the man who promises to be a dictator on “day one” leads the GOP primary by 50 points. How could this be? The horrifying conclusion is that there is plenty of appetite within the party for this sort of rhetoric and it doesn’t turn many people off.
Surveys back this up. A recent poll of likely Iowa caucusgoers found that 42 percent of them were more likely to vote for Trump based on his assertion that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country. Twenty-nine percent said the comments don’t matter, and 28 percent responded that it would make them less likely to vote for him. In a national poll, 42 percent of Republicans identified themselves as “MAGA” conservatives.
Which is to say, Hillary was correct. About half of Republicans hear Trump’s rhetoric and think, “Yes, this exactly what I want.” These are the Americans who believe they should be forever atop the social and political order because of their race and/or religion and are angry at society for changing in ways that have leveled the playing field even a little. Trump promised these voters that “I am your retribution,” and they are planning to hold him to it.
They were instructed and encouraged in this mindset by Fox News for years, and then along came Trump to make them even worse.
Some might point out that only 28 percent of U.S. voters are registered as Republicans. True, but Republican-leaning independents constitute another 17 percent, and actual swing voters are relatively rare. So the best-case scenario is that only 14 percent of voters are really dedicated to installing a fascist dictatorship. However, history tells us that that is a sufficient critical mass to send a country spinning into horror. When Milton Mayer visited Germany in the early 1950s to interview former low-level members of the Nazi party, he concluded that perhaps only a million out of 70 million Germans were “Fanatiker” (fanatics or true believers)—the rest were just along for the perks or to simply avoid unwanted scrutiny for lack of ideological purity.
And/or a mix of all three – a little true belief plus a little for the perks plus a little conformity.
Republican Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey said recently that “Israel is the only state in the world whose fundamental right to exist, within any borders at all, is openly denied by other states.” But Israel is the only nation with a “right to exist,” as the phrase is not commonly attached to any other country. And that’s the tell: This is not a legal concept, but a political one, available for broad interpretation and rhetorical weaponization.
I wonder if that’s true. Aren’t there claims that Cataluña is a nation? Weren’t there arguments about Pakistan’s right to exist as a nation during partition? What about Northern Ireland? Ukraine? Other former bits of what was the Soviet Union? Former bits of Yugoslavia? Rhodesia? To name only a few?
Questions of “existence” are typically left to theologians and philosophers, for good reason—pinning treaty obligations on issues of metaphysics is a recipe for confusion. So what can we say with honesty? Israel has no right to exist because no nation does; only people do. Israelis exist; so do Palestinians. They all have a right to exist but only because they are human beings. And there is no justice in securing your own right to exist by denying it to others.
But the question is about a right to exist, not existence itself. It’s an interesting question.
Transgender athletes face increased restrictions ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympics compared to previous rules, as it was recently decided that they must have completed their transition before the age of 12 to avoid unfair advantages.
Transgender athletes face greater hurdles in qualifying for the upcoming Olympic Games, which will take place in Paris from 26 July to 11 August. It has been mandated that the transition must be completed before the age limit of 12, as doing so after that age could give an advantage over cisgender female competitors.
That is, male athletes who cheat by claiming to be women will find it harder to cheat now that they are required to have completed “transition” before age 12.
Previously, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had issued guidelines that allowed any transgender athlete to compete as a woman as long as their testosterone levels were below 10 nanomoles per litre for at least 12 months before their first competition. However, the current requirements have been changed to avoid disadvantaging cisgender women.
Women. The requirements have been changed to avoid blatantly cheating women.
Unsurprisingly, transgender athletes, who previously qualified to compete against cisgender female athletes, have not welcomed the new protections for female athletes. It appears that these restrictions are based on the premise of not disadvantaging cisgender women.
Male athletes who want to cheat women have not welcomed the new protections for female athletes, because they prevent the male athletes from cheating women. The point of the restrictions is to prevent male athletes from cheating women.
Was in a grocery store years ago and there was one man unloading his cart and another man bringing his cart into the checkout line. The second man’s cart BARELY touched the first man’s cart, it was an accident, second guy did not tap the first guy’s cart on purpose. Well, they looked at each other and then they kept looking at each other and then really started glaring at each other and starting to square up aggressively. I expected to hear Marlin Perkins doing narration about how exciting it was that we got footage of these two magnificent animals about to fight in this amazing wild kingdom.
I said quite loudly that fighting was NOT allowed in this supermarket. That managed to break up the glaring and both guys went back to checking out groceries, but they still huffed and gave each other nasty looks. When first guy was leaving, the floor manager came over to ask if everything was OK with the second guy — she was trying to give first guy time to get clear of the parking lot to make sure the ruckus did not reignite out there.
Nature or nurture or some combination of both? This male-on-male 0 to 100mph in two seconds aggression event that ended up with one man dead seems to come from the same mold, doesn’t it? Too bad there was no chance for bystanders to try and distract either of these two men from their own violent impulses in this case.
Seventeen women’s rights groups have signed a letter to the charity UN Women UK expressing concern about its choice of a transgender woman as its “UK champion”.
Organisations including Fair Play for Women, Sex Matters, Transgender Trend and the Women’s Rights Network wrote of their “dismay and disappointment” that Munroe Bergdorf had been picked.
One, a man; two, a man who dresses up as a parody of a Hot Babe. Insult piled upon insult.
Bergdorf, 36, a model and broadcaster, was given the post of the first UN Women UK Champion in November. UN Women UK supports the work of the UN Women entity to improve the lives of women and girls, as well as the “empowerment of women equality globally within civil society, government and the corporate sector”.
Except it clearly doesn’t do that, because it’s too busy promoting men like Munroe Bergdorf and their porny ideas of what women are.
“I’m incredibly proud to step into my new role as a UN Women UK Champion,” Bergdorf said. “Working with the UN has been a personal ambition and dream of mine ever since I started working in the activism space over a decade ago. It’s a responsibility that I don’t take lightly.
“I will use this role to further advocate for the progress, safety, inclusion and empowerment of all women and girls, of all communities and identities. I will continue to draw attention to the systemic and social impact of misogyny, transphobia and gender-based inequality within the UK — in order to help provide data and insight that contributes to forming tangible methods of tracking and countering it.”
In other words he’ll use his role as a UN Women UK Champion to change the subject from women to men who dress up as women. Thanks, that’s a big help.
A Bel Air woman was shot dead during an argument on Wednesday, according to court documents.
According to charging documents, the incident happened on Churchill Road Wednesday in Bel Air, where Brian Delen, 47, was delivering food. The documents said Delen asked Meghan Lewis, 52: “Are you waiting for a food delivery, sir”
As per Delen’s account described in the documents, Lewis was offended and believed Delen had misgendered her, and yelled at him.
In other words this is yet more dishonest reporting. A man was shot dead, not a woman.
The filing says Delen drove away, and Lewis followed on foot; Delen stopped driving and the two ‘engaged in a physical altercation.”
Presumably the case will turn on that. Why did Delen stop driving? Why didn’t he just leave? He shot Lewis in the abdomen and Lewis died.
Members of the local LGBTQ community are describing Lewis as ‘uplifting,’ and a committed supporter of transgender people in Maryland.
“That’s just who she was as a person – she was always interested in uplifting our fellow community members,” said Lee Blinder, the executive director of Trans Maryland, a group which supports the trans community across the state. Blinder told WMAR Lewis went out of her way to help those within her community.
The community of men who usurp women.
Delen faces serious charges, including second-degree murder and first-degree assault.
Delen was released on recognizance, according to Maryland court records. His preliminary hearing is scheduled for January 25.
Happy New Year, dear siblings all, from a cis woman who helped draft the Equality Act 2010. A gentle reminder that when EA2010 speaks of women it means ALL women. The word cis is absent from the act; there are NO cis-specific rights. Oh, and ‘sex based rights’ don’t exist.
What this driveling fool is trying to make us believe is that “ALL women” includes men who call themselves women, and that if the word “cis” isn’t used then the word “women” means men as well as women.
It’s such a spectacle, watching apparently fully-adult women with serious jobs eagerly giving away women’s rights while patting themselves on the back for doing so.
Not sure why you refer to ‘believe’ here? This isn’t about faith and belief. Some lesbians have penises. Most don’t. Hope this helps.
A London council has demanded that companies in its supply chain prove their commitment to approved LGBT inclusion values. Labour-run Camden Council has introduced a range of measures to ensure that its internal policies and processes are inclusive.
But of course by “inclusive” in “LGBT” terms they mean mostly non-inclusive of women. The tiny tiny barely visible minority made up of people who claim to be the opposite sex is being “empowered” to demolish women’s rights. Why is that tiny minority, made up of people suffering from a trendy delusion, so important that they get to take away the rights of half of all humans?
According to information from the local authority, it is aiming to “positively influence” through the policy. It states that “building our commitment to LGBTQ+ equality into our procurement processes” has been one of the ways in which it has sought to be more inclusive.
Spreading the trans tyranny from the council to all the firms that the council gets stuff from.
The council states: “We are beginning to ask businesses to demonstrate their commitment to LGBTQ+ equality before we procure them.”
But they don’t really mean LGB equality, they mean T equality. It’s all about the T.
Other measures brought in to increase inclusion at the local authority include introducing trans awareness sessions, partnering with Stonewall and Proud Employers, and celebrating dates on an inclusion calendar, including a Bi Visibility Day and Transgender Day of Remembrance.
No Women’s Day of Remembrance though. Women don’t matter. Women are, frankly, Karens. In fact, if you must know, we hate them. The only good women are men.
Camden had previously launched a project to examine the potentially offensive views of historical figures represented in the borough, including Virginia Woolf.
Well duh. She was a woman. She sullied Tavistock Square by living in it; this must be exposed and examined and posthumously reviled.
Pope Francis used his New Year’s Day address to highlight concern over the worsening situation of the Roman Catholic Church in Nicaragua as a result of a protracted crackdown by the government of President Daniel Ortega, which has detained clerics, expelled missionaries, closed Catholic radio stations and limited religious celebrations.
Of course the church itself has a long long history of doing all that to others. It has detained people, expelled people, closed libraries and burned books, and limited non-religious celebrations. It’s a very coercive organization.
Speaking to the faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square for the traditional New Year’s Angelus prayer and blessing, Francis said he was “following with concern what is happening in Nicaragua, where bishops and priests have been deprived of their freedom.”
And how many people have been deprived of their freedom by the church over the past two thousand years or so? How many have been executed by it? How many tortured?
It’s not the benign institution the Times is framing it as being.
Vatican News reported on Monday that at least 14 priests, two seminarians and a bishop had been arrested in recent days in Nicaragua, and that the country’s top church leader, Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes, had expressed his closeness “to the families and communities who are without their priests at this time.”
Are priests supposed to be immune from arrest? What if they’ve been raping children? A hell of a lot of priests got away with doing exactly that for generations. It’s odd that the Times doesn’t even pause to ask the question. Maybe the priests did something criminal? Like kiddy-fiddling? Or worse? Why should we just assume they’re innocent?
In the long campaign to dismantle the church’s reach in the country, dozens of clerics and missionaries have been detained or expelled, and Catholic institutions shut down.
Is it just self-evident that the church should have maximal reach in the country? Not to me.
In March, the Vatican closed its embassy in Nicaragua, after the Nicaraguan government proposed suspending relations with the Holy See, and its representative to Managua, Msgr. Marcel Diouf, left the country for Costa Rica, The Associated Press reported. The Vatican’s ambassador had been forced to leave a year earlier.
Is that supposed to be a bad thing? The Vatican isn’t a country. It’s a small area within the city of Rome. Why should the Vatican have ambassadors at all? Why should any country be obliged to recognize them?
The University of Alberta fired its Sexual Assault Centre director for signing an open letter questioning sexual assault and rape claims against Hamas during the Oct. 7 attack in Israel.
Samantha Pearson’s use of the centre’s name was “improper and unauthorized” and “raised understandable concerns from members of our community and the public,” U of A president Bill Flanagan said in a statement Saturday.
Pretty much the last category of person who should endorse such an open letter, you’d think. “Bitches be lyin’,” said the director of the Sexual Assault Center.
The open letter posted online urges politicians in “so-called Canada” to “end their complicity in the ongoing massacres and genocide in Gaza, Occupied Palestine.”
Federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was also singled out in the letter for repeating the “unverified accusation that Palestinians were guilty of sexual violence.”
“Furthermore, by failing to recognize Israeli occupation as ‘terrorist’ and only directing this term at Palestinian resistance, you perpetuate an Islamophobic trope,” the letter reads.
We’re allowed to hate Islam just as we’re allowed to hate Catholicism and any other religion. Hatred of Muslims is one thing and hatred of Islam is quite another.
And we are allowed to condemn terrorism by rape no matter who perpetrates it.
So why, then, in a moment when statements of solidarity fly fast and furious, have feminists and their progressive allies not been more outspoken about the grotesque sexual violence visited upon Israeli women on Oct. 7?
Many feminist organizations rushed to express support for the Palestinian cause while eliding the plight of Israeli victims. The organization UN Women issued a four-page report last month exclusively addressing the impact of the war on women and girls in Gaza but made only a brief condemnation of the Oct. 7 attack that made no mention of the sexual violence that had been reported. A group of prominent scholars circulated a letter under the title “Feminists for a Free Palestine,” without explicitly condemning the sexual violence against Israeli women.
I guess the thinking is that some women deserve rape?
So, yes, the thinking is that some women deserve rape. It seems Israeli women are all Karens.
This tragic minimization — or justification, in some cases — of violence against Israeli women appears to be the result of an ideological turn among some feminists and progressives that elevates an “antiracist” agenda above the core feminist commitment to defend the universal right to bodily autonomy for all women. This argument contends that because Israel is a colonial power oppressing the Palestinians, any resistance is a justified dimension of decolonization.
Meanwhile, be sure not to ask any questions about how Hamas treats Palestinian women.
Grrrrr. Now we’re “non-trans women” – a subset of ourselves.
1. The Equality Act allows “places where it is reasonable for” non-trans “women only to have access”. The designation of a non-TW space must be a “proportionate & legitimate response” to need, but the Courts have not held any private & separate spaces eg toilet stalls, or … https://t.co/Q4wimsyHOk
— Prof. Stephen Whittle OBE, PhD, DLaws, FAcSS, (@stephenwhittle) December 31, 2023
Sneak sneak sneak. Sneak in the “non-trans” bit as if it needs to be spelled out that women are not men who call themselves women. No thank you, that is surplus to requirements; we are women; men who pretend to be women are men.
Peter Tatchell tries to school women on who can be a woman and Rosie Duffield reminds him that we don’t need him to tell us who can be a woman. Go school yourself Peter.
Thanks Peter, but we (the majority of the population) don't need you to explain our own biology back to us, or tell us who may opt in if they feel like it. The use of spurious pseudo-science-speak to #mansplain and patronise makes your biological sex pretty clear… #NoThankYou.
Tim Harris’s mention of Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland has prompted me to summon the book from the library and to read the Guardian review by Fara Dabhoiwala.
In the endless catalogue of British imperial atrocities, the unprovoked invasion of Tibet in 1903 was a minor but fairly typical episode. Tibetans, explained the expedition’s cultural expert, were savages, “more like hideous gnomes than human beings”. Thousands of them were massacred defending their homeland, “knocked over like skittles” by the invaders’ state-of-the-art machine guns. “I got so sick of the slaughter that I ceased fire,” wrote a British lieutenant, “though the General’s order was to make as big a bag as possible.” As big a bag as possible – killing inferior people was a kind of blood sport.
And blood sport is a Thing to [a certain class of] the British. I did a post once, not very long ago, about a fact I hadn’t known: the toffs like to shoot birds out of the sky and then just walk away. They don’t shoot them for food, they just shoot them. Same with “trophy” hunting – elephants, lions, whatever they think will look nice on the wall.
And now we learn that they saw a set of people the same way. A “bag,” a “trophy,” a blood sport.
On the one hand the people are so much garbage, as cheerfully slaughtered as mosquitoes. On the other hand, creators of precious manuscripts and artworks well worth looting and taking home to show off.
Well which is it?
Sitting at home watching the BBC antiques show Flog It one quiet afternoon in the early 21st century, Sathnam Sanghera saw the delighted descendant of one of those soldiers make another killing – £140,000 for selling off the artefacts his grandfather had “come across” in the Himalayas.
As one does.
It’s a characteristically instructive vignette in Empireland, Sanghera’s impassioned and deeply personal journey through Britain’s imperial past and present. The empire, he argues, still shapes British society – its delusions of exceptionalism, its immense private and public wealth, the fabric of its cities, the dominance of the City of London, even the entitled and drunken behaviour of British expats and holidaymakers abroad. Yet the British choose not to see this: wilful amnesia about the darker sides of imperialism may be its most pernicious legacy.
To return to the question of ‘indigenous’ religious artefacts in museums, it should surely be pointed out that a great bone of contention is that a great many, if not most, of such artefacts were looted in the course of colonial wars, etc., and it is hardly surprising that the descendants of those peoples should not be happy about it, and the lack of respect shown to them then and now, a lack of respect that – forgive me for saying this – appears in at least one of the comments here.
There was the Younghusband invasion of Tibet in 1903, in which monasteries were sacked and plundered, and the man, Lawrence Waddell, mostly responsible for (as he said) ‘procuring from that closed land those manuscripts and books so greatly required by Western scholars’, even as he described Tibetan Buddhism as ‘a parasitic disease’ and Tibetans as ‘sunk in the lowest depths of savagery’, and as being ‘more like hideous gnomes than human beings’. There was the looting and burning of the Summer Palace in Peking in 1868. More than 10,000 Indigenous Australian & Torres Island artefacts have been identified in institutions around the world, a third of them in the British Museum. The ‘British Expedition to Abyssinia’ of 1868, in which… But I shan’t go on, except to say that you may find all this information, and more, in Sathnam Sanghera’s excellent and fair-minded book, Empireland.
I have confined the above to Britain, but I rather doubt that the objects in question in science museums in the USA were all happily handed over by happy ‘natives’ (‘Oh, great, you are going to put them in museums along with those skulls you need for your physiognomical research into IQ, etc.! Thank you so much’!). And I am not surprised at all that indigenous peoples are still unhappy about the situation.
I don’t think one should be worried about accusations of ‘virtue-signalling’, which come for the most part from people whose attitudes, even though they may proclaim themselves as atheists, seem uncomfortably close to those of nineteenth-century imperialists, colonisers, colonists, and Christian missionaries.
