My Surrogacy Journey (MSJ) bring this webinar to raise awareness for all healthcare professionals involved in maternity services.
But it’s not “maternity” services; it’s rent-a-womb services.
Michael and Wes, the co-founders of MSJ, will be sharing their experiences of maternity services and their pathway to parenthood, focussing on both the difference that high quality, equitable care from midwives can make, and the harmful impact poor, stigmatised care can have on a surrogate and intended parents.
All about the men, the men who rent women to gestate and push out their luxury bespoke paid-for babies.
They will also provide a brief overview of their extensive campaigning and the change in direction of both of their careers, all due to them both becoming parents through surrogacy.
It’s the National WOMEN’S Law Center…but now it systematically hides that filthy word.
BREAKING: SCOTUS allows Idaho's abortion ban to proceed.
This decision will force people to wait until they are on the brink of death with pregnancy complications before hospitals will let their doctors intervene. https://t.co/YCOlTqDwtl
No, it won’t force “people” to wait until they’re on the brink of death, it will force WOMEN to do that.
If you treat the word “women” as an obscenity then get out. Go set up your own group; get out of any group that was set up as and has always been a group for and about and by women. If you think that word is poison then get out get out get OUT.
Bev of course is not doing any such thing, and many people are swapping their current headers for the one Comerford objects to. Neener neener bully-boy.
A part of me agrees with having singular standards. I’d quite like it if Konstantin Kisin gave it a bash.
You see the standard I have is that one shouldn’t take what someone says in a specific context completely out of that context in order to demonize them.
And that appears to me to be what is happening to Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy here.
To put what she is saying into context, her filmography includes A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness. It is about a girl who survived an attempted honor killing by her father and uncle, only for the Pakistani public to pressure her into forgiveness – so the people who tried to kill would get to go back home.
An earlier documentary was Saving Face, about two women who survived acid attacks. Women in the Holy Kingdom is about feminists in Saudi Arabia.
As a man I do not object to being disturbed by subject matter like this. She should absolutely be happy that men find this stuff disturbing, and it is the precise sort of stuff that should be made with that in mind.
I am extremely opposed to this idea that I should never be disturbed, and generally when the shoe is on the other foot, well, if the shoe was on the other foot Kisin would be championing Sharmeen’s right to express ideas people find disturbing.
So far as to whether she’s the right person to revive Starwars, I don’t know. Her background in politics and economics could be useful for fixing the biggest flaw in Disney Starwars – the lack of solid world building.
In the OT – we know why the emperor wants to build the Death Star, it is because he wants to devolve governance to the system lords, and the Death Star is there to keep them from taking the opportunity to rebel. The conflict is between the empire that rules by fear, and the resistance which believes in rule by consent.
You never really get just what the First Order really believes in, what its ultimate big picture vision for the galaxy is. Having someone come in with a background in politics and economics, if she can bring some of that into the story, may well be what the series needs.
Polls show that a large percentage of Trump supporters believe that God personally picked the twice-impeached, thrice-married, four-time-indicted former president to lead the United States — and Trump himself is now encouraging that belief.
Sure; why wouldn’t that be true? Naturally a god would pick an ignorant greedy mean lazy corrupt sadistic empty suit to take the top job in a nuclear-armed nation with a history of reckless adventures.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump promoted a video that flat-out declared that “God gave us Trump” as His personal representative to lead the United States of America.
Among other things, the video declared that God needed Trump to “fight the Marxists” in America while also working past midnight every night, despite the fact that leaked White House schedules showed that Trump spent almost every night watching Fox News instead of meeting with world leaders.
The video then purported to quote God as saying, “I need somebody with arms strong enough to wrestle the Deep State and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild.”
Ew. That’s a mental image I could have lived without. Also he doesn’t have a gentle bone in his body or thought in his head. He’s the most casually brutal human being most of us have ever seen.
No. We are done with allowing group-based discrimination. If you can't say it about women, you shouldn't be able to say it about men without the same repercussions. https://t.co/J7xDBic5sv
“If you can’t say it about women, you shouldn’t be able to say it about men without the same repercussions.”
So, you can’t talk about rape. You can’t say that women rape women because women aren’t equipped to rape women, and therefore you can’t say that men rape women, even though men are equipped to rape women and, as a sex, have a long history of raping women. What a handy way to shut women up!
Apparently there’s no such thing as a power imbalance of any kind ever, so you can’t talk about rich bosses exploiting poor workers, you can’t talk about prosperous safe powerful people exploiting and/or punishing struggling threatened powerless people. You have to pretend that everyone is on an equal footing right now this minute and therefore no one can accuse anyone of committing any form of injustice.
When did all this get straightened out and why weren’t we told?
A young woman named Roya Heshmati shared her horrific ordeal of receiving 74 lashes for refusing to cover her hair. Despite her punishment, she remained defiant, refusing to wear the hijab during and after her lashing. Singing courageously, “In the name of women, in the name of life, the chains of slavery have been torn apart.” At the same time, Taliban arrested women of Afghanistan for “bad hijab”.
I call on all women across the globe to condemn this barbaric laws, and show their solidarity with the women of Iran and Afghanistan, who are suffering under the Taliban and Islamic Republic.
This is 21st century, and we need global unity to END gender apartheid regimes.
Read part of Roya’s story:
“This morning, I faced my sentence of 74 lashes for defying the mandatory hijab. Accompanied by my lawyer, I entered the District 7 prosecutor’s office, deliberately removing my hijab. Ignoring the officials’ orders to cover up, I stood my ground.
An officer threatened additional punishment if I didn’t comply, but I refused to wear the hijab. Defiantly, I was handcuffed and led to a basement room, akin to a medieval torture chamber.
In the execution room, with concrete walls and an ominous execution bed, the judge asked if I was okay. I remained silent, showing my resistance. Ordered to prepare for the lashes, I hung up my coat and scarf, refusing to wear the hijab despite their insistence.
As the lashes commenced, I silently recited a poem about liberation and resistance. Despite the pain, I didn’t let them see my suffering. After the punishment, I continued to defy their demands to wear the hijab, a symbol of my unwavering stance against oppression.” This is the reality of living under Sharia Laws. #LetUsTalk
[T]he fallout at one of the nation’s elite universities is also illuminating the ways in which the political right is increasingly targeting education, with deliberate efforts to “take on” elite schools by stripping them of federal student loan money and undermine diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, and a parallel movement to undo K–12 education with laws that limit the teaching of history or ban books and classroom libraries.
The trouble here is that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs aren’t an unmistakable good even to people who aren’t on the political right. The lunacy that bubbles and festers around “trans rights” has made a lot of lefty jargon suspect even to many lefties. Like the word “inclusion” for instance – which means things like “including” men in everything that belongs to women, if those men say they are women. That kind of verbal manipulation tends to provoke suspicion of all progressive jargon, because how can we be confident it’s not all that stupid?
Sir Nicholas Winton, who saved hundreds of children from the Nazis, was so modest that he rejected an initial proposal to make a film about him, according to the producer of One Life, the soon-to-be released biographical drama about the British humanitarian.
Iain Canning told the Observer that, about five years before Winton’s death in 2015 aged 106, he and fellow producer Emile Sherman visited him at his Maidenhead home during a break from shooting their film, The King’s Speech.
Over tea, they broached the subject of making a film about the man who helped save 669 children from German-occupied Czechoslovakia, just before the beginning of the second world war, but Winton politely turned them down.
…
[Anthony Hopkins] was inspired to play a man who, alongside others, saved the lives of children who were otherwise destined for the gas chambers and furnaces of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Belsen.
One Life, released on 1 January, tells the story of “Nicky” Winton who, as a young London broker, visited Prague in December 1938 and found families who had fled the rise of the Nazis in Germany and Austria. They were living in desperate conditions with little or no shelter or food, and under threat of Nazi invasion. He immediately responded to their plight and, in a race against time, tried to save as many children as he could before the borders closed.
Why were the children destined for the gas chambers? Why did the families flee the rise of the Nazis? It’s a secret; it must not be mentioned. The Guardian does very well: there’s not a single appearance of the words “Jew” and “Jewish” in the entire article.
The family of Sir Nicholas Winton, who organised the rescue of more than 600 children from the Nazis, say he refused to think of himself as a hero. The philanthropist is now the subject of a film which tells the story of him bringing them from German-occupied Czechoslovakia to the UK in 1939.
His grandson Laurence, who lives in Herefordshire, said the making of the film had been an emotional process. It also had a pertinent message about refugees today, he added.
Sir Nicholas, known as Nicky to his friends and family, saved 669 young children in the nine months leading up to the outbreak of World War Two.
Missing: the word “Jewish.” It seems it’s become an obscenity to the BBC.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is attached [sic] to direct an upcoming “Star Wars” film, making her the first woman to helm a film in the iconic franchise—but right-wing critics are blasting the movie as “woke” after Obaid-Chinoy said it’s “about time” a woman directed a “Star Wars” installment.
Hell yes, what business does a woman have saying women should participate in the common culture?
Obaid-Chinoy, a filmmaker known for directing feminist documentaries, was announced in April 2023 as director of an upcoming, unnamed film set in the “Star Wars” universe and starring Daisy Ridley—who portrayed protagonist Rey in the sequel trilogy of the main “Star Wars” series.
Obaid-Chinoy will be the first woman and the first person of color to direct a film set in the “Star Wars” universe.
Some right-wing pundits criticized Obaid-Chinoy, deeming her comments “woke,” and resurfaced remarks she made at a 2015 Women in the World summit in which she said she likes to “make men uncomfortable” through her art.
Shut up guys. Men make women uncomfortable via the movies they create all the time. Some men make some movies that are about nothing else. Lots of men love to make women uncomfortable.
Conservative pundits criticized Obaid-Chinoy’s comments, including Benny Johnson, who claimed the “Star Wars” franchise is “doomed.” Pundit Matt Walsh posted a video of Obaid-Chinoy’s Women in the World summit interview, stating the film is “destined to be Disney’s biggest flop yet.” “It’s like they ENJOY losing money,” the popular right-wing account Libs of TikTok posted in response to Walsh.
Blah blah blah. Women are supposed to make dinner and spread their legs. Men are supposed to make the culture. It’s God’s plan.
You don’t want that, see, because it can motivate the prez to do things for $$$ instead of for the common good.
During Donald Trump’s presidency, his businesses received at least $7.8 million in payments from the foreign governments and officials of 20 countries, including China, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, according to a report released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee.
The report argues that the payments violated the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, a provision that bars federal officials, including the president, from accepting money or gifts from foreign governments without permission from Congress. That clause was central to a protracted legal debate when Democrats controlled the House and sought access to Trump’s financial records. The issue eventually landed at the Supreme Court, but there was no definitive ruling on whether Trump illegally profited from his presidency. Instead, the justices in 2021 said the cases were moot because Trump no longer held office.
In other words Trump and the Supremes waited it out. Score!
“These payments were made while these governments were promoting specific foreign policy goals with the Trump Administration and even, at times, with President Trump himself, and as they were requesting specific actions from the United States to advance their own national policy objectives,” according to the 155-page report released Thursday.
“Trump heading into the 2024 election has decided to go all in as being the pro-Jan. 6 candidate,” said Tom Joscelyn, a counterterrorism expert who served as a senior staff member on the Congressional Select Committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack. “He’s gone full steam ahead in praising and in his own way endorsing the Jan. 6 rioters and extremists who attacked the Capitol.”
And what is January 6? An attempted coup.
Trump launched the first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign by playing a rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” sung by Jan. 6 defendants in jail. He frequently refers to that day as “beautiful” and says his supporters facing criminal charges are “January 6 patriots.” He refers to people in prison on Jan. 6-related charges as “hostages” in his stump speech. He has also hosted fundraisers for a controversial nonprofit group that financially supports Jan. 6 defendants, and campaign finance records show that his political action committee donated $10,000 to the group.
…
Trump’s stated promise to act as a “dictator” on day one of his presidency, alongside his description of his political enemies as “vermin,” his call for the “termination” of provisions in the Constitution and his claim that unauthorized immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country, have led his critics to fear how he will use presidential power.
As POV cameras surge in popularity, many incidents of discourteous trail behavior have made their way to the internet.
Perhaps the worst was when a disabled rider was confronted by a man on the trail about his adaptive bike. Watch the video below.
In this video, a man was riding in the woods on his adaptive bike when a very rude mountain biker accosted him about whether his bike was legal in the park. Despite having no authority, the Karen took it upon himself to enforce wrongly perceived rules of the park.
Heads they win tails we lose. Rude women are Karens and rude men are…Karens. The “reporter” is named Zander Lingelbach-Pierce. I hope he gets a blister.
In December the UN Women’s UK committee appointed a male who presents in a highly sexualised stereotype of womanhood as an ambassador for women. We coordinated a letter from seventeen UK campaign groups to register our dismay, as reported in the Times today.
UN Women has made a point of demonstrating that it considers males can become women. It’s disappointing to see the UK committee go so far as to select a male to represent women. Their credibility is in tatters.
UN Women made such a point of demonstrating that it considers males can become women that it actually appointed a male to represent women. In other words UN Women made a point of insulting women, on purpose, with deep malice aforethought. Why bother to be UN Women at all then? Why not just give that up and be UN Men Who Pretend To Be Women instead?
From the letter:
We wish to register our dismay and disappointment at the appointment of a male activist, Munroe Bergdorf, as a UN Women UK champion. The female population of the UK is more than 33 million, yet you have ignored every one of us and chosen a male.
And not just any male, but a male who explicitly tells women to shut up about their womeny problems.
Munroe Bergdorf’s well-publicised activism is not pro-women. This person has objected to women making references to our female bodies. Yet many issues affecting women, such as FGM, child marriage and forced marriage, reproductive rights, male violence against women and girls, rape as a war crime, pregnancy and maternity healthcare, and more, are inextricably linked with our female biology. How can this person be a champion of women if these issues are deemed unmentionable?
And in case that’s not enough? The guy’s an asshole.
Bergdorf resigned as an adviser on LGBT+ to the UK Labour Party after previous homophobic and racist posts on social media were revealed. These included saying that “all white people” are “violent racists” and “fuck you, stupid dirty and smelly nigga”. There are numerous examples of homophobic messaging, using expressions like “faggot” and “old poof”, “hairy barren lesbian” and “barren…hairy dyke”.
So UN Women decided that’s the guy for them?
The UK has reason to be proud of its strong feminist credentials. We have a dynamic feminist sector with numerous campaign groups advocating for women and girls. If UN Women UK wants to select a women’s ambassador there is plenty of choice. To ignore all these pro- women activists in favour of a male advocating only for people like themselves seems like a deliberate message which many women in the UK and elsewhere will read as anti-female.
Your nomination for a women’s ambassador should be a female who is willing and determined to speak about the issues affecting women and girls. Munroe Bergdorf is unsuitable in every regard.
I had known my (now) ex-wife for a year before we got married, and I knew she liked the movie. She was born in Louisiana, and would sometimes say things that made no sense to me as her personal point of pride at being from one of the 4 states that are the “real South.” The Mason-Dixon line was BS, she said. Only Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana were the Real South. So, you can imagine what it felt like as we were driving through Mississippi on our way back from a honeymoon in New Orleans for her to say “Slavery wasn’t so bad. Some of them were even treated like members of the family.” It was one of the most sinking feelings I had ever had (and I’m a Minnesota Vikings fan, so you can imagine the depths.)
She didn’t get what is so wrong about people owning other people, let alone the subjection to whippings, rape, family separation, torture, and murder that the slaves were subject to. Imagine even living your whole life without the hope of every being free from the yoke of another. I think that’s the worst torture.
Do these people who romanticize the Old South and tour the Plantation homes in awe of their splendor have an ounce of human empathy? She didn’t get that someone who was a ‘house nigger” faced being sent out to the fields on a moment’s notice if they were imagined to be looking the wrong way at the daughter of a plantation owner, or for trying to learn to read. I tried to reason with the woman I had just married, but it was so ingrained in her by growing up in a culture that embraced such romanticism as depicted in this story. “Gone with the Wind” isn’t the only movie to depict the Reconstruction this way, either. “The Outlaw Josey Wales” is the story of a former Confederate driven from his land and his family murdered by the Union. And he was depicted as a hero, while the Union soldiers were depicted as bloodthirsty avengers.
It’s not virtue signaling to be disgusted by the influence that “Gone with the Wind,” movie and novel, have had on our society. It excuses the worst excesses of our history. And the attitude enables idiots to fly both the US Flag and the Stars and Bars on their trucks as patriots.
GWTW was not the reason we got divorced, but it was a sickening foreshadow of some of the conflicts to come.
(I never understood why Joan Baez covered “The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down.” There must be some hidden meaning that I miss. Robbie Robertson said he got the idea from listening to family of Levon Helm talk about Reconstruction, and one could perhaps think of Virgil Caine, who was not a slaveholder, as an innocent victim in an existential power struggle in a country at war with itself.)
“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.
