Medical sociologist writes idiotic think-piece about abortion rights for the NY Times in which she’s so busy tapping all the required Stations that she obscures whatever it is she’s trying to say. Editors should just say no to this brand of crap.

Matt Lavallee was in college when he learned his girlfriend was pregnant. “The news scared me,” he said, acknowledging that an unintended pregnancy was an even more daunting prospect for his girlfriend. “But there was no question that abortion was the best option for us.”

…

We don’t often hear abortion stories from cisgender men like Mr. Lavallee, even though they are responsible for the overwhelming majority of the world’s unplanned pregnancies, and so often benefit when an abortion occurs. The much more familiar pattern when efforts are made to curtail abortion is for a slew of mostly women to share their abortion stories.

If by “responsible for” Andréa Becker means “impregnated” then it’s not the overwhelming majority, it’s all. And Mr. Lavallee isn’t a “cisgender man,” he’s a man. The word “cisgender” is an absurd redundancy.

As for her pretend surprise that discussion of abortion focuses on women, I would point out that that’s because it’s women who are at the sharp end of it. Men may or may not take responsibility, they may or may not help with logistics and financing, they may or may not share parental duties in the absence of an abortion, but the whole thing happens outside their bodies and inside the bodies of women. Abortion is about women not because women are hogging the limelight but because it’s women’s bodies that are involved.

Reproductive health science has likewise disproportionately focused on the people who have abortions. 

She means women, but she’s rude enough to pretend she doesn’t. Contemptible.

Researchers like myself have devoted our careers to examining not only who gets abortions, but what the experience is like, what barriers must be overcome and how having an abortion or being denied one alters a person’s life trajectory. This research has found that access to abortion is associated with improved physical and mental health and is correlated to higher educational and financial attainment in the long run for both women and their children.

Yet now for some reason she’s pretending that “people” other than women need access to abortion.

Yet amid all this abortion research, some critical questions remain: What’s the effect on men who co-conceive and then the pregnancy ends in abortion? And who even are these men?

Ya mean people?

By contrast, there’s scant data on how cis men benefit from abortions, let alone demographic data that characterizes this population. This is partly because of methodology concerns: A man might not necessarily know he helped cause an abortion. Moreover, amid continuous attacks on abortion rights, the urgency among researchers has logically been to demonstrate the benefits of abortion access for those who can become pregnant.

One minute she is talking about women, the next minute she isn’t. One minute it’s people, the next minute it’s cis men. Confusion soup.

Her intention seems to be to point out that men benefit from abortion too, and she does eventually get around to spelling that out, but there’s so much cis-ing and person-ing that she clogs up and obscures her own argument. Dumb as paint.

PROBLEM SOLVED.

Totally utterly completely solved. Boom.

Except. Well, just a few details.

One, you can’t have just one door for every school.

Two, you can’t have two armed cops on duty at all times at every school.

Three, what are they supposed to do, “take out” everyone who approaches the door?

Other than that, PROBLEM TOTALLY SOLVED.

Updating to add a fourth tiny problem with Cruz’s otherwise brilliant plan:

NPR tells us:

Approximately 40 minutes to an hour passed from when the gunman first arrived at Robb Elementary and fired a shot at a security guard to when he was killed by a Border Patrol agent, according to The Associated Press.

Witnesses shouted at police to go into the school after the gunman, but the officers did not do so initially.

Still a BRILLIANT PLAN though.

Ok it’s no fun to be a child blown to smithereens by a teenage boy with an assault rifle, but what about men who call themselves women? They’re the ones who really have a tough time.

Norway is so “progressive” it’s reactionary.

A Norwegian feminist could be facing up to three years in prison for allegedly “hateful” tweets directed at a male who claims to be a lesbian woman.

Christina Ellingsen, a representative of feminist organization Women’s Declaration International (WDI) is being investigated under hate crime charges for tweets she made between February 2021 and January 2022.

The tweets in question were replies directed at Christine Marie Jentoft, a representative of trans activist group Foreningen FRI. Jentoft is a male who identifies as a lesbian woman.

Ellingsen’s charges are centered around her questioning why FRI promoted the belief that men could be lesbians. While police are still investigating, if she is found guilty, Ellingsen could face a prison sentence of up to three years.

Police are investigating a lesbian for saying a man is a man and not a lesbian.

A second tweet that has been cited as evidence of hate speech reads, “Jentoft, who is male and an advisor in FRI, presents himself as a lesbian – that’s how bonkers the organization which supposedly works to protect young lesbians’ interests is. How does it help young lesbians when males claim to be lesbian, too?”

Is there a compromise possible? If men can be lesbians, can lesbians who aren’t men have a name for themselves? Realesbians perhaps?

We know the answer. No. Men would just invade that too.

Ellingsen was recently accused by Amnesty International Norway of harassing Jentoft after telling him on national television that he was male.

How is it Amnesty International’s job to tell women to pretend men can be female?

After speaking with her lawyer earlier this week, Ellingsen told Reduxx she had learned that the police report made against her was filed by Jentoft himself.

Jentoft previously sparked controversy after inviting children to contact him for hugs in a tweet made in 2018.

But he can get the police to harass a woman for saying he’s a man.

“I am under police investigation for campaigning for women’s rights, because to certain groups, the fact that women and girls are female and that men cannot be women, girls, mothers or lesbians, is considered hateful,” Ellingsen told Reduxx.

“Women are not protected against hate speech in Norway, but men who claim to be both lesbian and a woman, are protected both on the grounds of gender identity and on the grounds of sexual orientation,” Ellingsen said.

Who made that rule?

India Willoughby angrily asks what does Martina Navratilova know about sports. That’s a good look.

We don’t need to know anything about trans to say that men don’t get to invade women’s sports. The issue isn’t being trans, it’s being male. If you’re male, get out of women’s sports. Simple.

I’d be out of there at the speed of light.

It’s so touching when a guy gets to combine his fetish with his job. Like for instance

Dr Jonathan Harrow MD, a man with two PhDs, who’s lectured on health at universities and had senior medical jobs all over the world and who mostly, it seems, presents and identifies as a man.

…

However, despite being so qualified in medicine, a few weeks ago he started a community job as a nurse practitioner. The role involves wearing a nurse’s uniform. He attended the interview dressed in women’s clothing…Since starting the job there’s been a common theme in his online posts – he wants people to validate his choice of wearing a nurse’s uniform, and alludes to the fact that the women’s tunic accommodates breasts and a bra.

Notice me notice me notice me notice me.

That’s what people go there for of course – not for medical care, but to pay close attention to men who present as women.

He wore scrubs for years but that won’t do now because oh no they don’t have big signs on the front saying TITS TITS TITS.

One brazen woman asked for a female nurse, but she soon backed down from that outrageous insult.

All perfectly healthy.

God? Why God of all people? He’s the biggest mass murderer of all time.

As for good moral values, MTG wouldn’t know them if they bit her on the ass. They start with respect for others, and that’s not her style at all.

Day after tomorrow.

Former president Donald Trump will headline a forum at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Houston this Friday — about a four-hour drive from where a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., killed at least 19 children and two teachers on Tuesday.

Trump said Wednesday he would keep the appearance, in a post on his Truth Social platform.

Yeah he’s a tough guy, he’s not gonna let other people’s agony stop him dancing on the graves of a bunch of kids.

The Memorial Day weekend event is the year’s largest for the gun lobby meeting after cancellations due to the coronavirus pandemic. It’s set to take place over three days and “showcase over 14 acres of the latest guns and gear,” according to its official website.

What are guns as consumer items for? They’re not primarily for shooting game, so what are they for? What do people need assault rifles for?

Overthrowing the government, I guess – that would be one item. “Self-defense” – like blowing away that guy jogging through the neighborhood because hey it’s a white neighborhood and he’s not white so he must be there to steal your stuff.

The forum is also slated to include Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem, and North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson — all Republicans. The next night, “American Pie” singer Don McLean is due to perform.

…

Cruz tweeted Tuesday that he was “fervently lifting up in prayer the children and families in the horrific shooting in Uvalde.”

Yeah see that does no good. That’s worthless. Fuck that. Nobody wants your fervent lifting up in prayer bullshit. What we need is for you and the rest of those ruthless bloodthirsty fucks to stop blocking gun control laws. That’s it. Just your job.

Originally a comment by NightCrow on Cotton ceiling tweet.

CM: I don’t see that the workshop is necessarily coercive. We have no information about the contents of that workshop. AB’s opinion that it must be coercive is not substantiated.

Here’s the advertisement for the ‘Cotton Ceiling’ workshop preserved in its original context. Full transcript below; all emphases added by me.

Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women, with Morgan M Page

Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling will explore the sexual barriers queer trans women face within the broader queer women’s communities through group discussions and the hands-on creation of visual representations of these barriers. Participants will work together to identify barriers, strategize ways to overcome them, and build community. Open to all trans women and MAAB genderqueer folks.

According to Tribunal Tweets CM said ‘We have no information about the contents of that workshop’, or something very like it. In a strictly literal sense this is true. We don’t know what went on during the actual event. But anyone with even a modest capacity for close contextual reading should be able to recognise that the language in this abstract is violent and oppressive: ‘overcoming’, ‘breaking down … barriers’, ‘strategize ways to overcome’ and utterly dehumanizing: ‘cotton ceiling’ – lesbian women reduced to what is in their knickers, their right to agency denied.

The whole premise is saturated in misogyny and sexism: lesbians (those bitches) have been rejecting our demands! We must force them to understand that the point of their existence is to service the fantasies of heterosexual males with a cross-dressing fetish, and alleviate (whisper it quietly) our painful awareness that we are imposters.

Ed: Have a screenshot to see for yourselves.

Laurence Tribe explains what’s wrong with the claim that overturning Roe v Wade would be like the ruling that overturned “a long line of decisions that had blocked minimum wage and maximum hours and other worker-protection laws in the name of employers’ rights of “private property” and the “liberty of contract”.”

Professor [Akhil] Amar treats as laughably naïve the observation by ACLU national legal director and Georgetown law professor David Cole that, although “Parrish took away some rights of business owners … its real effect was to expand rights protections for millions of Americans subject to exploitation by powerful corporations.” Amar’s rebuttal? He says, and I’m serious here, that it’d be equally legitimate to say that “Dobbs’ real effect would be to expand rights protection for millions of innocent, unborn Americans … unborn humans, subject to extermination by society.”

It’s hard to know where to begin in unraveling that alleged parallel. Suffice it to note that the status as rights-bearing persons of embryos and fetuses remains a matter of profound sectarian controversy in America and throughout the world while no such controversy attends the status as rights-bearing persons of the array of workers whose rights, at least under laws designed to limit economic exploitation if not directly under the constitution itself, were indisputably expanded by virtue of the Parrish decision and the overturning of the Lochner line of cases.

Now why might that be? Why is it controversial?

For one thing, it’s because an embryo is an embryo. It’s unfinished. Its rights are in the future. If a woman and a man decide one convivial evening that they want to have a baby, that notional baby doesn’t instantly acquire rights. An embryo is more solid than a decision, but it’s still lacking the full humanity that needs rights.

And for a second thing, unlike all other kinds of persons, an embryo and a fetus are inside a full human being. She is making them, with her body. They can’t have any rights without her. They’re parasitic on her. She gets to reject that arrangement.

That’s what the anti-abortion faction means by “innocent” of course – they’re innocent because they’re not formed yet, they’re not independent yet, they can’t do things in the world yet – they’re hidden away inside someone else’s body. But what we’re supposed to take from that word is that they’re tiny saints, when the reality is that they’re raw material. Of course they’re “innocent” in the sense of not having shot up a school yet, but that doesn’t give them a 9 months lease on a woman’s body if she doesn’t agree.

You have got to be kidding.

This is an MP! Not your neighbor’s 12-year-old, but an actual LibDem Member of Parliament.

Does she think most people love others because of their gender, or even their sex? Because if so she has to think most people love roughly half the people they encounter daily, half the people they’ve ever met, half the people shopping at Waitrose when she shops there, half the people on the bus, half the people walking down the street, half the people in the census.

Sex is generally (though far from always) a basic starting point for sexual and romantic love, kind of the way species is, but that’s all it is. Personality and “vibe” (and other intangibles) matter more for everyone. It’s like…”Do you want to go see a play?” “If it’s in a theater, yes.” That’s not how that works. What’s the play, who’s in it, who directed it, what do the reviews say?

Pansexual visibility day ffs. Get over yourself.

Let’s revisit that article by Jo Bartosch last November about Stonewall’s calling a BBC investigation “equivalent to racism.” (It’s in the Daily Mail but you know the drill – the Graun won’t publish such things.) I did a post on it then.

Jo writes:

For many, it was a brave and long-overdue airing of an important and distressing subject: a painstaking investigation into claims that predatory trans women have been pressuring lesbians for sex, published on the BBC News website.

But a leaked email shows that the influential trans lobby group Stonewall attempted to suppress the investigation before it had even been published – and made the extraordinary claim that debating the issues was equivalent to ‘sexual racism’.

And today a QC repeated the claim at Allison Bailey’s tribunal.

Earlier this month, the BBC followed several other high-profile bodies, including Whitehall departments, in dropping its membership of Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme.

Under the scheme, employers pay the lobby group to help ‘embed LGBTQ+ inclusion’ in the way they work.

The BBC’s announcement came two weeks after the Corporation published an investigation by journalist Caroline Lowbridge in which some lesbians told how they felt pressured into having a sexual relationship with trans women – specifically, men who say they are women but who have retained their male genitals.

THE investigation cited three lesbian women who said they feared being labelled ‘transphobic’, and risked being shunned and threatened by the gay and trans community if they refused to take trans women as partners.

I remember when “lesbian women” would have been redundant. Now, I guess, you have to specify.

[I]t has emerged that months before the article appeared Stonewall’s chief executive Nancy Kelley wrote to the editorial director of BBC News to denounce Lowbridge’s work in an apparent attempt to get her piece stopped.

In her email, Kelley suggested that the BBC article would end up being ‘transphobic’ because it represented trans women as ‘sexual predators’, which was a ‘central anti-trans argument’.

She further complained that the ‘highly toxic’ cotton ceiling issue was ‘analogous to issues like sexual racism’.

And today a QC repeated the claim at Allison Bailey’s tribunal.

I’m glad to see I’m not the only one whose hair caught fire on reading that “it is similar to South Africa attempting to racially integrate society” tweet. Far from the only one. Much conflagration ensued.

Many furious replies agree.

The tribunal had a very interesting discussion today on the cotton ceiling and whether or not it’s coercive to call lesbians “exclusionary” for not wanting to have sex with men who claim to be women (aka “trans women” in the jargon). Ben Cooper questions CM (Cathryn McGahey QC) for a long time; it feels like shoveling very heavy wet snow.

One tweet and the rest as dialogue, with some punctuation and other tweaks for clarity which the tweeter doesn’t have time to include.

BC: go to page 767, just follow through the substance of the claimant’s response, she is explaining the basis of her tweet. CM: yes BC: she then provides part of the material you had at the time that identifies ‘overcoming the cotton ceiling’.

CM: overcoming the reluctance of lesbians to have sex with trans individuals. BC: AB goes on to explain cotton ceiling. CM: I always understood that. BC: reading out AB’s explanation that requiring lesbians to have sex with a man (trans) or shaming them is coercive 11454.

BC: let’s break it down. If there is a basis to describe what’s going on as coercive then the tweets are reasonable. CM: it’s important to understand what happens or happened at the workshop. There is nothing in the material put out by PP Toronto that advocates coercion.

BC: that is your conclusion about the material. Let’s take it in stages. Do you agree with me that coercion does not involve physical action? That coercion can be emotional, social etc. CM: Yes. I’m not giving my opinion on the content of the workshop. Absent any detailed information, there are many possibilities, and coercion is one of them but not a necessary conclusion. BC: shaming can be a form of coercion. CM: that’s fact specific, it may be. I’ve seen nothing to suggest that shaming is part of the workshop.

It’s enough to make you scream. A “workshop” about “the cotton ceiling” i.e. lesbian underpants i.e. lesbians not having sex with men who identify as women. That’s a grotesque thing to have a “workshop” about in the first place, and of course it’s coercive. Calling it “the cotton ceiling” is calling it an unfair arbitrary anti-equality injustice for lesbians not to have sex with men who identify as women. Lesbians don’t have to have sex with anyone they don’t want to have sex with. Yes of course it’s coercive to have “workshops” about how to convince lesbians to stop deciding for themselves which people they want to have sex with.

BC: lets explore that. In the bottom right – this is part of the material the claimant provided, it explains ‘cotton ceiling’, refers to underwear. Ultimately, transwomen are accept[ed] in many ways but not sexually. Can you accept that the meaning of ‘cotton ceiling’ is referring to getting into lesbians’ knickers? CM: yes, that is clear. BC: connection to glass ceiling implies discrimination. CM: yes, lesbians don’t want to have sex with transwomen. Discussion glass ceiling workshops. It’s wrong to say that because there is fear the workshop is advocating coercion. BC: the difference is that no reasonable person holds the view that women shouldn’t rise up the corporate ladder. CM: yes. But some men are prejudiced against women. BC: The difference is – it is not a matter of prejudice for lesbians to be same sex attracted. CM: do not understand the question. What are you getting at? BC: In relation to the glass ceiling. AH: complaining about BC question refrain from characterising earlier answers. EJ: you are trying to put a view about cotton ceiling and glass ceiling. And witness not understanding. Do you want a break to work on it. BC: No. I may simply not be able to express it. No one disputes that women should be able to rise up the corporate ladder and break the glass ceiling. But lesbians are defined by being attracted to other women. Hence, the cotton ceiling. CM: I now see your point. BC: you can see why lesbians are deeply offended by lesbians being told their same sex attraction is discriminatory.

You’d think, but no. Huh? Discriminatory?

CM: I don’t see how the workshop is discriminatory? BC: Overcoming the cotton ceiling is coercive. CM: I don’t see that the workshop is necessarily coercive. We have no information about the contents of that workshop. AB’s opinion that it must be coercive is not substantiated.

[shouting] The very existence of the workshop is coercive! The way a workshop titled “Why do women think they get to say no to sex with me?” would be coercive.

Skipping a couple of repetitions of the pattern “You see it now?” “No, what mean?” to include yet more repetitions of the pattern.

BC: inherent in the workshop is that sexual barriers that transwomen want to overcome are rooted in transmisogny and transphobia. AB’s claim – it is inherently coercive to label lesbians as transphobic for failing to have sex with transwomen.

CM: I don’t see the coercion. It is appalling to coerce or shame anyone into sex. I don’t see that in the workshop. BC: this workshop on its face is labelling lesbians as transphobic and trying to coerce them.

CM: back to South Africa rugby world cup. CM: the point I am making is no evidence of coercion. BC: the workshop is sexually and socially coercive. CM: I’m not saying that is acceptable for the workshop to say that to any individual lesbian. But we don’t know what the workshop is about. I have no knowledge and no personal interest. I was looking from a professional standards point. AB did not have a basis for this tweet, cannot substantiate and there may be a problem here. Not trying to express a view on the merits of the workshop.

BC: still believe workshop is inherently coercive. CM: No, it is similar to South Africa attempting to racially integrate society. Morning break.

NO! No no no no no no no. It is not like that. That’s the whole point. Pushing lesbians to fuck men who call themselves women is not like South Africa’s attempting racial integration of society.

I could never be a lawyer, I’d be having a tantrum five minutes in.

Activism:

A bench inspired by the final series of a Ricky Gervais TV show about loss has been broken into bits by vandals.

The After Life bench in Nottingham’s Arboretum was one of 25 donated to councils by streaming service Netflix and suicide prevention charity Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM).

Nottingham City Council said the vandalism over the weekend was “unacceptable and heart-breaking”.

…

The authority said the bench was donated to the park in January via the Ricky Gervais show Afterlife. Ms Wynter added: “It’s been a symbol of hope and support to many people off the back of the series, which shone a light on loss, bereavement and mental health.”

Never mind all that, he mocks the idea that men can be women.

The back story of the benches:

In After Life, the main character Tony, played by Gervais, is often seen sitting on a bench in the churchyard where his wife is buried.

A woman played by Penelope Wilton, whose husband is also buried in the cemetery, often sits beside him.

The bench is the setting of their conversations across all three series, as Tony deals with his grief.

A suitable target for vandalism then.

Ricky Gervais has thrown a stone into the festering pond.

Oh but

Heads he wins tails she loses. More on that hereditary baron trans woman guy, this time from Sam Leith at the Spectator:

Matilda Simon has applied to contest the next by-election for hereditary peers, in the hope of taking her hereditary seat as Baron Simon of Wythenshawe.

Waltzing Baron Matilda.

Matilda began life as Matthew Simon – becoming on the death of her (then his) father the second Baron Simon of Wythenshawe. But she has since transitioned and become Matilda Simon. And the Lord Chancellor last week approved her claim to the peerage and therefore gave her permission to stand the next time a seat becomes vacant among the hereditaries in the Lords. (That hereditary peers now have to stand for election is the peculiar result of the half-grasped nettle of Lords Reform.)

It’s hilarious in a way. On the one hand – get with the times, people, a man is a woman if he says he is. On the other hand Please sir can I have my claim to the peerage approved? A hyper-progressive reactionary or a hyper-reactionary progressive? Only his sister knows for sure.

If Matilda Simon is a woman, she doesn’t qualify to inherit a male peerage. Indeed, if she’s a progressively minded person you might wonder why she’s so keen to take advantage not only of a hereditary membership of the upper house, but of the still more reactionary custom of male primogeniture. In so doing, be it noted, she leapfrogs her elder sibling Margaret – who as a natal woman is unable to inherit the title.

Firstborn Margaret can’t have the title because she’s a woman, but Matthew can even though he’s a woman, albeit the fake kind. Anyway, whatever you do, don’t misgender him.

The very principle of hereditary peerage – to enshrine power through an immutable accident of birth — is directly at odds with the identitarian notion that you can be who you damn well please, and it’s nobody’s business but yours.

The trick is to do them in sequence. Do one, then wait a few minutes, then do the opposite. It sounds odd but it works.

There’s a very particular difficulty with holding Trump to account, that is probably more acute than with most crooks. Just Security explains:

To prove that Trump criminally obstructed the electoral count proceeding, prosecutors would need to convince a 12-person jury that he acted “corruptly.” According to the D.C. courts, this means that “the defendant must use unlawful means or act with an unlawful purpose, or both” to obstruct the proceeding. In addition, the “defendant must … act with consciousness of wrongdoing,” which is defined as acting “with an understanding or awareness that what the person is doing is wrong” (emphasis added).

You can see where this is going to go.

In other words, it is not enough to prove that Trump knowingly engaged in an act that was unlawful; he must have subjectively understood that the act was unlawful.

I paused to think about that, as I’m sure every reader did. Is Trump even capable of understanding such a thing? He gives every appearance of not being. It’s not even that he’s too dumb, it’s that he (apparently) genuinely sees everything in whatever light is most flattering or useful to him, because that’s how he’s wired. He translates the entire world and everything in it to “good for me” and “bad for me.” That’s it. He doesn’t (to all appearances) even understand that there are other criteria. His stupidity and his self-dealing unite to form an impregnable seal around his brain, that repels any whiff of subjective understanding that a thing he wants to do is unlawful.

It’s kind of an interesting phenomenon to observe, in a depressing way.

Several commentators who have questioned the likelihood of a Trump prosecution have highlighted the challenge of proving that Trump doesn’t sincerely believe his own prolific lies or those of his sycophants, and lamented the absence of smoking-gun evidence revealing Trump’s inner thoughts when it comes to proving that he knew what he was doing was wrong as he attempted, in various ways, to stop the electoral count proceeding.

Well, yes. Although I’m not sure it’s that he sincerely believes his own lies so much as it is that he doesn’t ask the question in the first place. It doesn’t arise. He just does what he thinks will work in the moment, and truth or untruth is somewhere out beyond Jupiter in terms of relevance.

For example, in one New York Times piece weighing the prospects for a Trump prosecution, the authors noted that Trump “would have a powerful argument about his mental state” against a claim that he pressured former Vice President Pence to violate his legal duties under the Electoral Count Act – i.e., that Trump “sincerely thought he was asking Mr. Pence to do something lawful” because of the “advice” he received from lawyer John Eastman, who concocted a baseless rationale for Pence to ignore the law. Likewise, in a second piece, the Times quoted a law professor for the proposition that “[t]he problem with Trump is defining his state of mind when it is so changeable. He believes whatever he wants to think and it doesn’t necessarily have to be grounded in reality. That’s a tough argument to a jury, to say he knew a particular thing.”

That. It looks to me as if that’s how he does it. He believes whatever he wants to think, and reality is over there somewhere, beside the point. His ego is everything, and the rest of the world is a lot of meaningless specks, like gnats over a garbage dump.

A Washington Postanalysis similarly observed that while there’s ample evidence “that Trump was repeatedly warned his rhetoric [about election fraud] was untrue, it may be more difficult to prove that Trump believed those warnings.”

Or even heard them, or if he did hear them, understood them as anything but disloyal outrageous insults to his greatness.

Women are women. Men are not women. It’s pretty simple.

Man jumps up to explain in a very loud voice that this guy over here says he’s a woman so that’s all there is to it, sucks to be you.