The Guardian talks to some actual women about the abortion ruling:

Bonnie Greer:

As someone who had an illegal abortion – in my home town of Chicago in 1969, four years before Roe v Wade – I was very angry when I heard the news. I am very angry. For women, our destiny has always been our biology, and we’ve fought for ever to change that, to ensure that we’re respected and protected as whole human beings, equal to men under the law.

Now we’re fighting just to be mentioned in news stories about the loss of our rights.

Know this: women will always get abortions, and the overturning of Roe v Wade would mean we will once again be at risk.

It means that men and women are not equal under the law, based on our biology. It’s the same thing as saying that a human being is not equal under the law based on the colour of their skin. Both are things that cannot be altered. I hope that the US people will vote out of office the Republicans who have pushed for this to happen.

Greer doesn’t change the subject to trans women. The next interviewee, Judy Chicago, does.

The fight for women’s rights is a long historic struggle against a set of values that restricts the rights of, not only women, but LGBTQ people, trans people and people of colour.

Must change the subject. Women are the deferential sex, so we’re not allowed to focus on our own rights. It’s shocking that the Guardian allowed Bonnie Greer to get away with it.

Mona Eltahawy defers:

I had an illegal abortion in 1996 in Egypt and a legal abortion in the US in 2000. I can’t believe that my past is becoming the present in the United States. This is the most powerful country in the world, and this fundamental right for pregnant people is being stripped away.

Those who can afford to get a safe abortion will continue to do so, and mostly Black, Indigenous and Brown people, and working-class people, will not. But that’s been the reality for many years now. Texas had already shrivelled the number of abortion clinics it had.

People people people. But she does use the word “women” in the end – just long enough to blame them.

As an Egyptian feminist, I have to call out the role of women in creating this theocracy. Look at supreme court associate justice Amy Coney Barrett. It is not just men taking away our abortion rights.

Robin Morgan is with Bonnie Greer: not ashamed to use the word.

There will be marching, demonstrations, sit-ins, petitions. Women will go ahead and disobey the law. What are they going to do when half the population is in revolt? Not 20%, not the ultra right wing, not the evangelicals. Women are going to control what happens to our own bodies. No matter how many thousands of us have to go to jail. We are not turning back the clock. No way.

Katha Pollitt, of course, doesn’t mess around.

Roe v Wade was a life-changing ruling, probably one of the most important – from the ground level – supreme court rulings there has ever been. It meant that women could stay in school. It meant women could work in a consistent way. It meant women could leave abusive partners. It meant that women didn’t have to marry the man who got them pregnant.

I felt horrified when I found out it could be overturned. This really allows states to do whatever they want with abortion, and 26 states is a lot of people. This is going to affect women whether or not they have an abortion, because it says, basically, you’re here to procreate, and we don’t care if there are health concerns, or rape or incest.

If a man can get you pregnant, you have to have that child. I think that’s a tremendous statement that women do not have that human right any more.

Katha literally wrote the book.

Signal that virtue, you woman-hating toads.

Yes this is the way to defend abortion rights, pretend you don’t know who does the baby-having.

“Birthing bodies.” How fucking insulting.

The ignorance is staggering.

Not anti-women, just anti-women. Women aren’t allowed to get together to talk about women’s rights, that’s blatant hypocrisy and transphobia, and it’s not at all anti-women to say so.

Ahhhhh but what if we don’t call it “the LGBT community”? What then? What if we call it the LGB community? Changes everything, doesn’t it.

News flash: there is no law that we have to include the T. The reality is the T doesn’t have much in common with the L and the G, and it tends to do all the talking and certainly all the shouting, so a lot of people are fed up with the forced teaming.

But it gets even better.

For sure. I just can’t imagine why women would be talking about women’s rights at a moment when the Supreme Court is about to enshrine forced pregnancy in federal law. How selfish and narcissistic women are making it all about them. Let’s talk about how forced pregnancy affects men.

Do better! Stop making abortion rights all about women! Be inclusive of men when you talk about abortion rights!

Investigate! Investigate now!

Investigate what?

The leak! The leak the leak the leak!

Not the corruption?

What corruption?

Chief Justice Roberts said that there would be an investigation of the SCOTUS leaker, but he has done nothing about Clarence and Ginni Thomas.

Roberts said in a statement:

We at the Court are blessed to have a workforce – permanent employees and law clerks alike – intensely loyal to the institution and dedicated to the rule of law. Court employees have an exemplary and important tradition of respecting the confidentiality of the judicial process and upholding the trust of the Court. This was a singular and egregious breach of that trust that is an affront to the Court and the community of public servants who work here. I have directed the Marshal of the Court to launch an investigation into the source of the leak.

Conflicts of interest, however, we don’t give a rat’s ass about – unless it’s some pesky liberal justice doing it.

We are still waiting for Chief Justice Roberts to announce the investigation into Justice Thomas and his wife for their conflicts of interest, corruption, and activities surrounding the 1/6 attack.

We might as well wait for Donald Trump to say something intelligent. Ain’t gonna happen.

There’s a Woman’s Place UK event in Bristol this evening; it just got started a few minutes ago.

Some people want to keep women out of Bristol.

Do gender critical women ever say things like “trans people are not welcome in our city”? I don’t think so. It sounds threatening as well as hostile and rude and unjust. We don’t think we own particular cities and get to keep other people out of them. We generally recognize “X people are not welcome in our city” as way too similar to slogans and placards from, say, protests against the integration of Little Rock Central High School.

But apparently it’s fine to say it about women meeting up with other women. “Women are not welcome in our city.” Okaaaaaaay…

From The Atlantic in 2011:

In an interview with California Lawyer magazine, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia seemed to suggest that the Constitution does not protect women from gender-based discrimination. “Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that,” said the famously conservative justice, adding, “If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws.”

What does the 14th Amendment say?

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

It’s a Reconstruction amendment, which made enslavement a violation of the Constitution.

The Atlantic quoted some reactions:

“The central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to guarantee equal citizenship and equality before the law for all citizens and for all persons,” Legal blogger Jack Balkin argues. “It does not simply ban discrimination based on race. The fact that the word race is not mentioned in the text (as it is in the fifteenth amendment) was quite deliberate. Scalia argues that the fourteenth amendment was not intended to prevent sex discrimination. That’s not entirely true.”

The two forms of discrimination were often linked at the time. Frederick Douglass was a feminist; the Grimké sisters were abolitionists.

Moira Donegan doesn’t mince words.

The draft opinion, authored by Samuel Alito, the most rabidly hateful member of the court’s arch-conservative wing, will upend 50 years of precedent and undo a landmark ruling that has profoundly shaped legal doctrine, popular conceptions of the law, and millions of American lives. It will make women prisoners to their own bodies, and to men’s ideas of what those bodies must mean. It will make our country weaker, crueler, stupider and less vibrant.

We’re all prisoners to of in our own bodies, of course, but unwanted pregnancy is a particularly intrusive and disruptive demonstration of that imprisonment.

In a way, the leaked opinion didn’t tell us anything we did not already know: these are the last days of reproductive freedom in America, and most states will soon ban abortion outright, or restrict it so onerously that it is inaccessible within their borders. But Alito’s draft opinion nevertheless represents about as odiously maximalist an approach as the court could have taken.

The opinion does not just overturn Roe and Casey; it expresses outright contempt for the notion that the constitution protects bodily autonomy for women.

Because after all what are women for if they’re not baby factories? What is even the point of them?

The end of legal abortion will not be where the court’s reactionaries stop. They aim to hurt, punish and narrow the lives of Americans in many more cruel and inventive ways.

…

The state compelling a person to be pregnant is not like compelling her to pay taxes. The event doesn’t occur in a courtroom or on a balance sheet; it occurs inside her body.

It is, perhaps, somewhat like the draft. Draft laws are also controversial, for obvious reasons.

In making abortion illegal, the court is imposing a legal status that is so cruel, so personal and so life-altering on half its population, that those subject to this imposition cannot be called free. Is there any condition more essential to democratic citizenship than a person’s control over her own body? Can we call ourselves a free country without it?

Could 1950s Ireland call itself a free country? (Spoiler: no.)

What next? The Post says likely a push for a nationwide ban on abortion.

Leading antiabortion groups and their allies in Congress have been meeting behind the scenes to plan a national strategy that would kick in if the Supreme Court rolls back abortion rights this summer, including a push for a strict nationwide ban on the procedure if Republicans retake power in Washington.

…

A group of Republican senators has discussed at multiple meetings the possibility of banning abortion at around six weeks, said Sen. James Lankford (Okla.), who was in attendance and said he would support the legislation.

…

One top advocate, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the antiabortion group Susan B. Anthony List, has spoken privately with 10 possible Republican presidential contenders, including former president Donald Trump, to talk through national antiabortion strategy. Most of them, she said in an interview, assured her they would be supportive of a national ban and would be eager to make that policy a centerpiece of a presidential campaign.

Falling all over themselves to enchain women.

Guy takes it upon himself to try to change the subject from abortion rights to The One Important Subject.

This is about women, and our right to decide whether or not to gestate an infant. Just that, nothing else. It doesn’t need to be about anything else; it’s massively important all by itself.

But clearly way too many people think otherwise. Apparently women are the trivial sex, the silly sex, the sex that doesn’t need the right to make its own choices about its own life. Apparently women always have to have some variety of men added to make their rights seem to matter.

Some thoughts.

Politico reports:

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

But even now – women’s organizations are still talking about “people who get pregnant.”

From a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Average maximum temperatures.

Dr Forrest said Mr Malinauskas had “experienced the incredible power of zero emission green hydrogen when he drove FFI’s huge haul truck, seeing with his own eyes, how a massive 6mhigh mining truck can operate without using a polluting fuel like diesel”.

Perhaps his irony metre is broken, as the reduced pollution from a hydrogen-powered truck is more than outweighed by the coal in each load it carries.

How much of the process that mkes the hydrogen that goes into the truck is “zero emission?” If it’s only the bit that gets burned in the vehicle that’s “green,” then that’s not quite the solution it claims to be. As Mike B. pointed out above, the real problem is ecological overshoot. Even if we were to change all our energy use to renewables, we’d still be fucked, beacuse we’d still be overconsuming. Energy conversion without energy use reduction (amongst many other things), just puts us on a slightly greener road to hell.

The overall global response to the pandemic gives a very slight cause for hope. If the current ecological/biodiversity/energy crises could be seen and acted upon in a similar manner, with equivalent speed and robustness, we could make more progress than we are currently. Unfortunately, we need to do a good deal more than wear masks and keep farther apart. We would have to reinvent our economies, learn to live with less, and reduce wealth disparities. There is little that we do that would not be touched by the need to restructure and scale back our economies. Ophelia has pointed out a number of times that no government promising to do what needs to be done would ever be elected, and that those inclined to dictatorship would probably accelerate in the opposite direction. Countries have found the will to make sacrifices in times of war, but this time the war we are fighting is against our very way of life. The greatest threat to our way of life is our way of life. We have met the enemy and he is us.

To undertake the transformations required would be painful and expensive; failure to do so will result in even greater pain and expense, on an unimaginable scale, greater than all previous human conflicts combined. It could be slow and gradual, or it could involve massive, abrupt changes to previously reliable, stable systems and processes. Most likely it will be a combination of both. By refusing to choose the lesser of two evils, we ensure the inevitable manifestation of the greater.

We are in uncharted territory, leaving the envelope of conditions within which our civilization arose, and upon which it is based. We are travelling at great speed without a clue as to where we are heading. Cultural inertia makes changing direction on a global scale slow and awkward, if not impossible. There are powerful forces actively working to block any change at all. We are running out of water; we are running out of food. If you think things are bad now, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Wait wait wait – Mhairi Hunter tripped herself up with this one.

See it? Of course you do. Why does no adult really need to ask what a woman is? Because we already know, right? That has to be what she means?

But what do we already know? That women are adult human females – the sex that isn’t male, just as men are the sex that isn’t female.

But Mhairi Hunter’s whole thing is that we don’t know that, that in fact that is wrong and evil.

So, what the hell is she talking about?

The wheels really are falling off this rusty wagon.

As hundreds of gigantic cruise ships belch their way around the planet, people in India struggle to survive a heat wave.

Thousands of Indians have turned to umbrellas, fruits and swimming pools as they try to cope with a brutal heatwave that has hit the country.

Average maximum temperatures in March and April in northern and central India were the highest since the country’s weather office started keeping records 122 years ago.

The heat has sparked an increase in demand for electricity, leading to outages in many states and fears of a coal shortage.

That’s the Catch 22. When it gets hotter we use more power to cool ourselves, so it gets even hotter. Repeat until only the reptiles survive.

While summer temperatures have always been high in many Indian states, experts say India is now recording more intense, frequent heatwaves that are also longer in duration. The “root cause”, says climate scientist Roxy Mathew Koll, is global warming.

But it’s worth it for the cruise ships, right?

Let’s look at some cruise industry stats (presented by someone who seems to think the cruise industry is an excellent thing):

In 2019, the global cruise industry welcomed 29.7 million passengers, created jobs for 1.8 million people around the world and contributed over $154 billion to the global economy. 

And added huge amounts of carbon to the atmosphere. Yay.

Cruising was suspended worldwide in mid-March 2020. July 2020 saw a resumption of sailing in parts of Europe, Asia and the South Pacific with around 200 cruises departing in the second half of the year.

In 2021, the cruise industry bounced back further, welcoming almost 13.9 million passengers worldwide. However, this is still only 46% of the passengers that cruised in 2019.

And we want to keep those carbon-dumping figures up, dammit.

Work on building new cruise ships slowed in 2020 and some ships such as Royal Caribbean’s Odyssey of the Seas which were due to be completed in 2020 were delayed until 2021.

Fewer shipyard closures in 2021 meant that 24 brand new cruise ships were delivered, compared to just 15 in 2020. However, this is still behind the target of 28, as the builds of four new ships were pushed back into 2022.

More, more, more; we can never have enough.

This is why I see zero reason to think humans are going to be able to do anything about global warming until it burns up everything. We can’t even stop building fucking cruise ships so what are the odds we’re going to do anything more difficult than that?

Your mega cruise ship burns 80 thousand gallons of fuel a day when traveling. I assume it’s significantly less when tied up at the pier, but it ain’t nothing. All of this is pure recreation, and thus optional, and thus when the result is the heat death of the planet, you’d think we could decide we should maybe stop. But no.

Worth letting the planet catch fire? I wouldn’t have thought so.

It’s always surprising and alarming to see academics this pugnaciously dogmatic in enforcing belief in absurd fictions. The belief itself is ridiculous, like believing in flying elephants or talking snakes, and the rudeness and contempt with which the belief is asserted is unbecoming to anyone and appalling in an academic.

“Fascists.” Because we understand that men are not women.

And she can’t defend her claim.

“I can’t hear you, lalalalalalalalala.” Grown-up academic, teaches at an actual university.

When she does hear it’s even worse.

My point exactly. I’ve learned to expect this kind of crap from very young random ideologues on Twitter, but I can never not be surprised to see it from people with academic reputations to protect. This Yvette Russell sounds like Rhys McKinnon on crack.

Charming.

NEBRASKA CITY, Neb. — Former president Donald Trump is making a closing pitch for a Republican gubernatorial candidate who has been accused of sexually assaulting multiple women, stepping deeper into a primary that has divided Republicans in this staunchly conservative state.

When in doubt, always go for the rapey guy. Rapey guys gotta stick together.

Trump appeared at a Sunday afternoon rally in Greenwood with Charles Herbster, a businessman who has advised the former president on agricultural policy and has donated to his campaigns. The visit comes after a recent Nebraska Examiner report in which eight women, including a state senator speaking on the record, accused Herbster of touching them inappropriately. Last week, another one of the eight women alleged on the record that Herbster had groped her. He has denied the accusations.

All of them. All eight. Who ya gonna believe, a businessman or eight women? How about eight hundred women? It’s the businessdude every time.

According to state Sen. Julie Slama (R), Herbster reached up her skirt without her consent and touched her inappropriately as she walked by during a local Republican fundraiser in a crowded ballroom in 2019. 

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if his hand is up her skirt he’s already “touching her inappropriately,” no matter what bit he manages to grab en route, no matter if all he manages is the back of a thigh just barely above the knee. That whole thing is inappropriate. One doesn’t want strangers thrusting their hands inside one’s clothes uninvited.

Multiple women told the Nebraska Examiner that Herbster touched them inappropriately when they greeted him or posed for a photo.

Therefore Trump went all the way to Nebraska to urge the people to vote for him. What a mensch.

I hate the ACLU more than ever.

Women in prison forced to live with men at the behest of the ACLU.

On April 13, NJ News reported that at least two women became impregnated by men incarcerated in Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, the only female-only prison in the state of New Jersey. The men were placed there because they claimed to have a female gender identity.

I have a billionaire identity; can I be housed in a mansion?

The story was quickly picked up by several mainstream media outlets around the world. The Daily Mail reported that American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), once a respected human rights advocacy group, “managed” to house at least 27 people at the women’s prison, many of them men. The ACLU fought a long legal battle to transfer men to Edna Mahan and the prison, which started accepting male inmates in 2021.

The ACLU fought a long battle to force men on helpless women trapped in prison. The ACLU can go jump off a cliff.

Wales Online tries to monster a woman for not believing trans ideology:

A Cardiff Labour council candidate has come under fire after voicing her views on gender identity. Sue Lent, a Labour council candidate for Plasnewydd, posted to her public Facebook page suggesting that trans people are “brainwashed.”

And? Does Wales Online think all this transing just happened spontaneously? Nothing to do with social influence at all?

When questioned about her comments and views, Ms Lent told WalesOnline she found the topic of trans children “difficult” and said that people experiencing gender dysphoria “need counselling”, despite NHS Wales stating that they support the banning of therapy to change somebody’s gender and sexuality.

And? Are people not allowed to disagree with something NHS Wales says? Is NHS Wales infallible? Also it’s a large mistake to lump trying to change people’s sexuality together with questioning the new gender ideology.

“My main concern is the aspect of children being influenced to think that they’ve got something called a gender identity, which was an unheard of concept until fairly recently,” she explained.

“I have a sex, I don’t have a gender identity. I think the whole idea of gender identity is very regressive. We’re now seeing a whole generation of a whole group of girls who have damaged their bodies, and then are regretting it. Because as teenagers they’ve been led to believe that because they like their hair short or they’ve been disturbed by puberty or whatever that therefore, they’re really boys.

“Many of these girls are actually lesbians, but they’ve been made to think that possibly, they’re actually boys. It’s very anti lesbian as well. The whole gender ideology is, in the end, quite homophobic. I have every sympathy with anybody who’s got gender dysphoria, [and I] think they need counselling.”

She sounds like a comrade.

Updating to add: Yay, she accepted my friend request on Facebook. Solidarity foreva.