More reactions to Esme Houston’s joy at attacks on women.

Adding a couple more

This guy part two:

Our “silly games” he calls it. He’s the one who’s going around demanding to be allowed to get naked in the women’s changing room and he accuses us of “silly games.”

I read a long long string of comments and didn’t see one that agreed with him, let alone cheering him on or crying with him or shouting at women for him.

Could the ship be slowly slowly slowly turning around?

This happened today:

Was anyone around to say “maaate”? Did it help?

Entitled man in a skirt rages about the servants.

There is no “rule of self identity.” There is no rule that says everybody has to take everybody else’s word for their magic “identity.” We don’t have to do that. Angry men don’t get to force us to do that.

And we feminist women who say a skirt doesn’t turn a man into a woman aren’t playing silly games, we’re risking jobs and friendships and mental tranquility on defending our rights against the encroachments of entitled men in skirts.

https://twitter.com/AnneICoombes/status/1683114970165260290

He wants to send a hotel worker for re-education because she knows a man when she sees one. Also, being sent on a DIE (better known as EID for perhaps obvious reasons) course is being punished, especially if the course is there to teach people that men are women if they are wearing skirts.

Rhodes is burning.

A large wildfire tearing through the Greek island of Rhodes forced thousands of tourists to flee their hotels in what Greek officials said was the largest evacuation effort in the country’s history.

Those caught up in the blaze described chaotic and frightening scenes, with some having to leave on foot or find their own transport after being told to leave.

The wildfire in the central and south part of Rhodes – a hugely popular island for holidaymakers – has been burning since Tuesday. It is the largest of a number of blazes in Greece, which is sweltering due to a heat wave that experts say is likely to become the country’s longest on record.

The hotter it is the more the vegetation dries out and becomes susceptible to bursting into flames on contact with a smoldering cigarette butt.

The Greek government said nearly 19,000 people had been evacuated on Rhodes since Saturday. The government called the operation “the largest such effort Greece has ever seen,” and said 16,000 people, including tourists and residents, were transported by land and 3,000 by sea.

Good that CNN finally mentioned residents. It’s not as if tourists matter more than residents.

Large parts of the northern hemisphere have seen fierce temperatures, with Europe seeing dramatic shifts from one form of extreme weather to another.

Italy’s northern region of Veneto was pounded with tennis-ball sized hail overnight on Wednesday, injuring at least 110 people. Emergency services responded to more than 500 calls for help due to damage to property and personal injuries, the Veneto regional civil protection said.

The country also experienced record-breaking heat, with capital Rome hitting a new high temperature of 41 degrees Celsius on Tuesday. Earlier in the year the country was hit by devastating floods.

In the Balkans, severe thunderstorms storms claimed several lives after hitting on Wednesday, CNN’s affiliate N1 reported Thursday.

Scientists are warning that the extreme weather may only be a preview of what’s to come as the planet warms.

“The weather extremes will continue to become more intense and our weather patterns could change in ways we yet can’t predict,” said Peter Stott, a science fellow in climate attribution at the UK Met Office told CNN.

It’s shocking to see MPs (or Senators and Representatives) ranting about the wickedness of colleagues who know and say that people can’t change sex. It’s like theocracy without the theo part.

Of course parents who “support their kids through transition” are irrevocably harming them. The idea that people can change sex is a mistake, and physically acting on it is of course harmful.

Osborne is the one using dangerous language, not Helen Joyce. It’s dangerous to talk dreamily about “supporting kids through transition” as if surgery to alter genitals were like getting a driver’s license as opposed to mutilation. Encouraging children to destroy their genitalia in pursuit of a magic identity is what’s dangerous.

We’ve been hearing lately that house insurance is difficult to get, and very expensive if you can get it, in Florida. Fortune looks at it from the profit or no profit point of view:

Given that Farmers is not the first home insurer to stop offering coverage in Florida over the past year or so, things are looking challenging for its housing market, and particularly, its homeowners that are already paying the highest insurance premiums in the nation, with an average premium of $6,000 per year versus the U.S. average of $1,700 per year, according to Mark Friedlander, Florida-based director of corporate communications for the Insurance Information Institute. That’s 42% higher than the year prior, Frielander added. 

And why is that?

Florida’s insurance consumer advocate, Tasha Carter, who was appointed by Florida’s chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, listed four factors behind the homeowner insurance market that she said is in “dire condition.” The first has to do with claims from recent hurricanes, given hurricane Irma, Michael, and Ian (combined) generated nearly 3 million claims filed and resulted in approximately $46 billion in estimated insured losses.

Would you want to gamble on insuring houses in Florida? I sure as hell wouldn’t. Might as well drop bundles of cash down a volcano.

Florida’s Sea Level Is Rising

The sea level around Florida is up to 8 inches higher than it was in 1950.^1 | 2 This increase is mostly due to ice melting into the ocean and, complicated by the porous limestone that the state sits on, it’s causing major issues. Many traditional methods to solve for sea level rise and flooding in Florida won’t work, because water can flow through the porous ground, up from below, and under sea walls. In Miami-Dade County, the groundwater levels in some places are not high enough relative to the rising sea levels, which has allowed saltwater to intrude into the drinking water and compromised sewage plants. There are already 120,000 properties at risk from frequent tidal flooding in Florida.³ The state is planning over $4 billion in sea level rise solutions, which include protecting sewage systems, raising roads, stormwater improvements, and seawalls.

Pouring a glass of water onto a lava flow.

We’re getting closer and closer to the buzzsaw.

A series of climate records on temperature, ocean heat, and Antarctic sea ice have alarmed some scientists who say their speed and timing is unprecedented. Dangerous heatwaves in Europe could break further records, the UN says.

It is hard to immediately link these events to climate change because weather – and oceans – are so complex. Studies are under way, but scientists already fear some worst-case scenarios are unfolding. “I’m not aware of a similar period when all parts of the climate system were in record-breaking or abnormal territory,” Thomas Smith, an environmental geographer at London School of Economics, says.

Scary enough yet?

The average global ocean temperature has smashed records for May, June and July. It is approaching the highest sea surface temperature ever recorded, which was in 2016. But it is extreme heat in the North Atlantic ocean that is particularly alarming scientists. “We’ve never ever had a marine heatwave in this part of Atlantic. I had not expected this,” says Daniela Schmidt, Prof of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.

In short, they’re scared.

The area covered by sea-ice in the Antarctic is at record lows for July. There is an area around 10 times the size of the UK missing, compared with the 1981-2010 average. Alarm bells are ringing for scientists as they try to unpick the exact link to climate change. A warming world could reduce levels of Antarctic sea-ice, but the current dramatic reduction could also be due to local weather conditions or ocean currents, explains Dr Caroline Holmes at the British Antarctic Survey.

She emphasises it is not just a record being broken – it is being smashed by a long way. “This is nothing like anything we’ve seen before in July. It’s 10% lower than the previous low, which is huge.” She calls it “another sign that we don’t really understand the pace of change”.

And the pace we don’t really understand is worse than we thought.

Press release from the office of the Mayor of London:

Mayor launches new campaign empowering men to challenge misogyny by saying ‘maaate’ to their mates when they cross the line

Empowering them? What, they’re so enfeebled now that they can’t say “maaate”?

But, more to the point, does that really “challenge misogyny”? Naaaaaah.

The innovative campaign aims to help men and boys confidently step-in when they witness language and behaviour towards women and girls that crosses the line.

Step-in? What’s with the hyphen? A century ago “step-ins” was a word for women’s underpants. It’s not a verb. One steps in, one doesn’t step-in. One doesn’t go-out or come-in or run-away. Just say No to superfluous hyphens.

The Mayor is clear that when it comes to ending violence against women and girls, men and boys must be the champions of change. To help illustrate that, the Mayor today joined comedian Romesh Ranganathan, social media activist Max Selwood and anti-VAWG campaigners at a café in Central London to demonstrate the vital need to call out misogyny and sexism in everyday settings – where these important conversations urgently need to be had.

Blah blah blah. Then why did this oh so clear Mayor abruptly fire Joan Smith from her role as co-chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women And Girls Board? Without explanation? And without responding to any of her requests for an explanation?

Oh blah blah blah. Stonewall trots out the usual evasive dishonest generalities instead of for once condescending to be clear and precise.

On 20 July, Stonewall Chair, Iain Anderson, was interviewed by Beth Rigby on Sky News. The interview was supposed to be an opportunity to talk about 10 years of marriage equality, LGBTQ+ veterans, and Rainbow Laces 10 – all remarkable moments that deserved recognition and celebration.

We took part in the interview because Stonewall has always been engaged in difficult conversations on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community.

No it hasn’t, for the simple reason that Stonewall has not always talked about the fictional “LGBTQ+ community” at all. Stonewall started out as an organization for lesbians and gay men.

The interview largely focused on highly detailed elements of trans policy issues and Stonewall’s position on these remains unchanged.

The details are where the problems are, you weasels. The “policy” to let men destroy women’s sports may seem like a detail to the men doing it, but it matters to the women involved.

Sport should be open to everyone, including trans people, and this includes elite sport. Out of hundreds of thousands of elite athletes, a small handful are trans.

This is what I mean about the evasive dishonest generalities. Stonewall knows damn well it’s not about “trans people” in general, it’s about men ruining women’s sports for women. They don’t say that because if they did it would sound shitty and brutal, so they hide their real meaning. This shows that they know damn well how unfair the actual policy, the one they refuse to name accurately, is.

Stonewall believes trans people’s rights should be fully respected and it is past time that conversations around the trans people’s lives should be used as a political tool. Instead, we’re calling for political leaders to develop a meaningful strategy for trans equality that ensures trans people are properly supported, included and able to participate fully in society.

Same again. No one is arguing that trans people’s rights should not be fully respected. We’re arguing that it’s not a “right” for men to be able to force their way into women’s sports thus ruining them for the women. Trans people, including men who say they are women, can participate fully in society without trashing women’s sports.

Thanks for all the help, slavery!

Kamala Harris was due to visit Florida on Friday, to respond to the state board of education’s controversial new standards for Black history education which include the contention that some Black people benefited from being enslaved.

I wonder if the members of the state board of education wish they could be enslaved so that they too could get some of those sweet sweet benefits.

On Wednesday, the Florida board of education approved new standards for how public schools should teach Black history.

According to a 216-page document, public school students will now be taught that some Black people received “personal benefit” from slavery – because it taught them useful skills.

Well of course it taught them some useful skills, so that they could use those skills to enrich the people who held them in slavery. That’s not an actual “benefit.” That’s exploitation, not benefit.

The changes to the state curriculum came a year after the Republican Florida governor, the presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis, enacted the Stop Woke Act, Time reported.

The law prohibits teaching students or employees about anything that could cause them to “feel guilt, anguish or any form of psychological distress” because of their race, color, national origin or sex.

What about the distress felt by descendants of enslaved people? What about the strong likelihood that those descendants will feel flaming hot distress and anguish on being told their great-grandparents derived “personal benefit” from being enslaved?

I missed the news that Nancy Kelley is leaving Stonewall.

Nancy Kelley, head of the divisive charity Stonewall, announced earlier this week on Twitter that she is to step down from the role. Her post on Monday stated that while the job hasn’t “always been a pleasure”, leading Europe’s largest LGBTQIA+ organisation “has surely been a privilege”. 

But under her leadership Stonewall morphed into a TQ organization with extra added misogyny.

Over her three years in the post, Kelley brought a smorgasbord of hitherto unrepresented identities under the organisation’s “trans umbrella”. Perhaps spokespeople from the asexual, pansexual, demisexual and allosexual communities will be sad to see her go. But it’s fair to say that many homosexuals who once turned to Stonewall for guidance are cheered by the news of her departure. 

Dennis Kavanagh, a longstanding critic of Kelley and executive director of the Gay Men’s Network, said that she had “promised dialogue and big tent politics” but instead “delivered ideological division and controversy”.

Now people are thinking maybe she didn’t jump, maybe she was pushed.

That Sky News interview where the guy from Stonewall distances the group from just abut every position they held under Nancy is all the proof we need to know she was ousted and Stonewall is moving away from the trans nonsense. It’s too late for @stonewalluk of course, they’re cooked. But yet another data point that a seismic shift in attitudes is occuring on this issue, something most GC ppl on here have intuited for a while now

Hmm. Irony, or no? Lia Thomas having a little laugh, or Lia Thomas going all Patty Hearst on us? Hard to tell.

At least we know he’s still an entitled abuser of women.

Well he doesn’t say quite exactly that – he says the less true, less fair, less justifiable version. He says there are competing rights, in other words that men do have a right to invade women’s spaces regardless of what women want.

What do you say to women who want to keep women’s spaces she asks, do you understand them she asks. “I do,” he says with energy, “and I think there is um more of a conversation to be had to try and you know to try and calm this, to try and provide reassurance”

Ah yes, that’s the important thing, calm this, provide [empty] reassurance so that these god damn women will shut the fuck up already. It’s not that women have needs and rights, it’s that they just will not shut up, and we need to persuade them to shut up.

Shut down the entire sport why don’t you.

On Friday [last week], Disc Golf Pro Tour announced that it would relocate the Female Professional Open (FPO) division at some of the largest events of the season to other states while canceling other FPO divisions completely in order to avoid more legal troubles as a result of lawsuits from Natalie Ryan, a male disc golfer who identifies as a female and has sued DGPT in California and Minnesota over gender eligibility policies that restrict him from competing.

…

In a press release obtained by The Post Millennial, DGPT said, “These adjustments have been made in order to protect competitive fairness in the FPO division and to limit financial burden in locations where the PDGA Policy on Eligibility for Gender-Based Divisions may become the subject of last-minute litigation harmful to the tour.”

The release mentioned several times that financial liability was a major part of the decision to change the schedule. According to a tour spokesperson, DGPT has already spent more than $100,000 on the legal fights surrounding transgender eligibility. A survey by the association in December showed 67 percent of its members and 80 percent of its female members disagreed with the statement: “Transgender women should be allowed to compete with other women in disc golf and in other sports.”

Whatever. Women have no right to anything, so it doesn’t matter what they agree or disagree with. Bitches.

Ryan filed a discrimination lawsuit protesting the Professional Disc Golf Association Pro Tour’s new rules in February which stated that trans-identifying males seeking to compete in the women’s division must have medically transitioned during Tanner Stage Two of puberty or before turning 12. The new rules also required a low testosterone level, which excluded Ryan from playing.

Male narcissists win, women lose. Tough shit, Karens.

In 2022, Ryan was the first biological man to win the women’s Elite Series event. Earlier this month, a Minnesota judge blocked the Professional Disc Golf Association from enforcing its policy restricting trans-identifying players from participating in women’s events, a policy change went into effect on Jan. 1.

As a result of the judge’s ruling, Ryan was able to compete earlier this month in the Preserve Championship Female Professional Open in Clearwater, Minnesota.

Ryan underwent sex change surgery in 2018 and then began competing in women’s disc golf. Ryan won two Elite Series events in 2022 and earned $19,360 in prize money.

Nearly 20 grand. Worth having. Worth taking away from women.

The part of Beth Rigby’s interview of Iain Anderson that deals with the gross insult of “Lia” Thomas stealing women’s wins is absolutely disgusting. He blathers and huffs and bloviates and completely ignores the obvious, gruesome, painful injustice to the women, the mere tedious boring nobody cares women.

“Do you think that’s fair Iain?”

“So, em, sport by sport, people are looking at this, they absolutely are – we’re about to celebrate, this year, ten years of Rainbow Laces” – big beaming smile. Grassroots sports, he says, he’s ab-so-lutely delighted that more and more “LGBTQ” people are getting involved.

That’s not the question.

He thinks there’s still a problem with the Premier League, and men’s sport.

That’s not the question.

Sporting body by sporting body is looking at this, he says smugly. Oh well that’s fine then – how many years will it take them to see the problem?

Rigby asks him how he would feel if he were number two or number three in that scenario, would he think that’s fair.

“We’re working our way through on this,” he says, “this is how trans folk take part in elite sport”

But it’s a problem, Rigby interrupts him to insist. “Do you think it’s a problem.”

“I think it’s a problem in terms of perception.”

No, you absolute fuck, it’s a problem in reality.

“You can see it’s a problem, no?” Rigby says, gesturing at the image of giant hulking Thomas looming over the two much much much smaller women. “I want everybody to take part in sport,” he replies idiotically.

Rigby pushes the question again and he says “I understand the question you’re asking” – and I’m going to go right on refusing to answer it. “Are we going to say that trans people shouldn’t take part in sport?” he asks indignantly. Yet again, that’s not the question.

It’s fascinating to see how easily men brush off injustice to women.

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Do it to her and her.

Carl Schmitt, that highly intelligent but nasty old Nazi, had some interestingly nasty thoughts on the importance of making a distinction between ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” Though I doubt whether any Tory politicians know much about Schmitt’s thought, one saw (and sees) his playbook in action in the Brexit disaster, both before and after Britain’s leaving the EU, when not only virulent Brexiters with no formal political power but the British government as well deliberately sought to cast the EU as an enemy who sought Britain’s destruction.

Hitler & Goebbels were very good at creating enemies, both within Germany (Jews, Roma, homosexuals) and without it. The more recent collapse of Yugoslavia showed how readily the idea of ‘friend’ versus ‘enemy’ becomes salient – it is not merely tribal, it runs through the whole of humanity. I don’t think one should blame only tribes.

And cynical politicians are happy to use it. Trump, for one; De Santis, for another, Johnson, Erdogan, Orban, and of course Putin, among many. The world these people want is that described in Auden’s ‘In Memory of William Butler Yeats’:

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace

Stares from every human face,

And the seas of pity lie

Locked and frozen in each eye.

Well of course he does. What answer can he give?

Beth Rigby on Sky News talked to Stonewall chair Iain Anderson about the war on feminist women. He tells us it’s Both Sides.

No it isn’t. Not even close. We get abuse, insults, name-calling, venomous misogyny day in day out. Very few of us on team terf try to match them.

From The Guardian:

“A site visit carried out on 12 July 2023 confirmed that whilst the colour of door is currently pale pink and not white as required by the notice, it is a muted colour and is acceptable to under-enforce the requirements of the enforcement notice.

“It is therefore recommended that the case is closed.”

And, down the page:

In a report to councillors recommending that the council take no further action, the city’s chief planning officer, David Givan, warned that Dickson remained on notice.

See it? In the first extract the subjunctive is not used, and in the second it is. It’s especially interesting because it’s the same kind of subjunctive – the kind that follows “recommend that” in the present tense. I’ve seen that called (with disdain) “the American subjunctive” as if it were some crass vulgarity like spitting tobacco juice on the Queen’s favorite Corgi, but honestly, you need the subjunctive for “it is recommended that” [something be done]. Why do you need it? Because “it is recommended that something is done” makes no sense. It’s done, so there’s no need to recommend it, is there.

The solution would be to avoid the subjunctive by just saying “should” or “must” or similar. But “It is therefore recommended that the case is closed” is just inane. If the case is closed why are you recommending closing it?

Convince me I’m wrong.