We still have “National Prayer Breakfast.” In the government. FFRF tells us:
The Freedom From Religion Foundation reiterates its disapproval of the National Prayer Breakfast held today, including President Biden’s involvement, the U.S. Capitol venue and the overarching Christian message.
The 71st annual event, although technically private, had an even stronger appearance this year of being sponsored by the federal government because it took place for the first time in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall. Historically, when under the open sponsorship of the Fellowship, a shadowy Christian nationalist group, the main event took place at a hotel.
Steps, innit. Start out in private and inch your way into the god damn Capitol building.
There was reading from scripture, a rendition of “Amazing Grace” and countless long prayers “in Jesus’ name,” all recited exclusively by government actors, from event co-chairs Reps. Tracey Mann and Frank Mrvan to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Gillibrand’s remarks were most shocking, calling for the president to put on the “full armor of God” and the “breastplate of righteousness” (favorite phrases of Christian nationalist politicians). A final prayer to Jesus was given by House Chaplain Margaret Kibben.
Voters in Paris have approved an effort to drastically increase parking fees for large sport utility vehicles and other heavy cars, the latest move by Mayor Anne Hidalgo to reshape the French capital with environmentally conscious and pedestrian-friendly policies.
It’s nice how the two go together. Walking around does minimal harm to the environment, and massive cars are a bad thing in more ways than just the contribution to global hotting.
Paris residents who park in their neighborhood will not be affected. Neither will taxis or other professional vehicles, or people who use larger vehicles because of a disability.
The city authorities had argued that big S.U.V.s and other large cars emit more greenhouse gases than average-size cars and are more dangerous for pedestrians because of their bulkiness.
And, I think, because of their effect on drivers, especially the way they encourage aggression.
A female football fan was banned from matches over social media posts that were deemed transphobic after a “Stasi” spying investigation by the Premier League.
A special unit set up to root out racism in the game was used to comb through comments made by Linzi Smith, a gender-critical Newcastle United supporter, even though the posts had nothing to do with football.
And even though knowing that men are not women is not racism.
Ms Smith, who is gay and promotes lesbian, gay and bisexual rights and women’s rights, was put under investigation by the police, the Premier League and Newcastle United after expressing strong views on trans ideology on her personal account on X, formerly Twitter.
“Strong views” on the fact that men are not women. What kind of strength are we talking about here?
The 34-year-old was shocked to discover that the Premier League had compiled a dossier detailing where she lives, works and where she walked her dog. The 11-page “target profile”, marked confidential, included data on “associated aliases” and “vulnerabilities”.
How is any of this any of their business????
She was interviewed under caution by police after the dossier was handed to officers by Newcastle United. Officers took just two hours to inform her that she had not committed any crime, but the club, which had spent four months looking into her background, revoked her membership and banned her from games until 2026.
Because the club dislikes the fact that she knows men can’t become women.
It’s as if everyone had to submit a thousand-item questionnaire before attending a play or a concert or a movie. What next, a questionnaire and 6 hour interview before you can buy a quart of milk?
The Premier League had trawled through her social media posts to find her date of birth, where she lives, the area where she works, and discover that “they do appear to walk their dog by [XXXX] Church which is just off [the street where she lives].”
The intelligence was accompanied by a picture Ms Smith had posted on social media of her dog, Chester, which has since died, being walked near the church, and two screenshots of the church and its environs from Google Street View.
Who needs Big Brother when we’ve got Big Football?
It’s all part of a new state law that goes into effect this fall. Local and regional boards of education shall provide free menstrual products in women’s restrooms, all-gender restrooms and in at least one men’s restroom for 3rd to 12th grade students.
Just in case an 18-year-old boy decides he wants a tampon and can’t wait to go to a drugstore or ask a friend or steal one from a sister.
One parent in town, who wished to stay anonymous, was disheartened to learn what happened at the school. “I think anyone who menstruates has a right to get menstrual products, I think if anyone identifies with a certain gender, has the right to use the bathroom they want to use,” she said.
And the girls who don’t want boys popping into their toilets? They don’t count. Everything for the gender fantasists, nothing for the residents of planet earth.
A coalition of gender-critical groups have accused Stonewall of “targeting” the female boss of Britain’s equalities watchdog.
Led by women’s rights organisation Sex Matters, which believes biological sex takes precedence over self-identified gender, the 39 groups said Baroness Kishwer Falkner, chairwoman of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, was being attacked for taking action to protect women.
They said Stonewall had subjected her to the same sort of “unreasonable, vexatious complaints” used to harass ordinary women at work.
The groups have signed a letter to the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (Ganhri), which has been persuaded by organisations such as Stonewall to carry out a “special review” into the EHRC, claiming it is anti-trans.
What does Stonewall mean by “anti-trans”? The usual – not bowing to every demand no matter how destructive of other people’s rights.
Stonewall and other groups applied to Ganhri for the EHRC to be stripped of its UN accreditation as an “A” status national national human rights organisation.
They complained after the EHRC advised the government on the protected characteristic of sex in the Equality Act 2010, in which it said transgender people could be legitimately excluded from single-sex services if the reasons were “justifiable and proportionate”.
Reasons such as “for the safety of women.” Stonewall wants men who claim to be women to be able to force themselves on women’s services no matter what the women think. Rights are for trans people (especially the male ones); submission is for women.
Jon, as it happens we had a written question on this at the @CambridgeUCU + @OUbUCU hustings last week, to send in today.
Because it's a 156 page judgment + the case itself exposes the damage of Twitter "pile ons", please see my written answer rather than a tweet: pic.twitter.com/d33fwG5ylz
Nasty stuff tucked away in among the boilerplate babbling about undefined “inclusion” and “rights.”
“I am completely committed to equality, inclusion, and freedom,” he says, as if others were committed to inequality, exclusion, and slavery. Inclusion of what? Freedom to what?
“UCU will never be baited into the right-wing culture war” – meaning what? That defending women’s rights is a right-wing culture war? Spell it out.
“even expressing views that ‘shock, offend, and disturb’ are [is] protected,” he says, signaling that he thinks Jo Phoenix’s views are shocking, offensive, and disturbing. How are they shocking etc? Spell it out.
He does not “share in Professor Phoenix’s conclusions about gender,” he says. Meaning what? He thinks men can literally be women? Spell it out.
He will “always act to defend our transgender colleagues rights,” he says. What are those rights? Spell out exactly what rights you mean, and explain how they are rights, and why you will defend them at the expense of your female colleagues’ rights.
He will have “zero tolerance for discrimination,” he says, implying that Jo Phoenix does tolerate discrimination. Knife right between the shoulder blades.
A “union” that treats women with contemptuous hostility. Brilliant.
The tweet Iseult saw was then deleted, but there are others.
May 14th I will be participating in Burning Day. The Israeli flag has become a symbol of oppression, subversion, and genocide.
They censor our speech. They undermine our governments with bribery and blackmail. They've captured our media, banks, and virtually all of academia.… pic.twitter.com/gdmocxNjnO
“They’ve captured our media, banks, academia”…golly gee that sounds familiar, i.e. exactly what the Nazis used to shout, when they weren’t too busy dropping the zyklon B pellets into the “showers.”
Dead people can’t change anything, on account of being dead.
A Labour MP has called for the law to be changed so transgender people can have their gender changed posthumously in official records.
Well they can’t do that either, because people of any kind can’t do anything posthumously. They can leave instructions for other people to do things, but they can’t posthumously do them themselves. Aren’t journalists expected to know how to use words?
Another indication that human emissions dwarf those of volcanoes is the fact that atmospheric CO2 levels, as measured by sampling stations around the world…
This reminded me of conversations I’ve had with climate change deniers who have argued that the global temperature isn’t rising, there are plenty of cold areas that would lower the average that the scientists calculate if only there were more measuring stations. In other words, there are large areas between measuring stations and that’s where ithe colder regions are that would lower the measured average. Some even go so far as to claim that the scientists deliberately avoid those areas in order to keep the lie going!
When I point out that more measuring stations are put in place all the time to enable more accurate measurements, and that the result is still increasing temperatures, the reply has been that it’s because where there was once one unmonitored gap, now there are two – placing a station c in the gap between stations a and b just creates gaps a-c and c-b.
They are playing the creationist ‘God of the gaps’ argument with climate change.
1. By trying to shut me up and because I stood up to them, the harassers and bullies and discriminators at OU have given me a platform I would never have had. Own goal there. Misjudged the strength of my conviction and belief in… pic.twitter.com/iRGkxpofbI
1. By trying to shut me up and because I stood up to them, the harassers and bullies and discriminators at OU have given me a platform I would never have had. Own goal there. Misjudged the strength of my conviction and belief in academia. Or you are all just too bloody arrogant.
2. I win a case of harassment, discrimination, unfair and constructive dismissal along with post-employment victimisation and within days I get those who seem to possess “irrational fears” or are palpably “uncomfortable” with sex realism swarming around my X feed like flies on shit.
3. For years I get told *any* expression of my views harms trans ppl – with no evidence and then when a court says I have said and done nothing unlawful or transphobic, the little flies tell me my logically and factually derived position is toxic, that I am fat, look masculine, get told to shut up, get misquoted, get called a bully. My replies have been a effing train wreck of offensive and personal abuse.
4. I’ve spent my life researching and fighting against male violence, have experienced a fair bit of it myself and now I call bullshit on the self styled trans /queer progressive flies – including those doing it under the veil of academia. I know the tactics of male violence when I see them – even when they come from women. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck … It’s an effing duck.
Thanks @OpenUniversity. What a bloody lovely legacy being employed by you has left for me. I get traumatised by the unlawful actions of your employees and in fighting them and you successfully, the flies and trolls try to carry on what your staff started. Imagine what would have happened if someone told Leigh Downes, Deb Drake, Chris Williams etc to stop acting in such prejudicial discriminatory ways, or that constantly complaining about GC expressions looks like harassment. Imagine if someone had put these discriminators back into their bloody box and stood up to the bullying. It was never AF. It was *always* bullying.
Imagine how different things might be now.
Anyone know what “AF” means here? Obviously not as fuck; administrative something?
Anyway. That whole thing reminds me of the atmosphere of Freethought Blogs in my last few weeks there. It’s pathetic that the Open University can be compared those “freethinkers.”
A thing dissenters say about global warming is that volcanoes contribute way more than human activities. Back in 2009 Scientific American said nuh-uh.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the world’s volcanoes, both on land and undersea, generate about 200 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, while our automotive and industrial activities cause some 24 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year worldwide. Despite the arguments to the contrary, the facts speak for themselves: Greenhouse gas emissions from volcanoes comprise less than one percent of those generated by today’s human endeavors.
200 million v 24 billion. Hard to argue that it’s close.
Another indication that human emissions dwarf those of volcanoes is the fact that atmospheric CO2 levels, as measured by sampling stations around the world set up by the federally funded Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, have gone up consistently year after year regardless of whether or not there have been major volcanic eruptions in specific years. “If it were true that individual volcanic eruptions dominated human emissions and were causing the rise in carbon dioxide concentrations, then these carbon dioxide records would be full of spikes—one for each eruption,” says Coby Beck, a journalist writing for online environmental news portal Grist.org. “Instead, such records show a smooth and regular trend.”
You also have to wonder why the whole warming thing started around the same time the first railroads were built.
Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch has not responded to my invitation to discuss the Govt's troubling failure to ban conversion therapy, adequately fund sexual health clinics & enable trans self-ID via a legal Statutory Declaration
We were told by one of the directors at @womenslibrary that they don’t agree with censorship at the library. So why do they not have any displays or books about the amazing GC women & women’s groups currently working hard for women’s rights in Scotland?
Most of the above measures seem to be aimed at keeping minors from irrevocable changes. Prime Minister Trudeau has done the forced teaming work for Team Trans, calling the proposed policies “most anti-LGBT policies anywhere in this country.”
It spends most of its space discussing the Semenya case and testosterone levels. It downplays the irreversible musculoskeletal and cardio-pulmonary advantages that male puberty confers on trans identified male athletes, and quotes a study that concluded that
The CCES study also noted that social factors have a greater impact on athletic performance than hormones.
“Researchers in the sociocultural field of study argue that social factors contribute to performance advantages to a far greater extent than does testosterone and that assessing testosterone levels is another way to perpetuate the long history of policing women’s bodies in sport,” the report reads.
“Researchers highlight the many social factors that contribute to differences in athletic performance, including, for example: discriminations, disparate resource allocations, inequities, and violence against women in sport in the forms of sexism and sexual violence in sport contexts, arbitrary differences in rules and equipment between men’s and women’s sport, as well as histories of barring women from certain sports.”
One of its conclusions is that ‘the CCES strategy is a continuity with the history of the exclusion and oppression of female athletes in sexist, misogynist, patriarchal sport structures whilst, at the same time, masquerading as inclusive, anti-sexist and anti-misogynist.”
Also, as a basic fact, humans can’t change sex. Trans identified males remain male, however they dress, whatever name they give themselves, and whatever “gender” they claim to have. “Gender identities” don’t play sports, human bodies do. Sports are segregated by sex so that women can have their own level playing field. Letting men cheat their way into women’s sports under the guise of “trans inclusion” destroys fairness for women in favour of men, obviating the reason that women’s sports were established in the first place. But sure, you go ahead and keep saying that men in women’s sports have no advantage:
It probably won’t do a goddamn thing, but still worth it.
Time after time, with predictable regularity, never missing a beat, Donald Trump proclaims his innocence…
Then, he declares himself to be the victim. Whatever it is, he is falsely accused. But his self-dramatization as the wounded sufferer is only half his story: he insists that whoever has accused him is in fact the offender. He emerges triumphant, the martyr, the truth-teller, courageously unmasking the real villain. J’accuse!
Trump’s pattern is textbook manipulation – literally. It has a precise name given to it after decades of academic research. Jennifer Freyd, now professor emerita of psychology at the University of Oregon, developed the theory over her career studying sexual assault, trauma and institutional betrayal. She named the process by which the perpetrator seeks to avoid accountability Darvo – a strategy with the elements of denial, attack, and reversal of victim and offender.
Or in a single word: bullying.
Trump’s instinctive reliance on Darvo goes beyond the mean-spirited tactics he learned from Cohn. Those lessons settled long ago into his pathology, becoming something more pervasive, systematic and fundamental, defining Trump’s behavior in every area of his life.
I think it’s probably even more fundamental than that: I think it’s probably that he just is a poisonous, mean, selfish, sadistic shit. Tragically for all of us he’s a poisonous, mean, selfish, sadistic shit who was able to leverage his daddy’s real estate business into a major cash cow, upon which a brainless tv network decided it would be a good idea to make him a star. It would be nice if he were just a poisonous, mean, selfish, sadistic shit of a minor Queens landlord, but that’s not the world we live in.
He, along with a group of other venture capitalists, is currently deploying part of his vast fortune to help bankroll a pro-drugs version of the Olympics called the Enhanced Games. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a sporting competition in which participants are encouraged to take as many performance-enhancing substances as they can get their steroid-enlarged hands on. All in the name of science and innovation, naturally.
Much science! Peak innovaty! Artificial enhancements are good at artificial enhancement. Who knew?!
Honestly? It sounds amazing. I would 100% watch. It’s a real shame Thiel, who currently runs spy tech firm Palantir, doesn’t spend all his resources on reality TV ideas masquerading as science instead of his many other dystopian projects. Thiel, you see, isn’t just a guy who really likes the idea of bionic boxing: he’s a libertarian and ideologue who has an exerted an oversized and pernicious influence on American politics and culture.
For all his obsession with innovation, Thiel has some stone-age views on the world. He doesn’t seem completely sold on the whole women-having-rights thing, for example. In 2009, for example, he published an essay lamenting that women being given the right to vote had dealt a blow to libertarianism. His exact words: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
By “libertarian” of course Thiel means “letting billionaires do whatever they want all the time.”
A French policeman who called a female sexual assault complainant a “whore” has been let off by a police court.
The incident happened in February 2022 when the woman filed her complaint at a Paris police station. The officer later rang her and left a voicemail message about paperwork but his insults were accidentally recorded after he thought he had hung up…
During the hearing, the court was to asked consider that the officer made the insults to himself or to his colleagues, and that they were not aimed directly at the woman…A female judge ruled that the comments had not amounted to a sexist insult and acquitted the officer.
Well, sure, it’s not a sexist insult because women who report sexual assault obviously are whores, also bitches and cunts and Karens. Bitches.
Just a straight-up lie. Many people have lined up to point out that there are no such front pages. No newspapers are glorifying the children who killed Brianna Ghey. (It would be extremely odd if there were. What would that even look like?)
I'm not going to share the repellent front pages glorifying the children that killed Brianna,once again demonstrating the extreme institutional transphobia of our press. Please if you can, help the organisations that support trans children every day. Lets do better 👇 https://t.co/L1VKZdxaS1
Grace Powell was 12 or 13 when she discovered she could be a boy.
Well, no, she didn’t discover “she could be a boy.” She discovered she could claim to be a boy, identify as a boy, pretend to be a boy. Let’s be careful about how we word things, ok?
Growing up in a relatively conservative community in Grand Rapids, Mich., Powell, like many teenagers, didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin. She was unpopular and frequently bullied. Puberty made everything worse. She suffered from depression and was in and out of therapy.
“I felt so detached from my body, and the way it was developing felt hostile to me,” Powell told me. It was classic gender dysphoria, a feeling of discomfort with your sex.
What? How do we know it wasn’t “classic” discomfort with puberty? Why assume it’s “classic” gender dysphoria? Isn’t that how we got into this mess in the first place?
Reading about transgender people online, Powell believed that the reason she didn’t feel comfortable in her body was that she was in the wrong body. Transitioning seemed like the obvious solution. The narrative she had heard and absorbed was that if you don’t transition, you’ll kill yourself.
Yes, like that. It’s a socially constructed belief, fostered by “reading about transgender people online.” Hold that thought: it’s important.
At 17, desperate to begin hormone therapy, Powell broke the news to her parents. They sent her to a gender specialist to make sure she was serious. In the fall of her senior year of high school, she started cross-sex hormones. She had a double mastectomy the summer before college…
Well thank god they made sure she was serious first, and then a week or two later let her get her tits chopped off.
At no point during her medical or surgical transition, Powell says, did anyone ask her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression. At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.
So what did the “gender specialist” actually talk to her about?
“I wish there had been more open conversations,” Powell, now 23 and detransitioned, told me. “But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”
I guess her parents picked the wrong gender specialist.
