Here’s a piece of good news at last – racial gerrymandering is racial gerrymandering.

Alabama Republicans illegally discriminated against Black voters when they drew the state’s seven new congressional districts last year and must quickly redraw the plan, a federal court has ruled.

The ruling is hugely consequential, a blunt assessment of the way lawmakers use their power to draw district lines to dilute the influence of Black and other minority voters.

Pending lawsuits in North Carolina and Texas similarly allege that lawmakers illegally drew districts on the basis of race.

It sounds as if this could be the undoing of the Shelby ruling. Unless of course the Supremes get involved.

The seventh congressional district in Alabama, which stretches from Birmingham to the rural Black Belt, has consistently elected a Black Democrat to Congress for 30 years. Nearly 56% of the voting-age population in the district is Black. The state’s other six districts have all been represented by white Republicans.

The plaintiffs in the case, including four voters, two state senators and several civil rights groups, argued that Alabama Republicans packed as many Black voters into the district as possible – about a third of Alabama’s Black population – in order to weaken their influence in other district across the state.

Let’s hope the ruling stands.

It seems like such a self-immolating way to sell one’s new book.

Eye roll. Of course Julie Bindel didn’t make “a huge fuss.” Laurie Penny, on the other hand…

They’re not a priority for her, but they are, but she wouldn’t want to make anyone feel coerced, but she would, but everyone should take responsibility for their own use of language, but everyone should also obey orders to remember specialty pronouns.

And then she has the nerve to claim that not using her specialty pronouns will “hurt” her. Please. Of course it won’t hurt her – it will give her that little thrill she seeks of being pretend-persecuted. And who comes across as more selfish and petty here? Does she really think it’s Julie?

Well, no, because…

Ooops.

Man writing about Lia Thomas in the Times pretends not to know what everyone knows:

So much is open to interpretation each time Thomas jumps into the pool. She is a transgender woman, and has excelled this season while competing on the women’s team. She owns the best marks in the nation among college swimmers in the 200 and 500 freestyle, but for some, her success has also set two pillars of the sporting ethos — inclusion and fair play — in conflict.

So little is open to interpretation if you’re not being dishonest. Thomas is a man, so of course he “has excelled” while competing on the women’s team. He’s excelled by cheating.

Thomas has become a red-meat topic for right-wing media, a divisive matter for L.G.B.T.Q. advocates and a thorny subject for competitors as well as the N.C.A.A. and other sports governing bodies, who are trying to chart a path for athletes who do not fit neatly into the sex classifications used in most sports.

Who says Thomas doesn’t fit neatly into the sex classifications used in most sports? Besides Thomas? He fits plenty neatly into the male classification from what I can see and have read.

While there have been an increasing number of transgender athletes who have transitioned while in college, the ones who generate the most attention (and criticism) are transgender women who compete in women’s events — and who win.

Yes, and they get the most criticism because they’re giving themselves a massive physical advantage. It’s very simple if you’re not pretending not to understand.

[T]he Ivy League championships lie ahead next month and then the N.C.A.A. championships arrive in March. That will almost assuredly raise the temperature again, as has happened when iconic figures like Michael Phelps, who is making a second career as a mental health advocate, and Martina Navratilova, a champion of L.B.G.T.Q. rights, questioned whether Thomas should compete on a women’s team.

Others, meanwhile, will wonder when the discussion will be centered less on the winner than on the human being.

What about the female human beings who are being cheated by William Thomas? Can we center the discussion on them?

And so if there was something enduring about Saturday, it was not the two races that Thomas comfortably won or the two relays where she gamely tried. It was the way she carried herself in the water — head down, with grace and ease.

Bros before hos.

The title is a story all by itself.

Laurie Penny drops a bomb on The Critic magazine in pronoun row

Pronoun row? Next up: all out nuclear conjunction exchange.

AUTHOR Laurie Penny has criticised Right-wing magazine The Critic as “rude and childish” for failing to use their preferred pronouns.

First sentence, and already we see why pronouns should be accurate as opposed to Crafted to Your Personal Taste. Whose preferred pronouns – the magazine’s? Laurie Penny’s? It’s not clear. That can happen anyway, when there is more than one she or he or they, but using the accurate ones at least keeps those ambiguities to a minimum. Using luxury pronouns does the opposite, with a vengeance.

And then of course there’s “rude and childish.” Which is more rude and childish, The Critic’s use of standard pronouns or Penny’s demand that she get special customized ones that will make the article more irritating to read?

Julie Bindel used the accurate ones, the article goes on, and that just wouldn’t do.

Penny’s publishers Bloomsbury asked that Penny be referred to as “them/ they”. The Critic refused to make the change, instead adding a reference to the request at the foot of the review.

Bloomsbury shouldn’t have asked. Language can’t be customized for individuals in this way without rapidly ceasing to be comprehensible. The whole point of language is to communicate, and specialty pronouns are just roadblocks to that project. Plus it’s all just so narcissistic and self-indulgent and stupid. See Laurie, see Laurie get free publicity by “dropping bombs” over her childish “my pronoun” demands.

Penny told us: “It’s rude, and it’s childish…”

No, what’s rude and childish is to expect special language rules for oneself. That’s rude and childish.

“They want to think of themselves as cool and edgy… it would be nice to see them engage with the actual arguments I’m making.”

Then stop bleating about your stupid pronouns!

If she really wants us to engage with her arguments then she’s a complete fool for distracting everyone with outrage that we don’t call her “they.”

Sarah Phillimore summarizes a podcast on which Jennifer Swayne talks about her experience in the Newport jail last night.

Yes seriously why IS this? Why can they put a disabled woman in a cell for ten hours because she posted some stickers they don’t like? And then push her out at 3 in the morning to get home on a battery scooter? WHY?

They arrested her for nothing then left her there for five hours, for nothing.

Meanwhile – rape cases? Pfffffffffffff, they don’t matter.

I fucking think so too.

Ok Newt.

Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, stoked outrage on Sunday by predicting members of the House committee investigating the Capitol attack will be imprisoned if Republicans retake the chamber this year.

So he’s saying the Republicans plan to kill what’s left of US democracy if they win.

One of two Republicans on the committee, Liz Cheney, said: “A former speaker of the House is threatening jail time for members of Congress who are investigating the violent attack on our Capitol and our constitution. This is what it looks like when the rule of law unravels.”

…

Calling the members of the 6 January committee “wolves [who] are going to find out that they’re now sheep”, he said that if Republicans take Congress in November, “this is all going to come crashing down … they’re the ones who in fact, I think, face a real risk of jail for the kinds of laws they’re breaking”.

Except that they’re not.

LP keeps revealing herself to be…how shall I put this…not all that bright.

Like that. It’s not just that it’s wrong, it’s that it’s dim. Clumsy, inaccurate, clunky, backassward – just dim.

We’re not notable for windbaggery. We don’t talk more than other people. It’s just a sloppy label, that falls off because it doesn’t fit.

And then telling ourselves not using luxury pronouns makes us cool and edgy??? Could not be more wrong, or more absurd. She might as well say we think saying 2+3=5 makes us cool and edgy. Of course we don’t think that. It’s the other way around. We think their furious efforts to force us to use the specialty pronouns make them too “edgy” for their own or anyone else’s good. We think it’s fashion run amok. We think it’s a trend, and a stupid one, and a complete dead end.

As for childish and tiresome – well it’s too obvious so I won’t spell it out.

As for anti-intellectual – pull the other one. Trans ideology is not intellectual. It’s emotional, psychological, pseudo-political, but it’s not intellectual.

It is true that in some ways we feel threatened by the “ideas” of people like her, because they are doing damage and will continue to do damage. We do worry about women who need women-only refuges and rape crisis centers, about women in sports, about women’s prizes and promotions and jobs, about women’s representation in government and politics and education. We do worry about women being displaced by men who identify as women. But we (naturally) think the LPs are the ones who get it wrong, and we don’t think it’s all a matter of “the next generation” shoving us overboard because it’s so much more “progressive” than we are.

Remember, women, you are not allowed to have anything that’s for women only. If you try you will be hounded and pursued until the last cruise ship melts.

“Will this error be fixed?” the pretend-journalist asks. It’s not an error you miserable woman-hating creep.

The police are there to protect you. No wait, not you. Other people. Male people. The clean ones.

The Metropolitan police have apologised and paid compensation to an academic for “sexist, derogatory and unacceptable language” used by officers about her when she was strip-searched.

“What’s that smell? Oh, it’s her knickers,” officers at a north-east London police station said to each other after Dr Konstancja Duff was held down on the floor and her clothes cut off. “Is she rank?” another said.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Apologizing isn’t enough. Compensation isn’t enough. They need to fire people, and hire a lot more women, and put a stop to this kind of dehumanizing shit.

The Met apologised to Duff, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham, after CCTV video capturing the officers’ conversations was disclosed to her as part of a civil action against the force.

How sad for the police, that they didn’t get to keep it a secret.

Honest to god shouldn’t they be better trained and supervised than this? They get to have people in their power, as they did here – they should be extra vigilant against dehumanizing people who are helpless in their hands.

Duff said: “In every detail the footage backed up what I had said in my statements for years and years.” Officers had claimed they had acted with professionalism, strip-searching her for her own safety because she would not give them her name.

What? How does “her own safety” come into that?

“It was such an effective gaslighting: ‘We were just concerned for your mental health, that was why we had to – for your own good – forcibly strip you naked and mash you up.’

“It was so obviously not what they were doing at the time. They were doing it as punishment, they were doing it as intimidation, they wanted to soften me up and get my details.”

Duff was arrested on 5 May 2013 on suspicion of obstructing and assaulting police after trying to hand a legal advice card to a 15-year-old caught in a stop-and-search sweep in Hackney – allegations she was later cleared of in court. She was taken to Stoke Newington police station, where Sgt Kurtis Howard, in charge of the custody area, ordered the search when she refused to cooperate with officers.

In 2018 Howard appeared before a disciplinary panel, which cleared him of gross misconduct. He argued the search was necessary to assess any risk Duff might pose to herself, and its chair concluded his actions were those of a responsible officer. The CCTV footage now obtained by Duff of the police station custody area on the day she was searched shows Howard telling officers to show her “resistance is futile” and to search her “by any means necessary”.

“Treat her like a terrorist,” he says. “I don’t care.”

Why? Handing someone a legal advice card isn’t at all like terrorism. Why didn’t he care?

In a cell, three female officers bound Duff by her hands and feet, pinned her to the floor and cut her clothes off with scissors. Duff described the ordeal, which left her with a number of visible injuries, as like a sexual assault.

…

Duff’s case has come to light as the Met finds itself under the spotlight for what critics have described as a culture of institutional misogyny. The rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a Met firearms officer, prosecutions of serving officers for rape, and revelations of sexist and racist online chats between officers have led to renewed questions about sexism in the force.

Which get drowned out by all the blather about men who identify as women.

Julie Bindel reviewed Laurie Penny’s long unawaited book on “feminism” for The Critic.

One of the key problems with Sexual Revolution is its very premise: that we can explain misogyny in its current form with the growth of right-wing ideology and fascism. This excuses a huge growth area in modern misogyny, which is the so-called male progressives: men on the left.

Excuses it and draws a tactful veil over it. An actual feminist wouldn’t want to do that.

And its style can be grating. Penny’s schtick has always been to overwrite her sentences to the point where they become tediously indulgent while saying little. For example, Penny says:

Something has broken. Something is breaking still. Not like a glass breaks or like a heart breaks, but like the shell of an egg breaks – inexorably, and from the inside. Something wet and angry is fighting its way out of the dark, and it has claws.

Ugh. That’s a stupid person’s idea of Fine Writing.

There is no doubt that Penny is genuine in her commitment to naming male violence, so long as it does not get in the way of her “trans women are women” and “sex work is work” ideology. Swotting up on her feminist history wouldn’t go amiss, but I have a sneaking suspicion that she can’t credit her theories on male violence to those deserving of it; after all, these women are now the baddies in her world.

No amount of fudging and outright denial will alter the fact that the feminists currently labelled “TERFs” and “SWERFs” are those who have changed laws, raised public awareness and established domestic violence refuges, rape crisis centres and other women-only services that have proved essential in a world where male violence is endemic.

And then there’s more to the story. The publishers of Penny’s book responded.

The publishers wanted Julie to rewrite the review to include Penny’s stupid illiterate Specialty Pronouns. Are they children?

Also speaking of cruise ships…

On the fourth day of a seven-day Mexican Riviera cruise, Jesse Suphan and other passengers onboard the Carnival Cruise Line’s Panorama were denied entry at the port of Puerto Vallarta, because of the number of onboard coronavirus cases. That was the first Mr. Suphan heard about the virus spreading on the ship.

“The captain announced that five people had tested positive for Covid and were quarantining,” Mr. Suphan, a 39-year-old revenue cycle manager, recalled in a telephone interview. “But, then, talking to the crew, they told me there were between 100 and 150 crew members who also tested positive, but the captain didn’t mention that.”

Well naturally not. That might have a harmful effect on the cruise industry. The cruise industry must be protected.

Two days later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans to avoid travel on cruise ships, regardless of their vaccination status. The advisory, the agency’s highest coronavirus warning, came in response to a surge in cases in recent weeks, caused by the spread of the contagious Omicron variant.

There’s also the fact that cruise ships burn 80 thousand gallons of fuel a day and hello global warming? But let’s not talk about that, it’s not cheerful.

But even as case numbers rise, and criticism mounts about the safety of cruising and over cruise line protocols in reporting cases to passengers, ships keep sailing and guests keep embarking…

And 80 thousand gallons of fuel per day per ship keep getting added to the total but never mind, we still have a few good years left, maybe.

Most major cruise lines do not publicly announce the number of coronavirus cases on board their ships, but they are required to submit daily figures to the C.D.C. Currently, the agency is monitoring more than 90 cruise ships, because of reported cases that have reached the agency’s threshold for an investigation. (An investigation is undertaken when a certain number of cases is reported among a percentage of passengers.)

More than 90. How many cruise ships are there in total???

Speaking of cruise ships…

The Crystal Symphony left Miami on Jan. 8, as scheduled, on a two-week cruise. On the way back, things took an unexpected turn.

The climate changed?

The ship was scheduled to arrive in Miami on Saturday, but mid-trip, a United States federal judge ordered the cruise ship seized over a lawsuit regarding unpaid fuel bills. The ship changed course for Bimini, in the Bahamas, according to a cruise tracker, rather than sail into the clutches of federal authorities.

In other words the ship went on the lam. Such an ethical industry.

Steven Fales, 51, an actor and playwright, was on the cruise with a couple of friends “hoping that the pandemic would end and trying to do something adventurous.” The adventure came to an abrupt end when they learned the cruise was being rerouted.

Is there anything less “adventurous” than getting on a cruise ship? Cruises aren’t about adventure, they’re about eating a lot while being on a very large ship. Being rerouted is more adventure-like than staying on course.

Then again, going on cruises in defiance of CDC advice is at least risky, so maybe that should count.

H/t Sackbut

The Gwent cops certainly seem terrified about these OffenSive posters.

“Safely” remove – because they’re radioactive, you see, and poisonous, and wired to explode, and laced with razor blades. Stay 500 feet back and summon the helicopters.

Well no wonder they’re mad at women. Male cops are standing up for themselves at last!

The dangerous sticker-poster tells the story herself:

Meanwhile rape is hardly ever prosecuted. Let’s look at the stats in Gwent, shall we?

MORE than 500 alleged rapes were reported in 2021 – but only five charges were made, according to Gwent Police figures.

Only five charges have come from the incidents, however a large majority of the reported cases – 436 – are still under investigation. Nineteen of the cases have completed investigations with no identified suspect.

Well they probably just don’t have time, when they’re so busy interviewing disabled women in the middle of the night.

Strange doings.

In other words, We Are Fair Cop received a direct message about the arrest of a woman for feminist graffiti and stickering. They didn’t stop with arresting her though. They held her until 3:30 a.m. and then threw her out to get home on her mobility scooter, without her phone, which she always keeps with her in case the battery on the scooter dies.

Word is there may be a valid charge of vandalism…but the police have added “hate crime.” What, because domestic violence doesn’t happen? Or it’s women doing it to men? Or what? Where’s the hate crime? What in hell is wrong with them?

Trump thinks it’s very very very unfair that anyone is investigating his darling little children who just want to play with their teddy bears in peace.

Former President Donald Trump believes that his children are being targeted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Jan. 6 commission and the New York attorney general to deflect attention from President Joe Biden’s failings.

Or – and hear me out for a second – it could be that they did illegal things.

“It’s a very unfair situation for my children. Very, very unfair,” he told Secrets in a telephone call.

You know how he could have avoided it? By maintaining a wall of separation between them and his crimes. Instead of course he raised them to commit crimes, and he allowed Princess Ivanka to install herself and her sinister husband in the White House.

“They are using whatever powers they have. They couldn’t care less. They are vicious people,” Trump said of the panel.

Did Trump use whatever powers he had (and some he didn’t have)? Was he able to care less? Is he a vicious person?

He suggested that the commission investigation is a smokescreen to cover for Biden’s missteps. “It’s a disgrace, what’s going on. They’re using these things to try and get people’s minds off how incompetently our country is being run. And they don’t care. They’ll go after children,” Donald Trump said.

“Children.” Princess Ivanka is 40.

“They’ve done a great job,” he said. “You know Ivanka very well, and you know the quality of her,” he added. “For them to have to go through all this stuff is a disgrace.”

They wouldn’t have “had” to if he hadn’t involved them in his crimes.

It’s Nominate a Queer Icon Time.

Meat Loaf, arguably the most unlikely musician to have ever become a full-fledged pop star, has reportedly died at the age of 74…He was also known, at least by some of us, as an icon of queer masculinity—an inspirational and aspirational figure of manhood and butch lesbianism for people of all genders.

Ooh, Mabel, how queer is that. An icon of manhood and butch lesbianism! I’m so out of touch I can remember when those were two different things, not the same thing with different labels. That’s the joy of queering things though: you get to talk complete nonsense and pretend it’s “iconic.”

Gay and queer aesthetics are known for stepping outside of stereotypical categories for male/masculine and woman/feminine, but they often they make that step in one fairly predictable direction that we call androgyny.

Blah blah blah fucking blah. What “aesthetics”? You mean your clothes, hair, makeup, piercings, tatoos? You boring self-involved trivial nitwit?

Guess what: nobody cares. The world isn’t high school, and in the world nobody cares what other people wear. Nobody is taking notes on your “aesthetic.” We.don’t.care.

This is what people do as a substitute for creativity or intellectual activity or politics or anything else demanding and significant. It’s a shortcut to being interesting, but the trouble is that it’s not interesting. Some shortcuts turn out to lead to the town dump, and this is one of them.

Trump had perhaps his worst week ever:

It included a rebuke from the supreme court over documents related to the 6 January insurrection which Trump incited; news that the congressional committee investigating the riot was closing in on Trump’s inner circle; evidence from New York’s attorney general of alleged tax fraud; and, perhaps most damaging of all, a request from a Georgia prosecutor for a grand jury in her investigation of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

The week ended with the leaking of a document showing that Trump at least pondered harnessing the military in his attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.

Aka his attempts to steal the election in order to make himself unelected dictator.

It is that Department of Justice investigation into the deadly Capitol assault, parallel but separate to the 6 January House committee, which harbors the most legal peril for Trump. Some believe sedition charges for members of the Oath Keepers militia indicate that the inquiry has moved into a higher gear.

…

At a rare press conference earlier this month, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, did not mention Trump by name but sought to reassure critics of his investigation.

“The justice department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law – whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy,” he said in a carefully worded address.

“At any level.”

Sonia Sodha on the triumph of the karenphobes:

Last week, it was announced that [Kate Clanchy] and her publisher, Pan Macmillan, had parted company “by mutual consent” and that it will “revert the rights” and cease distribution of all her work.

The book that prompted this is Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, her memoir of a 30-year teaching career. Rave reviews and an Orwell prize gave way to mixed reactions from readers: some adored it, others thought she used racial and ableist stereotypes to describe her diverse students. Among the readers of colour I know, reactions were just as mixed: some found her descriptors offensive, others thought they were OK, especially in the context of her honesty about her own naivety and prejudices.

She and Pan Macmillan apologized, she intended to rewrite the book, but it wasn’t enough.

Clanchy appears to have been cast beyond the pale, where there is no room for nuance. But it is evident from the testimony of those who know her that she has done a huge amount of good, championing young people whom society too often ignores. Her students have gone on to address the UN, been commissioned to write poetry for the BBC and had their poetry set to music by acclaimed composers.

All very well but she’s a Karen.

How to make sense of her ostracism? Some people are desperate to see the world cast in black and white. Clanchy’s worst crime is not to fit this mould. Of course she doesn’t: none of us can rise above the imperfectly human. Look at her in the round and it’s obvious she’s done more good than most. This is why the strand of anti-racist thinking that is obsessed with the blame and shame all white people should bear for structural discrimination is so corrosive to common cause and understanding. White people who do nothing to challenge racism are terrible, but white people who trip up when trying to do something about it are even worse. The societal misogyny that infects this movement means it sees older white women as the very worst of all. Any expression of distress is the weaponisation of “white women’s tears”. The witch is not permitted to have feelings; they distract from her role as lightning rod for anger at all of society’s ills.

She’s permitted to have them, in fact it’s good that she has them, so that we can gloat, but she’s not permitted to object to having them. She just has to take it.

Pan Macmillan’s overreaction has caused huge collateral damage – it will no longer publish a new anthology of poems by Clanchy’s students – and is no substitute for working at becoming more diverse. “Sensitivity readers”, people who comb manuscripts looking for the potentially offensive, are a crass development: it outsources responsibility and plays on the idea that if a book has the potential to offend, it shouldn’t be published.

Especially in a world where “the potential to offend” can be something as commonplace as saying that a man is not a woman.

Anna Slatz on the Cork outrage:

Susan Stryker, a transgender Professor of gender studies at the University of Arizona, is the first of three keynote presenters at the 25th Lesbian Lives conference, which is being held in March at the University of Cork in Ireland. Its 2022 theme is “solidarity.”

Stryker was one of the first academics who sought to apply critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of “intersectionality” to males who insisted they could become women. In 2020, Stryker wrote an article for Time Magazine drawing and relying on the history of racial segregation to claim that women were merely a social construct. Such comparisons have been extensively decried by Black feminists.

Thus performatively underlining what a man he is – entitled, domineering, contemptuous of women. Women simply can’t pull off that kind of dominance display because everyone would just laugh.

But Stryker’s most infamous work is a 1993 essay subtitled Preforming Transgender Rage, in which he describes himself as a “Harley-straddling, dildo-packing leatherdyke from hell.”

Oh it’s “dildo-packing” now. How “playful.”