Not all conservatives are damn fool anti-vaxxers.

Cue shocked intake of breath – “He wants us all dead!!”

Rebecca Solnit summarizes the danger:

The crisis isn’t just that we had a coup attempt almost a year ago, but that the Republican party has itself become so venal, so corrupt, so ruthless in its quest for power, that it seems assured that we will see further attempts to overrule any election outcomes they don’t like. Already the kind of election laws they’ve pushed across the country seem aimed at such goals, and voter suppression has long been one of their anti-democratic tactics (it played a substantial role in Trump’s 2016 win, and the genuine illegitimacies of that election – foreign interference, anomalies the recount might have uncovered had the Republicans not stopped it – were appropriated as false claims for 2020).

The Republicans made a devil’s bargain decades ago, when they decided that they would not change course to win the votes of an increasingly nonwhite, increasingly progressive people, but would try to suppress those who would vote against them. That is, they pitted themselves against democracy as participatory government and free and fair elections. The rhetoric of the far right makes it clear they are fearful and know their power will ebb if they cannot command and subvert the laws and elections of this nation, and they are aiming at some form of minority rule.

They have to rig the system in order to win, so they are rigging the system. They are hell bent on arranging things so that a conservative minority gets to rule a less conservative majority.

The crisis isn’t just that we had a coup attempt and have a political party that has gone rogue, but that much of the rest of the nation seems to be normalizing or forgetting or sleepwalking through the crisis. The warnings are getting more urgent.

“They’ve decided to burn it all down with us inside,” said NBC anchor Brian Williams on Thursday, in his parting words as an NBC anchor. Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii stated Sunday: “The road to autocracy is paved with overly chill responses from people who would see this all with great clarity if only it were happening in a faraway place.” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy declared, “This is nation-ending stuff we’re dealing with here and folks better wake up soon. I’ll do my part. Think about what yours is.”

We don’t have much time left.

American bro goes on rant shocker.

One, what’s that “(alleged)” doing there? You don’t need an “alleged” in a hypothetical! There is no alleged rapist who is going to sue you for calling him a rapist, because this is a hypothetical, so the words are general, not particular.

Two, wtf is a trans rapist? Someone who identifies as a rapist without actually raping? The issue is actual convicted rapists, not men who say they’re rapists when they’re not.

Three, the issue isn’t “trans persons,” it’s men in women’s prisons. Men. Not persons, men. Your clumsy attempt to cover that up betrays the fact that you know that and are working to hide it. It’s not cute for a man to try to obfuscate the fact that it’s men who rape women, not “persons” who rape women.

Four, the policy, obviously, does one hell of a lot more than “proper recordkeeping.” It puts rapists in women’s prisons. Also it’s not “proper recordkeeping” at all to record rapist men as women.

Five, the issue isn’t “claiming to be trans,” it’s men claiming to be women. Why are you so eager to hide that fact by lying about it?

Six, “no issue here” – that’s easy for you to say, you woman-hating pig.

Oh that’s okay, rape statistics don’t matter.

Police have been criticised for saying they will record rapes by offenders with male genitalia as being committed by a woman if the attacker “identifies as a female”.

Gee why would anyone criticize them for that?

The move, reported by The Scottish Sun on Sunday, comes ahead of proposed new laws to make it easier for people to self-identify as whichever sex they want, which are opposed by some feminist groups.

Feminists are funny that way. We think that only women are women, and that men (as it says on the label) are men.

MacAskill, who is the Alba party MP for East Lothian, having defected from the SNP, said: “As a lawyer for 20 years and justice secretary for almost eight, I’ve seen some legal absurdities. But this tops it all and is dangerous. It’s physically impossible and is about dogma overriding common sense. Women prisoners are being harmed by this and vital crime statistics rendered useless.”

…

Detective Superintendent Fil Capaldi said: “The sex/gender identification of individuals who come into contact with the police will be based on how they present or how they self-declare, which is consistent with the values of the organisation. Police Scotland requires no evidence or certification as proof of biological sex or gender identity other than a person’s self-declaration, unless it is pertinent to any investigation with which they are linked.”

But it is pertinent when it’s rape you absolute numpty.

Letting us all know she’s not backing down and not going away.

Guardian columnist John Harris muses on the contempt for other people displayed by Boris Johnson:

There are two elements to all this: one is Johnson’s Trumpish disdain for some of the most basic components of our democracy – the rule of law, scrutiny of the executive, an independent BBC (which he is now lashing out at yet again). The other is bound up with the prime minister’s apparently dim and disrespectful view of his fellow human beings – which, as revelations about Downing Street parties pile up, is now at the heart of our politics.

Both of those are Trumpish though. They’re very alike, but also very different – Trump entirely lacks that Etonian posh boy vibe that Johnson gets to use to his advantage. Johnson is vulgar in the way Etonian posh boys are and Trump is vulgar in the way crass boys from Queens are – the two are radically different.

Remember what a teacher at Eton wrote to his father in 1982: “Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility … I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.” A justified retort, of course, would be that this is the exact mindset that Eton is designed to produce – but even in that context, Johnson seemed to be in a league of his own.

Trump did not go to Eton, or Andover.

I recently read Sad Little Men, the writer Richard Beard’s eloquent book about private schools and the kind of leaders they produce, which shines light on Cameron and Johnson via his own story of an elite education. In his experience, contempt for the lower orders began with the idea that “everyone else was less special and often stupid”, and blurred into indifference: “We saw from car windows the petrol stations and primary schools and Bovis homes in which less privileged lives played themselves out, but the hopes and dreams of these people didn’t meaningfully exist for us, nor their disappointments and pain.”

Lords of the manor.

What I keep saying. People pretend to be concerned about global warming but they go right on taking cruises and trips involving air travel and buying SUVs and gigantic yachts.

… the superyacht industry is booming – and the number of vessels under construction or on order worldwide has hit a new record. According to figures revealed in the latest edition of Boat International’s Global Order Book, more than 1,200 superyachts are slated to be built – a rise of 25% on last year.

That’s ok. The people who are struggling to stay alive 50 years from now will have every sympathy with contemporary people who just need a little recreation.

“The market’s never been busier,” said Will Christie, a superyacht broker.

…

“Everybody just wants freedom, and ultra-high-net-worth individuals can afford it,” he added. “The ability to escape anywhere is very attractive in the current climate. They think: I don’t need to be stuck in the office, and if you’re worth billions, why should you be?”

Why indeed? They’ll be dead before the planet fries completely, so why should they give up anything?

Critics of the boom in superyachts point to the vastly disproportionate environmental damage produced by the super-rich. “Whether it’s this or private jets or trips to space, they’re just sticking two fingers up at the rest of society,” said Peter Newell, a professor of international relations at Sussex University. “It’s decadent. They’re not comfortable with the constraints that come with accepting collective responsibility for the fate of the planet.”

Being rich does that to people. They think it makes them superior, and thus entitled to say “fuck the rest of society.”

The economic anthropologist Richard Wilk, a distinguished professor at Indiana University in the US, said: “Of course, if you add every superyacht together, it’s just a blip on total greenhouse gas production. But it is symbolic – and the global impact of the 2,000-odd billionaires on the planet are very significant. So it’s part of a pattern of overconsumption by the upper crust.”

In research with his colleague Beatriz Barros, he found that the average billionaire had a carbon footprint thousands of times that of the average person. The global average footprint of CO₂ emitted per person is just under five tonnes, while they estimated that Roman Abramovich – the top polluter according to their list – was responsible for about 33,859 tonnes of carbon emitted in 2018. More than two-thirds of that was the product of his yacht, the 162.5-metre Eclipse.

Well he’s six or seven many many many times more important and special than we 5-tonners are.

If a rapist identifies as a woman that rapist is a woman so SHUT UP TERFS, say the police.

Police have been criticised for saying they will record rapes by offenders with male genitalia as being committed by a woman if the attacker “identifies as a female”.

Rape is a thing men do to women. Women can’t return the favor even if they want to, because women don’t have the right equipment. In other news, crime statistics should be accurate as opposed to fanciful.

Police Scotland said that they would log rapes as being carried out by a woman if the accused person insists, even if they have not legally changed gender.

Oh well if the rapist insists he’s a woman whaddya gonna do?

Kenny MacAskill, the former Scottish justice secretary, asked Police Scotland how it would deal with recording rapes after the new laws take effect. Gary Ritchie, assistant chief constable, set out scenarios where a rapist could be recorded as a woman.

They included “where a person born male obtains a full gender recognition certificate and then commits rape” and “where a person born male but who identifies as a female and does not have a full GRC . . . commits rape”. The Sexual Offences (Scotland) Act 2009 defines rape as nonconsensual penetration with a penis, so it cannot be committed by someone without male genitalia.

…

Detective Superintendent Fil Capaldi said: “The sex/gender identification of individuals who come into contact with the police will be based on how they present or how they self-declare, which is consistent with the values of the organisation. Police Scotland requires no evidence or certification as proof of biological sex or gender identity other than a person’s self-declaration, unless it is pertinent to any investigation with which they are linked.”

Is it not pertinent when the crime is rape?

This made me sit up and take notice.

The point is to say don’t push academics to use “the wrong” pronouns, but if you stop to think more about it your hair stands on end. Universities have institutional policies about something absurdly called “misgendering”? Universities have institutional policies that forbid referring to people by what we’ve all learned from infancy is the natural intuitive unforced way to refer to people? Universities have institutional policies that mandate referring to people by anti-intuitive and inaccurate pronouns? Universities have institutional policies that order employees to perform this entire system of lies?

It takes my breath away.

#PennCheats

Another “no she’s the evil person” open letter:

Dancers who accused a leading choreographer of transphobia have claimed she has jeopardised their safety by publicising her resignation.

She was supposed to go quietly.

Earlier this week, the choreographer said she could not “endure this humiliation any longer” and spoke to the media about her decision to resign.

However, in an open letter seen by the BBC, the dancers claim that, by going public, Kay has caused “potential detriment to our careers”.

Why would that be? Oh, because their bullying was shameful? But then the detriment is their doing, not hers. If your behavior can’t stand publicity then that could indicate the behavior is bad behavior. Maybe the dancers should be thinking hard about why the exposure of their bullying could be detrimental to their careers.

In the letter, the dancers say they want to “set the record straight and to ensure that any dancers under the supervision of Rosie Kay do not undergo the same marginalisation that we have suffered”.

There it is again. They want to be free to bully her and they want her to shut up and take it. They haven’t suffered any “marginalisation.”

Kay said the event on 28 August was supposed to be a bonding dinner for a dance company about to perform Romeo and Juliet. She explained she had wanted to invite dancers round ahead of the show’s opening, after the long months of the pandemic had lowered spirits.

“We’d had no social time because of Covid,” she told the BBC. “I cooked, put candles in the garden, and made a lot of effort as I wanted them to enjoy themselves.”

The dancers see it differently. They told the BBC that she was their boss, in a position of authority, which they felt made it an “unequal situation” from the start. “It was a work environment… she abused her position of power,” one company member said.

By not letting them tell her what to think.

The letter, signed by six members of the company, added: “Rosie spoke about ‘the cake of rights’ and stated women have fought for their slice of rights and now men pretending to be women want a portion of that slice. This is a deeply offensive analogy and due to the fact that two trans non-binary people had a seat at the table, it felt very pointed.”

But however offensive it is, it’s true. Trans “activism” has become all about taking more and more rights away from women. You could change “pretending to be” to “identifying as” to be more tactful, but the taking of rights is all too real. What the board of Rosie Kay’s company did to her is an all too clear example of that circular diminution: if you say out loud that trans dogma is eroding women’s rights then you will be punished, which proves your point.

New Zealand passes a law making it easier to carry fake proof of identity.

Parliament has unanimously passed a sex self-identification law which will make it easier to amend a person’s sex on their birth certificates.

…

Once law, it will mean transgender, intersex, gender diverse, and takatāpui people will no longer need proof of medical treatment or a Family Court declaration to change the sex listed on their birth certificate, but instead apply for it to be changed on the basis of how they identify.

“Today is a day about inclusion–having the right to have a birth certificate that reflects who you know yourself to be,” Internal Affairs Minister Jan Tinetti said, during the third reading of the bill in the House.

Except of course that’s not what birth certificates are for. They’re not about “who you know yourself to be” but who you are in fact, as a matter of record. We all no doubt know ourselves to be perfected beings, beautiful as the dawn, swift as a cheetah, clever as a MacArthur Fellow, wise as Baby Jesus, but birth certificates are about a few dull literal facts. Sex is one of those facts.

“This bill has had some controversy. It’s been a tough journey for our trans- and non-binary community … there have been real people who have been hurt when they have been belittled, mocked, or discriminated against,” Tinetti said.

“A lot of the discussion has been aimed at our transwomen, who, as a cisgender woman, I am proud to stand alongside and call my sisters.”

There’s a reason for that. The reason is that transwomen are men, and their pretending to be women does harm to actual women, and some people actually think that women matter. Weird, I know.

The bill was strongly opposed by groups concerned it would damage women’s rights and protections, and became a lightning rod for culture wars issues.

But sod them, right? Sod women and sod their rights and protections.

H/t Rob

The administration strongly advises them to keep their filthy slutty bitchy greedy mouths shut or else.

Even after a Wednesday team meeting where a source says Penn administration “strongly advised” its swimmers to avoid talking to the media about the situation surrounding transgender Penn swimmer Lia Thomas, a second female Penn swimmer has stepped forward to speak out via an exclusive interview with OutKick.

Now why would the administration lean on them to shut up about it? The administration would doubtless say “Because transphobia!!” but that’s just virtuespeak for “Because we know how this looks.” The administration doesn’t want the cheated swimmers to tell the media how angry and frustrated they are about being cheated.

The second female Penn swimmer to speak out, who was granted anonymity due to what is viewed as threats from the university, activists, and the political climate, wants people to know that Penn swimmers are “angry” over the lack of fairness in the sport as Lia Thomas destroys the record books and brings fellow teammates to tears.

The second Penn swimmer to come forward was at the University of Akron Zippy Invitational where she watched Lia Thomas beat fellow teammate Anna Kalandadze by 38 seconds in the 1650 freestyle. OutKick’s source described Penn swimmers on the Akron pool deck as upset and crying, knowing they were going to be demolished by Thomas.

They weren’t happy for him? They weren’t rejoicing that he gets to live his dream?

After just five meets and the Akron Invitational, Thomas has not just destroyed opponents. The Penn freestyle records are being rewritten by a swimmer who was second-team All-Ivy league in 2018-19 — as a male.

Akron was an absolute beatdown by Thomas, but it wasn’t without disgust from fans who were in the building watching meet, pool, and school records drop one after the other.

“Usually everyone claps, everyone is yelling and cheering when someone wins a race. Lia touched the wall and it was just silent in there,” OutKick’s source said during a phone interview.

Some people still recognize cheating when they see it.

According to OutKick’s source, Thomas was unhappy with her time after the 500 race, but while standing in front of teammates, made sure to mention, “At least I’m still No. 1 in the country.”

“Well, obviously she’s No. 1 in the country because she’s at a clear physical advantage after having gone through male puberty and getting to train with testosterone for years,” OutKick’s source said. “Of course you’re No. 1 in the country when you’re beating a bunch of females. That’s not something to brag about.”

He’s at a clear physical advantage.

A team source who was at Wednesday’s meeting says the administration drew a line in the sand and announced that Thomas wasn’t going anywhere and it was non-negotiable.

Despite the obvious, glaring, shameful unfairness of it. Take a bow, Penn.

After years of battling for Title IX and equal rights with men in college athletics, the biological women are pretty much being told to shut their mouths and move along by the school and the NCAA.

…

During an interview published Thursday by swimming outlet SwimSwam.com, Thomas spoke out for the first time since destroying pool records and said, “I’m just thrilled to still be able to swim and I love to compete and I love to see how fast I can go. It’s sorta an ongoing evolution of what I think I can go.”

As for the records Thomas now holds, he doesn’t seem to have any regret in smashing biological female swimming marks.

“I’m proud of my times, my ability to keep swimming and to continue competing. And they’re suited up times. I’m happy with them and my coaches are happy with them,” Thomas added.

And that was that from Thomas. No shame. No mention of not claiming the records so that they can remain the property of biological women. Thomas is moving on — with the records.

No shame; smug bragging instead.

As Anna reminds us, Weimar Germany did have a sexuality institute which the Nazis did destroy. Wikipedia:

The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was an early private sexology research institute in Germany from 1919 to 1933. The name is variously translated as Institute of Sex Research, Institute of Sexology, Institute for Sexology or Institute for the Science of Sexuality. The Institute was a non-profit foundation situated in Tiergarten, Berlin. It was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld, who since 1897 had run the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (‘Scientific-Humanitarian Committee’), which campaigned on progressive and rational grounds for LGBT rights and tolerance.

But it didn’t call it that, one because that’s not German and two because there was no such label then. “LGBT rights” is a contemporary shorthand; it doesn’t pre-date the Nazis.

The Nazi book burnings in Berlin included the archives of the Institute. After the Nazis gained control of Germany in the 1930s, the institute and its libraries were destroyed as part of a Nazi government censorship program by youth brigades, who burned its books and documents in the street.

The Nazis were very keen on keeping men Manly and women Womanly. They weren’t what you’d call subtle thinkers.

At the institute, Magnus Hirschfeld championed the doctrine of sexual intermediacy. This proposed form of classification said that every human trait existed on a scale from masculine to feminine. Masculine traits were characterized as dominant and active while feminine traits were passive and perceptive. The classification was further divided into the subgroups of sex organs, physical characteristics, sex drive or sexuality, and psychological characteristics. Hirschfeld’s belief was that all human beings possess both masculine and feminine traits regardless of their sex. In fact, he believed that no one was fully masculine or fully feminine but rather a blend of the two.

So then why call them “feminine” and “masculine” at all? If we all have some of each why not come up with some less confusing way to talk about the subject?

A man with a female sex drive, for example, would be homosexual, whereas someone with male sex organs and mostly female psychological characteristics would likely be transgender.^[7]

A man with a female sex drive would be homosexual? I don’t think that’s right. I think they mean orientation or attraction, not drive.

At any rate, it existed and the Nazis did trash it but it wasn’t the loving parent of today’s ideologues.

It’s in the Daily Mail. Maybe that’s because knowing that men are not women is a loathsome far-right opinion – or maybe it’s because journalism to the left of the Daily Mail has lost its fucking mind.

UPenn trans swimmer Lia Thomas broke her silence on Thursday in response to the widespread outrage over her smashing women’s swim records and praised the controversial IOC rules for transgender athletes.

He’s lost muscle, he’s lost strength – but he still has more than women so hahaha bitches. He says it’s totally fair.

An anonymous female swimmer at UPenn gave an explosive interview to sports website OutKick on Thursday expressing her fury and frustration, and how she and most of her female teammates are upset because their coach, Mike Schnur, is allowing a transgender athlete to take a woman’s spot because he ‘just really likes winning.’

He likes it so much he’s happy to let Thomas cheat. How very sporting.

In a reversal of the IOC’s previous stance, the new guidelines, set to be rolled out after the Beijing Winter Olympics this year, say that there should be no presumption that trans women have an automatic advantage over other women.

Despite the fact that they do have a built-in anatomical advantage, or rather multiple advantages. It’s not a “presumption,” it’s thoroughly documented.

[Thomas] also noted her teammates as a continued support system through her transition and the national criticism she has since faced.

‘The team has been unbelievably supportive since the beginning, you know, teammates and coaches….I feel very supported. Just treated like any other member of the women’s team,’ she said.

But the unidentified female swimmer told OutKick that support is ‘fake.’

‘When the whole team is together, we have to be like, “Oh my gosh, go Lia, that’s great, you’re amazing.“ It’s very fake,’ she said.

‘Pretty much everyone individually has spoken to our coaches about not liking this,’ the anonymous Ivy League athlete told Outkick. ‘Our coach just really likes winning. He’s like most coaches. I think secretly everyone just knows it’s the wrong thing to do.’

But ssshhh it’s a secret.

latsot alerts us to a useful Twitter thread.

There are no images or other toys so I’ll just quote the rest of it.

Firstly, I’d need to know that there was actually research being done on the effects of the policy, particularly wrt those most likely to be affected by the loss of sex as a clearly defined category (women, gay people, anyone affected by safeguarding procedures).

I’d need to know it was somehow possible to gather and analyse these data reliably, despite the confusion between sex and gender. I’d want to see the data tracking patterns over a long time period to monitor societal changes.

I’d want to see that there hadn’t been an increase in crime against women. I’d want evidence that women were not self-excluding from situations that they would have accessed on a single-sex basis. I’d want to know that there was no reduction in the services that women need, and that women were still willing to access them.

I’d want to know that women’s chances in sport had not been affected. I’d want to know that religious women hadn’t suffered due to loss of single-sex spaces.

I’d want to know that safeguarding procedures were still robust, that children still had rights to single-sex facilities, that people could still request, and access, a health or care provider of their own sex when it was important to them.

I’d want to know that demographic data was still sound, that service planning hadn’t been negatively impacted. I’d want to track any effect on the pay gap and on women’s employment. I’d want to know there were no human rights abuses (such as mixed-sex prisons).

I’d want to know if the policy made things better, worse, or unchanged for the most vulnerable in society. That’s just off the top of my (non-expert) head. What have I got wrong? What have I missed?

There’s all that, but there’s also just the fundamental ground-level fact that truth matters. There are some categories a human can identify into or out of, and there are others where that makes no sense. We need things to make sense. People can play and dream and imagine and fantasize that they are birds or planets or trees or the other sex all day long, but they can’t impose their fantasies on the rest of us. That may seem boring and confining but is it really? It seems to me that privacy is good for fantasy – more free, less beholden to anyone else. Anyway whether it is or not, we all have the right to remain non-complicit in anyone else’s fantasy.

India Willoughby is appropriating the Nazi persecution of lesbian and gay people to himself.

The Nazis made gay men wear pink triangles.

There was no such thing as an “LGBTQ” library in Nazi Germany. The category did not exist. India doesn’t call himself a gay man, he calls himself a woman.

Didn’t happen.

Ah yes people who object to men stealing sporting wins from women are “nasty” and to be shrugged off. Shrug shrug shruggity shrug, bitches. The Daily Beast:

A trans university swimmer attacked by right-wing media for smashing records in her first meet as a woman says she expected some “pushback” but has chosen not to “engage” in the nasty online debate.

The scare-quotes should be on “as a woman” not “engage.” There’s no such thing as “as a woman.” If you’re not a woman then you’re not a woman; you don’t get to take women’s stuff by saying you’re doing it “as a woman.”

Over the weekend, Lia Thomas—now a member of the University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team after three years on the men’s team—smashed multiple swimming records at the Zippy Invitational in Ohio…

Yes quite, after three years on the men’s team, because he’s a man, with a man’s build and a man’s strength. “She” set records, the Daily Beast drools. Yes of course he did, because he competed against women.

The New York Post Editorial Board slammed Thomas in an essay on Thursday, calling the swimmer “selfish” for competing among women. 

And what do you call it, Brooke Leigh Howard of the Daily Beast? Not selfish? Not a shameless punch in the face to all the women in those races?

Thomas, though, in an interview with the SwimSwam Podcast, said that the guidelines from the International Olympic Committee for intersex and trans athletes are fair, with rules that are inclusive and “promote competition integrity” while allowing athletes to compete in whatever category makes them comfortable.

Well he would, wouldn’t he. Thomas says it’s ok for him to cheat – of course he says that, so that he can go on cheating. And the categories are not there to make men “comfortable” competing against women.

Oh yes, completely fair, nothing to dispute here.

Being male is a proven unfair advantage in competing against women.

I daresay “Lia” Thomas would see the point if one or two or six other men decided they were most comfortable competing against him and the dwindling number of women who got that far.

Another target.

She’s not wrong though.