The head of Vale of Glamorgan Council calls lesbians at a Pride march “hate-filled protesters.”

Love? She calls it love? She calls a malicious lie about lesbians at Pride “love”?

Joan Smith reviews the new JK Rowling novel:

Like its predecessor, The Ink Black Heart is a doorstopper, giving Rowling space to explore the psychology of individuals who abuse women online, but it is evidence of her ingenuity as a writer that this intention only gradually becomes clear.

…

“He’s convinced people I worked as a prostitute when I was broke,” Edie tells Robin. “He sent me pictures of my dead mother, claiming I told lies about her death. And the fandom believes all of it, and they attack me for stuff I’ve never done, never said, things I don’t believe.” The final sentence is not just heartfelt, it could be Rowling speaking about herself after a couple of years of persecution by individuals posting wild misrepresentations of her work and views online.

It could be many many other women, too.

Academic debate 2022:

There is but one Idea, and many academics to exchange it.

Originally a comment by Army Ant on People became slotted.

This isn’t surprising at all. Anthropologists are very in love with all types of quackery (cultural relativism, post-structuralism, etc). It isn’t even a new phenomenon, BTW – they’ve been like this for several decades now. They also often seriously say things like (paraphrased, of course) “there’s no objective reality”, and basically that a cultural group’s emotional truth about its past/history is objective truth or at least should be treated as such.

This bullshit claim that sequential hermaphrodites (like clownfish and some arachnids) somehow “prove” biological sex isn’t real or that there aren’t just two of them is so utterly asinine. It’s akin to one of those “age sliders” claiming that since many organisms (including us) change from pre-pubescent child (juvenile, immature) to adult and then to old person/individual (senescence), biological ageing doesn’t exist – and we should totally accept that creepy 50-year-old who claims to be a 6-year-old as *~valid~* and let him play with the real 6-year-olds unsupervised. *facepalm*

A little history lesson…

All of the ancient cultures that used the oldest writing systems we’ve found and deciphered* (cuneiform script, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Linear B, oracle bone script -Chinese-) had terms/words for male and female (animals and humans). In fact, some ancient languages (notably Sumerian; sort of) used the same word to designate human females and their non-human counterparts. Others lacked an adult/non-adult distinction for human females (that is, no separate terms for “woman” and “girl”; IIRC Old Tamil was such a language, young or old, human or animal, everyone female is just called “pen”).

Anyway, none of the earliest cultures that wrote and whose writing we’ve deciphered were under the delusion that we’re a single-sex species, or that there are more than two sexes – or that people are whatever they say they are. The Sumerians especially (I’ve read a lot of the private letters they wrote) would have absolutely no patience for things like someone wanting to be addressed only by special snowflake pronouns that person just invented.

Most of these ancient scripts had symbols for “male” and “female” and/or “woman” and “man” that were completely unambiguous (case in point: Sumerian’s stylized penis and stylized vulva symbols, or the oracle bone script’s “seated person with protruding breasts” symbol). The same is true of the ancient languages written with those scripts/systems: in most of them, the terms for male and female were biologically descriptive (in contrast, the Nahuatl term for woman means “skirt and huipil”, the Mongolian one means “beltless”, and the one most Tibetan languages use means something like “a person of low birth”).

So, as a whole, the most ancient cultures with deciphered writing were a bunch of binarist, trans-excluding, heteronormative, allonormative** fucks.

* One of the scripts we haven’t yet deciphered (the Indus script; y’know, Harappa/Mohenjo-Daro) almost certainly had a specific sign/hieroglyph to refer to males.

** A term the asexual community uses to refer to people who aren’t under the delusion that everyone is asexual.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on People became slotted.

“It’s not just complex in the context of intersex … Our bodies are far more variable than our categories.”

This makes it sound like people with DSD (or “intersex” *as they would rather not be called), are more numerous than they really are, and their existence somehow blurs sex into a spectrum, ruining our ability to figure out who is male and who is female. It’s like saying that the existence of conjoined twins throws into doubt the classification of humans as bipedal tetrapods, and that to question that human limb number is anything but a spectrum is hateful bigotry.

Western science recognized only one sex—the male—and considered the female body an inferior version of it. The shift historians call the “two-sex model” served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions

…I’m pretty sure people have always and everywhere noticed that there are two!

They want to be able to say that the sexual binary is a Western, colonialist invention imposed on other peoples against their will. This allows activists to claim more woke cookies by being able to tar Western ideas further. Never mind that there are plenty of good reasons to oppose Western colonialism without having to add this genderist bullshit to the list of charges. It also implies that the poor, benighted Indigenous societies had no ideas of their own about sex, and that they would have been completely mystified as to why their society’s gender non-conformists weren’t capable of performing the biological functions of the sex they weren’t. If gender is primary and sex is “assigned”, shouldn’t all those Two Spirit people be able to have kids according to their inner feelings rather than the inconsequential details of their biology? Damn those Western Colonialists, ruining the Edenic Gender paradise where trans-identified men can menstruate and trans-identified females can be fathers. Talk about spoiler alert!

It’s telling that they say that the introduction of the completely imaginary and arbitrary sex binary helped enforce gender and racial divisions. First and foremost, gender divisions (i.e sexism) are used to enforce patriarchy. Sex comes first; beyond the basics of reproductive biology, the limitations and constraints on what women and men are allowed or expected to do (i.e. gender) are applied to the sexed bodies of humans under patriarchy.

*And transactivists will keep using the term because “intersex” suits their “sex is a spectrum” agenda much better than “differences of sexual development” or “disorders of sexual development” because the former suggests a huge unmapped territory between the sexes, while the latter indicates the failure to achieve the usual developmental endpoint of being one or the other sex.

There was a protest at the Hampstead Ladies Pond today. No doubt that’s why India Willoughby went there and took his gloating taunting misogynist selfie.

But at least the documents are totally secure at Mar-a-Lago, because it’s not as if anyone can just waltz in off the street.

According to an article from the Organized Crime & Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a Ukrainian woman posing as a member of the Rothschild banking dynasty is under [FBI] investigation after infiltrating the private members club under a false pretense.

Inna Yashchyshyn, 33, allegedly lied to members that she was a Rothschild heiress and mingled with Trump, US Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and others at Mar-a-Lago functions.

OCCRP, in conjunction with the Pittsburgh Gazette, reported that Yashchyshyn had demonstrated “the ease with which someone with a fake identity and shadowy background” could bypass security at Trump’s club.

Darn. I thought they were on top of this whole security thing.

Yashchyshyn – the daughter of an Illinois truck driver – maintained that she was a Rothschild heiress while holding a position as president of United Hearts of Mercy, founded by Florida-based Russian oligarch Valery Tarasenko in Canada in 2015.

So you’ve got your posing as a Rothschild and you’ve got your Russian oligarch. Interesting recipe.

Typical Willoughby: taunting women with his ability to invade their spaces.

Hur hur heehee smirk smirk.

Update: Now he’s blocking everyone so I’ll add a grab.

Another battle between/among a children’s hospital and Libs of TikTok/Chaya Raichik:

Children’s National Hospital has been inundated with threatening emails and phone calls after an influential right-wing Twitter account published a recording that falsely suggested the hospital is performing hysterectomies on transgender children, a hospital spokeswoman said…

The recording, made by Libs of TikTok founderChaya Raichik, features twotelephone operatorsat the renowned D.C. medical facility stating — in response to Raichik’squestions — that a 16-year-old trans boy would be eligible for a hysterectomy at the hospital’s gender development clinic. Children’s has not disputed the authenticity of the recording but said the employees provided inaccurate information.

“None of the people who were secretly recorded by this activist group deliver care to our patients,” hospital spokeswoman Ariana Ahmadi Perez said. “We do not and have never performed gender-affirming hysterectomies for anyone under the age of 18.”

That’s nice as far as it goes, but note that they do think there is such a thing as a “gender-affirming hysterectomy,” in other words they remove women’s healthy uteruses [or uteri if you prefer] on the basis of a belief in magic gender. That’s actually quite scandalous on its own.

The scrutiny of Children’s comes just weeks after Libs of TikTok similarly targeted Boston Children’s Hospital over its care for transgender people. In that instance, the account highlighted a video produced by the hospital discussing “gender-affirming hysterectomies.”

But there again, you see, calling it “care” is a little strange. It’s major surgery for no strictly medical reason. The reason is psychological, and the reality is it’s a very drastic kind of “care” in response to feelings and thoughts.

The uproar over transgender care at children’s hospitals comes as lawmakers in many states are seeking to curb LGBTQ rights in classrooms and on athletic fields.

That’s just meaningless slop. The issue here isn’t LGB rights at all, it’s specifically T “rights,” and it’s in dispute exactly what those rights are. Lawmakers are not trying to stop lesbians and gay men turning up on athletic fields. Precision is essential in journalism.

Raichik — a former real estate salesperson who has operated under various online pseudonyms — has amassed 1.3 million followers with posts that avidly stoke the nation’s culture wars, with a particular focus on LGBTQ issues. Her previous targets have included schools and Pride events, said Ari Drennen, LGBTQ program director for Media Matters of America.

The new focus on children’s hospitals is particularly worrisome, Drennen said, bringing the potential for violence and harassment directed at families seeking medical care.

“I think most people should be able to agree that health-care decisions are not best made by angry internet mobs,” Drennen said.

Sure, but most people should also be able to agree that health-care decisions are not best made by people in the grip of a delusion about magic gender.

It seems the police removed lesbians from a Pride Cymru march today.

Just the lesbians. Not the men threatening the lesbians, just the lesbians.

Pride Cymru is proud of expelling lesbians.

Trans rights are human rights and lesbian rights don’t exist. Capeesh?

Also lesbians are cunts.

Oh really? What historians?

That’s an ambiguous, not to say sneaky, thing to say. Even if there are some historians who talk about a “two-sex model,” it’s absurd to claim that all historians do as a matter of course – it’s absurd to treat it as universally accepted professional jargon.

It’s actually one Thomas Laqueur, who made the claim in a book titled Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, in 1990. Some people were impressed, others were not. SciAm is being deceptive at best in saying “historians” say it, implying all of them do.

The Washington Post has an interesting detail:

Federal Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart read the affidavit and approved the search on Aug. 5. Three days later, FBI agents dressed in polos and khakis executed the search warrant at the Palm Beach estate, carting away an additional 20 boxes of items from a bedroom, office and a first-floor storage room, according to an inventory of what was retrieved from the property that was made public earlier this month.

A bedroom and an office. I guess we should rejoice they didn’t find any in the lobby or the hotel dining room?

The affidavit says federal agents sought permission to conduct the search after reviewing the contents of 15 boxes Trump returned to the National Archives earlier this year and finding found documents with classification markings. Some were marked “HCS,” a category of highly classified government information; others related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and material meant not to be shared with foreign nations. The “HCS” acronym stands for “HUMINT Control Systems” and refers to the government systems used to protect intelligence gathered from secret human sources, the affidavit says.

Why would a former president even want that stuff? It’s not his business any more, so what would he think he was doing with it? Apart from selling it to the highest bidder?

The affidavit also includes a May 25 letter from Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran to the Justice Department, defending the president’s conduct by arguing Trump had the ultimate classification authority within the government. 

How could that possibly be true? The job doesn’t continue after you lose the election; you’re out, you’ve finished, you don’t get to play any more.

Former Trump people tell us he never did bother to learn how to handle documents.

A former Trump official told CNN that they were not surprised to hear that the National Archives found boxes with classified records that “were unfoldered, intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly (sic) identified.”

According to this source, the former President was known to walk around both the White House and Mar-a-Lago and pull documents out of boxes and look at them, then put them in other boxes or to the side, often with no method or reasoning to it. One source said that Trump was constantly putting things into stacks and leaving them around his office to go through later. These stacks often included everything from newspaper clippings to the Presidential Daily Briefing. 

Sources also said Trump would write notes on the back of other presidential documents — even when aides told him not to.

Another source described how Trump would show off presidential documents to visitors including the letters between himself and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, indicating how lax the protocol seemed to be around these documents.

This is one consequence of being both stupid and lazy. Trump is too stupid to grasp that being president isn’t the same as being the crooked head of a crooked real estate swindle. Trump is also too lazy to figure out that he’s too stupid to understand his change of jobs and too lazy to do the work to become slightly less stupid on the subject. You have to be really dim and incurious to think you treat official papers like so much scrap paper left over from printing contracts.

Ah isn’t that adorable.

(He didn’t really get it from Marks & Sparks.)

Hur hur.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on 9 a.m. Pacific time.

After reviewing the affidavit (it’s here, the link @6 is to something else), I would say it’s not a completely uninformative nothingburger, but not terribly illuminating or new.

My notes:

— A criminal investigation was opened after the return of the 15 boxes. In other words, it’s not just the discovery that Trump continued to withhold documents that triggered a criminal inquiry.

— Of the 15 boxes that Trump voluntarily turned over, there were 67 documents marked confidential, 92 marked secret, and 25 top secret. Many also carried other designations, including those relating to human intelligence (i.e. sources)

— According to the FBI agent, many of the documents contain national defense information, which is a basis for criminal liability separate and apart from any classification status (this is not really new info)

— The classified documents were not kept in any orderly fashion and were interspersed with other nonclassified materials

— some of the documents bear what appear to be Trump’s handwritten notes (unclear whether those notes were made during his time in office or later)

— Trump’s counsel wrote a letter to investigators pointing out the president’s authority to declassify, and demanded that the letter be provided to any court. The DOJ did in fact attach the letter to the warrant application; Trump’s position was not “hidden” from the judge

None of the unredacted portions shed any light on how DOJ came to believe there were additional materials being withheld. Unsurprising as that would reveal sources and methods.

The BBC offers some summaries:

The Department of Justice – which obtained the search warrant – described its work as a criminal investigation over the improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorised spaces.

A criminal investigation of Trump, that is.

The 38-page affidavit said there was “probable cause” to believe that “evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed” breaking federal laws would be found at Trump’s home.

Not a coincidence.

Trump is truth socialing his views.

Affidavit heavily redacted!!! Nothing mentioned on “Nuclear,” a total public relations subterfuge by the FBI & DOJ, or our close working relationship regarding document turnover – WE GAVE THEM MUCH. Judge Bruce Reinhart should NEVER have allowed the Break-In of my home. He recused himself two months ago from one of my cases based on his animosity and hatred of your favorite President, me. What changed? Why hasn’t he recused himself on this case? Obama must be very proud of him right now!

You have the right to remain silent…

What Judicial Watch had to do with it:

Not long after the National Archives acknowledged in February that it had retrieved 15 boxes of presidential records from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, Trump began fielding calls from Tom Fitton, a prominent conservative activist.

Fitton, the longtime head of the legal activist group Judicial Watch, had a simple message for Trump — it was a mistake to give the records to the Archives, and his team should never have let the Archives “strong-arm” him into returning them, according to three sources familiar with the matter.Those records belonged to Trump, Fitton argued, citing a 2012 court case involving his organization that he said gave the former President authority to do what he wanted with records from his own term in office.

Fitton told Trump he should not give up any more records.

While Trump continued to publicly tout his cooperation with the Archives, privately the former President began obsessing over Fitton’s arguments, complaining to aides about the 15 boxes that were handed over and becoming increasingly convinced that he should have full control over records that remained at Mar-a-Lago, according to people with knowledge of his behavior at the time.

This is where Trump’s stupidity comes into play: he obsesses over what one guy said to him instead of considering what a range of legal experts think. Trump is a one guy kind of guy.

Even people close to the former President have begun to privately question the competence of the legal team around him, particularly Christina Bobb, the former One America News Network TV host who has become one of the faces of Trump’s legal team in the aftermath of the Mar-a-Lago search.

Here we see one of the drawbacks of being a flagrant bully and cheat: the finer legal minds may decide they just don’t feel like squandering their talents on a flagrant bully and cheat.

Trump’s advisers have made it clear they want this fight to be a political not legal battle.

Well of course they do. A legal battle is not good for him, because he’s a crook. If he makes it a political battle he can win by shouting and fussing and carrying on.

Some of Trump’s allies believe the former President is more secure than ever, at least politically speaking. In the days following the FBI search, Trump raised millions of dollars and saw an outpouring of support — including from his potential GOP rivals in a 2024 presidential primary.

The head of the Asshole Party sees an outpouring of support, because they gotta lotta assholes in that party.

Hmmmm.

Hungary’s state audit office has issued a report about the risks of the country’s education system being “too feminine”, saying it could hurt the development of boys and create demographic problems.

…

“The phenomenon called ‘pink education’ has numerous economic and social consequences,” states the report by the state body, which is seen as close to the nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán.

Why is it called that though? What color is “masculine” education? Does “masculine” education also have numerous economic and social consequences?

“If education favours feminine traits” such as “emotional and social maturity” and “provokes the overrepresentation of women in universities, equality (of the sexes) will be considerably weakened”, the report concludes.

Seriously? They’re going with that? They’re saying emotional and social maturity is bad? They want more manly emotional and social cluelessness and crudity? Less thought, more bullying?

The report adds that boyish traits of creativity and innovation are “necessary for the optimal development of the economy”.

Who says those are boyish traits? And how do they interact with social and emotional maturity? Is there any reason all four traits can’t co-exist?

Tomorrow is going to be interesting.

A federal judge in Florida on Thursday ordered that a redacted version of the affidavit used to obtain a warrant for former President Donald J. Trump’s Florida residence be unsealed by noon on Friday — paving the way for the disclosure of potentially revelatory details about a search with enormous legal and political implications.

It will be heavily redacted to protect people Trump is going to want to have killed.

Justice Department officials had previously suggested they will abide by [the judges’] general guidance but push hard to scrub anything that could expose witnesses in the case to intimidation or retribution by Mr. Trump’s supporters. After the search at Mar-a-Lago, the F.B.I. reported a surge in threats against its agents; an armed man tried to breach the bureau’s Cincinnati field office, before being killed in a shootout with the local police.

They want to protect the gang boss.

Following up on Screechy Monkey’s tip about a target letter – Google turns up nothing current but Twitter is more helpful.