Francine Prose was supposed to interview Blake Bailey, who has just published a hefty and admiring biography of Philip Roth, but the interview was called off because uh oh.

This was the first I’d heard about what the email termed the “recent developments surrounding Blake Bailey”. But it took just two key strokes to learn that several women have come forward with extremely disturbing allegations about the biographer. These range from accounts of reckless behavior with female students he’d taught in a New Orleans junior high school (dirty jokes, encouraging girls to write about their sex lives) to more recent and highly believable accusations of rape. No charges have been made. Bailey has denied all allegations. His publisher has cancelled a second 10,000-copy printing of the book and halted its distribution, ending all publicity and promotional events.

… Bailey’s refusal to censure (or even express a twinge of disapproval) of Roth’s odious mistreatment of many of his lovers was interpreted by other critics as a sign of moral failure or complicity. The devastating way in which Roth broke up with one woman who adored him – telling her to leave his house keys on her way out – is no more than a punchline that ends one of Bailey’s chapters. But even the less admiring reviews were, as they say, ink, and Philip Roth: The Biography was already appearing on several bestseller lists before the dream publication imploded.

Most of the time misogyny is not a problem, but once in a blue moon it will put a kink in the plans.

Prose found the biography entertaining, but…

But even as I tried to read it uncritically, for entertainment, certain sentences jumped out at me, details that seemed unnecessary, excessive, prurient or simply strange. The odd claim that childbirth had withered Roth’s first wife’s vagina; the suggestion that Roth was more excited about having dinner with Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark, both important writers, when he learned that their daughter was home from Yale; the description of Roth’s particular sexual acts with women mentioned by name….

Bailey describes Roth’s firing of an earlier biographer, Ross Miller, who thought Roth was a misogynist. And much of the recent publicity has surrounded the care with which Roth chose the more simpatico Bailey – whose previous books included biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever – to write his life. In light of the allegations against Bailey, and his neutral responses to Roth at his worst, one can’t help thinking: they found each other.

But Prose goes on to question the slamming of the door on Bailey.

Meanwhile there is a parallel narrative to the one about two guys with serious problems with women. And that is the story of Bailey’s book having been pulled from circulation. It’s all perfectly legal, thanks to a clause that is now standard in many publishing contracts, added over the objections of the Authors Guild and many writers and agents. Such provisions – the so-called morals clause – permit publishers to terminate a contract and even demand the return of an advance if the author is accused of “immoral, illegal, or publicly condemned behavior”. The idea is to protect the publisher in cases like Bailey’s, but the slippery slope is obvious. It’s easy to imagine the Twitter storm of unproven rumors destroying years of work. And how can we ask publishers to be our arbiters, to distinguish the moral from the immoral? Plenty of books have been written and published by politicians with blood on their hands.

I find that paragraph unpleasantly ironic, given that she joined the people who objected when PEN America gave an award to Charlie Hebdo after the slaughter. I’ve admired several of her novels but I did not admire her actions then.

Originally a comment by Enzyme on That stat in a vacuum.

…a false conclusion that insinuates…

Yeah, but no. What’s gone on here – and I think it’s a fairly common mistake – is a slide from inference to implication or (in this case) insinuation.

Why does a disease apparently hit some populations harder than others? It might be that biological explanations can be quickly eliminated; but they aren’t wild, and they don’t imply or insinuate anything as morally loaded as the idea that there is something inherently wrong with the more vulnerable.

For example: imagine that the genetic lottery has thrown up a gene that makes carriers that bit more resistant to a certain pathogen. And imagine that that gene happens to be more common in population A than B. People from population B are therefore that bit more likely to succumb to that pathogen. One might infer from that a claim about inherent inferiority among Bs: but it’s not – or at least, it doesn’t have to be – implied. Nature doesn’t work like that.

It’s perplexing – and counterproductive – that this kind of highly moralised inference gets quite so much traction. If a claim about biology in this context is false, then it’s false, and we try to solve the problem by another route. But “worse at resisting this virus”, even if true, wouldn’t imply “worse all told”. That should be pretty obvious. The listener has to do the work to add that; but complaining about insinuations from bare hypotheses concerning reality hides that fact.

Things not to care about:

Many Muslims consider it offensive to depict the Prophet Mohammed in any circumstances – even if those depictions are not intended to be mocking.

I don’t care. I just really don’t care, in any way. You might as well say many hoopoops consider it offensive to depict hurpurps in any circumstances. It’s not my problem. Now if you were offering a chain of reasoning to explain why Xs consider Y offensive, with some real-world harm at the end of it, I might care, but just the stand-alone finding offensive is a big fat nothing. Or it’s worse than a nothing, because it becomes a pretext to punish and threaten and kill people, for an utterly stupid worthless me me me reason.

Religious people can have their rules about what’s “offensive” within their own community of believers, within reason (they can’t murder each other over it), but those “rules” are meaningless to people outside the community of believers, and we don’t care about them. We don’t care. They don’t matter. They’re not important. The “offense” is factitious – it’s only there as a pretext for flying into a rage. It’s a way to make the religion seem important and scary. It’s all dreck and it’s long past time for people to grow up about this nonsense.

People gathered in protest outside Batley Grammar School, in Batley, near Bradford, West Yorkshire, this week after a teacher showed students a cartoon of the Prophet, widely reported as taken from the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

Commenting on the matter, Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick said children should be taught “contentious issues appropriately”, adding: “It must be right that a teacher can appropriately show images of the Prophet Mohammed.”

However, Dr Alyaa Ebbiary, a researcher in Islamic studies at the SOAS University of London, believes the Muslim community at large would disagree with Mr Jenrick’s comments.

I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. “The Muslim community” can disagree all it likes, but it doesn’t get to impose its taboos and fears and rules on everyone.

Dr Ebbiary said: “There is a lot in Islamic legal and theological texts prohibiting image-making, in general and in relation to the sacred more specifically.”

I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. Islamic legal and theological texts don’t apply to everyone else, and everyone else is not obliged to pay attention to them or respect them. If you’re putting together a model from instructions, that doesn’t mean I have to follow the instructions too.

It doesn’t matter. We don’t have to care. You can’t make us care.

Remember, kids – women are never allowed to have anything just for them. Never never never never.

Today, on Lesbian Visibility Day, we will change the subject.

It tends to be hard to pin down what people are talking about when they talk about Critical Race Theory. Is it that nonsense from Robin DiAngelo (who is white) claiming that a whole list of good things like reading and thinking carefully are white? Or is it people patiently reminding us that mass incarceration isn’t just some random accident?

TIME attempted an explainer.

Here’s a specific current example: consider the fact that a disproportionate amount of people from Black and Latinx communities are being impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the CDC, Black and Latinx people are twice as likely die from the virus as white people. A person considering that stat in a vacuum might assume that genetic or biological factors are to blame—a false conclusion that insinuates that there is something inherently wrong with Black and Latinx bodies. However, a person applying a critical race theory framework to this issue would also ask how historical racism—which manifests today in everything from access to clean air to treatment by medical professionals—might be influencing this statistic, and would thus arrive at a much more complete and nuanced explanation.

If that’s all it is…it’s not so much a theory as pointing out the fucking obvious. Yes of course African Americans have had poverty forced on them for generations by a million things like redlining and all-white labor unions and barriers to promotion (Michelle Obama’s father couldn’t get out of the damn boiler room because those other jobs weren’t for the likes of him) and crap schools and crap city planning and on and on. If that’s all it is why doesn’t everyone subscribe to it?

Miserable theocratic shits.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been sentenced to a further year in prison and a one-year travel ban after being found guilty of propaganda against the regime in Iran.

Her lawyer said she was accused of taking part in a protest in London 12 years ago and speaking to the BBC Persian service.

Iran doesn’t have jurisdiction over what people do in London.

The British-Iranian charity worker was first jailed in Tehran in 2016.

She has always denied the spying charges levelled against her.

Confirming the latest sentence, her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, said the court’s decision was a bad sign and “clearly a negotiating tactic” by the Iranian authorities – who are in the middle of discussions over the country’s nuclear activities.

Next they’ll be cutting off bits of her as a “negotiating tactic.”

A medical evaluation carried out for the human rights charity Redress recently found Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe had post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and obsessive stress disorder due to “traumatising experiences in the prisons of Iran” and the uncertainty about her fate.

She told doctors that, during solitary confinement at the beginning of her sentence in 2016, she was interrogated – often while blindfolded – for eight to nine hours a day.

Nasty god in charge of that theocracy.

I can’t get used to this business of the police “investigating” people saying things. Last October:

Historian Dr David Starkey has said he is being investigated by police over an interview in which he made controversial comments about slavery.

The police investigate controversies? Isn’t that a tad outside their remit?

Dr Starkey made the remarks on YouTube to conservative commentator Darren Grimes, who is also being investigated.

Dr Starkey has apologised for saying in June that slavery was not genocide because “so many damn blacks” survived.

He said he did not “intend to stir up racial hatred” and would “defend myself robustly” against the allegation.

The Metropolitan Police said it was investigating “a public order offence relating to a social media video”.

Those “public order offences.” I remember the warnings at the time.

My guess (without having seen the video) is that what he said was a spoonerism: he put the “damn” in the wrong place. I’m guessing he meant to say “so damn many,” in which case damn just mean “very.” It’s only a guess, but people do make flubs of that kind in extempore speaking.

In a statement, the TV historian said: “I have apologised unreservedly for the words used and I do so again today. It was a serious error for which I have already paid a significant price. I did not, however, intend to stir up racial hatred and there was nothing about the circumstances of the broadcast which made it likely to do so.”

He said he only discovered he was under investigation on Tuesday, six days after the Met sent an email to notify him and Mr Grimes of the action, because the email had not been forwarded on to him.

Scotland Yard sent it to the Bow Group conservative think tank, of which he is vice-president, who thought it was a hoax, he said.

And why did they think it was a hoax? Could it be because it’s so ludicrous that Scotland Yard would be “investigating” such a thing?

Figures from former home secretary Sajid Javid to ex-Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron and former director of public prosecutions Lord Macdonald of River Glaven have criticised the investigation into Mr Grimes as a threat to a free media.

In a statement, the Met said: “On July 4, the Metropolitan Police Service was passed an allegation from Durham Police of a public order offence relating to a social media video posted on June 30.

“The matter was reviewed by officers and on July 29 a file was submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service for early investigative advice.

“On September 25 early investigative advice was received and officers began an investigation. This will remain under review. No arrests have been made.”

Rape isn’t prosecuted, street harassment and abuse of women isn’t prosecuted, but a spoonerism on YouTube – that’s a whole different thing.

During the original discussion, Dr Starkey said slavery “was not genocide” because “otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or Britain would there? An awful lot of them survived.”

That’s an obnoxiously flippant thing to say, no question, but obnoxious flippancy isn’t actually against the law.

Will the march of political correctness never end? They’re going to make us drink plant-based beer now?!

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has joined a flood of social media users gleefully trolling Larry Kudlow after the former economic adviser to Donald Trump complained that Joe Biden wanted Americans to drink “plant-based beer”.

Kudlow made the indignant claim on his Fox Business show on Friday, saying Biden’s climate policies and attempt to slash emissions would force Americans to “stop eating meat, stop eating poultry and fish, seafood, eggs, dairy and animal-based fats”.

“OK, got that? No burgers on 4 July. No steaks on the barbecue … So get ready. You can throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussels sprouts and wave your American flag.”

Which is best – steak-based beer, ham-based beer, or cheeseburger-based beer?

That’s not Woman’s Hour.

Charlie Craggs is a man who identifies as a woman, aka a trans woman. Woman’s Hour is supposed to be for and about women.

Also I hate that word “pampering” in this context. It’s so patronizing, so infantilizing, so “aren’t women adorable sweet empty-headed bunnies whose idea of luxury is some uncomfortable body-modification shit.” Keep your god damn “pampering” to yourselves.

Edie Wyatt at Spectator Australia makes a valuable point:

The right frequently refers to the “cultural Marxism” that dominates gender ideology, while the gender-critical left sees it more as cultural capitalism.  Genuine socialists are materialists after all, and don’t believe in the ethereal concept of a gender soul. They object to the unrestrained capitalist greed of the medical-industrial complex and the commodification of the human body.

Yes. Both of those. Well said.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany Room 6.

Retweeted by Dr. Jane Clare Jones:

Apparently, her Thoughtcrime was to write this paper for the journal from whose editorial board she was removed: Scrutinizing the U.S. Equality Act 2019: A Feminist Examination of Definitional Changes and Sociolegal Ramifications.

Abstract:

The U.S. Equality Act, which amends civil rights statutes to explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, passed the House in May 2019 with unanimous Democratic support. Adopting a feminist perspective, I scrutinize the act from a largely neglected position, one that supports both LGBTQ and sex-based rights. Although laudable in its aims, the Equality Act is objectionable in form. The Act extends non-discrimination protections to LGBTQ individuals not by creating new protected classes but by redefining sex to include gender identity and sexual orientation, which is not only terminologically imprecise but also creates a clash between sex-based and gender identity-based rights. By defining gender identity as something that exists to be protected “regardless of sex,” the act undermines sex-based provisions, replacing them with provisions based on gender self-identification. Recognizing confusion over terminology, I describe key terms (sex, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation) and consider various usages. I conclude by discussing ways the bill might be modified so as to protect LGBTQ people without undermining women’s (sex-based) rights.

From farther into the paper:

Like many political issues at present, public debates around the Equality Act usually fall on left–right party lines with little debate on substance, including the gender identity theory implicitly endorsed by the bill. The Congressional discussion of the bill consisted of Democratic lawmakers lauding the bill (e.g., as “literally a life-saving bill”) with Republican representatives panning “the deep flaws” in the legislation (H.R. 5 Text, 2019). Much of the public seem largely content to adopt party-line positions without discussion or critical scrutiny. This lack of public discussion is objectionable in a democratic society, in general, but it is even more problematic in this case given the pronounced shift in American jurisprudence the Equality Act will institute from sex-based to gender identity-based protections. Many on the left supporting the bill appear unaware of the sweeping nature of this legislation and uninformed about the practical details.

Although laudable in its nondiscriminatory aims, the form of H.R.5 is problematic. The Equality Act extends federal nondiscrimination protections to LGBT people not by creating new protected classes or by protecting sexuality or gender expression under existing sex-stereotype protections but rather by expanding the definition of sex to “include sexual orientation and gender identity.” Departing from our creditable legal tradition of definitional precision, the Equality Act is terminologically imprecise, as it conflates distinct terms (i.e., sex, gender, and sexual orientation), defines gender identity vaguely and circularly, and fails to define gender at all. More concerning, however, is the bill’s prioritization of gender identity over biological sex. The Equality Act defines gender identity as something that exists to be protected “regardless of sex” without exception, thereby giving primacy to gender identity over sex when they clash (i.e., in determining eligibility for [otherwise or previously] sex-based provisions). The result is the erosion of females’ sex-based provisions, which include sex-separated spaces (e.g., prisons, locker rooms, shelters), opportunities and competitions (e.g., awards, scholarships, sports), and events (e.g., meetings, groups, festivals) (see Lawford-Smith, 2019c, for a discussion and justification). As I will discuss, female sex-based provisions remain important given both women’s historical disadvantages and different reproductive biology.4

For these reasons, while I support the Equality Act’s nondiscrimination aims, I submit that the bill, in current form, fails to strike a balance between the rights, needs, and interests of two marginalized (and overlapping) groups—trans people and females—and instead prioritizes the demands of trans people over the hard-won rights of female people. This imbalance led Rep. Lesko (2019) to argue that the bill should be called “The Forfeiting Women’s Rights Act.” In current form, the Equality Act’s elision of the distinction between biological sex and gender self-identification, with the prioritization of the latter over the former, amounts to an impracticable attempt to provide sex-based protections with sex-blind policies. Because, as I will discuss, gender identity is vaguely and circularly defined without the requirement for any verification or formal status change, any person can access opposite-sex provisions merely on the basis of first-person testimony through gender self-ID (e.g., “I identify as a woman”), no medical or legal gatekeeping or even presentation style (e.g., as feminine) required.5 Therefore, and unbeknownst to many, the Equality Act eliminates the right to sex-based provisions.

We can see here how the UK has become “TERF Island,” something that seems to puzzle non-UK TAs to no end. Because in UK law “sex” is a protected characteristic, women have a solid legal foundation from which to defend their rights. In the UK, gender critical feminists have a position to defend, meaning that trans activism can be portrayed, accurately, as trying to undermine and destroy women’s legal, sex-based rights. Women in the US and Canada , because of the way protection for “gender identity” has come to be incorporated into the law, have already lost that legal position, making regaining it that much harder.

Here’s how the journal describes itself, and we can see in a single word the genesis of Burt’s removal:

About this journal

Feminist Criminology (FC), published five times a year, is an innovative journal dedicated to research related to women, girls, and crime within the context of a feminist critique of criminology. The official journal of the Division on Women and Crime of the American Society of Criminology, this international publication focuses on research and theory that highlights the gendered (emphasis mine) nature of crime. This journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Here’s a link to a response to Burt’s piece above, by Nishant Upadhyay.

It’s not open access, but the abstract is heavily loaded with orthodox, anti-colonialist, “white-feminism” jargon:

Coloniality of White Feminism and Its Transphobia: A Comment on Burt Abstract

In this comment, I challenge Burt’s colonial epistemological framework in her theorizations of sex, gender, and transness. Drawing upon anti-racist, decolonial, and trans of color feminisms, I argue that transphobia is inherent to white feminisms due to its roots in colonialism. Heteropatriarchy and cisnormativity are products of colonialism, and feminists who espouse transphobic discourses invariably reproduce colonial and white supremacist frameworks of patriarchy and gender violence.

Sounds like well-poisoning bullshit to me. With all that name-calling in the abstract, I’d bet he addresses none of Burt’s actual arguments. If he could, he’d emphasize that in the abstract. Instead, he denounces her as a heretic.

Here’s where you can find him, sorry, them.

Cynical or stupid?

Lindsey Graham isn’t that stupid, so…cynical.

CW: Senator, is there systemic racism in this country, in policing and in other institutions?

LG: Uh, no, not in my opinion. We just elected a two-term African-American president, the vice-president is of African-American Indian descent, so our systems are not racist. America is not a racist country. Within every society you have bad actors; the Chauvin trial was a just result.

Talk about a non-sequitur. Obama was elected therefore our systems are not racist. You what? Can you show us your reasoning for that?

As for American not being a racist country…it’s a country that had a ferocious system of chattel slavery from 1619 to 1865, and a thinly veiled system of slavery from the defeat of Reconstruction to the mid-60s, and a pattern of imprisoning black people that’s barely distinguishable from slavery right on up to this very second – so how likely is it, given all that, that the country in question is not a racist country? How possible is it?

I’m sure it’s very comforting for Republicans to tell themselves that slavery didn’t shape the way all Americans see African-Americans, but the reality is, that is not possible. Human thinking isn’t that clever or advanced. If it were, we would see the enslaver race as the “spoiled” race, but it isn’t, so we don’t. Human thinking is all too good at unreasonable back-formations like “these people are enslaved therefore they must be inferior” instead of “these people are enslaved therefore the people who enslaved them must be immoral.”

The 2008 election didn’t magically erase all that. Sorry.

The thing about language is that often the need for precision and accuracy outweighs the need for “inclusivity.”

This Gabe is a trans man, so, a woman, and here she is busily trying to remove the word “women” from the language in the name of a bogus “inclusivity.”

Nothing new, but still irritating.

John McWhorter has views on Critical Race Theory and how it’s being deployed in education.

The organization 1776Unites, founded by my mentor and model Bob Woodson, has tweeted out a video where various black people decry a now fashionable idea that “whiteness” includes being smart. As in, precise, objective, fond of the written word, oriented towards dispassion, on time.

Those things are all manifestations of intelligence, vigilance, discipline. But according to our Elect folk, we black people are best off channeling our Crazy Badass Mothafucka. Because that’s more “authentic.” And, I get the feeling, fun to watch.

Well, that last is debatable. Personally I find McWhorter very fun to watch when he’s doing the tv talking head thing.

Because so many think that the battle that I and others are waging against Critical Race Theory’s transmogrification into education for children is an obsession with something that isn’t a real problem, I want to explore a bit.

…

I knew something was really wrong when in 2019 at a conference in New York City for the city’s principals and superintendents, participants were presented with an idea that to teach with sensitivity to race issues meant keeping certain issues in mind.

These included ways of looking at things that are “white” rather than correct: namely, objectivity, individualism, and valuing the written word.

Yes. I did a post last August about Robin DiAngelo and that whole idea. One paragraph from that post:

What’s the problem? The problem is ascribing things like “emphasis on scientific method” to whiteness ffs! Bam, with one blow of their fist they declare black people uninterested in science. That will work out well! I guess Katherine Johnson was just mistakenly trying to be “white” with all that math skill she had? Neil Tyson should have played basketball instead?

So, yes, I’m on Team McWhorter on this one.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza was fine with this, happily telling the media that it’s white people’s job to do the “work” of identifying the racist assumptions in how they go about their business.

So: to stand outside of matters and analyze them with one’s own private mind, and perhaps couch one’s conclusions with the considered artifice of writing rather than the spontaneity of speaking, is inauthentic for black and Latino people. It is racist to impose such things on black and Latino (and Native American?) kids. Or at best, brown kids should be taught this uptight “white” business only as a gloomy alternative to the realness of just hanging out sharing passing personal impressions via chatting.

There’s nothing progressive about telling people that science and learning are for the dominant people and that the subordinate people are “authentic” instead of learned and that’s a better [read: holier] thing to be.

The Voice and Speech Trainers Association has posted a “White Supremacy Culture Daily Self-Check-in” ushering members through exactly this kind of mantra, including “The belief that progress is bigger and more” and “Fear of open conflict” as “white” things to cleanse yourself of. In other words, one is supposed to distrust wanting to expand or increase, and one is to cherish people yelling at each other, which, I’m sorry, is a cute way of saying that America needs some ghetto authenticity in the way people talk to each other when they disagree. … This view of precision and detachment as white is a view about, more economically, reason. The idea is that to master close reasoning is suspect. It is exactly the roots of the “Math is Racist” notion, and if you want a whiff of how religiously people can glom on to such ideas, take a look at my Twitter feed in the week after I posted about that here.

Yet, seeing this educational philosophy laid out in the sunlight, The Elect cannot dismiss it as fringe “kookiness” — unless they want to insult the curators of a national museum devoted to celebrating the very black people The Elect live to liberate. At the African-American History Museum in Washington, D.C., for a hot minute or two in 2020 you could see a variation on the Jones-Okun business, an expanded presentation of what we must reject as “white” evil. An educational poster was displayed that slammed not only objectivity, individualism, and writing, but linear thinking, quantitative reasoning, the Protestant work ethic, planning for the future, and being on time.

That’s the one that prompted the post last August.

Yes, this was real – from people who surely bemoan the stereotype of black people as dumb and lazy! Again, only a mental override could explain why the people responsible for this display would allow that emblazonment of precisely the stereotypes lobbed at black people for centuries. Tarring whites as imposers of alien values felt more important than considering that the poster depicted black people as gorillas – and was created by a white woman!

Exactly. You couldn’t make it up.

No deviation allowed.

An author of Islamic books in Algeria has been sentenced to three years in prison for offending the religion.

You can’t offend a religion – it doesn’t have a mind.

Said Djabelkhir said he was surprised by the severity of the sentence he had been given and would appeal.

He was tried after seven lawyers and a fellow academic lodged complaints against him for disrespecting Islam.

Mr Djabelkhir had said the animal sacrifice during the Muslim festival of Eid was based on a pre-Islamic pagan ritual.

He also suggested that parts of the Quran, such as the story of Noah’s Ark, might not be literally true and criticised practices including the marriage of young girls in some Muslim societies.

The kind of thing people ought to be free to say and write.

Islam is Algeria’s religion of state. The law imposes a fine or prison sentence on “anyone who offends the Prophet or denigrates the dogmatic precepts of Islam, whether it be by writings, drawings, a statement or another means”.

Doesn’t make you want to rush there to see the sights, does it.

Rights group Amnesty International’s deputy regional director Amna Guellali described the three-year sentence as “outrageous” and a “chilling setback for freedom of expression” in Algeria.

“Punishing someone for their analysis of religious doctrines is a flagrant violation of the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of belief – even if the comments are deemed offensive by others,” Ms Guellali added.

Amnesty still gets some things right.

Oh ffs people. Epidemiology is not like the Holocaust! Not even within a billion miles of like the Holocaust.

Epidemiology:

not

like

the

Holocaust.

Punish the traitor:

A Michigan Republican who spoke out against former President Donald Trump and was hospitalized with COVID-19 after a GOP committee meeting has lost his position as the group’s treasurer.

The 6th Congressional District’s executive committee voted 26-0 on Saturday to remove Jason Watts, 44, of Allegan, as its treasurer. The vote occurred less than a month after Watts attended a district committee meeting at a Portage restaurant where he believes he contracted the coronavirus.

Maybe because the people at the meeting weren’t wearing masks.

Republican officials have linked at least four COVID-19 cases to the March 25 gathering. Watts, one of the four, was hospitalized for five days. He told his story publicly, drawing criticism from fellow committee members ahead of Saturday’s vote.

Yes you’re supposed to keep it secret when your fellow party-members infect you with the covid.

Watts has been a member of the Republican Party for more than two decades.

He drew criticism from fellow executive committee members after he told The New York Times in February that he had never voted for Trump. In 2016, he cast his ballot for independent candidate Evan McMullin and in 2020, he voted for  Libertarian Jo Jorgensen, according to the article.

He’s lucky they didn’t torture him to death.

Some of the Republicans in the 6th District wanted Watts removed after those comments. His revelations about the March 25 district committee meeting at Traveler’s Cafe in Portage added further fuel to the fire. Watts told The News earlier this month that about three of the 70 people in attendance for the gathering were wearing masks at one point.

67 maskless people at a meeting. Oh well, what are ya gonna do.

“Most of them in that room are not believers in the vaccine,” McGraw said. “That’s something we’ve got to contend with.”

Michigan has been leading the nation in new COVID-19 cases per population since the beginning of April.

It’s Freedom Covid, wear it with pride.

Originally a comment by Sastra on Just a bomb party, officer.

why on earth is the “gender reveal” such a big deal?

I had my two kids in the early 80’s, which was just before learning your child’s sex before birth became easier and more popular. Moms my age “wanted to be surprised.” When it started to change, the most common reason we gave to each other was “I want to know what color to paint the nursery” or a similar variation. In other words, decorating.

Many years ago I read a book on the sudden uptake in “labor-saving devices” for housewives back in the early 1900s. The people (men) who created and promoted them saw their major selling point as adding leisure time for ordinary women. A vacuum or washing machine meant the wife could visit, read, go to concerts, join clubs, or volunteer for noble causes. It was like having a maid.

Instead, the ability to do chores more quickly resulted in higher standards of cleanliness. If doing the laundry didn’t take all day, then doing it every day instead of once a week meant you weren’t lazy. The space to be filled simply raised the level of measuring what was already there, and was filled with more of the same. The labor-saving devices ended up making more housework, not less. Human nature.

And it occurs to me that this may have happened when we suddenly began learning sex before birth. Names, then decorating, then more decorating, and clothes, and toys, and books — all more and more divided along the lines of sex. The opportunity to create a sex-based environment lead to increasing elaborations on that theme. Not just a pink wall, but a pink nursery; not just a pink nursery, but a pink sparkle princess castle playhouse nursery. And the little tiger got the same treatment, but with sports and planes. And slowly, over time, the “gender reveal” became more and more important.

And now we’re dealing with young people who insist that their “true” gender is what defines them as human, the very core of who and what they are.

Tell you what, we can say that was genocide and you can say that was and is systemic racism.

Joe Biden has become the first US president to issue a statement formally describing the 1915 massacre of Armenians as a genocide.

The killings took place in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, the forerunner of modern-day Turkey.

But the issue is highly sensitive, with Turkey acknowledging atrocities but rejecting the term “genocide”.

Just as many people in the US reject the term “systemic racism.” But the racism wasn’t and isn’t random or accidental, and the Turkish atrocities happened to a particular set of people, a geno.

Armenia says 1.5 million people were killed in 1915-16 in an effort to wipe out the ethnic group. They regard it as genocide, and many historians and governments agree the killings were orchestrated.

Turkey accepts that atrocities were committed, estimating that 300,000 died. But it argues there was no systematic attempt to destroy the Christian Armenian people and says many innocent Muslim Turks also died in the turmoil of war.

Armenians, however, are not convinced.

There’s just no fixing stupid.

Trump has defended his close personal relationship with the leaders of Russia and North Korea, telling Fox News that his ties with them as president were “a good thing and not a bad thing.”

Last week the Biden administration released intelligence suggesting that Russia obtained Trump campaign data in 2016, raising further questions about ties between Trump, his associates, and Moscow.

The White House this week also threatened sanctions against Russia if opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was poisoned with Novichok last year, dies in prison.

However, the former president used an hour-long interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News to dismiss all criticisms of his closeness to Russia and its leader.

Because that’s how stupid he is. Unfixable.

“I liked him, he liked meeee” – yep that stupid is permanently unfixable.