Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Pompous man tells women what to think and say, then complains when they don’t follow his instructions.

Where would we be without the Peter Jukeses of the world?

A little look back at Maugham v Rowling a couple of months ago:

Jolyon Maugham, a campaigning barrister, described Rowling’s definition of “sex-based rights” in the wake of a recent Supreme Court ruling as being “about the exclusion of trans women”, which he said was “mind-blowing”.

The exclusion of trans women from what, though?

Certainly not from everything. JKR doesn’t want to exclude men who pretend to be women from public transportation, restaurants, Waitrose, parks, cinemas, theatres, the public highway, medical facilities…the list is endless. She wants, I think it’s fair to say, to exclude them from the definition of women, which is simply a continuation of what has always been the case, and from some spaces and institutions and competitions that are specifically for women. That’s all. It’s not “exclusion” tout court, it’s reasonable exclusion for reasons of safety or fair competition or both.

Maugham must know that, but he doesn’t word it that way. That is at the very least manipulative as well as unjust. He should stop.

This is a good one.

“what it means to oppose trans joy”

Now is that fair??? I’m not aware of opposing any “trans joy” – what I oppose is trans dogma, trans dogma-enforcement, trans bullying, trans catastrophizing, trans intrusion, trans war on women, trans misogyny.

I mean, suppose people break into your living space and destroy all your books, paint graffiti on your walls, eat everything in the fridge, piss on all your clothes. It’s not their vandal joy that you object to, it’s their vandalism. A subtle distinction perhaps, but real.

Hey kids! It’s international nonbineree day!

They will keep…fighting?

Fighting what?

What are we even talking about?

The Corporate Memphis graphic is certainly no help.

Are nonbineree people persecuted, excluded, shunned, exploited, bullied, locked up, tortured, denied housing, jobs, promotions? Is it all official? Do bosses tell them “I’m putting you in the mailroom and you’re never getting a promotion”? Do they get lumps of coal for Christmas?

What exactly will the Liberal Democrats keep fighting?

Maya asks an important question.

And why is the ability to debate destroyed?

Because the subject of the debate is childish nonsense.

Adults don’t “debate” the existence of Mickey Mouse or Harry Potter. Fictions are fictions; there’s nothing to debate.

Same with trans ideology. No, people can’t change sex. The end. Nothing to debate.

For debate to make any sense there has to be the possibility of truth on both sides. If one side is just obvious fantasy, the game is pointless.

Haha, it’s all in good fun, just pretending to stab people as a way of encouraging them to do what we tell them to do, everybody laughed, anyone who didn’t laugh is a prude and a violation of something.

Green Party councillors attended a transgender rights rally where some protesters repeatedly stabbed darts into an effigy of Andy Burnham, The Times can reveal.

The demonstration outside Hackney Town Hall called on the Green-run council to refuse to implement the guidance on single-sex spaces. 

Activists were filmed stabbing darts into the head and eye of an effigy of Burnham, the prime minister in waiting, who has backed the Supreme Court’s ruling on the legal definition of sex and the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) guidance on single-sex services.

Well there you go. What do people who defend women’s rights deserve? To be stabbed in the eye.

ICE scores yet another kill.

A federal immigration officer fatally shot a motorist in Maine on Monday, the second time in a week that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have used deadly force and at least the ninth time since President Donald Trump began his immigration crackdown.

Immigrant rights groups identified the man who was killed as a 26-year-old native of Colombia.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in a post on the social platform X that ICE was surveilling an address for a person with a final order of removal. When ICE tried to stop a vehicle driven by someone coming from that address, “The vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon,” the department said.

U.S. Sen. Angus King previously said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told him the officer opened fire after the man tried to use his vehicle as a weapon against ICE agents in Biddeford, a coastal city roughly 15 miles (24 kilometers) southwest of Portland.

We’ve heard that before.

A witness said he heard the guy say “I tried to stop.”

The Good Law Project has a new campaign, called “Of course I support trans – I’m not a monster”.

What does “I support trans” even mean? Is this Maugham trying to sound like a fellow kid? “Bro, I support trans, hur hur”?

They’ve employed a real artist and everything.

But most people in the UK think trans people should be left in peace to live their best lives.

We’ve commissioned public artist Martin Firrell to highlight this majority view, using bold images of a T rex, a shark, and a giant gorilla.

These monsters are appearing on billboards across the UK, boosting the voice of the silent majority: “Of course I support trans – I’m not a monster.”

Childish enough yet?

NPR reports:

The New York Times says several of its journalists have been subpoenaed by the Department of Justice over their reporting on Air Force One, describing it as a “brazen act.”

On Wednesday, the newspaper published an anonymously sourced story that the Secret Service urged President Trump to leave the recent NATO summit in Turkey on an older version of Air Force One instead of the Boeing 747 donated by Qatar last year because of security concerns. The following day, the Times reported, again citing anonymous sources, that the gifted plane lacked “defensive countermeasures that were security features of the old model, including its advanced antimissile capabilities.”

The four reporters bylined on Wednesday’s article — Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt — all received subpoenas, according to the Times. The paper said federal agents delivered the subpoenas Friday evening to some reporters at their homes.

The subpoenas “seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday,” the Times reported. Their testimony, according to the subpoenas, was requested “in regard to an alleged violation of federal criminal law.”

“The appearance of Federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” David McCraw, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for the Times, said in a statement. “Our journalists report the facts and advance the American public’s right to know how their government is operating and their taxpayer dollars are being used. This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”

We’re zooming down the highway to full-on fascism.

The usual adamant refusal to be clear.

Amnesty claims it regrets.

Amnesty International UK has said it regrets a report which labelled JK Rowling’s sexual assault support centre for women ‘anti-rights’.

…

Amnesty International UK has said it regrets a report which labelled JK Rowling’s sexual assault support centre for women ‘anti-rights’.

Has it said why it regrets the report? Does it regret the report because the report is shit, or because people noticed that it’s shit?

Amnesty summons up a lot of words:

“Amnesty International conducts independent research and campaigns on human rights issues worldwide, and works alongside victims and communities on the frontlines of the struggle for dignity and justice. This work includes a long‑standing and explicit commitment to gender justice, including the rights of women, LGBTQI and trans people.”

Trans people get counted twice. But more to the point: as usual, women must not have their rights supported without instant follow-up mention of LGBTQIZFRDNM people. If you say women have rights you have to mention someone else who has rights; no exceptions. Women must not be allowed to take center stage, ever.

In a published list of 117 UK organisations, Amnesty International mentions Beira’s Place under “gender critical” in the anti-rights category.

Amnesty International also condemns For Women Scotland – the group of women who took the  Scottish Government to court over policies which allowed transgender women, born male, to take up female-only spaces on public boards.

The organisation’s three co-founders – Trina Budge, Marion Calder and Susan Smith – have written to Amnesty to warn the report contributes to “reputational harm” against For Women Scotland.

The letter states: “We note that your primary charitable object is to promote human rights. Women also have human rights. We recently won a case in Scotland to protect the human rights of incarcerated women in Scotland. The old Amnesty would have taken that case rather than attack the women who brought it.

“We now ask that you apologise to FWS for the malicious characterisation of our organisation in your report.”

Women also have human rights. Women are half of humanity, and they are the half that reproduces humanity. Without women, no humanity. You’d think that would count.

Jo Bartosch on how Amnesty got so horrible:

Its new report, ‘A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK’, was recently published and then, like a disfavoured comrade, quietly disappeared from the organisation’s website less than 24 hours later. Before its abrupt vanishing act, Amnesty warned that an ‘anti-rights ecosystem’ was threatening ‘the safety of women and LGBT+ people in the UK’. It identified 117 organisations allegedly working to roll back human rights, lumping together American Christian groups with a patchwork of British feminist, lesbian and gay organisations.

It’s very progressive to tell destructive lies about feminist, lesbian and gay rights organizations.

That ordinary people might simply have had enough of trans tyranny – or concluded for themselves that sex-based rights are worth defending – doesn’t seem to have occurred to Amnesty’s overeducated, underthinking professional whingers. Nor, apparently, has the unfortunate optics of compiling lists of ideological enemies and then silently deleting it.

It’s not just the having enough of trans tyranny…it’s the being expected to repeat an obvious lie as if it were true. It’s the being expected to repeat that particular obvious lie – it’s the expecting women to repeat that obvious lie. It’s the expecting the underdog sex to pretend that some members of the overdog sex are not members of the overdog sex. It’s a very bizarre, warped thing to expect, and it reveals an indifference to women that feels all too New Left circa 1970.

This is the organisation that once presented itself as the conscience of the free world: a champion of dissidents and those who stood up to authoritarian power. Today, Amnesty International resembles the very forces it was created to oppose. It spreads the misinformation it claims to be combating, smears grassroots campaigners as extremists, and casts ordinary people who refuse to deny biological reality as enemies of human rights. The organisation that once defended prisoners of conscience now seems determined to identify a new generation of thoughtcriminals.

No amnesty for women.

The fury at Amnesty is mounting.

Euan is very cross.

Euan calls someone else’s writing “a hack job at writing”. Euan claims to be a writer – a journalist – himself, yet his writing is hair-raisingly terrible. He’s not the right fella to judge someone else’s writing chops.

Originally a comment by The Whimster Gap on Christian Nationalist wish list.

“Though not a religion, secularism, like theocracy, is incompatible with our First Amendment freedoms because it excludes religious voices from the process of self-government.”

Well, that’s got things arse-about-face, hasn’t it? Secularism – properly understood – does not exclude religious voices. Secularism actually guarantees a space for their participation in public life, precisely because it’s public life and so takes all comers. Secularism says, “Oh, that’s what you believe, is it? Fine. Feel free to make the case. Feel free to argue what you like. No strongarming, mind; but that’s about the limit of the limits.” (This is why I’d classify the repressively atheist regimes of people like Enver Hoxa as not secular; they didn’t have the commitment to the state stepping back and letting people figure stuff out.)

There’s a tendency among reactionary religionists to complain that secularism is a threat to them. That’s why in the UK you sometimes see strange confluences of the more evangelical bits of the Church singing the same song as conservative Muslims. It’s dressed up as a common concern for the rights of the religious, and – more dubiously – of religion.

But the real motivation is that secularism threatens their ability not to make the case for their position, but their ability to enforce it. And so they’ll join together to moan about how awful secularism is. Of course, they despise each other really, and in the non-secular world they claim to want their pretence of a unified protection of religion would crumble; they’d be at each other’s throats for heresy faster than you could say “Arminian Heresy”.

They should love secularism, because it protects them against the beastliness of others. But it also stops them being beastly in return if they happen to have the whip hand; and that’s a big price to pay. Too big, it seems.

Now here’s a fascinating thread.

It turns out that organizations such as Women’s Rights Network don’t much like being called “anti-rights” and seek to know the reasons for being so labeled.

Let’s all of us consider our options. It’s about time.

“Heather” Herbert may end up regretting his verbal sadism.

Aberdeen University is conducting an urgent review of comments made by an employee who said she hoped former MP Ann Widdecombe suffered “an extremely painful death”.

Heather Herbert, a web developer at the university, faced backlash after making the comments on Friday, July 10 following news of Widdecombe’s death.

Herbert responded to a news report of her passing on her Bluesky account, writing: “Some good news for once.

“I hope it was an extremely painful death.”

She added: “I hope she was handcuffed to the bed as she screamed in agony.”

It’s a news article, not a TwitX burble. He’s not a she. He’s a man who hates women and isn’t embarrassed to make his hatred public.

Aberdeen University has confirmed that they are reviewing the comments as a “matter of priority”.

What’s to review? He said what he said. It’s only a few words. They kind of review themselves.

Principal and Vice Chancellor, Professor Peter Edwards, added: “Ann Widdecombe was a highly respected figure in both the Westminster and European parliaments.

“The University of Aberdeen does not tolerate violence or hateful behaviour in any form.

“We are aware of the incident and the concerns that have been raised and are looking into the matter as a priority.”

It doesn’t really matter whether she was a highly respected figure or not. Rejoicing that she was beaten to death is not ok.

I’ll admit that there is one person I would like to see facing some major karma, but then he has had many people murdered and many more injured, tortured, immiserated, displaced, bereaved – the list is endless. He has literally hundreds if not thousands of lives to account for. One former MP, however right-wing, not so much.

A Facebook group called The Sports Bra tells us:

This weekend, July 11–12, The Sports Bra is joining the boycott of Women’s Elite Rugby (WER) matches.

That means that we will not stream matches, host watch parties, or otherwise promote WER competition during the boycott window.

We’re doing this in solidarity with the players, fans, and organizers calling for rugby to live up to its own values of respect, integrity, and inclusion.

The Sports Bra exists to celebrate and elevate women and girls in sports. That includes trans women and girls. Always.

Well, no it doesn’t. Ever. Trans women and girls are men and boys. Always.

We love women’s sports. We love seeing new leagues grow. We want more athletes on bigger stages with more fans in the stands. But growth cannot come at the cost of belonging.

But males don’t belong in female sports. There is no “cost of belonging” in having things for girls and women. Girls and women are allowed to have their own belonging, and men shouldn’t try to force their way into it.

They added in a comment:

Part of our commitment to belonging means we protect our marginalized community members. We will delete comments that are hostile, threatening, or use profanity. We will block repeat offenders.

They will delete comments that disagree with their determination to trash female sports. How progressivey.

Nick Fish of American Atheists writes in a mailing:

“The biggest lie that’s ever been told in America”

Those are the words Dan Patrick, Lieutenant Governor of Texas and Chairperson of President Trump’s so-called “Religious Liberty Commission”, used to describe church-state separation.

And if the draft report just released by the Religious Liberty Commission — along with its Christian Nationalist wish list of recommendations for policy changes — is any indication, Patrick’s (mis)belief that church-state separation is a lie was the unanimous position of the commission.

Of course, that should come as no surprise. A panel made up of ultra-conservative, reactionary Christians and just a single (conservative) Jewish member does not represent the religious diversity of our nation. Their views on, well, everything are dramatically out of step with everyday Americans — and in some cases, the majority of their coreligionists.

The recommendations from the panel include both the boring (a “Presidential Medal of Religious Liberty” award, “Know Your Rights” posters, and a reporting hotline) and the five-alarm fire for equality (repealing the Johnson Amendment, completely turning the understanding of the Establishment Clause on its head, and a massive giveaway of your tax dollars to religious schools).

And all this at the behest of Trump, who is notoriously not a believer. I’m not going to call him an atheist, because that would require at least a moment or two of thought at some point. He’s just a de facto non-believer, in the same way he’s a non-believer in quantum physics or Etruscan tennis.

Despite the report’s executive summary claiming that religious liberty “protects believers and nonbelievers alike,” the report spends 224 pages proving they don’t actually believe that. Atheists and the nonreligious appear nowhere else in the document except as an ideology to be defeated.

Why? Because the Commission made no effort to hear from members of the atheist community.

Can we not call it that? Can we not keep bunching things into “communities”? Can we not just say “atheists” and leave it at that?

It’s not just that they deny that we might have a shared commitment to freedom of conscience. Rather, it’s that they believe we don’t exist at all except as enemies of their freedom.

Possibly the most chilling line of the entire report makes that belief crystal clear: “Though not a religion, secularism, like theocracy, is incompatible with our First Amendment freedoms because it excludes religious voices from the process of self-government.”

Wut? Theocracy excludes religious voices from the process of government? Theocracy puts religious voices at the core of government; that’s why it’s called theocracy. The line is chilling but also incoherent.

Anyway, thanks for the update Nick; keep up the good work.

Freedom of the press much?

The Department of Justice has subpoenaed New York Times journalists after they reported on security concerns involving the new, Qatari-gifted Air Force One, marking a dramatic escalation of President Donald Trump’s campaign against the media that has drawn condemnation for eroding a fundamental freedom of American democracy.

…

The subpoenas seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan next week, the Times said, adding that federal agents delivered some subpoenas to the reporters at their homes. The subpoenas were issued after FBI Director Kash Patel and other Justice Department officials met at the White House on Friday to talk about the matter.

…

“The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” David McCraw, a lawyer for the Times, said in a statement.

Hey it’s not our consciences on the line. The appearance of the feds should shock us; it’s Patel and his thugs who need their consciences shocked.

Bruce D. Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said Trump’s “war on the press is looking for another victim.”

He said in a statement that the subpoenas “break from longstanding Justice Department practice to protect the public interest and press independence by requiring prosecutors to only seek information from reporters as a last resort when all other avenues have been exhausted.”

The department said that “to be clear, reporters are not the targets, those leaking classified information are.”

Cool. Question: who classified the information, and why? Is it classified for reasons of public safety and the like, or is it classified because it’s dirty and they want to keep it secret?

Issuing subpoenas represents further ramping up of Trump’s effort to threaten independent new organizations by leveraging the power of the federal government against them. It is also part of a systematic pattern by the Republican president to attempt to undermine press freedom in order to shield him[self] from negative coverage.

And by “negative coverage” we mean truthful reporting on his many violations of longstanding norms and outright crimes.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department issued subpoenas seeking to compel testimony from reporters at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. In both cases, the department later withdrew the subpoenas.

They were just kidding both times, right? Funny stuff.

During his first term, Trump suggested that the press constituted an “enemy” of the American people. Since returning to the White House last year, he has waged an aggressive campaign against the media unlike any in modern U.S. history.

Trump’s pattern of attacks against news outlets and media figures he believes are overly critical of him has included filing lawsuits against outlets whose coverage he dislikes, threatening to revoke TV broadcast licenses, and seeking to bend news organizations and social media companies to his will.

He’s just doing what any self-respecting dictator does.

Amnesty better lawyer up.

Round of applause.