Another one of those “rights” that isn’t a right.

‘We have a right not to be insulted,’ demonstrator claims as Cineworld fears for workers’ safety

Well, no, you don’t, not exactly, and especially not if you define “insulted” so broadly that it includes living in the same city as a movie house that’s showing a film about Mohammed’s daughter.

A cinema chain has been forced to pull a film about the prophet Muhammad’s daughter over fears for the safety of its staff.

And you don’t have a right to threaten and terrorize people, either.

Demonstrators outside branches in Bolton and elsewhere claimed the work was blasphemous and that freedom of speech should not apply to the subject of Islam. In response, filmmakers decried the suggestion that people offended by a film should be able to dictate what Britons can watch at the cinema.

Britons or anyone.

Check out this jackass:

“You will have repercussions.”

Nous sommes Charlie. Piss off.

Jason Stanley is going all-in on the abuse, not to say libel.

That’s an academic colleague he’s talking to.

Interesting times. Not in a good way.

Updating to add: I see it’s a continuation of his accusations yesterday, which I shared at the time. He’s consistent, at least.

Morality aside, it just doesn’t seem sensible or reasonable or adult to talk this way to a colleague (or anyone else, but administrators could be watching the colleague problem). Bye Felicia at the Washington Post just learned that a couple of days ago.

Women’s cis privilege in China:

CCTV footage of the incident widely circulated online shows a man placing his hand on a woman’s back as she shares a meal with two companions at a barbecue restaurant in the city of Tangshan in Hebei province in the early hours of Friday.

After the woman pushes him away, the man strikes her before others drag her outside and deal a barrage of blows as she lies on the ground. Another woman is also knocked to the floor.

Why are women so cruel and violent to men?

The video quickly went viral on China’s internet and renewed a debate about sexual harassment and gender-based violence in a country where the conversation around women’s rights has grown in recent years despite pressure from a patriarchal society, internet censorship and patchy legal support.

Much like the rest of the world, in fact, except the internet censorship is probably a lot more stringent.

The attack has shocked China and prompted many to ask why this has happened. “The reason that these men felt they could freely assault the woman for rejecting their harassment is because so many men in the past have gone unpunished by the authorities for doing the same,” said Yaqiu Wang, a senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Bullying and dominating women never goes out of style.

Virginia Thomas is even more coup plot-involved than we thought.

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pressed 29 Republican state lawmakers in Arizona — 27 more than previously known — to set aside Joe Biden’s popular vote victory and “choose” presidential electors, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.

Which means she tried to leverage Clarence Thomas’s position to bully state legislators into stealing the election.

The Post reported last month that Thomas sent emails to two Arizona House members, in November and December 2020, urging them to help overturn Biden’s win by selecting presidential electors — a responsibility that belongs to Arizona voters under state law.

She used an online platform that facilitates mass mailings.

New documents show that Thomas indeed used the platform to reach many lawmakers simultaneously. On Nov. 9, she sent identical emails to 20 members of the Arizona House and seven Arizona state senators. That represents more than half of the Republican members of the state legislature at the time.

Telling them to help steal the election.

On Dec. 13, the day before members of the electoral college were slated to cast their votes and seal Biden’s victory, Thomas emailed 22 House members and one senator. “Before you choose your state’s Electors …consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead,” the email said. It linked to a video of a man urging swing-state lawmakers to “put things right” and “not give in to cowardice.”

…[T]he revelation that Ginni Thomas was directly involved in pressing them to override the popular vote — an act that would have been without precedent in the modern era — intensified questions about whether her husband should recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 presidential election and attempts to subvert it. Ginni Thomas’s status as a leading conservative political activist has set her apart from other spouses of Supreme Court justices.

And then trying to subvert an election sets her apart some more.

Absolutely classic oblivious male lefty sexist pig type guy. Sports editor at The Nation.

Right? Right?? That precious little Susie, who does she think she is? Bitch.

Uh huh. He’s really in a lather about those “young Black women,” and the irrepressible joy of sporting success. Any excuse will do when it comes to dismissing girls and women who want fair competition in their sports.

Dave Zirin and Jason Stanley should be a dual act, like Laurel and Hardy.

The ACLU is promoting this shockingly bad and dishonest article by Chase Strangio and one Gabriel Arkles:

Four Myths About Trans Athletes, Debunked

The dishonesty is apparent already: the issue isn’t “trans athletes,” it’s male trans athletes invading women’s sports. They know that of course, and carefully pretend not to.

Upholding trans athletes’ rights requires rooting out the inaccurate beliefs underlying harmful policies sweeping through state legislatures.

What are “trans athletes’ rights”?

No athletes have a “right” to cheat by playing in categories that are for people smaller or younger or less muscular than they are. That’s it, that’s the issue.

For years state lawmakers have pushed legislation attempting to shut trans people out of public spaces. In 2020, lawmakers zeroed in on sports and introduced 20 bills seeking to ban trans people from participating in athletics.

Seeking to ban male trans people from women’s athletics. Are there any bills that seek to ban all trans people from athletics? I don’t know because I haven’t examined all of them, but the ones that have made it into news stories and think pieces have all been about not letting men – trans or otherwise – invade women’s athletics. Strangio and Arkles are carefully hiding that fact, as the trans dogmatists always do.

Though we are fighting every day in the courts and in legislatures, upholding trans rights will take more than judicial and legislative action. It will require rooting out the inaccurate and harmful beliefs underlying these policies. Below, we debunk four myths about trans athletes using the expertise of doctors, academics, and sports psychologists serving as experts in our litigation in Idaho.

First myth:

MYTH: The participation of trans athletes hurts cis women.

Many who oppose the inclusion of trans athletes erroneously claim that allowing trans athletes to compete will harm cisgender women. This divide and conquer tactic gets it exactly wrong. Excluding women who are trans hurts all women. It invites gender policing that could subject any woman to invasive tests or accusations of being “too masculine” or “too good” at their sport to be a “real” woman. 

So instead women should just put up with men taking all the prizes?

Further, this myth reinforces stereotypes that women are weak and in need of protection.

Oh fuck off. Don’t pretend any of this is feminist reasoning. It’s just a fact that men as a class are bigger and stronger than women. That’s one reason the fight for our rights never ends. It’s not a “stereotype” that Lia Thomas has an obvious advantage over the women he is competing against.

The real motive is never about protection — it’s about excluding trans people from yet another public space. The arena of sports is no different.

Note the complete, callous, brutal indifference to women.

On the other hand, including trans athletes will promote values of non-discrimination and inclusion among all student athletes.

Then why discriminate against athletes on steroids? Why discriminate against tigers or gorillas or elephants? Why discriminate against athletes on motorcycles or in tanks?

It’s all bullshit. There are rules and stipulations and qualifications in athletics; there is no blanket value of total non-discrimination and inclooosion. Competitions “discriminate” against all the athletes who didn’t make it to the competitions. That’s how competitions work. It’s all discrimination and exclusion: the winner excludes everyone else.

Dr. Mary Fry adds that youth derive the most benefits from athletics when they are exposed to caring environments where teammates are supported by each other and by coaches. Banning some girls from athletics because they are transgender undermines this cohesion and compromises the wide-ranging benefits that youth get from sports. 

But those “girls” are not girls; that’s the whole point. These stupid childish language games are just that”: stupid and childish. The ACLU is making a complete fool of itself.

The other “myths” are just as ludicrous.

MYTH: Trans athletes’ physiological characteristics provide an unfair advantage over cis athletes.

No, male athletes’ physiological characteristics provide an unfair advantage over female athletes. Not a myth, a stone-cold fact.

MYTH: Sex is binary, apparent at birth, and identifiable through singular biological characteristics. 

Not a myth, a stone-cold fact.

FACT: Trans girls are girls.

Not a fact; a lie.

You’d think an adult who works in a job where he has to handle philosophy would refrain from publicly saying fatuous nonsense like this.

It depends what the “embattled minority group” is, obviously. I mean OBVIOUSLY, spoken with all the heavy disdain of an enlightened teenager. Duhhhhhhh-uhhhhhhhhhh.

An “embattled minority group” can be anything. It can be rapists. It can be murderers. It can be mass murderers. It can be men who stalk and trap and overpower and rape and murder women. It can be men who stalk and trap and overpower and rape and murder women and are cops. It can be lying cheating thieving heads of state. It can be anything. Just being embattled and a minority does not guarantee you are good or other-regarding or halfway decent people.

Jason Stanley can’t be so dumb that he doesn’t know that, yet he talks the childish slogany jargon anyway.

This guy should be stripped of all assets and forced to clean out sewers for the rest of his life. Without a shovel.

Professional philosophy of the highest order.

Jason Stan continues to cover himself with glory.

Jason has met only “pro trans” feminists, therefore Jane Clare Jones doesn’t speak for all women. (Mind you, she’s never claimed to speak for all women, and Stanley’s sneaky insinuation that she does say that is…sneaky.) It’s not a very powerful argument. Jon Pike puts it more bluntly.

What did our not at all lazy philosopher do? Debate the complex issues? No…

Another philosopher:

That’s what I was railing about a couple of days ago – all that wild, reckless name-calling of feminist women, as if we were a gang of Proud Boys or similar.

I’m sure people will be admiring that tweet 200 years from now.

Boola boola.

Obama deals with the “Oh no identity politics ew ew we’re all individuals and only individuals matter” trope a lot more briskly than I did.

Steve Phillips at the Guardian makes an important point:

The last time the United States failed to properly punish insurrectionists, they went on to form the Ku Klux Klan, unleash a reign of murderous domestic terrorism, and re-establish formal white supremacy in much of the country for more than 100 years. As the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack begins televised hearings this week, the lessons from the post-civil war period offer an ominous warning for this moment and where we go from here.

It’s true. The insurrectionists weren’t much punished and the victims were not even slightly compensated, and the results were and are horrific.

In 1860, many people believed that America should be a white nation where Black people could be bought and sold and held in slavery. The civil war began when many of the people who held that view refused to accept the results of that year’s presidential election. They first plotted to assassinate President-elect Abraham Lincoln (five years later, they would succeed). Then they seceded from the Union, and shortly thereafter started shooting and killing people who disagreed with them.

…

Mere months after the ostensible end of the civil war in April 1865, half a dozen southern young white Confederate war veterans gathered in Pulaski, Tennessee, in December 1865 to discuss what to do with their lives, and they decided to form a new organization called the Ku Klux Klan. The first Grand Wizard of the KKK, Nathan Bedford Forrest, was a Confederate general who had been pardoned by Johnson. In less than one year, Forrest would go on to orchestrate “336 cases of murder or assault with intent to kill on freedmen across the state [of Georgia] from January 1 through November 15 of 1868”.

The Proud Boys and the rest of them are of that type.

…the enemies of democracy in the Republican party have only become emboldened, like their Confederate counterparts of the last century. Just as happened in the years after the civil war when the prospect of large-scale Black voting threatened white power and privilege, the defenders of white nationalism have engaged in a legislative orgy of passing pro-white public policies. From trying to erase evidence of racism and white supremacy from public school instruction to laws making it increasingly difficult for people of color to cast ballots. As journalist Ron Brownstein has warned, “The two-pronged fight captures how aggressively Republicans are moving to entrench their current advantages in red states, even as many areas grow significantly more racially and culturally diverse. Voting laws are intended to reconfigure the composition of today’s electorate; the teaching bans aim to shape the attitudes of tomorrow’s.”

And it looks as if they’re going to win.

I guess preening Yale philosophers don’t have to know anything about history.

It didn’t matter whether or not women were “supportive of” lynching, whatever that means. Nobody asked them. Nobody cared. Women had no power. It’s grotesque to talk about them as if they had just as much power to “be supportive of” lynching as men had. Women could have favored communist revolution or fascist counter-revolution or a takeover by Martians, it would have made no difference to anything.

World’s most conceited philosophy academic continues his campaign to malign feminist women.

One guy retweets something=”this alliance.”

(Who’s Jerry Dunleavy? I’ve never heard of him. Google tells me he’s a reporter for the Washington Examiner. Somehow that’s feminists’ fault?)

And that’s why he’s a Yale professor of philosophy and you’re not.

Feminists like chocolate and so does the far right!!!

Trump’s thug children revealed to be thugs.

Ivanka did a whispery heavily made-up little video saying she was aware that Trump had lost the election. Did she do anything about it? Of course not. Did she keep pretending to be a Government Person, and riding on the Big Plane? Of course.

Next was Mr. Kushner. In his video he was pressed by Representative Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chairwoman, about whether he was aware that the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, had been threatening to resign because Mr. Trump was making increasingly outlandish efforts to stay in power.

“Like I said,” said Mr. Kushner, who was rarely heard from in public during his father-in-law’s presidency, “my interest at that time was on trying to get as many” presidential pardons finished as possible.

Not in preventing his criminal daddy-in-law from stealing the election. Interesting priorities. Also, what right does he have to meddle with presidential pardons?

Mr. Kushner repeatedly inserted himself into the pardons process, prompting complaints from legal experts and some of his colleagues. He added that he knew that Mr. Cipollone and “the team were always saying, ‘Oh we are going to resign, we are not going to be there if this happens, if that happens.’ So I kind of took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you.”

Ahhhhh there speaks the tiny privileged mind of a rich twerp who will commit any crime for more money. Noticing that a coup is in progress is “whining.” He would have a point if he were saying “the team” did nothing to stop Trump, but that’s not what he’s saying at all. He’s saying he doesn’t care about Trump’s treason and he doesn’t care what anyone said about it at the time.

Ms. Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, sounding grim, spoke to the hearing room after the video ended. “Whining,” she said. “There’s a reason why people serving in our government take an oath to the constitution. As our founding fathers recognized, democracy is fragile. The people in positions of public trust are duty bound to defend it, to step forward when action is required. In our country, we don’t swear an oath to an individual or a political party.”

Except when it’s Trump and his trumplings.

And he could be back in about 18 months.

The Daily Beast has more on the Post ructions, which is good, because I don’t much want to go digging through days of tweets.

The seemingly unending dramatics began late last week when political reporter Dave Weigel retweeted a sexist post about bisexual women. He later apologized but not before Sonmez publicly called him out along with the paper’s management, writing, “Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!”

Fellow Post reporter Jose A. Del Real then publicly accused Sonmez on Saturday of “repeated and targeted public harassment of a colleague,” which led to several tweets worth of beefing between the pair until Del Real blocked her Sunday.

It all sounds a bit high school, but then so does a lot of Twitter.

On Tuesday, Buzbee sent out yet another company-wide memo, stating that the paper does “not tolerate colleagues attacking colleagues” and promising to enforce the paper’s social media and workplace harassment policies. The memo came hours after Sonmez published a 30-tweet thread alleging editors took a years-long approach of preferential treatment for higher-profile reporters and their social media presence.

That seems kind of silly. Of course higher-profile reporters are going to get some preferential treatment – because they’re higher profile! High profile is what the bosses want, so they’re going to reward it. They shouldn’t get preferential treatment in areas where the rules are clear and apply to all, but other than that, deal. Stars get star treatment; surprise surprise.

Sonmez, meanwhile, continued to tweet, highlighting critical posts from Del Real (who had not responded to Sonmez after Saturday) as a mockery of Buzbee‘s claim to a “collegial workplace.”

Veteran Post reporter Lisa Rein then stepped in to publicly plead with Sonmez: “Please stop.”

That same afternoon, several high-profile Washington Post reporters, including Josh Dawsey and Ashley Parker, tweeted about how “proud” they are to work at the newspaper.

That kumbaya moment prompted Sonmez to post a lengthy tread on Thursday noting how “the reporters who issued synchronized tweets this week downplaying the Post’s workplace issues have a few things in common.” She added that they are “All white” and “They are among the ‘stars’ who ‘get away with murder’ on social media.”

See above. Stars are stars; what do you expect?

So that went well.

Felicia Sonmez, a reporter for The Washington Post who in recent days has been at the center of a debate over the organization’s social media policies and the culture of the newsroom, was fired on Thursday…

In an emailed termination letter, which was viewed by The New York Times, Ms. Sonmez was told that The Post was ending her employment, effective immediately, “for misconduct that includes insubordination, maligning your co-workers online, and violating The Post’s standards on workplace collegiality and inclusivity.”

I added that comma after “your co-workers online” – the Oxford comma, the one the NYT style guide forbids. That comma is often needed, and that sentence is one such place. It’s three items, not two, and you need the comma to make that unambiguous. I hate style guides and I hate “rules” that ignore style and readers.

Back to the excellent gossip.

The email also said Ms. Sonmez’s “public attempts to question the motives of your co-journalists” undermined The Post’s reputation

Yes it’s not actually the best idea ever to attack people you work with on Twitter. Who knew?

“We cannot allow you to continue to work as a journalist representing The Washington Post,” the letter said.

Plus, we don’t want to.

Her name is actually Felicia. The “Bye Felicias” are going to inundate us.

In the past week, she has been at the center of a public firestorm over the newsroom’s culture.

Dave Weigel etc etc.

In the following days, Ms. Sonmez wrote a series of posts on Twitter about the newsroom culture at The Post and what she said was the uneven way its social media policy was applied to different reporters. At times she jousted with fellow journalists at The Post on Twitter.

I can see wanting to do that. Boy can I see it. But actually doing it? Well, you’d better be prepared to lose that job.

Sally Buzbee, the executive editor of The Post, subsequently wrote two memos to the newsroom asking for colleagues not to attack each other on social media.

Do it behind the scenes, peeps, not on Twitter where everybody can see you and laugh.

But Bye Felicia didn’t listen so Bye Felicia is out.

Vanity Fair on ructions at the Washington Post:

On Tuesday afternoon, Washington Post reporter Josh Dawsey tweeted that he was “proud” to work at the paper, a place “filled with many terrific people who are smart and collegial.”

And a lot of other familiar names followed suit.

The public outpouring of Post pride—which I’m told political reporters were urging one another to take part in—followed executive editor Sally Buzbee’s memo reiterating workplace policies and promoting collegiality among staff. The memo dropped following a few days at the Post that have been, as one reporter described it, a “clusterfuck.” Dave Weigel, a national political correspondent, is, as of Monday, suspended without pay for the next month after retweeting a sexist tweet last week, which he then promptly unshared and apologized for after a colleague called him out both on the company Slack and publicly. Hours after news of Weigel’s suspension broke Monday, that colleague, political reporter Felicia Sonmez, was urging the paper to take action against a different colleague, Jose Del Real, who on Saturday took aim at Sonmez for “the cruelty you regularly unleash against colleagues.” (He made this point after commending Sonmez for “your bravery in sharing your story,” adding, “I support your fight against retribution for doing so.”)

Let’s everybody work from home forever, ok?

Ben Hunte excitedly reports:

Exclusive: Trans Journalists Pull Out of Guardian Newspaper’s Pride

Cool that it’s exclusive. Congrats, man!

Also trans journalists is a nice touch. I prefer the real ones myself.

Freelance journalists Freddy McConnell and Vic Parsons said they were declining all future work with the UK paper “until it changes its trans-hostile and exclusionary stance.”

And they won’t be missed. They’re not journalists but ideologues.

McConnell and Parsons told VICE World News they believed a recent opinion piece was “misleading and discriminatory” about cis lesbians dating trans women and said it was “the final straw” for them. Published on the 29th May in the Guardian’s sister paper the Observer and online on the Guardian’s website, the article has been widely criticised as anti-trans, with the author of the article repeatedly calling trans women “biologically male” and labelling trans campaigners working for trans equality as pushing “gender ideology”. 

In other words telling the truth. Blah blah blah; run along now.

You were asking about Sophie Grace Chappell?

But latsot didn’t “misgender” people. Emily Bridges is indeed a man. He claims to be a trans woman, but that doesn’t make him a woman, it just makes him a man who claims to be a woman or a man who claims to be a trans woman, depending on how genuine his claim is.

Chappell is a man too of course. One thing he’s famous for is saying it doesn’t matter if more women are killed because trans women are allowed to invade our spaces. The Glinner Update last September:

BBC Radio Scotland’s morning programme hosted a discussion about the Scottish government’s proposed GRA reforms and self ID legislation….One of the guests was trans-identified male, Sophie Grace Chappell, a Philosophy professor at the Open University.

Before I go on – when’s the last time you saw a grown woman dressed like that? In my case the answer would be never. Never. Grown women do not wear flouncy starched sticky-out skirts like that with white cardigans and pearls and whatever the fuck those shoes are. Nor little pink ribbon barrettes nor a coy bit of petticoat sticking out nor nail polish on stubby little nails. A grown woman would not go out in public like that, let alone a grown woman who is an academic with a job in a real university. He’s mocking us.

Ahem. Back to the update:

From the off, Chappell dismissed women’s safety concerns as ‘fearmongering’.

…

“Suppose people were saying ‘Well you know if you make it easier for gay people to be themselves in society there’s going to be a crime wave or dreadful homosexual murders are going to happen, it’s going to be awful if we do that’, I think we’d rightly dismiss that as scaremongering and we’d say ‘No it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter’. It wouldn’t matter, actually, if there was a slight spike in those statistics because this isn’t about that kind of issue.”

Cool. It wouldn’t matter if more women were murdered, as long as “Sophie Grace” (flatter himself much?) gets to wear his stupid flouncy skirt.