Wait a second though.
If you look at the full photo of our hero you can see that he’s both huge and angry-looking. It’s nice that he’s confident in his own mind that everyone was safe, but what I want to know is, how in hell does he think he can know that everyone else could know that? In particular, how does he think he can know women could know that?
I asked him that question and then read replies and saw that so did everyone else.
Pure coincidence. Completely random. The Post:
Democrats and Republicans in Congress on Thursday expressed alarm that the IRS under President Donald Trump may have targeted two of his political enemies with tax audits, joining in rare unity to call for an investigation into the matter.
The requests came a day after reports that the IRS initiated detailed reviews into the tax records of James B. Comey, the former FBI director, and Andrew McCabe, a deputy who later took over the agency. The two officials at the time had been primary targets of Trump’s ire after they probed the president in connection with his 2016 campaign, leading Comey to raise the possibility this week that the newly revealed audits amounted to political payback.
Knowledgeable people have been saying on Twitter that it’s wildly unlikely to be Just One of Those Things.
For some, the news even invoked the specter of the disgraced Nixon administration, when the president leveraged the IRS — and its vast powers to look into Americans’ finances — to pursue his political enemies before he was forced to resign.
…
The types of IRS audits they experienced are designed to be rare and random. The likelihood that two people so loathed by the former president would get audited within the space of a few years raised concerns for Comey about possible political misuse of the IRS’s authority.
The unlikelihood, that is, or the incredibly vanishingly tiny likelihood.
“I don’t know whether anything improper happened, but after learning how unusual this audit was and how badly Trump wanted to hurt me during that time, it made sense to try to figure it out,” Comey said in a statement. “Maybe it’s a coincidence or maybe somebody misused the I.R.S. to get at a political enemy. Given the role Trump wants to continue to play in our country, we should know the answer to that question.”
We should know it even if Trump flees the country today.
Boris Johnson has given in at last.
Scandal-ridden British Prime Minister Boris Johnson capitulated to mounting pressure to step down Thursday, announcing his decision after days of high-profile government resignations and calls from fellow Conservative Party members to quit.
If only we could have said the same of scandal-ridden Donald Trump.
“In the past few weeks, I have been trying to convince my colleagues it would be eccentric to change governments when we have achieved so much,” he said in his speech outside No. 10 Downing St. amid loud booing from the crowd nearby. “I regret not to be successful in those arguments and, of course, it’s painful not to be able to see through those projects myself.”
Johnson also said he planned to remain as prime minister until a successor is chosen — a move that may face opposition from others in an increasingly hostile Parliament.
Johnson should just tell them they have to be more inclusive.
Perfect photo.
Pink News rejoices that more people are spitting venom at radical feminist women.
New Queer as Folk is a big ‘fuck you’ to transphobes and a beautiful story of trans love, stars say
Aw iddn that sweet.
Queer as Folk stars Jesse James Keitel and CG have a simple message to people who don’t think trans people should exist: “Fuck you.”
Except of course that’s not what we think. It’s not about existing, it’s about claims about what one is. It’s about self-description. It’s about the new and worthless doctrine that people can change their sex, and not only that but they can do it just by saying the words. Existence isn’t the same as self-description. Exist away, exist your socks off, but if you start up a new ideology that says you’re a Dilophosaurus then we get to say your ideology is stupid and wrong. Bonus: you still exist.
Two decades ago, Queer as Folk came along and changed the game for gay representation on television – but today, it’s glaringly obvious that it didn’t represent the breadth and depth of the LGBTQ+ experience.
In other words we hadn’t yet smeared trans all over everything but now we know better.
The ACLU is really tanking.
They seem to have a very stupid very rude very belligerent person working for them and making them look bad on Twitter.
Oh the irony – the lie is on the other foot. Pamela Paul (her op-ed is clearly the target here) didn’t say that. She said “woman” has become verboten, meaning in general, and then she quoted a comment on the Roe decision by the ACLU that carefully did not say “women.” She did not say “the ACLU forbids the use of the word ‘woman’.” The lie is hers, there is no fallacy, the purported “hate” is in her head.
Please. Language matters. Feminism has always had a lot to say about language. Of course it matters if women and girls are simply airbrushed out of much of public discourse. I’m pretty confident Rebecca McCray wouldn’t sneer so happily at the idea that we shouldn’t airbrush Black people out of public discourse by carefully never mentioning them.
Also what is this “most marginalized” shit? Who says they’re “most marginalized”? Are men who pretend to be women really more marginalized than women, people of color, disabled people, lesbians and gays, immigrants, the working class, disabled people, homeless people? Pffffffff.
Brunt? What brunt? Trans people bear the brunt of the re-criminalization of abortion more than women do? Of course they don’t. Women bear that brunt, and no one else.
Aaaand out comes the nasty childish foul-mouthed brat. Lucky ACLU, having her on the team.
Miss her? How? Are we all supposed to dash around to her place to help block all her access to the NY Times? It’s a newspaper. It publishes op-eds. It can’t “miss” individuals who don’t like a particular editorial.
Transmisogyny doesn’t exist. Misogyny is hatred of women, “full stop.”
I wonder if the less stupid people at the ACLU – if there are any left – are cringing. They should be.
It’s not ideal that six people can doom the world to runaway planet heating.
The supreme court’s ruling that the US government could not use its existing powers to phase out coal-fired power generation without “clear congressional authorization” quickly ricocheted around the world among those now accustomed to looking on in dismay at America’s seemingly endless stumbles in addressing global heating.
The decision “flies in the face of established science and will set back the US’s commitment to keep global temperature below 1.5C”, said Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, in reference to the internationally agreed goal to limit global heating before it becomes truly catastrophic, manifesting in more severe heatwaves, floods, droughts and societal unrest.
Six people – three of them given the job by a moronic deranged criminal.
Biden’s promise to end oil and gas drilling on public land has been unfulfilled, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused gasoline prices to leap, prompting the president to urge oil companies to ramp up production, to the horror of climate campaigners.
And lots of us breathers, too.
The president has vowed that the US will cut its emissions in half by 2030 but this goal, and America’s waning international credibility on climate change, will be lost without both legislation from Congress and strong executive actions.
And it’s blindingly obvious that neither of those is going to happen.
The Guardian on today’s ruling:
A researcher who lost her job at a thinktank after tweeting that transgender women could not change their biological sex has won her claim that she was unfairly discriminated against because of her gender-critical beliefs.
Maya Forstater suffered direct discrimination when the Centre for Global Development (CGD), where she was a visiting fellow, did not renew her contract or fellowship, an employment tribunal found on Wednesday.
I think some local government policies are going to be in conflict with this ruling: the ones that state flat-out You May Not Say Thats on trans issues. There was a town council that came out with one just yesterday, I think; I’ve already forgotten which town it is.
The tribunal examined a number of tweets by Forstater, including tweets in which she drew an analogy between self-identifying trans women and Rachel Dolezal, a white American woman who misrepresented herself as black, and another in which she said: “A man’s internal feeling that he is a woman has no basis in material reality.” It concluded that the tweets asserted her gender-critical beliefs.
It said the same of one that described self-identification as a woman as “a feeling in their head”, rejecting the suggestion that it equated self-identification with mental illness.
The tribunal also considered tweets in which Forstater said she was surprised people could say they believed that males could be women, and that they are “tying themselves in knots”.
It said they were “fairly mild examples” of mockery, adding: “Mocking or satirising the opposing view is part of the common currency of debate.”
And when the opposing view is as absurd as this one is…
Maya’s statement to the press:
6th July 2022: Maya Forstater, who took a claim for belief discrimination against her former employer, the Center for Global Development, has been vindicated by a ruling that she was unlawfully discriminated against by her former employer on the basis of her protected belief.
This follows a ruling at an Employment Tribunal in June 2021 when Ms Forstater successfully established a binding legal precedent that gender-critical beliefs were in principle protected by the Equality Act. Following that appeal, her case continued at the Employment Tribunal, to determine whether she was unlawfully discriminated against by her former employer on the basis of her protected belief.
And the answer is yes, she was.
“My case matters for everyone who believes in the importance of truth and free speech.
“We are all free to believe whatever we wish. What we are not free to do is compel others to believe the same thing, to silence those who disagree with us or to force others to deny reality.
“Human beings cannot change sex. It is not hateful to say that; in fact it is important in order to treat everyone fairly and safely. It shouldn’t take courage to say this, and no one should lose their job for doing so.
…
“To hear that my case has helped other people to speak up against unfair and
discriminatory practices at work makes the hardship of the last three years easier to bear. All those who are fighting similar battles — and there are many such people now — have my solidarity and support.“
Truth matters.
Hey hey hey breaking news – Maya has won her tribunal!
Originally a Facebook post by an anonymous thoughts-haver.
Something about the way Matthew 6:5-6 (the bit about going into your closet to pray) is being shared around in the wake of the school prayer ruling has been bothering me, and I finally kind of figured out what it is. First, though, a disclaimer: I am an atheist who has read the whole bible more than once. I took some comparative religion classes in college, but I have never been a Christian and anything I say is coming from a theoretical understanding, not practical.
So, here’s a thing. The term “prayer” does not mean one simple thing. It doesn’t mean the same thing in all contexts, and it doesn’t mean the same thing to all people. When I see a football coach midfield praising Jesus for the game they just played, it’s easy for me, a nonbeliever, to say “what a hypocrite, praying in public like Matthew says not to do”. But that coach might not even think of it as praying, because to him prayer is the thing he only does in private. What he’s doing in public is witnessing, which is something his holy text calls for him to do. Mark 16:15: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” Matthew 28:19: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost”
There is no conflict in his mind between the admonition to pray in private and his making a spectacle of himself in public if what he’s doing in public isn’t praying. And if you call him on it, you are only reinforcing his belief that he is doing the right thing. Matthew 5:10-12: “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.”
Does that make what he’s doing any less coercive and less of a violation of the separation of church and state? Not by any sane standard (which is to say, to anyone who isn’t in the majority on the Supreme Court right now). But it does point to a problem that I think the left has right now, which is that it thinks using tactics which would work against it are going to work against the right.
I skimmed a study recently, and I wish I could find it now. What I remember it saying, though is this: conservatives are better at modelling the thought processes of liberals than vice versa. When given a list of questions to answer twice, once as yourself and once as you imagine a person on the opposite side of the political spectrum would answer, conservatives were better at answering how they thought liberals would than the other way around. They’re better at coming up with tactics which work in the real world, because they’re better at thinking about what would work on them if they were on the other side. They can look at our arguments and say “I understand what makes you think that, but here’s why I think you’re wrong”, while we’re looking at their arguments and saying “you think that because you’re bad”.
To call someone a hypocrite, you need to understand how their actions are in conflict with their beliefs. If you don’t know what their beliefs are, how are you supposed to do that? You can only be right accidentally, and that’s no way to be.
Make your language more inclusive, or you’re a bad person.
The trouble with that is, language can’t be “inclusive.” If it’s inclusive it will stop meaning anything, and then it will be useless. We need language. It does so much work for us. Imagine being suddenly transported to a tiny distant country where you don’t know the language and the people there don’t know yours – imagine how helpless you would feel.
We need the word “women,” the actual word that means what it has meant all these centuries. We need it and we need it to go on meaning what it has meant. If we’re forced to change it to mean “and some men” we’ll just have to find a new word to mean what women meant until that day. There’s no point in telling us to make it more “inclusive” because that’s not its job.
The outrage engine is overheating.
It’s possible that people are getting tired of hearing quite so much from “transgender people and their allies.”
“A few small healthcare cases”??? Give me a break.
“They had no skeletons pre-Enlightenment” hahahahahahahahaha
By the way what was that tweet?
The Willoughby dude is as usual doing his best to punish and exclude women.
Owen Jones talks of a “reversal on LGBTQ rights,” but of course what he means is mostly the T bit, which doesn’t belong with the LGB bit in the first place. As usual this ploy enables a lot of dishonest framing.
Even more terrifying is Texas’s banning of gender-affirming healthcare for young trans people, with their parents now legally defined as child abusers if they seek it.
But of course it’s not “healthcare.” Switch the frame and it’s mutilation and/or dangerous and damaging use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. It’s not healthcare as commonly understood at all. “Gender-affirming” is not a medical term – it’s a political one. No one can change sex, and “affirming” gender is just feel-good drivel. “Young trans people” is a very squishy category, because so is “trans” itself. It’s basically just an thought-balloon. There’s an idea that there’s such a thing as “trans” and that self-reporting is 100% reliable, but both of those claims are highly debatable.
In January, the Council of Europe placed the UK in the same category as Hungary, Poland, Russia and Turkey for its position on LGBTQ rights, while for the third year running the UK has been relegated in the annual ranking of LGBTQ rights across Europe. The overriding reason is the anti-trans moral panic that grips British society, fostered by an overwhelmingly hostile media and a government that is using trans people as a prop in a “culture war” (just as Margaret Thatcher used gay people in the 1980s), and has refused to ban trans conversion practices.
Owen Jones is himself using trans people as a prop in a culture war, at the same time as he uses verbal nudges like “gender-affirming healthcare” and “trans conversion practices.” We’re supposed to think “trans conversion” is exactly comparable to gay conversion therapy, i.e. psychiatry coaxing or pushing lesbians and gays to go straight, but in fact they’re different. There’s no delusion involved in being same-sex attracted, while thinking you can become the other sex is a delusion full stop.
I know, it’s just Twitter, but really the argument is so powerful I have to share it.
See what I mean?
One powerful argument after another. Hume isn’t in it; Mill wishes he’d decided to be a gardener.
Now THERE is a message!
It wasn’t just about her testimony, it was about the possibility that her testimony would draw more. That’s happening.
Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger has said that bombshell testimony given by Cassidy Hutchinson to the January 6 hearings last week has inspired more witnesses to come forward and the committee is getting more new evidence by the day.
…
“There will be way more information and stay tuned,” Kinzinger told CNN’s State of the Union co-anchor Dana Bash. “Every day, we get new people that come forward and say, ‘Hey, I didn’t think maybe this piece of a story that I knew was important, but now I do see how this plays in here.’”
…
In a separate interview, another committee member, Congressman Adam Schiff, said: “There’s certainly more information that is coming forward … we are following additional leads. I think those leads will lead to new testimony.”
Schiff added that part of the reason the committee had wanted to put Hutchinson to testify would be to encourage others to do so as well. “We were hoping it would generate others stepping forward, seeing her courage would inspire them to show the same kind of courage,” he said.
Bring it on.
What if the pregnant rape victim is ten years old? Any concern for her?
The case of a 10-year-old child rape victim in Ohio who was six weeks pregnant, ineligible for an abortion in her own state, and forced to travel to Indiana for the procedure has spotlighted the shocking impact of the US supreme court ruling on abortion.
…
Dr Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, said she had received a call from a colleague doctor in Ohio who treats child abuse victims and asked for help. Indiana’s lawmakers have not yet banned or restricted abortion, but they are likely to do so when a special session of the state assembly convenes later this month.
Abortion providers like Bernard say they are receiving a sharp increase in the number of patients coming to their clinics for abortion from the neighboring states where such procedures are now restricted or banned.
“It’s hard to imagine that in just a few short weeks we will have no ability to provide that care,” Bernard told the Columbus Dispatch.
It will be 1960 again. We’ll be Ireland, while Ireland is now where we were until the other day.
Philip Pullman yet again.
As far as I can tell (replies are numerous and they go off into nested threads and subthreads and disappear into infinity) he never did: never specified and never apologized. Instead he pretended he wasn’t talking about Jo Bartosch’s article at all.
No. Zero points. He said it in reply to a tweet sharing the article, so he was necessarily badmouthing the article, even if he didn’t intend to in the moment. A decent person would grasp that and apologize if he really never intended to badmouth the article.
That’s just cheap. At that point he must have become aware, if he hadn’t noticed before, that he was in effect dissing Bartosch’s article. He should have just admitted it and made amends. He’s really not a very decent guy.