Now there’s a headline.

Tesla, bowing to pressure, stops allowing drivers to play video games while driving

Great god almighty. As if people don’t already drive insanely enough.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says the company will send out a software update over the internet so the function called “Passenger Play” will be locked and won’t work while vehicles are in motion.

Meaning that currently drivers can play video games while tailgating people going the speed limit in a downpour on a dark winter afternoon. Fabulous.

“The Vehicle Safety Act prohibits manufacturers from selling vehicles with defects posing unreasonable risks to safety, including technologies that distract drivers from driving safely,” NHTSA’s statement said.

But haha manufacturers pay no attention because it’s all just so much fun.

No [clap] No [clap] No [clap]

Meanwhile the National Organization for Women, like other national and global organizations for women, should be doing its job and focusing on women, not men who call themselves women and not trans people and not “non-binary” people. You don’t see labor unions dropping all their labor issues to say Respect [clap] the [clap] bosses [clap]. Why is it that women’s organizations are so eager to throw women overboard and “center” the concerns of male people instead?

Tory MP Caroline Nokes just wants to make the Gender Recognition Act kinder.

In order for an individual to have their acquired gender recognised, a person has to prove to a panel of strangers that they will never meet – the gender recognition panel – that they are either feminine or masculine. It has caused a great deal of concern in the transgender community that the panel, in effect, sits in judgment upon them and their transition. Who is anyone to decide whether someone is feminine or masculine enough?

Well, since you ask, why should whether someone is “feminine” or “masculine” be a matter for government at all? Why should it be officially “recognised”? Why should it even be mentioned?

It’s as if there were government panels to rule on how charismatic or repellent people are, and how extroverted or introverted they are, and how cheery or gloomy they are, and so on ad infinitum. Variations in personality should not be a government issue.

The problem of course is that the GRA isn’t about just “feminine” and “masculine” because it’s also about women and men. The process doesn’t just stamp men “feminine,” it stamps them women. That’s the issue. I think Nokes probably knows that perfectly well, but she’s hiding it.

Gender identity is no longer as rigid as it once was, thank goodness. Women wear trousers. Some of us choose to eschew makeup altogether, others only on some days. Hair can be long, or short, or shaved off. But there is no way of knowing whether the panel is making judgments based on outdated stereotypes because it is devoid of transparency.

Notice what she doesn’t say. Women wear trousers, yes, but do men wear skirts? The rules for women have loosened up in some ways (and tightened in others – like the law against having pubic hair) but the rules for men haven’t. Women get to step up to clothes coded for men but men don’t get to step down to clothes coded for women…unless they claim to be women, which seems a tad drastic.

We spent months speaking to trans rights and women’s rights groups and sought to strike a path that safeguarded the rights of both. They are not zero sum – both can be supported. 

No they can’t. They are zero sum in some instances – because of the way men who identify as women push them. Putting men in charge of rape crisis services? Including men on shortlists for women’s prizes? Calling men who rape women “she” in the newspapers and in court?

All I have ever sought is to make the GRA kinder, quicker and much more understanding of the needs of transgender people and the concerns of women’s rights groups.

And yet what she writes in this very piece shows that she puts the concerns of women’s rights group last by a long distance.

Meanwhile in Crouch End –

Because men who say they are women are infinitely more deserving and important and worthy of deference and “be kind” than mere women.

This is a novel way for shops to go about things.

Bookstores deciding which books are well written and thus to be sold and which are not and thus to be unavailable to customers. What a fantastic customer service! Apparently they read all the books themselves to save the buying public time.

Pedophile who Identifies as a 5-Year-Old Girl

A 60-year-old pedophile who claims to identify as a 5-year-old girl was found to have been in breach of his child sexual harm prevention order after he approached two little girls and kissed them.

Janiel Verainer, of Chatham, UK, was found by the court to have breached a sexual harm order imposed in 2016 after he was found kissing a small girl outside of a cafe in Thanet, UK. At the time, child sexual exploitation images were also found on Verainer’s devices. Verainer was sentenced to 15 months in prison, and the sexual harm prevention order – one requiring he stay away from all children – was implemented.

But he did it again: he approached two little girls and kissed them.

During the hearing for his violation, Verainer was dressed like an elf, wearing a green and red dress, red and white thigh-high stockings, and a festive sweater. He was allegedly sucking his thumb throughout.

At a previous hearing he sucked on a pacifier.

You know the punchline – the court Respected His Pronouns.

Via Sackbut

We always have to be kinder. Kinder and kinder and kinder and kinder. There’s never enough. No one bother about being kinder to us though. We’re just old boots.

Trans rights are a major part of the remit of [Tory MP Caroline] Nokes and her committee, which is currently undertaking the inquiry into the government’s response to Gender Recognition Act reform. (May’s government held a long consultation on updating the GRA and committed to introducing those reforms, which were later shelved by Johnson’s administration.) The committee hearings are extraordinarily sensitive, empathetic and detailed sessions with some of the leading figures on both sides of this debate, one of the most bitter in the current political landscape. 

Nokes, in ways that largely go unnoticed, quietly encourages a lot of support and kindness towards trans people. 

Why trans people in particular? The most visible and audible ones are male. Why do they need so much support and kindness? Especially from women?

“These are people who have the worst experience of the health service, they, as young people, have a really rough time in education, they then end up in a relationship where they’re the victim of domestic abuse. You sort of look at it and think we have to make the system kinder to trans people, and instead of focusing on having a massive row about what constitutes a woman, and whether we’re going to refer to a pregnant person as a woman or not, can we not please just be a little bit kinder to people and work out how we can make life easier for trans people?”

Instead of making sure we don’t lose the meaning of the word “woman”??? No we fucking cannot, and why in hell are you asking?

“When we’ve become so much more tolerant about so many aspects of life, it just seems to be really, really awful that we can’t be more understanding, and everybody the whole time wants to drag it back to sort of the lowest common denominator and to wheel out, you know, the one example they can find of a trans woman who’s attacked someone. Please, you know, we can be kinder than that. We can be nicer than that.”

Jesus, point missed by a mile. It’s not primarily about trans women who attack someone, it’s about opportunistic men who can claim to be trans to get access to vulnerable women. What about being kind to those women for a second?

“I have a massive problem with the whole sort of ‘cancel culture’,” she adds. “He who shouts loudest is not always right. And I think that we as a society have lost the ability to debate issues and views without resorting to abuse, and people just wanting to destroy others because they happen not to agree with them.”

You mean like Owen Jones, Jolyon Maugham, Gregor Murray? Tell them to “be kind” why doncha.

No, that’s not true.

That’s a man.

And humans can’t “have sex” with dogs. The man didn’t “have sex with an Alsation”; he abused a dog.

This is not our crime.

I don’t think so.

I don’t think it’s daft or purist or obstinate or stupid to dislike customized pronouns. It’s maybe somewhat stupid or wrong to tell off other people for using them, but I think we have good reasons for objecting to them in general.

For one thing they condition us, as is the plan. If we say it we start to believe it, involuntarily. I don’t want to be conditioned to believe it.

For another it’s a falsehood, and not the minor personal kind to save people’s feelings but the major public kind to convince us of a general falsehood. I just don’t think we should be pressured to comply.

And on a more trivial level it’s just irritating and stupid and tedious, and extra effort to remember.

On the other hand…it’s trickier for a journalist, because Singal can’t just use the real pronouns as the default, in a normal no-problem way. His not using them would send all kinds of messages, which he won’t want to send in a piece of journalism. We’ve been boxed into a no-win situation here.

Jolyon Maugham, aka The Good Law Project, continues his bullying of the LGB Alliance.

The Tribunal has agreed to hear our arguments as to why the LGB so-called Alliance (LGBA) should not have been given charitable status and why their activities are not those of a charity. This means Mermaids, the claimant in the case, will have the opportunity to present the facts in full. The hearing will take place in May 2022.

…

To be registered as a charity, an organisation must be established exclusively for purposes which the law recognises as charitable, and it must pursue them in a way which gives rise to tangible benefits that outweigh any associated harms. We don’t believe that legal threshold has been met.

Naturally he doesn’t, because he doesn’t think women have any rights which men who identify as women are bound to respect.

On Today this morning:

James Kirkup thanks Harry Miller and Fair Cop.

He talked to Harry almost three years ago about what the cops had done.

After all, he’d broken no law, and even the police force involved confirmed that. Instead, he was contacted and a record was made of his conduct under rules around ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs). These were introduced after the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence, with the intention of giving the police a means of tracking behaviour that, while not crossing the threshold of a crime, gave a fair indication that a person’s actions were likely to escalate to full-blown crime.

Aaaaand does that apply to gender critical tweets? Are gender critical opinion-havers likely to commit full-blown crimes?

Of course not.

What happened next was a legal campaign lasting almost three years that has seen not just Humberside Police’s treatment of Miller ruled unlawful last year, but the whole NCHI regime called into question by the Court of Appeal.

That latter ruling came this week and would have been bigger news were it not for the Covid blight. In short, the Court accepted Miller’s argument that rules on the use of NCHIs set by the College of Policing for individual constabularies were too broad and blunt. The application of those rules cast the net for hate incidents too widely, and thus risks a ‘chilling effect… on the legitimate exercise of freedom of expression’.

The college is now revising those rules, hopefully returning the hate-incident regime to its original, narrow and valid purpose. Ministers may change the law too, via the Policing Bill now in the House of Lords. There is talk of tens of thousands of NHCIs being stricken from the record. Harry Miller v The College of Policing is therefore a big deal, important for the way we conduct ourselves as a society and the way we deal with difficult, contested ideas.

The subject was discussed in the House of Lords last month, too.

My point is that the failures of the NCHI regime were plain to see, especially to the politicians, lawyers and officials who are supposed to make sure that stupid policies get fixed, or at least, get made a bit less stupid. But it wasn’t those people who fixed the NCHI regime and its chilling effect on free speech. It was Harry Miller and his fellow campaigners from the Fair Cop group he founded: Sarah Phillimore, a barrister, and Rob Jessel, a writer.

They didn’t have to, he says, they could have had a quiet life, he says, but they did it anyway.

Harry Miller and his friends didn’t have to have that fight. But they did. They fought and they won. They corrected a wrong, and made public policy better. There isn’t much positive news these days, but that really is a good story.

You’re darn tootin’, as Helen Joyce put it.

Genius.

Patreon

Gregor Murray three days ago:

Gregor Murray two days ago:

He means (he clarifies in a later tweet) that the Scouts deleted his Office account, not that he did it.

In short he had a tantrum and “resigned” on Twitter, and the Scouts said Okbye and deleted his removed his access to the account, and now he’s pretending to be concerned about the fallout for The Children.

Yes it’s Maya’s fault that he resigned in a huff on Twitter. Definitely.

A fossil of a dinosaur about to hatch.

Scientists have announced the discovery of a perfectly preserved dinosaur embryo that was preparing to hatch from its egg, just like a chicken.

Perfectly preserved skeleton, that is.

The researchers say it’s 66 million years old or more.

The discovery has also given researchers a greater understanding of the link between dinosaurs and modern birds. The fossil shows the embryo was in a curled position known as “tucking”, which is a behaviour seen in birds shortly before they hatch.

And the James Webb telescope lifts off tomorrow.

The “you can’t tell me what to do!!” party continues to embrace death by suffocation.

Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate, used the same week that the US passed 800,000 Covid-19 deaths to tell a rightwing gathering she would add to that toll herself before she would agree to be given a vaccine.

“It’ll be over my dead body that I’ll have to get a shot,” Palin told a cheering crowd. “I will not do that. I won’t do it, and they better not touch my kids either.”

Awesome! So brave, so defiant, so protective of her kids’ right to die instead of getting vaccinated.

Palin, who tested positive for Covid in March, was speaking at AmericaFest 2021 in Phoenix, Arizona, an event hosted by the conservative student organization Turning Point USA which attracted other staunch vaccine opponents including Tucker Carlson of Fox News and extremist Republicans Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

I wonder if it’s occurred to them that they’re promoting “don’t take steps to avoid COVID” while the other party is promoting “do take steps to avoid COVID” and that thus they are encouraging their own voters to get sick and die. You’d think the effect on elections would slow them down if nothing else did.

Really though I just marvel at the stupidity. What’s the principle they’re defending? That government should do nothing to prevent the spread of a lethal virus? What kind of principle is that?

Is it the principle that no one should ever do anything for the common good, even when it’s their own good too? But what kind of principle is that? Why is this a Republican thing as opposed to a stupid confused people thing? I’ll never understand it.

Let’s have a round of applause for You Cee ELLLL.

University College London has become the first university to formally cut ties to the LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall, saying its membership of Stonewall’s programmes could inhibit academic freedom and discussion around sex and gender.

UCL announced that it would end its involvement with Stonewall’s workplace equality index, which rates employers on their policies, and its diversity schemes, following a recommendation from the university’s most senior academics.

“Following a period of debate within our community and careful consideration of the issues, UCL has now taken the decision that we will not re-join Stonewall’s diversity champions programme or make a submission to the workplace equality index,” UCL said in a statement.

The Nolan Report may also be due a round of applause, and above all so are the mouthy feminists, especially academics and journalists, who’ve been on the case for years.

From the Telegraph:

Trans people should be able to self-declare their legal gender, MPs have recommended despite warnings of impact it will have on single sex spaces.

That is, on spaces women need for safety and privacy.

A new report from the Women and Equalities Committee has found that the process by which people can legally transition is “unfair and overly medicalised”.

Women and Equalities Committee shafts women.

Drop many of the requirements, the MPs say. No need to live in the bespoke gender for two years first – just go for it.

The Government has also been urged to also remove the need for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria before a person can acquire a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), saying that the “focus must be shifted to a system of self-declaration”.

Sure. What could possibly go wrong? Brave Tom can be Tina for the evening in the pub, do a bit of ogling and grabbing in the women’s loo, and go back to Tom on the way home.

Dr Nicola Williams and Professor Rosa Freedman pointed all this out to the Committee, but were ignored.

Professor Alice Sullivan tells us why we would want to know.

And in conclusion:

10/Team #nodebate have lost, and the poverty of their arguments is exposed for all to see. I hope for a changing of the guard at the Women and Equalities Committee. We deserve better.

The Guardian tells us:

Women around the world will take turns to fast for 24 hours in an attempt to put pressure on the UK government to secure the freedom of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe from detention in Iran.

The campaign by FiLiA, a female-led volunteer organisation working for the liberation of women, follows the 21-day hunger strike Nazanin’s husband, Richard Ratcliffe, mounted outside the Foreign Office in London until mid-November.

Photographs of all the participants in the fasting relay, which begins on Monday, will be published on the group’s website day by day in a display of solidarity.