Oops now she’s had to resign.

Allegra Stratton has stepped down as the government’s spokesperson for the Cop26 climate summit after footage emerged of her joking about a party at Downing Street during the peak of lockdown rules in December last year.

Where’s everybody’s sense of humor? Pandemics are funny, dammit! People who impose rules on underlings that they flout themselves are funny. Do what I say not what I do is funny. Hypocrisy is funny. Privilege and contempt are funny.

Boris Johnson partied right after telling everyone not to party.

On Tuesday last week, the British tabloid newspaper, the Mirror, published a story that claimed parties had been held at Johnson’s Downing Street residence in the run-up to Christmas last year.

One of the events was said to have taken place on 18 December, with dozens of people drinking wine and playing party games.

There was one major problem with this: London had just been placed under new restrictions to stop the spread of coronavirus. Last December, Covid was spreading rapidly, hundreds of people were dying every day, and Johnson’s government had told people that parties were no longer allowed.

Yes but he told people – as in he told the servants. He’s not people, he’s Boris Johnson.

The story was fading out but then there was leaked video of a practice press conference, at which someone asked a senior adviser about the party and she completely blew it.

Today was prime minister’s question time and it was awkward.

Johnson insisted he had no personal knowledge of any party, saying: “I repeat that I have been repeatedly assured since these allegations emerged that there was no party, and that no Covid rules were broken.”

Everyone laughed.

But, you know – it’s like Trump. Everyone laughs but the sinister clowns keep popping back up.

UN Women seems to have forgotten its own name.

UN Women is UN Women, not UN Men Who Say They Are Women.

Also that stupid little factoid isn’t even true, and it’s also absurd on its face – why are they comparing trans women to cis people? It should be either trans women compared to women or trans people compared to people in general.

But it shouldn’t be trans women at all. UN Women should be about women, as it says on the tin.

Originally a comment by Papito on Smile when you call us that.

Lumping Hispanics together into a single group would be an improvement over what “Latinx” does. Creating a unified Latin American group is what Univision has done so successfully, and as the article says, they never say “Latinx.” When I saw what Univision was doing in creating a broad yet unified Hispanic audience I was amazed.

What “Latinx” says is that Hispanics are using their own language wrong, and they need Anglos to fix it for them. It’s colossally demeaning, and utterly unnecessary. The word is used in English, and English doesn’t have genders (either to fix, or be left alone). If they just used a different word, it would entirely obviate the need. Using “Latino” in English in the first place is a patronizing appropriation of Spanish. It gained popularity because Anglos didn’t want to say Hispanic and are too lazy to say Latin American. The problems don’t start only once you get to “Latinx.”

Mostly, Hispanic people don’t dislike being referred to as Hispanic, they’re not squeamish about the idea of Spain (and, BTW, Spanish people don’t refer to themselves as “Hispanic,” they’re Spanish). The idea that we shouldn’t use “Hispanic” because of the reference to Spain is that kind of woke racism McWhorter talks about. It’s because nice Anglo liberals don’t want to be reminded, they want to project more otherness on Hispanics, and on more than just a linguistic level.

I used to teach Spanish at the college level, and the degree of ignorance of the incoming college student can hardly be exaggerated. Most Americans don’t think there are any white people, or black people, in Mexico, or elsewhere in Latin America. They think that “Hispanic” is a race. They don’t know that people speak Portuguese in Brazil. The term “Latinx” helps cover up all that ignorance.

Crap, you got me up on my soapbox now. The reason it’s important, in America, to use the term “Hispanic” is because of the unique history of Hispanic peoples in America. It’s all well and good to want to use the term “Latin American” if we want to talk about other people who may have immigrated here from the South, but Hispanics hold the distinction of the country moving to them, rather than vice versa. Hispanics aren’t a foreign, immigrant minority in the United States, they’re a linguistic minority (and more than one cultural minority) that has been present here since before the United States existed. Lumping Hispanics in with other Latin Americans is a form of denial of this history. The US never stole half of Brazil, or occupied Surinam. People who ended up in the US because the border crossed them are in a fundamentally different position.

Don’t Latinx Me, Bro!

Trump wants to be the next Zuckerberg as well as the first Emperor of Amurrika.

Donald Trump’s plan to launch “Truth Social”, a special purpose acquisitions backed social media company, early next year may have hit a roadblock after US regulators issued a request for information on the deal on Monday.

The request from the SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority for information from Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC), a blank-check SPAC that is set to merge with Trump Media & Technology Group, comes as a powerful Republican congressman, Devin Nunes, announced he was stepping out of politics to join the Trump media venture as CEO.

The twin developments set the stage for a major political battle over Truth Social, a platform that purportedly plans to challenge Twitter and Facebook, social platforms that have banned or curbed the former president over his involvement in stoking the 6 January Capitol riot.

I think it’s spelled Truth Soshul. That’s how Trump pronounces social, at least.

“Are you a woman or gender variant?”

I beg your pardon? Why are those my options? Do you ask everyone that?

It’s the Green Party.

The British Green Party says in an email sent to its members that anyone who “identifies” as woman or “other gender variant” is eligible to vote in the next Women Committee Election, party members have said.

So men are the normal and women are the weirdo variant along with other weirdo variants?

On December 6, members of the Green Party received an email about registering to vote in the 2021/22 Green Party Women Committee Election.

“Check that you’re eligible to vote: You are eligible to vote in the Green Party Women committee elections if you are a member of the Green Party of England and Wales and also identify as a woman or gender variant.”

You can’t just identify as a member of the Party, but you can just identify as a woman (or “gender variant” whatever tf that means). Being one sex or the other is all in the mind, but being a party member, that is solid.

But if you don’t sign up you can’t get the constitution changed (repaired) so…

Hand me my boots, I’m going gender variant.

Students outraged, onlookers concerned, words exchanged.

AN urgent investigation is underway at Durham University after students walked out of an event at which controversial journalist Rod Liddle was a guest speaker – and were later branded “pathetic” by a college principal.

Well, Rod Liddle – he lives to irritate people. Making a fuss just amplifies him.

This is the bit that interests me:

Durham’s Intersectional Feminist Society launched an open letter condemning Liddle’s remarks and the decision to invite him.

Durham’s what?

Does Durham have other “intersectional” societies or is it just women who are expected to be inclooosive and to enforce that inclooosivity on each other?

The society doesn’t seem to have its own website or space on Durham’s website but it does have a Facebook page.

Durham Intersectional Feminism Society is an inclusive feminist society, with a focus on providing a safe space for discussion, socialising, activism, self-care and education. We welcome people of all genders, religions, races, abilities and experiences to come to our meetings and talks, and get involved with campaigns.

So it’s not a feminist society but a chat about stuff society.

I wonder if Durham has an actual feminist society.

H/t latsot

Dud analogy time.

If a lecturer publicly expressed the view that people with red hair should never eat sauerkraut would you call that humane?

He’s on fire today.

Lesbians are women, so you get your homophobia and your misogyny and pretty soon things start getting really ugly.

Five stars for “I do not believe we are haunted houses home to gender ghosts.”

On fire.

Journalism: stop doing this. Don’t EVER do this. Don’t report that a woman sexually assaulted a woman when it was a man who did the assaulting.

Headline:

Lisa Jones sexually assaulted female stranger she followed in Melbourne

Subhead:

A woman has been thrown behind bars after sexually assaulting a stranger she followed down a Melbourne street before issuing a shocking demand.

First three paragraphs:

A Melbourne woman was walking home when another woman grabbed her and told her to “lie down and have sex with me” in a shocking attack.

Lisa Jones pleaded guilty to assault with intent to commit a sexual offence and sexual assault.

She was jailed for three years and three months in the County Court of Victoria on Tuesday.

Only then does the purported news outlet admit that it’s talking about a trans woman.

The “reporter” is a woman, one Caroline Schelle.

Jones, a transgender woman, spotted her victim and followed the other female down Lennox Street in Richmond in February this year.

Rubbing our noses in her stupid lie – the victim wasn’t the other female, she was the only female.

The 44-year-old grabbed her victim’s arm in a “strong grip”, forcing the woman to face her and then grabbed her jeans.

Yes the male grip generally is a “strong grip” when it comes to grabbing a woman by the arm in order to rape her.

Jones put her hands down the woman’s pants and tried to pull down her victim’s jeans but the other woman was able to fight her off as bystanders came rushing to her aid.

It’s not only a punch in the face to women, it’s also bad clumsy stupid reporting – all this “the other woman” shit when it’s not any “other woman” in the first place.

It was revealed in court Jones spent six years in a male prison in Germany for sexually abusing a six-year-old girl, before she transitioned.

Her time in the male prison was a “traumatic and harrowing” experience for Jones but did little to deter further sexual offending, Judge Tiwana said.

She was deported to Australia in 2018 and moved to the ACT, where she started hormone replacement therapy before returning to live in Melbourne.

The HRT seems to have fallen down on the job a bit.

Why do they do this? The bosses at news outlets, the editors, the reporters, whoever it is who makes this decision to pretend that it’s a woman trying to rape a woman when in fact it’s a man who claims to be trans? For all we know it’s entirely bogus and he doesn’t have any kind of gender dysphoria he just knows an opportunity when he sees one. Why do the news media report his sexual violence as being done by a woman? Without the word “trans” until a third of the way into the story?

H/t Roj Blake

Oops.

When woke Language Reform turns out to be not so much a reform as a mistake:

As Democrats seek to reach out to Latino voters in a more gender-neutral way, they’ve increasingly begun using the word Latinx, a term that first began to get traction among academics and activists on the left.

That is, non-Hispanic academics and activists, apparently.

But that very effort could be counterproductive in courting those of Latin American descent, according to a new nationwide poll of Hispanic voters.

Only 2 percent of those polled refer to themselves as Latinx, while 68 percent call themselves “Hispanic” and 21 percent favored “Latino” or “Latina” to describe their ethnic background, according to the survey from Bendixen & Amandi International, a top Democratic firm specializing in Latino outreach.

More problematic for Democrats: 40 percent said Latinx bothers or offends them to some degree and 30 percent said they would be less likely to support a politician or organization that uses the term.

You know what that sounds like? It sounds like women not wanting to be called “cis” thank you very much, and wanting nothing to do with anyone who does call us that.

Disgusting narcissistic pig.

No we fucking don’t. We have to keep working for women to be able to talk about violence against us, not violence against men in lipstick.

And it’s violence against women – it’s not “GBV.” Men in red dresses don’t get to rename it GBV so that they can pretend it happens to them too. Get your self-obsessed kicks somewhere else you creep.

This just in (well, an hour ago) –

It’s not great that it takes extreme gerrymandering to get the DoJ involved.

If only we could go back to reserving voting for white men of property.

Please, CBC, tell us more about this insulting and offensive move.

A transgender woman in Prince Edward Island has been invited to speak at a Montreal Massacre memorial service being held today by the P.E.I. Advisory Council on the Status of Women.

Monday marks 32 years since 14 women were killed at École Polytechnique.

Since 14 women were killed for being women, by a man who said that was why they were being killed. It was an explicitly, avowedly misogynist massacre of women.

“I was deeply touched,” said Anastasia Preston. “It is a huge honour for myself and it’s a huge honour as a trans woman to be included in an event like this.”

But there shouldn’t be “honour” given to a man on an occasion to mark the woman-hating massacre of 14 women. Preston shouldn’t be “touched,” he should be appalled. The event is not about him and it’s not about trans women.

“For decades, trans women have been kept out of the conversation around gender-based violence.”

No not “gender-based violence” you clueless fuckhead, woman-hating violence. Of course that conversation is about women and not men who call themselves women. Of course it is. It’s not a privilege to be massacred with your classmates you know. A memorial for the massacred women doesn’t need to be “inclusive” of men who want to intrude.

Government data does not have accurate records of the number of transgender women murdered in gender-based violence, Preston said. 

Fuck off. This one is about women.

During Monday’s event, Preston said she will speak about some of her experiences of harassment on P.E.I. She hopes her stories can raise awareness.

Oh jesus. He actually is going to change the subject. He actually is going to make it about him and his kink. It’s beyond disgusting, into a whole new territory without adjectives to name it.

There are four more paragraphs in which he talks about himself and his red dress and being groped.

Words fail me.

Talk about adding insult to injury…

What does a man who says he’s a woman have to do with the Montreal massacre? Those women were slaughtered by a misogynist man because they were women and he was a misogynist man. Men who say they are women have nothing to do with this subject.

CBC P.E.I. is more concerned about the man than it is about the massacre or the misogyny.

To reduce harm. What about the harm CBC P.E.I. is doing? What about the harm the man in lipstick is doing? What about women?

You don’t want Rachel Dolezal speaking at a memorial for the Tulsa Race Massacre. Why have the equivalent speak at a memorial for massacred women?

Piggy as ever.

In remarks to diners at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Saturday night, Donald Trump called the American media “crooked bastards” and Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, a “fucking idiot”.

The meandering, foul-mouthed speech to Turning Point USA, a group for young conservatives, was streamed by Jack Posobiec, a rightwing blogger and provocateur.

…

“The country is at a very important, dangerous place,” Trump said, amid familiar lies about his defeat in the 2020 election, which he says was the result of electoral fraud.

“We have no press. The press is so corrupt. We don’t have a press. If there is a good story about us, a good story about any of the people that are Republicans, conservatives, they make it a bad story. And if it’s a bad story they make it the worst story in history. It is the most dishonest group of people.”

His vocabulary and syntax remain as impressive as ever.

Trump said he asked [Milley]: “You think it’s cheaper to leave it there so they can have it than it is to fill it up with a half tank of gas and fly it into Pakistan or fly it back to our country?

“‘Yes, sir, we think it’s cheaper, sir.’

“That’s when I realized he was a fucking idiot.”

Sir, it’s the other guy in the conversation, sir.

I wonder if Zuckerberg ever lies awake at night thinking about the Rohingya. They think about him.

Facebook’s negligence facilitated the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar after the social media network’s algorithms amplified hate speech and the platform failed to take down inflammatory posts, according to legal action launched in the US and the UK.

The platform faces compensation claims worth more than £150bn under the coordinated move on both sides of the Atlantic.

A class action complaint lodged with the northern district court in San Francisco says Facebook was “willing to trade the lives of the Rohingya people for better market penetration in a small country in south-east Asia.”

It adds: “In the end, there was so little for Facebook to gain from its continued presence in Burma, and the consequences for the Rohingya people could not have been more dire. Yet, in the face of this knowledge, and possessing the tools to stop it, it simply kept marching forward.”

Marching forward for the market penetration.

In the US and UK, the allegations against Facebook include: Facebook’s algorithms amplified hate speech against the Rohingya people; it failed to invest in local moderators and fact checkers; it failed to take down specific posts inciting violence against Rohingya people; and it did not shut down specific accounts or delete groups and pages that were encouraging ethnic violence.

The US complaint cites Facebook posts that appeared in a Reuters report, with one in 2013 stating: “We must fight them the way Hitler did the Jews, damn Kalars [a derogatory term for Rohingya people].” Another post in 2018, showing a photograph of a boatload of Rohingya refugees, says: “Pour fuel and set fire so that they can meet Allah faster.”

You know, you’d think once it’s a national news story it would be worth taking action, if only to cover the corporate ass.

The Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has alleged the platform is fanning ethnic violence in countries including Ethiopia and is not doing enough to stop it. She said 87% of the spending on combating misinformation at Facebook is spent on English content, while only 9% of users are English speakers.

Facebook says no no it has a strategy, really it does.

About that “Moms for Liberty” complaint:

A Tennessee chapter of the right-wing group Moms for Liberty has tried to use the state’s new law aimed at banning “critical race theory” in school to ban a book about Martin Luther King Jr.

I have a feeling the “Moms” for liberty are for liberty for themselves but not so much for other people – people who teach history that isn’t all We Have Always Been Awesome, for instance.

Tennessee Republicans earlier this year passed a law in response to the conservative panic about “critical race theory,” barring the teaching of certain concepts in classrooms including “teaching that one race or sex is inherently superior to another; ascribing character traits, values, moral or ethical codes to a specific race or sex; that the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist or that a meritocracy is inherently racist or sexist,” according to The Tennessean. Critics argue that Republicans in Tennessee and around the country are trying to ban the teaching of history they don’t like.

I’d be more specific about it: history they don’t like because it doesn’t claim we have always been flawless.

The first complaint filed to the state came from Robin Steenman, chair of the Moms for Liberty chapter in Williamson County, just south of Nashville. The 11-page complaint claims that the state’s widely used Wit and Wisdom literacy curriculum has a “heavily biased agenda” that makes kids “hate their country, each other and/or themselves.”

There’s a book about Martin Luther King, there’s a book about Ruby Bridges (which naturally includes the fact that enraged white people tried to prevent her from going to a “white” public school), there are photos of civil rights campaigners being blasted with fire hoses. News flash for the “Moms”: all that is part of US history, and not a minor part at that.

“The classroom books and teacher manuals reveal both explicit and implicit Anti-American, Anti-White, and Anti-Mexican teaching,” the complaint said. “Additionally, it implies to second grade children that people of color continue to be oppressed by an oppressive ‘angry, vicious, scary, mean, loud, violent, [rude], and [hateful]’ white population and teaches that the racial injustice of the 1960s exists today.”

Instead they should be taught that all that was stamped out no later than 1966 and everything has been completely fabulous ever since?

The state said no for this time because the paperwork was late, but urged another try.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on A different story.

Several Sussex colleagues publicly denounced her on social media, although strangely, she says, not to her face. “No peer ever said to me: ‘Look, I really object to what you’re saying and I’d like to discuss it with you.’ They immediately went to Defcon 1: ‘She’s a bigot… arguing for single-sex spaces is like the Jim Crow laws [that historically enforced racial segregation in the American south].’” She remains fascinated by the performative aspects of social media debate. “The important thing is to show your tribe that you have the right morals and you could show that by saying, ‘I’m not with her.’”

Performative indeed. Just like India Willoughby’s faux geniality in and around the radio debate, followed by social media transperbolic accusations of “genocide.” The impersonal distance offered by the interposing technological channel allows and encourages extremism that would be stilted and inappropriate in personal, face to face meeting. You’re less likely to deploy boilerplate sloganeering (or a bullhorn) in an actual discussion with another person, than you are when playing for an audience of fellow true believers, where both the message and intended recipients are completely different. A genuine expression of hurt, or a sincere request for understanding and sympathy from someone you feel has wronged you, is not at all the same as a pearl-clutching rallying of the troops to come to your defence. One behaves differently in front of witnesses than in front of an audience.

There is always the danger of “our side” doing the same, though I daresay there seem to be few examples of this behaviour that I’ve seen coming from the feminist or gender critical side. The fact that trans activists must twist and misrepresent even the mildest statements in support of women’s spaces and boundaries into TERF “dog whistles” that are in reality denials of trans “existence,” and calls for trans “elimination,” is a pretty good indication of the fact they have no better evidence of explicit feminist malevolence. If they had any such evidence, they would use it.

Best of all is a statement that is blatantly, manifestly false. Like 1 equals 3. Or trans women are women. If you claim to believe something like that, they you are committing yourself to the group that says that, and burning your bridges to the reality-based community.

And at that point, Stock’s colleagues stopped being colleagues and became Inquisitors, more interested in proclaiming their own orthodoxy (and protecting their own skin) than in coming to any sort of understanding or compromise. To compromise with Evil is itself Evil.

Live free or die.

Well not free to teach about slavery OBVIOUSLY. Other free. Good free.

The Washington Post last July:

A majority of New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu’s diversity council has quit after he signed new restrictions into law that affect educators as well as public employees.

Language in the state budget Sununu signed in late June implicitly rejects the idea of systemic racism by directly prohibiting teachers and anyone leading diversity training for public employees from saying that any group is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, even if unconsciously.

More on how this is playing out:

They’re playing the “no you’re the racist” game. It’s “I don’t see color” but meaner.

In this column, white people with huge guns. In this other column, Ruby Bridges is a racist. Your deal!