I saw a tweet by Amy Siskind saying the Pillsbury Dough Boy of Fox News is now mocking today’s January 6 hearing, and after I got my breath back I looked for more. Aaron Rupar, as so often, obliges.
And in case that’s not enough –
“Hysteria” and “grift” – yes it’s all just a big con game. The 611 thousand dead would confirm if they could still breathe.
From a comment by iknklast on How to threaten power.
There is a battle between faculty and administration right now, both of whom claim to support high standards, but who identify that differently. High standards to the faculty means that you actually educate the students in what they came to learn; high standards to the administration means they are happy. They are doing battle right now with English and Math because they are trying to remove basic competencies in reading and mathematics that we currently require for graduation; the administration says that held up several students from getting their degree on time. Yeah. It’s more important that they graduate than that they learn anything.
They’ve also made it possible for students to get their degree without ever taking a science class. They added Psych 101 to the science curriculum; it is full to overflowing every semester while hard science classes are slipping in numbers. They used to put students in my Environmental Science course for the “easy” science…until it became obvious that it is not, in fact, easy, at least not if it’s taught correctly. I do not hold hands and sing Kum Bay Yah with my students, and we don’t sit around all semester learning about recycling for the 2000th time. They get the science of how the environment works, and why you shouldn’t try to get all chemicals out of the environment, and so forth. No New Age silliness in my class, just science.
So the administration did what any self respecting educator would do…they multiplied awards by giving them some sort of certificate for almost anything. A certificate for this class, a diploma for a couple more classes, and then a degree at the end. A student could probably come out with a dozen or two “awards” for doing nothing more than taking classes.
Meanwhile I’m sitting through harrowing ‘training’ sessions that tell me we should not give students deadlines; it’s too much pressure. Yeah, right. So next Sunday A.D. is fine if that’s when they want to turn in the paper? After they’ve been graduated for twelve years, because we don’t want to hold up anyone’s graduation just because they can’t read or do basic arithmetic? And we should let the student select how they are assessed. The example they give is to allow a student to do interpretive dance to demonstrate their knowledge of mitosis. So the fuzzy subjective feel good nonsense from elsewhere will begin to pervade the sciences, and we no longer have anything that can live up to the name of education.
From a comment by Rob on Systemic v individual.
I’m not going to enumerate all the examples of serious cultural, institutional and systemic racism in western society. Any reasonable person just needs to open their eyes to see the ocean we swim in. CRT was initially adopted by law schools as a tool for analysing the effect of laws (past and present) and the way their application affected people coming into contact with the legal system (police, courts and prisons). Remember this isn’t just kumbaya-singing hippies at universities, but hard headed lawyers from a wide ranging political and social spectrum. You can find plenty of non-academic lawyers and prosecutors online who give meaningful and specific examples of current systemic racism in the ‘law’ and a number who write about the racist background of specific laws and classes of law that still exist, but were designed to target black people.
Let’s not get started shall we on on the number of States in the US that are actively gerrymandering their Districts to disadvantage black voters, and who are also changing their voting procedures to specifically disadvantage not all Democratic voters, but overwhelmingly those of black or latino background.
Even if, for arguments sake, we say that there is only historical racism, that still doesn’t remove the consequences of generations of past active racism. Multigenerational disadvantage and poverty – laws around redlining, the ability to work (or refuse work), violent destruction of black wealth, refusal to allow loans on an equal basis, underfunding of public utilities, healthcare and education. That’s what creates ‘black’ culture.
NZ, as I’ve said before, has its fair share of racists (and racism deniers), but as a society we have been making a conscious effort for the last generation to redress some of the inequalities that exist. That has included reparations to Iwi groups, some of whom have invested wisely and created employment and wealth for their people and some not. Recognition of language, incorporation of cultural values and consultation into Government policies. Even so, we still have much worse outcomes for health, education, housing, imprisonment for Maori compared to non-Maori. A recent large study of health outcomes found, as an example, that when a particular subset of patients’ case files were examined (late middle aged obese male smokers with heart conditions), if you were white you were more likely to be referred by your doctor for further tests, medication and treatment. if you were Maori you were more likely to be sent home and told to quite smoking and exercise more. Maori are more likely to rearrested, and imprisoned, for the same crime than white people. Dysfunctional Maori families are far more likely to have their children ‘uplifted’ than non-Maori similarly situated.
There are rays of sunshine. These things are part of national debate and there is wide acceptance at Government and within many professions that things need to change. Schools that have made even token changes to adopt elements of Maori language and culture have found that students become more engaged and outcomes improve.
The best evidence that there is a systemic issue is that when people do try to change the system, the very structures and practices themselves make shifting outcomes slow and difficult and easily eroded. I don’t believe that NZ is unique and I don’t believe we are the worst country in the world with respect to these issues.
Well. That takes some nerve.
Really?!
No.
Stefanik’s claim is that the Capitol police raised concerns about security and that Pelosi “prioritized her partisan political optics over their safety.” But there’s a catch: their safety is not Pelosi’s jurisdiction.
It should go without saying that the main person who bears responsibility for the violence that occurred on Jan. 6 is former President Donald Trump, whose lies about the election being stolen are what inspired a militant set of protesters to gather in Washington. He then directed that very group he convened to head to the Capitol and told them to “show strength.”
But as far as who was responsible for security vulnerabilities that day [is concerned], Pelosi again is far from the guilty party. Capitol security isn’t the speaker’s responsibility. It’s the duty of the Capitol Police, along with the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms.
You know who else didn’t do anything about Capitol security that day? Dolly Parton! Also Angela Merkel, also Meryl Streep.
Nor is the House speaker responsible for the Capitol Police’s shortcomings. As the president of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, Jane Campbell, told CNN, “The speaker of the House does not oversee security of the U.S. Capitol, nor does this official oversee the Capitol Police Board.” Furthermore, the former Capitol Police chief has testified that Pelosi was not involved in decisions about the deployment of the National Guard in the run-up to Jan. 6.
But she should have been. Never mind that that’s not her job, she should have done it anyway. The whole thing is her fault.
Speaking of shorts on the men and tiny tiny underpants on the women, Gail Dines points out something I think of every time I see those damn photos and clips –
No discussion in mainstream media about the need for women athletes to have a full Brazilian wax to wear the hypersexualized, pornified skimpy outfits. Aside from the very painful procedure, women often bleed during the wax, get infections, and it hurts when the hair grows back. Could you imagine men having to wax their pubic area in order to compete in sports? And the mostly male coaches get to have a bird’s eye view of the women’s crotches, and we know that Larry Nassar is not just one bad apple!
Seriously. They can’t possibly wear those awful little rags without getting all their pubic hair yanked out, and they are forced to wear the awful little rags. It’s a god damn outrage.
The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack at the Capitol held its first hearing on Tuesday with harrowing testimony from four officers who shared their stories of being attacked by the rioters.
…
One by one, the four officers who testified Tuesday — DC Metropolitan Police Officers Daniel Hodges and Michael Fanone, and Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn and Sgt. Aquilino Gonell — recounted their gut-wrenching stories about how they were attacked and their lives were threatened on January 6.
Witnesses and committee members were verklempt at times.
H[odg]es described how he was forced to scream out in agony as he was pressed between the rioters and a metal doorframe. Fanone described how he was dragged into the crowd, beaten and electrocuted repeatedly with his Taser.
“I was at risk of being stripped of and killed with my own firearm as I heard chants of ‘kill him with his own gun,'” Fanone said. “I can still hear those words in my head today.”
Dunn’s testimony included detailing pro-Trump supporters hurled racial epithets at him, calling him the n-word, something he said he had never experienced while wearing his police uniform. He described afterward how he sat down with another black officer “and told him about the racial slurs I endured.”
“I became very emotional and began yelling, ‘How the blank could something like this happen? Is this America?'” Dunn said.
Gonell, who served in Iraq, said he was more afraid working at the Capitol on January 6 than at any point in serving a war zone. “I remember thinking to myself, this is how I am going to die, defending this entrance,” said Gonell, who couldn’t hug his wife when he returned home the following morning because he was covered in chemical spray.
Many Republicans in Congress, and Trump and his goons, are pretending it didn’t happen or was no big deal (or in Trump’s case, of course, both, often in the same sentence).
The officers said the rioters they fought against were terrorists. Woven into the stories about how they and their colleagues were attacked — and in some cases badly injured — the officers expressed outrage that the violence launched by pro-Trump supporters was being ignored by the very lawmakers they protected that day.
“I feel like I went to hell and back to protect them and the people in this room. But too many are now telling me that hell doesn’t exist, or that hell wasn’t actually that bad,” Fanone said.
“The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful!” Fanone continued, raising his voice and slamming his fist on the table in one of the most powerful moments of the hearing.
And these are the cops who survived to tell us about it. Not all of them did.
Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, one of the two Republicans appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the committee, asked Gonell specifically about Trump’s comments that the crowd was loving.
“It’s upsetting. It’s a pathetic excuse for his behavior for something that he himself helped to create this monstrosity,” Gonell said. “I’m still recovering from those hugs and kisses that day, that he claimed that so many rioters, terrorists, were assaulting us that day.”
The hit man sent them.
Aaron Rupar is following the January 6 hearing for us.
Labour is not supporting Rosie Duffield, Labour is instead doing what the trans “activists” and “allies” ordered them to do, and “investigating” her.
LGBT+ Labour said its demand “comes after a pattern of LGBT-phobic behaviour culminating in the endorsement of tweet from a person arrested on terrorism charges which accuses members of the LGBT+ community of being ‘cosplayers’”.
And? Is LGBT+ Labour seriously pretending zero such “members of the community” are cosplayers? Many such members go on at great length about their cosplaying.
Never mind that, heads they win tails we lose.
Update, 6.50pm: A Labour spokesperson said: “The Labour Party takes all complaints of homophobia or transphobia extremely seriously. This complaint will be fully investigated in line with our rules and procedures.” It is understood that the party is looking into the matter.
I wonder if the Labour Party takes all complaints of misogyny extremely seriously.
Kidding; I don’t really wonder; of course they don’t.
Oh the confidence of a man who knows nothing at all about it.
But how do women keep predatory men out of women’s change rooms when we’re not allowed to keep men out of women’s change rooms? They don’t show up with labels on you know.
The poor poor man, and the poor poor men who say they are trans – how terrible it is that all these witchy women won’t just shut up and do what we’re told.
You have GOT to be kidding.
All of a sudden the ugliest most right-wing Republicans care about treatment of prisoners – when the prisoners in question are white guys who did absolutely nothing wrong apart from invading the Capitol, assaulting cops, trying to assassinate members of Congress, and making an energetic attempt to overthrow the government and install a dictator.
It’s enough to make you projectile-vomit.
Speaking of female v male sport clothes…
It’s almost as if the whole point is to…
Check out this complete fuckwit answering demands for specifics and evidence with a tweet of his own which is just another string of assertions. “Show me some evidence!” “Ok here’s me saying things!” Doing this over and over again. The conceit plus stupidity is quite something. Complete fuckwit inexplicably has 248 thousand followers.
“But why should we believe you that Rosie Duffield is so wicked?”
“Because I said so in this other tweet!”
Scene: a sporting goods store in Montana. A guy spots Tucker Carlson and gets in his face.
In a confrontation that swiftly went viral, a Montana man told Fox News host Tucker Carlson: “You are the worst human being known to mankind.”
The man, identified on Instagram as Dan Bailey, posted the video of the encounter in a sporting goods store on 23 July.
…
Fox News’s most-watched host, a key influence on rightwing politics and invective, has recently come under fire for questioning vaccines against Covid-19 while refusing to say if he has had one, and for stoking racial division.
“Questioning vaccines” is putting it politely. Really what he’s doing is encouraging people not to get them, and to tell everyone else not to get them. During a pandemic.
In a statement, Fox News said: “Ambushing Tucker Carlson while he is in a store with his family is totally inexcusable – no public figure should be accosted regardless of their political persuasion or beliefs simply due to the intolerance of another point of view.”
Nonsense. Some public figures should be confronted, and Tucker Carlson is way high up on that list. Vaccinations are not just a “point of view,” they’re life and death. Tucker Carlson is literally telling people to die and to encourage others to die. Yes, he deserves to be embarrassed and irritated in a sporting goods store.
Pink News is trying hard to punish a woman MP who says that only women are women.
LGBT+ Labour are calling for Rosie Duffield to lose the whip and be suspended from the party after an alleged “pattern of LGBT-phobic behaviour” from the Canterbury MP.
Yes the pattern is “alleged” all right, and the allegation is false.
LGBT+ Labour’s statement comes after Duffield liked a tweet by Kurtis Lemaster yesterday (25 July) that stated the word “queer” is being reclaimed by “heterosexuals cosplaying as the opposite sex and as ‘gay’”.
Why would that be a reason to remove the whip and suspend her from the party? They don’t say.
Rosie Duffield’s history of anti-trans activity
That is, her history of saying things Pink News doesn’t like.
The row began at the start of August 2020, when Rosie Duffield insisted that “only women have a cervix” and doubled down on accusations of transphobia by labelling the backlash against her comments a “tedious Communist pile-on”.
Well guess what, only women have a cervix. Men don’t have a cervix. Women don’t have testicles. If saying that is a reason to suspend people from the Labour party that party is not fit for purpose.
PinkNews has contacted the Rosie Duffield, who has repeatedly denied she is transphobic, for comment.
Pink News is a sewer.
Shall we read a little of that oh so edgy paper?
This paper suggests that a purposeful political embodiment of threat opens up and revisits a trans* politics of monstrosity and virality that not only questions but threatens power. Taking seriously the transphobic notion of transness as an endemic threat to feminism, gender, and rights, I present ‘trans* endemics’ as a political and scholarly strategy that asks, what does an embodiment of threat, indeed, being a threat, do as a possible site of survival and resistance for trans* bodies?
With a hey nonnie nonnie and a hotchacha.
But picking our way through the obligatory theory-speak, we find that he’s saying it’s cool for trans people (male ones, he means but doesn’t spell out) to be threatening because by being threatening they threaten power. Yes that’s right, a guy with a knife to the throat of a feminist woman is threatening power. It all makes sense now. The knife to the throat is a site of resistance for trans bodies. What else would it be?
When you see me walk down the street with my long blonde hair, heeled combat boots, and make up to die for, are you scared?
No. One, I don’t generally examine people walking down the street that closely. I’m usually thinking about other things, or looking at the view, or both. Two, you sound more ridiculous than scary. Three, get over yourself.
When I walk down the street, I see people who hate me and admire me; want to kill me, and want to fuck me. They see a threat, and I see a weakness.
You see people who don’t give two shits about you, that’s what you see.
I am both threat and threatened. I am the monster in your nightmares, I am the lamb for the slaughter, I am the butcher. Watch me take my knife to your throat.
You’re not the butcher, you’re a very silly boy.
TERFs see transness as an endemic threat to feminism, a ‘social contagion’, the frontier on which they’re going to defeat patriarchy. They don their JK Rowling masks and shout bloody murder about ‘female erasure’.
Yeah, stupid women, why do they object to the erasure of women? Let’s all put knives to their throats.
Let us harness this parasitic imaginary and suck the cis out of feminism. Let us be the endemic. Let us exist as the evil twin to queer theory, and let us bleed it dry for all it can offer us. Chu is wrong: trans* is more than ancillary notion to queer. But do we have to depart from queer entirely? Is trans* even fucking here yet?
If TERFs think trans* is an endemic threat to feminism, let us be the threat to feminism. We are the endemic, the viral, the toxic onslaught of ideology that attacks the very core of what you hold dear. We go unnoticed, right up until the moment they scream for mercy.
Dude fantasizes about making women scream for mercy, and that’s a “paper” in “gender studies.”
Am I a threat to you? Do I send chills down your spine?
Picture this: I hold a knife to your throat and spit my transness into your ear. Does that turn you on? Are you scared?
I sure fucking hope so.
Those are the final paragraphs of the paper. Scholarly stuff I’m sure you’ll agree.
Gender studies=threats of violence against women? Who knew?!
“If TERFs think trans* is an endemic threat to feminism, let us be the threat to feminism…
Picture this: I hold a knife to your throat and spit my transness into your ear. Does that turn you on? Are you scared? I sure fucking hope so.”
Matt Thompson, LSE GENDER STUDIES MSc STUDENT
He’s a student taking the MSc in Gender (Sexuality) at the London School of Economics and Political Science, aka LSE.
The quote comes at the end of his paper entitled “Trans* Endemics: Embodying Viral and Monstrous Threat in Times of Pandemic”, presented at a conference (held in April 2021) for the course on Transnational Sexual Politics, taught by Dr Jacob Breslow and Professor Clare Hemmings. The session was called “No Time, No TERFs, No Norms”.
To be fair, one can argue that it’s a metaphor as opposed to a literal threat…but on the other hand we get accused of literal phobia and violence for making reasoned arguments, so I’m not sure the onus is on us to give the benefit of the doubt.
The campaign to bully women out of Labour and feminism and LGB rights continues.
It’s a lie, of course. She didn’t “endorse homophobic & transphobic content online.” She liked a tweet by a gay man on the subject of the word “queer,” which he dislikes. Disliking the word “queer” is hardly homophobic (and has nothing to do with trans anything). Liking a tweet by a gay man who dislikes the word queer has even less to do with homophobia let alone transphobia.
Acting like high-handed twitter “like” cops who hate women.
Another anti-vaxxer dies of Covid:
A California man who mocked Covid-19 vaccines on social media has died after a month-long battle with the virus.
Stephen Harmon, a member of the Hillsong megachurch, had been a vocal opponent of vaccines, making a series of jokes about not having the vaccine.
“Got 99 problems but a vax ain’t one,” the 34-year-old tweeted to his 7,000 followers in June.
But the virus was, and he died of it last Wednesday.
In the days leading up to his death, Mr Harmon documented his fight to stay alive, posting pictures of himself in his hospital bed.
“Please pray y’all, they really want to intubate me and put me on a ventilator,” he said.
In his final tweet on Wednesday, Mr Harmon said he had decided to go under intubation.
“Don’t know when I’ll wake up, please pray,” he wrote.
The praying seems to have failed.
Read with one set of assumptions this is a story of a woman bravely fighting to help her trans son. Read with the opposite set it’s the story of a woman hell-bent on having her daughter mutilated.
In terms of the real, material world that we know something about…the first set of assumptions is fantasy-based.
For over half an hour on a March afternoon, Arkansas legislators, activists and pediatricians outlined reasons why they considered gender-affirming health care dangerous, arguing in support of a bill that would ban transgender minors from accessing that care.
Notice the careful and misleading way CNN frames it (as always) – as “gender-affirming health care.” In reality it’s sex-denying medical malpractice.
The mother from Bauxite had listened as proponents of the bill claimed transgender teens like her son are too young to receive hormone therapies, which can help trans boys develop sex characteristics that may reduce their gender dysphoria.
Translation: The mother from Bauxite had listened as proponents of the bill claimed transgender teens like her son are too young to receive cross-sex hormones, which can help girls who identify as boys develop male sex characteristics, which may or may not make them feel more at home in their bodies, and which they may come to regret in a few years.
The establishment view now is that cross-sex hormones and surgeries are definitely, absolutely, unquestionably always required for children who think they are the other sex, always beneficial, always problem-free. It’s not even a maybe yes maybe no thing, it’s an absolutely yes thing and you’re evil if you’re not so sure.
At one point, the representative who introduced the bill likened gender confirmation surgery, a treatment that is not part of the standard care for transgender minors, to genital mutilation.
Because it is comparable. It may work out well for some, but the risk that it won’t is massive. It really is a drastic thing to do to a kid, and it’s not evil to point that out.
When Evans got to talk she started with saying the bill could kill her “son.”
“He is now able to live a happy and normal life as his authentic self,” she told lawmakers. “You will be taking that away from him, and it will cause him his imminent death.”
What she’s not keeping in mind is that she doesn’t know how her kid will feel about it in 5 years, 10, 20. The teenage years aren’t the most stable ones.
Evans had anticipated that the bill would pass. She quickly scheduled a mastectomy for her son.
Aka “yeeting the teets.”
