The Amazon is no longer a carbon sink.

The Amazon rainforest is emitting a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, according to a study. The giant forest had been absorbing the emissions driving the climate crisis but is now causing its acceleration, researchers said.

Most of the emissions are caused by fires, many deliberately set to clear land for beef and soy production. But even without fires, hotter temperatures and droughts mean the south-eastern Amazon has become a source of CO2, rather than a sink.

Growing trees and plants have taken up about a quarter of all fossil fuel emissions since 1960, with the Amazon playing a major role as the largest tropical forest. Losing the Amazon’s power to capture CO2 is a stark warning that slashing emissions from fossil fuels is more urgent than ever, scientists said.

But are we doing that? No.

Luciana Gatti, at the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil and who led the research, said: “The first very bad news is that forest burning produces around three times more CO2 than the forest absorbs. The second bad news is that the places where deforestation is 30% or more show carbon emissions 10 times higher than where deforestation is lower than 20%.”

Fewer trees meant less rain and higher temperatures, making the dry season even worse for the remaining forest, she said: “We have a very negative loop that makes the forest more susceptible to uncontrolled fires.”

Which, it turns out, isn’t even good for farming.

“The worst part is we don’t use science to make decisions,” she said. “People think that converting more land to agriculture will mean more productivity, but in fact we lose productivity because of the negative impact on rain.”

Research published on Friday estimated that Brazil’s soy industry loses $3.5bn a year due to the immediate spike in extreme heat that follows forest destruction.

Land cleared for farming is useless for farming because the clearance made the rain go away.

We can send Elon Musk to the edge of space, but we can’t stop torching the planet we depend on.

Another thing stolen from women:

The category is: making history. Mj Rodriguez has become the first transgender performer to pick up an Emmy nomination in a major acting category.

Rodriguez is nominated in the lead drama actress category for her fierce and formidable portrayal of house mother and nurse Blanca Rodriguez on FX’s ballroom culture period drama “Pose.” It is her first-ever attention from the Television Academy.

“I do believe this is a pivotal moment. There’s never been a trans woman who has been nominated as a leading outstanding actress and I feel like that pushes the needle forward so much for now the door to be knocked down for so many people — whether they be male or trans female, gender nonconforming, LGBTQIA+, it does not matter,” Rodriguez told Variety. “A moment like this extends and opens and elongates the possibilities of what’s going to happen and I believe the Academy is definitely making it possible and their eyes are more than open. Yes, I do believe they’re going to continue, and I also feel like we’re going to keep speaking and encouraging and informing and educating people around the world. I think that’s the most important thing.”

That’s a nomination that a woman won’t get, because a man got it. The door that’s being knocked down is the one that kept men out of women’s Emmy nominations, which is a door that didn’t need knocking down. Women have enough trouble just getting parts at all, let alone award nominations; there is no need for men who identify as women to grab some of those few nominations. Giving a woman’s award nomination to a man is not a yay hooray progressive move, it’s a punch in the face to women.

This nomination marks a significant step for LGBTQIA-plus representation — and specifically trans representation — at the Emmys.

No, it marks a significant backward step for female representation.

Biden gave a speech about voting rights, which is nice and all but it’s not going to do anything.

Some Democrats hope that presidential attention will persuade Congress to pass a voting-rights bill that outlaws the new Republican voting rules. But that’s unlikely. Congressional Republicans are almost uniformly opposed to ambitious voting-rights bills. And some Senate Democrats, including Joe Manchin, seem unwilling to change the filibuster, which would almost certainly be necessary to pass a bill.

Well. Let’s get real. Congressional Republicans are almost uniformly opposed to any voting-rights bills at all, except the kind that restrict them. The more people who vote, the fewer Republicans who get elected. They don’t gerrymander for the fun of it you know.

In 17 states, Republican lawmakers have recently enacted laws limiting ballot access, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Texas could become the 18th.

Republican officials have justified these new laws by saying that they want to crack down on voter fraud. They passed the laws after Donald Trump spent months falsely claiming that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent.

Studies have repeatedly found that voter fraud is not a widespread problem. Some of the very few cases have involved Republicans trying to vote more than once.

The substance of the laws makes their true intent clear: They are generally meant to help Republicans win more elections.

And we’re just going to stand around and watch it happen.

They’ve got to stop doing this. News from CP24:

A woman is facing charges after she allegedly sexually assaulted a child in a Toronto park two months ago and police believe there may be other victims.

What woman? This “woman”:

Just stop.

According to police, a six-year-old boy attended the Walter Saunders Park, near Dufferin Street and Eglinton Avenue West, on May 20. At that time, the boy was sexually assaulted, police said.

How would a woman even go about sexually assaulting a six-year-old boy? What would that even mean? For a man it’s all too obvious how.

In a news release issued on Tuesday, police said investigators believe there may be other victims.

But they will have trouble finding the perp, because they’re looking for a woman.

Trump in the bunker:

President Donald Trump was furious after reports last year said he and his family hid in the White House bunker during the George Floyd protests, and he said whoever leaked that information should be executed, according to a new book by The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Bender.

Executed, sure, why not.

In “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” Bender wrote that Trump seethed about the bunker story during a meeting with military and law-enforcement officials and West Wing advisors, according to CNN, which published excerpts from the book on Tuesday.

According to CNN, Bender wrote that the president “boiled over about the bunker story as soon as they arrived and shouted at them to smoke out whoever had leaked it.”

“It was the most upset some aides had ever seen the president,” the book continued, according to CNN. “‘Whoever did that, they should be charged with treason!’ Trump yelled. ‘They should be executed!'”

The people who fought their way into the Capitol and went looking for Nancy Pelosi in hopes of killing her, on the other hand – they should get medals, right?

Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, tried to calm the president down, while other aides avoided making eye contact with him, the book said, according to CNN. In the following days, it said, Trump became “obsessed” with discovering who had leaked the story, and those who had witnessed his reaction saw it “as a sign of a president in panic.”

Well, it was a sign of a worthless empty husk of a human trying to get people killed.

The usual stupid hodgepodge of Kinds of Anti-Racism I Don’t Like labeled “Critical Race Theory” as if the two were the same thing.

In schools across the country, woke teachers and left-wing parent activists are promoting critical race theory, a disturbing philosophical framework founded in radical, racially charged concepts about culture, society, and government.

No, you mean they’re promoting various innovations in teaching about race and history and racism. That’s not what Critical Race Theory means.

According to critical race theorists, virtually all of society’s problems should be viewed within the context of alleged systemic racism, which all people have a solemn duty to root out at any cost — including by promoting other forms of racism.

Ibram X. Kendi, a leading advocate of critical race theory, summarized this troubling idea in his popular book How to Be an Antiracist.

But Kendi is not a leading advocate of critical race theory. He’s an activist and academic, but that doesn’t make him a leading advocate of critical race theory. Those three words are not a catchall for every kind of antiracism there is.

Critical race theory has become an immensely popular idea among many in academia, and some of its core tenets have made their way into countless classrooms, in virtually every state in the country.

For example, a New York City public school principal asked parents earlier in 2021 to identify and evaluate their particular kind of “whiteness.” Among the eight options provided were “white supremacist,” “white privilege,” and “white traitor.”

Again – not critical race theory. Whiteness studies, yes, but crt no.

Justin Haskins (author of the piece) admits it at one point:

The argument that critical race theory is often linked to illegal, racist actions was bolstered in a recent ruling by Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen.

In a decision issued on May 27, Knudsen concluded, “In many instances, the use of ‘Critical Race Theory’ and ‘antiracism’ programming discriminates on the basis of race, color, or national origin in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Article II, Section 4 of the Montana Constitution, and the Montana Human Rights Act.”

Emphasis mine. This is what I’m saying. Haskins is talking about antiracism programming in general, and that’s not the same thing as critical race theory. It’s illiterate and pointless to keep insisting it is.

Speaking of men, and men relative to women, and women relative to men – James Innes-Smith finds there are far too many women on the BBC these days.

Is it any surprise that research carried out by the corporation for its annual report found that more than a quarter of men feel that the BBC ‘no longer reflects people like me’?

“People like me” meaning what? Just, men? Or is there more to it than that? If there is, Innis-Smith overlooked it.

In a concerted effort to redress gender imbalance men are gradually being airbrushed out. Across much of the BBC men have become something of a rarity.

Really? Really? Really?

I don’t believe it. I don’t believe men are a rarity on the BBC. I think James-Innis is confusing “more women than there used to be” with “almost no men.” I also think James-Innis sees an all-male BBC as quite normal, so that a BBC with some women feels to him like a vanishing of men.

Many of the corporation’s high-profile dramas are now female-focused, including the Pursuit of Love, I May Destroy You, Starstruck and Motherland.

And? What of it? Plenty of high-profile dramas are male-focused, so what’s alarming about the existence of some female-focused ones?

Female presenters dominate shows such as BBC Breakfast, The One Show and Songs of Praise. A rejuvenated BBC Three will be almost exclusively female led while Radio 4 has turned into one long episode of Woman’s Hour. 

No it hasn’t.

But you can hardly point the finger at the BBC; its female-centric programming reflects a cultural trend that is rife across society.

“Rife.” Slightly more inclusion of women is “rife across society.” Here’s a guy with his clutching hands stuck between his legs.

More on the NZ Herald article, which covers a lot of ground.

In Wellington City, a Speak Up For Women billboard has been removed from the CBD today.

In a statement Go Media general manager Simon Teagle said it was removed as soon as the company started fielding calls from offended New Zealanders.

He believed the billboard could be in breach of the Advertising Standards Authority’s codes.

A billboard that gives a dictionary definition of the word “woman” could be in breach of the Advertising Standards Authority’s codes? They must be very strange codes.

“Go Media is an inclusive, locally-owned New Zealand business and we support all communities. While we believe in freedom of speech, we do not condone content that upsets our community.

“We apologise unreservedly for any distress this may have caused anyone, and remedied the situation as soon we could.”

They support all communities, but if women put up a billboard with the definition of women, that “upsets our community.” What community? The community of everybody except women? If they support all communities why don’t they support [the community of] women? Are women the one “community” that doesn’t get to be considered a community? Why are women being singled out for shunning and exclusion this way?

Go Media is also a partner of the Wellington Phoenix [a football club].

Club general manager David Dome tweeted this morning that he has contacted Go Media for its position on the advertisement, which would be reviewed accordingly.

He said the billboard was at “complete odds with the club’s position on diversity and inclusion and specifically LGBTQI+”.

What on earth? Saying a woman is an adult human female is at complete odds with a football club’s position on diversity and inclusion? How is that possible?

Speak Up For Women’s spokeswoman Beth Johnson said in a statement the billboard was up for 24 hours before it was pulled down.

“The same vexatious complainants who have been harassing the women’s group for years have managed to bully a media company into bowing to their demands,” Johnson said.

Speak Up For Women is holding an event at the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington on Thursday.

But from tonight Wellington Mayor Andy Foster and councillors Fleur Fitzsimons and Teri O’Neill have organised for the sails of the Centre to be lit in the colours of the transgender flag.

In other words a kind of visual shouting down – visual and official. The city government is making a big show of bullying women for defending their own rights. So much for their “community.”

“The conversation which is being had around the country has caused angst for the trans community in particular,” Foster said.

“This is a vulnerable part of our community so we are trying to say to them that we’re standing beside them and we support them.”

So women are not vulnerable? Women do not experience angst? Women don’t need councillors and mayors to stand beside them and support them? Women are the all-powerful domineering monsters who can crush men between their thumb and forefinger? Is that it?

The NZ Herald reports on the official bullying of a feminist group:

Lower Hutt’s Mayor has apologised after saying controversial group Speak Up For Women could hold one of their events in a council waste bin.

“Controversial” group aka feminist group.

Also he didn’t really apologize.

Meanwhile, one of the group’s billboards has been taken down from one of Go Media’s central Wellington sites.

That is, misogynist bullies got it taken down.

These developments come on the same day as Wellington City Council will light up the Michael Fowler Centre in the colours of the transgender flag timed for when the group holds an event there.

In other words deliberately timed to spit in the faces of feminist women and women in general.

Recently the High Court ruled one of the group’s events should be allowed to go ahead at Palmerston North City Library, after the council cancelled the booking.

The judge said the group “cannot rationally be described as a hate group”.

The city council canceled an event at the library? That seems very high-handed, and grotesquely so when you know it’s a feminist group that was canceled. The war on women is getting more and more blatant.

Dunedin and Christchurch city councils have previously refused to allow the group to hold meetings in public facilities, but following the court decision a meeting at Auckland’s Town Hall went ahead as planned.

Lower Hutt Mayor Campbell Barry posted on Facebook last week saying: “If this group needs a venue in the Hutt, I’ve got some nice new waste bins they can use?”

Because that’s what women defending women’s rights deserve, is it? Being told by a mayor to hold their meetings in garbage cans?

Today Barry apologised if Speak Up For Women felt offended by his comment.

IF??????????

Is there any ambiguity about whether or not “hold your meeting in a garbage can” is meant to be offensive?

He said the right to meet, speak and debate was important and his comment was in response to some supporters of the group making “derogatory and harmful comments” towards transgender people.

“In terms of my beliefs, I do not support the views of this group and the harm that members within it promulgate.”

Except that they don’t promulgate “harm.”

This is pretty amazing.

Stand Up For Women put up the definition of “woman” billboard and fans of trans ideology promptly bullied the relevant people into removing it.

So, women are now the class enemy, women are the arrogant dominant class, women have all the privilege and power, and it’s men who have to struggle to be heard…by making sure that women are not heard.

Who knew feminism would be killed off not by the right but by the left?

Apparently labor laws and safety laws don’t apply to prisoners.

Temperatures reached 97 degrees on June 21 at the French Robinson Unit prison the day Seth Donnelly collapsed. The Texas Observer reported Seth passed out during his prison job of training attack dogs — running around in a 75-pound ​“fight suit” while the dogs tried to bite him. Seth’s internal body temperature was 106 when he reached the hospital, where doctors eventually took him off life support. He died on June 23, and his preliminary autopsy lists multiorgan failure following severe hyperthermia.

97 degrees. A padded suit weighing 75 pounds. It’s worthy of the tunnels at Camp Dora.

Danielle, who asked for In These Times to withhold her last name to protect her family-run business from social stigma, says she woke up in her cell in Texas at Gatesville Prison one typical early morning in July 2015, drenched in sweat. Without time (or permission) to shower or brush her teeth, she reports she was corralled to the fields in a heavy uniform.

“It didn’t feel safe,” says Danielle, who explains she picked tomatoes and jalapeño peppers without pay. Gatesville’s average high temperature that month was 98 degrees. ​“Texas in July, it’s like sitting on hell’s doorstep,” she says.

A guard who Danielle says she was ​“deathly terrified of” patrolled the ​“state property” (the term guards used for incarcerated people) on a horse. Danielle says she was not provided gloves, which often left her hands exposed to thorns and caustic jalapeño juices.

OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] rules do not apply to state prisons. Twenty-two states have adopted OSHA ​“state plans,” which cover state prisons with standards intended to be at least as effective as federal standards. Eight of the 10 states with the highest incarceration rates have declined to adopt these plans.

“The guards could literally do whatever they wanted to us,” says Danielle, who was incarcerated in Texas from August 2014 to September 2015..

Danielle’s stated working conditions appear antithetical to OSHA’s guidelines. ​“There was a vehicle that would come by and bring some water, but if the vehicle broke down you were out of luck for water that day,” she says. ​“That happened numerous times. Even when we get water it was gone within a few minutes and they won’t refill it for you. There are 50-plus women and the women in the back don’t get any.”

That causes death. It also causes misery of course, but it kills. Extreme heat is lethal, and hydration is essential.

Nearly half of people imprisoned in the U.S. work while incarcerated, a population disproportionately likely to be Black. Penal labor became a more significant part of the American economy following the Civil War; police would conduct sweeps and make arrests of Black men when plantations needed additional labor for planting, cutting and harvesting crops. Today, a majority of incarcerated workers perform ​“institutional maintenance,” which includes tasks like mowing the compound lawn and mopping floors. A relatively small number of others work in ​“correctional industries,” manufacturing things like license plates, sewing American flags and — as in Danielle’s case — harvesting vegetables that are later sold for a profit. All seven states that don’t pay for non-industry labor are in the South, which can reach dangerously hot summer temperatures.

And which are former slave states, and then Jim Crow states. Not a coincidence.

Powell attempted the Sheer Volume defense.

Powell insisted the volume of the suit they filed last November was testament to the extent of research and investigation the attorneys did.

“We filed a massive and detailed complaint in federal court that doesn’t even require us to append affidavits to it,” Powell said. “The very fact we filed 960 pages of affidavits with the complaint shows due diligence on our part. … The only way to test that is in the crucible of a trial or an evidentiary hearing,” she added, noting that the judge had thus far denied such a hearing.

Listen, it’s millions of words of bullshit, surely that counts for something.

“Volume, certainly for this court, doesn’t equate with legitimacy or veracity,” Parker shot back.

There oughta be an apothegm about that – A billion lies are as nothing compared to a single truth, or something like that. Attributed to Calvin Coolidge or Lucille Ball or whatever.

In a motion last December urging punishment of Powell, Wood and others, the city’s legal team wrote: “If sanctions are not deserved in this case, it is hard to imagine a case where they would be.”

“In a case involving the election of the President of the United States, the parties and their attorneys should be held to the highest standards of factual and legal due diligence; instead, they have raised false allegations and pursued unsupportable legal theories,” the city argued. “It is time for this Court to send a message back: lies and frivolous claims will not be tolerated. This abuse of our legal system deserves the strongest possible sanctions.”

It’s so awful it’s funny, but really it’s not funny at all.

[City attorney Herschel Fink said the misstatements in the court filings, like a claim that 139 percent of registered voters in Detroit cast ballots, had grave consequences. The correct turnout number reported by the city is just under 51 percent.

“These lies were put out into the world, and when they were put out into the world they were adopted and received by” influential people such as Trump, Fink said. He said that when Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to pressure him to flip the election to favor Trump, the president brought up the Detroit numbers.

“President Trump explicitly referenced the 139 percent voting statistic in Detroit as though it were fact,” Fink said. “These are the consequences. It’s the consequence of how they abused this system.”

And by the way what is Detroit famous for besides cars? For being a destination city during the Great Migration, and for remaining a majority Black city. It’s not a coincidence that these sleazes chose Detroit for their big lie.

In Trump lawyers news:

A U.S. judge on Monday appeared likely to reprimand Sidney Powell, a former campaign lawyer for Donald Trump, and other attorneys over a lawsuit they filed in Michigan seeking to overturn Democratic President Joe Biden’s election victory.

U.S. District Judge Linda Parker in Detroit suggested the pro-Trump lawyers should have investigated the Republican former president’s voter fraud claims more carefully before suing.

“Should an attorney be sanctioned for his or her failure to withdraw allegations the attorney came to know were untrue?,” Parker said during a court hearing via video conference. “Is that sanctionable behavior?”

You’d hope so.

Parker held the hearing to determine whether Powell, Lin Wood and other pro-Trump lawyers should be disciplined for a lawsuit they filed last November that made baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in the U.S. presidential election in Michigan.

They are not the only lawyers allied with Trump to land in hot water for supporting his false claims that his election defeat was the result of fraud. New York state and Washington, D.C., in recent weeks suspended former New York City Mayor and Trump confidant Rudy Giuliani’s law license after finding he lied in supporting Trump’s claims.

Parker asked Powell and co a lot of disbelieving questions.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen an affidavit that makes so many leaps. This is really fantastical,” Parker said. “So my question to counsel here is: How could any of you as officers of the court present this affidavit?”

How dare Parker question their faith.

In further apocalypse:

For nine straight days, waves of dead fish have washed ashore along downtown St. Petersburg and Coquina Key [Florida], plaguing residents with the intolerable stench. 

City officials say over 100 miles of coastline have been impacted, with the worst areas being along the east and southeast coast of St. Pete — Tierra Verde to Gandy Blvd. 

The city is working to clean up the mess and has collected over 25,000 dead fish in the past 10 days, along with 15,000 dead fish on July 9, alone. The number of dead fish amounts to over 15 tons.

Much of Florida is doomed because of the rising seas. I don’t recommend moving there.

Stephanie McCrummen at the Washington Post reports on

a growing Christian movement that is nondenominational, openly political and has become an engine of former president Donald Trump’s Republican Party.

It includes some of the largest congregations in the nation, housed in the husks of old Baptist churches, former big-box stores and sprawling multimillion-dollar buildings with private security to direct traffic on Sundays. Its most successful leaders are considered apostles and prophets, including some with followings in the hundreds of thousands, publishing empires, TV shows, vast prayer networks, podcasts, spiritual academies, and branding in the form of T-shirts, bumper stickers and even flags.

And this is why we can’t have nice things.

This is the world of Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White and many more lesser-known but influential religious leaders who prophesied that Trump would win the election and helped organize nationwide prayer rallies in the days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, speaking of an imminent “heavenly strike” and “a Christian populist uprising,” leading many who stormed the Capitol to believe they were taking back the country for God.

It’s an incredibly peculiar idea of “god” if you ask me.

What is new is the degree to which Trump elevated a fresh network of [New Apostolic Reformation]-style leaders who in turn elevated him as God’s chosen president, a fusion that has secured the movement as a grass-roots force within the GOP just as the old Christian right is waning. Increasingly, this is the world that the term “evangelical voter” refers to — not white-haired Southern Baptists in wooden pews but the comparatively younger, more diverse, more extreme world of millions drawn to leaders who believe they are igniting a new Great Awakening in America, one whose epicenter is Texas.

Ah yes Texas, home of so much right-wing lunacy.

It’s a bit late for the tut-tutting now.

Boris Johnson and Priti Patel have been accused of hypocrisy over their stance on racism in football, after they condemned the abuse of three black England players but previously refused to criticise fans who booed the team for taking the knee.

…

Sayeeda Warsi, a Conservative peer and former co-chairman, sent a public message to Patel, the home secretary, calling on her and all Conservatives to “think about our role in feeding this culture in our country”.

“If we ‘whistle’ & the ‘dog’ reacts we can’t be shocked if it barks & bites,” she tweeted. “It’s time to stop the culture wars that are feeding division. Dog whistles win votes but destroy nations.”

She added: “As a proud centre-right politician, as a proud part of a diverse vibrant nation that produced a football team that spoke to and represented England in all its modern diverse glory it shames me that in 2021 some in politics are still playing fast & loose with issues of race.”

I wonder if she was expecting Boris Johnson to be a pillar of anti-racism.

Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, was even more explicitly critical, saying Johnson and Patel “gave licence to the racists who booed the England players and are now racially abusing England players”. She said they were “like arsonists complaining about a fire they poured petrol on – total hypocrites”.

Johnson and Patel reject the accusation.

However, both have repeatedly stopped short of criticising fans who booed England players for taking the knee in a stand against racism. Patel has also said taking the knee represents “gesture politics” and whether to boo the England players was a “choice” for fans to make.

Well lots of things are “gesture politics,” aren’t they. Racist abuse of the players is gesture politics, rebuking players who take the knee is gesture politics, rebuking fans who send racist abuse to the players is gesture politics. Gestures are not automatically trivial.

As the players were subjected to a barrage of online abuse, a Tory MP had to apologise for suggesting Rashford should have concentrated on football rather than “playing politics” in an apparent reference to his campaign for free school meals.

Natalie Elphicke, the Tory MP for Dover and Deal, made the comment in a WhatsApp message to fellow MPs, suggesting Rashford should not have spent time on his successful campaign for free school meals for low-income pupils in the school holidays.

In comments first reported by GB News, Elphicke said: “They lost – would it be ungenerous to suggest Rashford should have spent more time perfecting his game and less time playing politics.”

Why yes, it would; thank you for asking. And seeing as how his campaign was successful, it wasn’t really “playing,” was it. Children’s full bellies aren’t a gesture, they’re the real thing.

The joys of sport.

England manager Gareth Southgate said the racist abuse aimed at Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka after the Euro 2020 final defeat by Italy was “unforgivable”.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Football Association also condemned it.

All three players missed penalties in the 3-2 shootout loss and were targeted on social media after the game.

Patriotism innit.

Updating to add:

The Death Party intensifies its push to kill more of us:

The Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Dallas this weekend has been full of the usual moments from the Republican Party’s most outrageous figures trying to be the most performatively provocative. Notable, however, has been the drumbeat of anti-vaccine rhetoric that has pervaded CPAC’s annual gathering—even as the Delta variant of COVID-19 continues to build steam across unvaccinated parts of the country.

Because what, half a million deaths isn’t enough for them?

Fauci is, naturally, horrified.

Fauci was reacting to a talk in which anti-vaxxer Alex Berenson was roundly cheered by a CPAC audience for saying the US government had failed to “sucker” 90 percent of Americans into getting vaccinated.

“It’s horrifying, I mean, the cheering about someone saying that it’s a good thing for people to not try and save their lives,” Fauci told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “If you just unpack that for a second… it’s almost frightening to say ‘Guess what? We don’t want you to do something to save your life! Yay!’ I just don’t get that and I don’t think anybody who is thinking clearly can get that.”

You can omit the “almost” from “it’s almost frightening.” Of course it’s frightening that people are happy to promote death for frivolous political or showbiz gratification.

Others carrying the anti-vaccine torch at CPAC included Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert, who mocked Biden’s efforts to get more people vaccinated and provide economic relief to states where the economy is still struggling to restart after pandemic-related shutdowns. “We’re here to tell the government we don’t want your benefits, we don’t want your welfare,” Boebert declared, strutting across a stage as she spoke. “Don’t come knocking on my door with your Fauci ‘ouchy’—you leave us the hell alone.”

Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine:

Rich Anderson, the chairman of the Virginia Republican Party[,] wrote to the president of the University of Virginia yesterday. Anderson begins by explaining, “I understand the commitment that public servants make to serving with integrity, dignity, respect, and honor in their taxpayer-funded roles.” The letter concerns Donald Trump, though not in a way that follows intuitively from the premise that public servants must act with integrity, dignity, respect, and honor.

Anderson’s letter demands UVA open an ethics investigation into Larry Sabato, the director of the school’s Center for Politics. Sabato’s alleged ethics violation is a series of mean tweets from his personal account, concerning Donald Trump.

“Not an ethics violation, Your Honour.”

“Agreed. Dismissed.”

Anderson pretends that tweets harshly critical of Trump violate the UV Mission Statement’s elevated values.

Exactly how Sabato violated any of these guidelines by pointing out that the former president was a deranged narcissist, Anderson does not say. Indeed, if you’re going to take these mission statement nostrums seriously, a line like “Everything we do must fulfill our goal of instilling citizens with an appreciation for the core values of American freedom, justice, equality, civility, and service” would seem to require the University’s staff to oppose Trump.

On account of how Trump opposes and acts against all those core values, you see.

Of course the legal merits of Anderson’s demand are not the point. It is an exercise in harassment and intimidation. Republicans are flexing their political muscle as a threat to employees of public universities.

Republicans are flexing their cancel muscles.

The occasional Republican pose as defenders of free speech, or mockers of snowflakes, was always a transparent ploy; no abuse by the illiberal left can hold a candle to the illiberalism of a political party pledged to the whims of an authoritarian.

And not just any authoritarian, but one with a florid array of bad qualities and a total lack of the other kind.

Milli Hill’s I will not be silenced is also relevant to that “mind your own fucking business” tweet of Christa Peterson’s. It is our fucking business; of course it is.

[T]oo many women have been silenced, and I don’t want to join them. There are conversations about women’s rights, women’s bodies, and the words we use to talk about women’s issues, which need to be had, but which have been made taboo in our current culture. And this is not healthy. Worse still, women like me have been used as an example to others of what happens to you if you raise questions. And others have seen these public draggings, and decided to keep quiet themselves. This kind of behaviour, in which dissidents are made a public example of in order to ensure compliance to dogma, does not have very good historical precedents. And yet it currently describes itself as ‘the right side of history’.

She’d been having misgivings about language like “assigned at birth” but had kept them to herself, because she didn’t want the monstering that would greet any questions.

However, on 25^th November 2020 I was tagged in comment on an Instagram post about obstetric violence. This is a topic I’ve written extensively about, and that features heavily in my book Give Birth like a Feminist. 25^th November was also International Day to End Violence Against Women, so I’d been reading a lot about violence against women that day and thinking about how obstetric violence sits within that and is often overlooked. There were several slides to this post, but this one jarred for me.

Wait. Notice anything odd about that besides the usual absurdity of “birthing person”?

The words “patriarchy” and “patriarchal” are allowed, but “woman” isn’t.

Why is that? Do they not realize that “patriarchy” is just as sex-specific as “woman” is?

Is it really only women who have to be erased and bullied?

Back to Hill:

My work and thinking around obstetric violence had led me to the view that it is ‘sex based violence’. Please note my use of the word sex here, not gender. Sex as in biological sex, not gender as in the social constructs around roles, clothing, behaviour etc. Like other forms of violence against women, obstetric violence happens to women because they are female. What I saw happening in this slide was a genuine mix up between the absolutely correct idea that the problem here is patriarchy, a system that oppresses and damages women on the basis of their sex, and obfuscating terminology that is unable to name the oppressed people.

It’s ok to name the oppressor but not the oppressed. Weird system.

So, as we know, she responded, and all hell broke loose. She provides a few screenshots of the many venomous attacks.

The situation seemed to be spiralling out of control, but what then made it worse was the organisation Birthrights joined in – and not to defend me. On the 26^th November, right in the eye of the storm, they posted on Instagram, not naming me directly, but stating that they were ‘proud to be an inclusive organisation’, that they would use the terms, ‘women and birthing people’, and that they would, ‘not work with individuals and organisations who do not share these values and will always challenge, either privately or publicly if appropriate, those in the maternity and birth rights movement who speak or act in a discriminatory way.’. It didn’t take long for people to work out who and what they were referring to.

“You will erase women from your language, or you will be hounded out.”

Read the whole thing.