Is this rapey enough yet?

Man talking too fast: “Quickreminder tosome cislesbians outthere that pleasestop centeringyour lesbianism around penis disgust.”

That “quick reminder” item – nobody asked for some “reminder,” slow or fast, that lesbians have to love penis. Nobody has that requirement on her to-do list or schedule or daily planner page. It’s not a requirement, so you can’t “remind” us of it as such. Also “quick reminder that please stop” is not quality speeching.

But the real point of course is fuck off. Lesbians do not have to love penis. The end.

He’s not saying that any trauma you have “around them” isn’t valid, but he is saying that it shouldn’t define your lesbianism.

I bet I can figure out why he’s saying that. I bet he’s saying it because he has one and he doesn’t want those bitches having their own thoughts on the subject. They have to consult him on what thoughts they’re allowed to have. Why? I don’t know, I guess because of the pretty curls?

Gee, I didn’t know people were allowed to set up “sting” operations without any kind of legal authority.

A network of conservative activists, aided by a British former spy, mounted a campaign during the Trump administration to discredit perceived enemies of President Trump inside the government, according to documents and people involved in the operations.

The campaign included a planned sting operation against Mr. Trump’s national security adviser at the time, H.R. McMaster, and secret surveillance operations against F.B.I. employees, aimed at exposing anti-Trump sentiment in the bureau’s ranks.

See this is what I mean. That stuff is illegal if you don’t have a warrant and stuff, isn’t it? People can’t just do “sting operations” and “secret surveillance” on their own, without any kind of law enforcement authority, isn’t it? Or am I hopelessly out of touch.

The operations against the F.B.I., run by the conservative group Project Veritas, were conducted from a large home in the Georgetown section of Washington that rented for $10,000 per month. Female undercover operatives arranged dates with the F.B.I. employees with the aim of secretly recording them making disparaging comments about Mr. Trump.

Since when is a random person spying on people with no authorization to do so an “undercover operative”?

Central to the effort, according to interviews, was Richard Seddon, a former undercover British spy who was recruited in 2016 by the security contractor Erik Prince to train Project Veritas operatives to infiltrate trade unions, Democratic congressional campaigns and other targets. He ran field operations for Project Veritas until mid-2018.

Isn’t all of that completely illegal? The government shouldn’t be doing it either, mostly, but at least when the government does it there is legal supervision and some accountability. (I say “mostly” because, you know, insurrections and stuff.)

That? That wasn’t an insurrection, that was just a few tourists visiting the Capitol.

Congressman Andrew Clyde was asked about his widely criticized comments downplaying the Capitol insurrection earlier today.

“You didn’t take what I said in context at all,” the Republican lawmaker told NBC News this morning. “So you go listen to what I said.”

Here’s exactly what he said during that committee hearing yesterday: “Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall showed people in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes, taking videos, pictures.”

He added, “You know, if you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”

Pelosi is not amused.

The Democratic speaker mocked congressman Andrew Clyde’s comments that footage from the insurrection looked like “a normal tourist visit”.

“I don’t know a normal day around here when people are threatening to hang the vice-president of the United States or shoot the speaker in the forehead,” Pelosi said. “I don’t consider that normal. Multiple people were killed.”

She added, “It was beyond denial. It fell into the range of sick.”

We’re walking on the edge of a precipice these days.

What a good plan.

Hundreds of people experiencing poor mental health will be introduced to the natural beauty of wetlands under a “blue prescribing” scheme.

In London, this is.

There is increasing evidence of the benefits of nature for mental health and wellbeing. A recent pilot wetlands project showed that people diagnosed with anxiety or depression moved up a clinical mental health grade, from below average to average.

I swear by this. I’m not afflicted with anxiety or depression but I can testify that getting outside always elevates my mood. (Well…one exception – when the air is in the red zone.) A clear bright breezy day elevates it into the stratosphere, as does going to the Lake or the Sound or a distant viewpoint or the like.

Now a scheme will start this summer at the WWT London Wetland Centre in the UK with six-week wetlands courses co-designed by the WWT, the Mental Health Foundation and participants themselves. Activities could include birdwatching, pond dipping, nature walks and habitat protection work. Participants’ travel costs are to be funded and their progress assessed using standard medical questionnaires.

Very good plan.

Previous schemes involving activities such as wildlife volunteering noted clear improvements in mental health. YouGov polling for the Mental Health Foundation found that being near lakes, rivers and the sea – ahead of time spent in gardens, parks and the countryside – was rated the highest by people in terms of having a positive impact on their mental health.

Heh. What I just said – Lake or Sound. Seattle is really exceptional in having not one but two large bodies of water promoting our mental health.

What the wicked TERF has been doing lately.

Academic ethics…

You may think that’s just some high school kid but in fact he’s an academic. He’s been comparing gender critical feminists to Holocaust deniers for hours.

So he’s saying that the ideology that says men are women if they say they are is an authoritative ideology, and that it’s true or at least strives towards truth, while skepticism about that ideology is not true and does not even strive towards truth.

How do people get so confused?

We’re a “specimen of untruth” because we say people are what they are and not what they fantasize they are (unless the two happen to be the same).

This is a belief system where fantasies represent the truth and empirical reality is a specimen of untruth.

How did that happen?

Wait who is the terrorist in this one-act play?

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene aggressively confronted Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday and falsely accused her of supporting “terrorists,” leading the New York congresswoman’s office to call on leadership to ensure that Congress remains “a safe, civil place for all Members and staff.”

In other words somebody please instruct Greene to act like an adult, and make it stick.

Two Washington Post reporters witnessed Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) exit the House chamber late Wednesday afternoon ahead of Greene (Ga.), who shouted “Hey Alexandria” twice in an effort to get her attention. When Ocasio-Cortez did not stop walking, Greene picked up her pace and began shouting at her and asking why she supports antifa, a loosely knit group of far-left activists, and Black Lives Matter, falsely labeling them “terrorist” groups. Greene also shouted that Ocasio-Cortez was failing to defend her “radical socialist” beliefs by declining to publicly debate the freshman from Georgia.

“You don’t care about the American people,” Greene shouted. “Why do you support terrorists and antifa?”

She did the same thing to David Hogg, the Parkland survivor and gun control activist, before she was [shudder] a member of Congress. She’s a belligerent bully, just like her hero Trump.

Before walking away, Greene said that the encounter was intended to hold Democrats accountable for their policy proposals.

“She’s a chicken, she doesn’t want to debate the Green New Deal,” she said to a small group of reporters and onlookers near the entrance to the chamber. “These members are cowards. They need to defend their legislation to the people. That’s pathetic.”

She sounds like every school bully and street corner punk.

Earlier this year Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) accused Greene and her staff [of]  accosting her in a tunnel beneath a House office building after [Bush] asked Greene to wear a mask “out of concern for the health of my staff, other members of Congress, and their congressional staff.” Greene denied the allegation and accused Bush of “lying” and of leading a “terrorist mob” because Bush supported Black Lives Matter.

The incident prompted Bush to ask Democratic leadership if she could move her office away from Greene at a time when the Georgia congresswoman was already under heavy scrutiny for her rhetoric and behavior.

…

Since asking earlier this year to debate Ocasio-Cortez, Greene has confronted her one other time on the House floor, when she approached the New York congresswoman last month to try to schedule a date for a debate over the Green New Deal, a set of environmental policies intended to combat climate change. In a video posted to social media a day later, Greene criticized Ocasio-Cortez for not debating her.

“If she chickens out, then she shows who she really is: a scared little girl that is pretty stupid and doesn’t know anything about the economy or economics,” Greene said.

In other words Marjorie Taylor Greene is trash.

There’s a plastic surgery firm in San Francisco called Align Surgical Associates. It’s on Facebook.

I didn’t include the photos.

Via

Is that true?

I’m not seeing it.

I’m not seeing where the confidence comes from, to announce that. How do people know such things? Where do they get them?

Why would we be “addicted” to our fear?

Really, why? What’s the reward that creates the addiction?

Why would we “fall in love with” our fear? Fear is nasty, so why would we fall in love with it?

I had a charismatic Comparative Literature teacher at university a few centuries ago who did this kind of thing regularly – informed us that professed motives were fake and the actual ones were something less idealistic and more selfish: sex or sadism or greed and the like. At some point I noticed that it was a pattern, and got bored with it, despite the charisma.

This nonsense is like that. It’s a silly show-offy empty bit of shtick. Oh you think people are genuinely concerned about the virus? Hahaha you are so naïve no of course they’re not, they’re lining their pockets, or they’re polishing up their CVs, or they’re addicted.

And you know that how, O genius of the tweeterverse? Your insight was bestowed on you by what tooth fairy?

It’s sad to see someone who used to be intelligent fall down this storm drain.

Thinking of applying to teach at Virginia Commonwealth University? They have a little requirement.

Statement of Contribution to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Virginia Commonwealth University is committed to organizational diversity, equity and inclusion – an environment where all can thrive in their pursuit of excellence. Applicants are requested to submit a Statement of Contributions to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion providing your career aspirations and contributions toward promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.

I like the way they say it three times in that one short paragraph, just in case you lost track of what they’re “requesting.”

It’s funny what lousy rotten grumpy sour sore losers they are, when…

Especially when Clinton won the popular vote (the actual vote) by 3 million and Trump…didn’t.

Ah yes the pretend-feminism of the predator. “Girls, tell them you don’t need “”””protecktinng””””.”

You know, if you make it mandatory, you’ll never know if it’s for real or just forced compliance. If a man tells a woman she has to say “I love you” to him at least once a day or he’ll punish her, can he be confident she means it when she says it?

The national anthem would have to be played before all sporting events held at Wisconsin venues that received any public funding under a mostly symbolic bill passed by the state Assembly.

Why? What’s the point? If it’s compelled, what good is it?

The requirement would apply at all levels of athletic events played on a field that ever received public money, from a bar league softball game at the local park to the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field.

If it’s compelled, you can’t be sure it’s sincere.

Updating to add:

It’s not really all that fast though. Could be cut at least in half!

One of the great joys of now as opposed to say six months ago is that we get to ignore That Guy. But every now and then I feel an atavistic impulse to point and laugh one more time.

FROM THE DESK OF

(Which is already ridiculous. Desk shmesk. It’s a flat thing where he can scribble with his Sharpie. He doesn’t need a desk because he can’t read or write or think.)

Anyway from the flat thing of –

Liz Cheney is a bitter, horrible human being. I watched her yesterday and realized how bad she is for the Republican Party. She has no personality or anything good having to do with politics or our Country. She is a talking point for Democrats, whether that means the Border, the gas lines, inflation, or destroying our economy. She is a warmonger whose family stupidly pushed us into the never-ending Middle East Disaster, draining our wealth and depleting our Great Military, the worst decision in our Country’s history. I look forward to soon watching her as a Paid Contributor on CNN or MSDNC!

Just think, the brainless creature who dictated that garble used to be a head of state.

Outrage as male voice actor dubs male actor, fumes the Guardian.

The Italian-language version of Emerald Fennell’s revenge thriller Promising Young Woman has come under fire for giving trans actor Laverne Cox a male voice.

But…Laverne Cox has a male voice. Necessarily, being a male person.

[T]he release has been pushed back after a clip of Una Donna Promettente was posted by Universal Pictures Italy on 6 May. In the since-restricted video, Cox’s character, Gail, talks to protagonist Cassie, played by Carey Mulligan, in a distinctively masculine tone. The Orange Is the New Black star was given the deep tones of voice actor Roberto Pedicini. Italian viewers couldn’t believe their ears, immediately taking to social media to voice their outrage.

Oh no, not taking to social media to voice their outrage!!! How will anyone survive?

“I think this dubbing choice was a straight-up act of violence,” Italian trans actor and voice actor Vittoria Schisano tells the Guardian. “It’s insulting. I’d feel bullied if I were [Cox],” she added.

Straight-up meaning genyoowine, real, not fake, literal – act of violence. But it isn’t a literal act of violence, is it now, even if you do think it’s insulting.

This isn’t the first time Italy’s dubbing industry has failed Cox and the trans community. In OITNB, her character, Sophia Burset, was voiced by male dubber Andrea Lavagnino, who also voiced her characters in The Mindy Project and short-lived drama Doubt. But Italy is far from being the only country misgendering Cox on the dubbing stage. In Spain and Germany, a cis man was cast to voice Cox in Promising Young Woman. Universal Pictures International, which is handling distribution of Fennell’s movie in Europe, has listened and reassesed.

Meanwhile women in the industry are underpaid, underemployed, written out of scripts, not written into scripts in the first place, harassed, pressured, raped…but never mind all that when men who claim to be women get voice-dubbed by men: the horror!

A spokesperson for Universal Pictures International told the Guardian in a statement: “We are deeply grateful to Laverne and the transgender community for opening our eyes to a bias that neither we nor many in our industry had recognised. While there was no malicious intent behind this mistake, we are working diligently to fix it. We have begun redubbing Ms Cox’s voice with female actors in our international territories and are pushing back release dates to ensure the correct version is available.”

So they have begun faking, because Ms Cox’s voice is a male voice, since Ms Cox is a man. If they’re getting female actors to dub Cox then they’re perpetrating a minor fraud.

From Gnu Atheism:

Now the Republicans are trying to pretend Fauci created the pandemic on purpose for [insert reason here].

For much of the past year, Republicans have decried lead government coronavirus expert Anthony S. Fauci’s prescriptions for mitigating the pandemic — including masks, social distancing and keeping society shut down.

Yeah, boy, masks – have you ever heard of anything so UnAmerican? Masks. I ask you.

But increasingly in the past week, the effort has taken on a new flavor — with suggestions that Fauci might be personally to blame for the advent of the virus itself.

…

With Fauci set to testify before the Senate on Tuesday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson teed things up the night before. In a commentary leading off his show, he played up the idea of a lab leak, pointing (rightly) to shifting beliefs in the medical community about its plausibility and treating it as an open question.

But then he pivoted to treating this as something amounting to fact.

While talking about National Institutes of Health funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Carlson referred to “the deadly experiments that were going on there” — which is valid, given that’s the kind of thing virologists do.

But he then referred to them, as if the lab-leak theory were proved, as “the experiments that clearly went so wrong.”

…

“This wouldn’t have happened if Tony Fauci didn’t allow it to happen — that is clear,” Carlson continued, referring to the funding. “It’s an amazing story. It is a shocking story. In a functional country, there would be a criminal investigation into Tony Fauci’s role in the covid pandemic that has killed millions and halted our country, changing it forever. So why isn’t there a criminal investigation into Tony Fauci’s role in this pandemic?”

…

The idea that Fauci is somehow using all of this to keep people in masks or locked down for his own edification has been a fixture in some corners of conservative media, and in their telling he’s gradually emerged as perhaps the epitome of overzealous government scientists. But this new line of attack is painting him as something else entirely.

I think global warming must be frying their brains.

Idaho has made it illegal to teach about slavery in schools and universities.

Idaho’s governor, Brad Little, has a bill signed into law that aims to restrict critical race theory from being taught as a subject in schools and universities.

We know there’s some dumb critical race theory out there, such as the Robin DiAngelo version for instance, but Idaho apparently interprets it very broadly.

The bill, H 377, prevents teachers from “indoctrinating” students into belief systems that claim that members of any race, sex, religion, ethnicity or national origin are inferior or superior to other groups. Signed into law last week, H 377 also makes it illegal to make students “affirm, adopt or adhere to” beliefs that members of these groups are today responsible for past actions of the groups to which they claim to belong.

The issue isn’t that contemporary people are responsible for what people did in the distant past, it’s that some of us benefit from it while others continue to be profoundly ripped off by it.

Since the publication of The 1619 Project in the New York Times, a number of school districts and school boards across the US have begun to adopt elements of critical race theory in their curricula.

As a result, Republican state legislatures have begun to push back, sending bills through statehouses that attempt to quell the momentum of teaching slavery and other such moments of American history as dark periods of the country’s past that continue to affect American life today.

Because what, they were actually bright happy periods that don’t continue to affect American life today?

Here’s the thing: the former slaves were never compensated for the generations of stolen labor. That’s all you need to know, really. Reconstruction was defeated and after that the former slaves and their children and grandchildren and so on were treated all too much like slaves, except without the protection that an expensive investment usually gets. It’s just idiotic to try to pretend that slavery doesn’t “continue to affect American life today.”

The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, has recently spoken out against The 1619 Project specifically, as the Biden administration is considering $5.3m in American History and Civics Education grants for anti-racist scholarship.

In a letter to the US secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, McConnell wrote that families in the US. “did not ask for this divisive nonsense”, and that a decision to move forward was not made by voters.

“Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil,” McConnell wrote.

You know who’s inherently evil? Mitch McConnell.

H/t Studebaker Hoch

Originally a comment by Arty Morty on Those drugs can’t possibly be legal.

I’ve been thinking more and more about this issue as though it’s a battle of stories. To some people, the Story of Trans absolutely must be a happy story, as uplifting and life-affirming as a lost-dog-reunited viral video. They genuinely think that being a good LGBT ally means simply making sure you fix in your mind a happy story about LGBT people whenever the topic arises.

Isn’t it incredible that there are two kinds of trans “allies”, two groups who actually hold completely opposing views about trans issues, but who remain united in their shared opposition to criticism of gender ideology, because they see anything with a critical tone as an unhappy story. It’s another reason why it feels so unreal being gender critical right now — we’re stuck in between these two contradictory groups all the time: you’ve got the friendly-but-unaware progressives who totally agree with you in principle about things like self-ID and mixed-sex sports and prisons, and children’s school indoctrination programs and draconian speech laws… but they absolutely disagree with you that any of it is happening in any significant way right now — because they have to disagree about that part, because otherwise they’d have to accept an unhappy story about trans into their hearts.

And then you’ve got the indoctrinated true believers, who are the polar opposite, who totally agree with you that all of it’s happening all over the place right now — they love it; for example all these kids getting “gender affirmed” by today’s medical “heroes”, it’s all so squee, like those lost little Labradors on YouTube, reunited with their people at last — but the true believers absolutely disagree with you that there’s anything about it that could possibly be bad or should raise any concerns, because otherwise it’s not a happy story but a potential tragedy.

These two groups’ positions are irreconcilable. There are lots of beliefs shared between each group individually and us — the friendly unawares share with us the belief that this stuff is bad; the zealous allies share with us the belief that this stuff is happening — but between each other their beliefs have exactly no common ground.

And yet, despite their total disagreement on the facts, they’re allied against us, high-fiving each other for simply holding their respective but incompatible happy stories in their hearts about trans in contrast to the supposed transphobia that we’re perpetuating by presenting facts and arguments which to them don’t sound very nice. It’s so stupid. I mean, if they themselves simply combined their beliefs they’d end up exactly in line with ours — those two happy stories when combined turn into a nightmare.

It reminds me of what Graham Linehan calls Festen moments, in reference to the Danish art film The Celebration, where a family patriarch’s 60th birthday gala is interrupted by his son who reveals that he was sexually abused by the tycoon, and all the guests turn against the son because they can’t allow the happy story of their family dynasty to be darkened. A truth that punctures a beloved story is like a heckler who threatens to spoil a good party.

I’m not so much interested in persuading the true believers anymore. They’ll have their reckoning later. But I hold out hope today for the friendly unawares. I want badly to get through to them, and maybe one way to do that is to show them that the real world is fundamentally not made up of stories. The real world is material; it’s made of a jumble of stuff. So I’d say an accurate way to think of social progress is something like, we’re looking at a bunch of people and things that interact in a big mess of contradictory motives and circumstances and variables and chaos, and our job is to look at facts and balance needs and principles and find ways to reduce harm and increase human rights and justice and wellbeing as best we can wherever possible. It’s messy and it sometimes involves looking and thinking hard at all that messy stuff.

It’s far less accurate to interpret social progress the storybook way: as looking at a bunch of comparatively simple conflicts between forces of good and forces of bad in the world where your job is just to make sure you always find your way to the side of the good guys at the end of each chapter.

I guess what I’m saying is, stop trying to see reality as a story where you can edit out the bad parts and polish up the good parts until, to you at least, it looks the way you like it and it just tells you exactly what you already wanted to hear anyway. We can’t ignore the messy stuff of reality, because it’s the material world, not the stories we tell ourselves and each other about it, that we all have to live in. And we have to find a way to live in it together.

So creepy Gegi is a lawyer now?

What does that mean? Is it a human rights violation to say that a skirt doesn’t turn a man into a woman?

What if teachers have too many other things to do to “practice articulating that one of our legal responsibilities is mitigating gender-based discrimination in our classroom and school”? And why do they need to “practice articulating” it anyway? Is there going to be a contest?