Another university tells another student to shut up about All That, but there’s a twist.

Alistair Bonnington, an ex-BBC legal adviser and former honorary law professor who taught Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon during her student days, posted his views on an Open University forum during a discussion about the 18th Century French writer Voltaire – an advocate for freedom of speech.

But his comments, referring to Scotland’s Hate Crime Bill, which will allow men to self-identify as women, and the ‘woke’ backlash faced by Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling earlier this year over her trans views, were deleted.

He’s a law maven, and an adult, but the OU wouldn’t (and won’t) let him speak freely.

In his post, Mr Bonnington, 68, who is now an English Literature student at the OU, argued the SNP plans ‘would make it a crime for anybody to deny that a “trans” woman (ie a man) was a real woman’, adding: ‘It looks like feminists in Scotland can look forward to incarceration. Poor J.K. Rowling may need to become an exile like Voltaire!!!’

So the OU sent him a “warning letter” telling him he was violating forum rules.

Accusing the OU of ‘infantile and anti-intellectual behaviour’, Mr Bonnington last night said: ‘Bear in mind this was in a debate about free speech. For the university to do what it did is an absolute joke.

‘Universities should be places where free debate can be had between people who hold different views. If we’re not allowed to debate things in universities, then things have got into a bit of a mess.

‘That’s just Stalinism, basically, and I find it quite shocking for free speech to be treated as an expendable commodity by a university.’

Especially when what you’re saying is just a simple, basic, obvious truth. The OU might as well forbid its students to say dogs are not cats, or turnips are not raspberries, or the moon is not the sun.

Mr Bonnington added: ‘I’ve taught in universities for over 25 years, but it seemed to me extraordinary that a university would be basically enforcing a particular viewpoint. It’s an incredibly infantile approach and anti-intellectual.’

It makes it all the more extraordinary, and obnoxious and destructive, that the viewpoint the university is enforcing is so childishly fatuous and reality-denying. The public infrastructure is trying to force us to echo a lie, and it punishes us if we refuse.

Last night, an OU spokesman said: ‘We will not allow views to be presented in a way that is hostile or degrading to others. This does not infringe our statement on academic freedom, which supports opinions and arguments, including those that could cause offence to some people, to be openly and freely expressed.’

Ha that’s funny because yes it does. Of course it does. The second sentence flatly contradicts the first.

Ugghh. Trump is doing his loathsome Steal The Election rally.

Pink News flings its stones at the witch with its usual sloppy illiterate vacuous zeal.

The SNP’s new equalities convener is facing scrutiny for her support of anti-trans pressure group For Women Scotland and the author JK Rowling.

Scrutiny from this Pink News reporter at least. That’s so typical of this kind of shite – agent-free accusations of “scrutiny” – from whom? Besides you there at your laptop?

Elections for the party’s national executive committee on Monday (30 November) saw Lynne Anderson chosen by the party membership to serve as equalities convener, giving her a crucial say in SNP policy.

And Nick Duffy, the hack who wrote this, wants the party membership to un-give that crucial say. He has her under scrutiny, after all.

He tells us what she tweeted. Then he tells us what David Paisley tweeted about her. What more do we need to know? (I’m doing the same thing right now, but I’m not Pink News trying to take someone’s political appointment away.)

Then he shares a whole bunch of tweets from someone else, as if they were eyewitness testimony to a murder. Then –

Earlier this week, more than 700 people signed an open letter condemning a “crisis of inaction on transphobic abuse” in Scotland and demanding that Holyrood launch an independent inquiry into transphobia in political parties.

The signatories, who come from across Scotland’s political spectrum, came together to ask cisgender allies to “put pressure on all political parties to take internal complaints of transphobic abuse seriously”.

Therefore…Lynn Anderson should not be SNP equalities convenor? It’s less than convincing, yet this collection of irrelevant tweets was brandished in the Edinburgh LGBTI+ Facebook group as if it were a damning exposé, and then some feminist women were kicked out of the group for objecting, and all their comments were deleted.

It’s total obedience or nothing in this world.

There’s a public Facebook group called Edinburgh LGBTI+. Note the public part: anyone can read the posts. It shares details in a top of the page post:

Edinburgh LGBTI+ Community Group is intended as a safe space for all members of our community, regardless of race, religion, sex, gender, sexuality, trans identity, and ability/disability. We stand, to the best of our current knowledge and understanding, against both direct and indirect discrimination, striving to be anti-racist, anti-abilist, anti-ageist, anti-religious discrimination. We are anti-asexual erasure, anti-aromantic erasure, anti-intersex erasure, anti-bisexual erasure and anti-polyamory erasure. We are pro-trans rights, pro-nonbinary rights. Ultimately we are pro-human rights.

It’s oddly careful to say nothing about women or sexism or misogyny or feminism. It does say “regardless of sex” along with all the other categories, but that’s the closest it gets to mentioning women, i.e. not very close. (It also doesn’t mention class. There’s room to mention the aromantic, but not the working class.)

The admins just did a purge of people they call transphobic, and deleted all comments made by the women they call transphobic. The dispute was over a post calling someone…transphobic, of course. The evidence was an article at Pink News.

Our equalities chief is not fit for purpose and if she cannot represent the needs of all of us, then she should not be getting to serve any of us, please please please get in touch with your local mp and also to Nicola sturgeon as this should not be allowed to happen. Long story short, she is a transphobe and as such, is not fit for her job. I call on others to join me in sharing and encouraging others to also contact their mps in order to stop this being allowed to continue.

The Pink News headline is: New SNP equalities chief proudly supports JK Rowling and anti-trans pressure group For Women Scotland.

Same old same old same old. She’s a witch, throw your stones now.

There were dissenters, as I mentioned, but they’re gone and so is everything they said. It’s unanimous! New SNP equalities chief is definitely a witch, everyone says so!

Is it cruel to find this funny?

He’s not always so sweet and obliging.

That must have been an awkward phone conversation, maybe the most awkward since that “We need you to do us a favor though” one.

President Trump called Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) on Saturday morning to urge him to persuade the state legislature to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state and asked the governor to order an audit of absentee ballot signatures, the latest brazen effort by the president to interfere in the 2020 election.

“Hi Brian, do me a solid and get the lej to throw out the votes for Biden, ok?”

Hours before he is scheduled to hold a rally in Georgia on behalf of the state’s two GOP senators, Trump pressed Kemp to call a special session of the state legislature to get lawmakers to override the results and appoint electors that would back him, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

Anything else? Invade Iran? Drop a few nukes on North Korea? Pave over the Amazon?

Kemp confirms.

Kemp, a one-time ally of Trump, has become a punching bag for the president who called him “hapless” for not doing more to help him wrest away Biden’s win.

That’s Trump for you. He has no friends, he has only people who do him favors. Once they refuse a demand, they’re the enemy aka one of his punching bags.

“Georgia law prohibits the governor from interfering in elections. The Secretary of State, who is an elected constitutional officer, has oversight over elections that cannot be overrriden by executive order,” Kemp’s spokesman said several days ago in response to Trump’s public demands.

Yes yes yes, blah blah, but he can just ignore that and do what he wants, because Trump told him to.

The fox-clubbing QC has riled people again. It’s about the Tavistock ruling of course.

Except that not giving children medication that stops puberty is not comparable to exterminating them.

Those rock paintings in the Amazon:

Thousands of rock art pictures depicting huge Ice Age creatures such as mastodons have been revealed by researchers in the Amazon rainforest.

The paintings were probably made around 11,800 to 12,600 years ago, according to a press release from researchers at Britain’s University of Exeter.

The paintings are set over three different rock shelters, with the largest, known as Cerro Azul, home to 12 panels and thousands of individual pictographs.

Located in the Serranía La Lindosa in modern-day Colombia, the rock art shows how the earliest human inhabitants of the area would have coexisted with Ice Age megafauna, with pictures showing what appear to be giant sloths, mastodons, camelids, horses and three-toed ungulates with trunks.

H/t Your Name’s not Bruce?

Ok so I was reading a story about COVID measures in California and there’s a photo of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco seen between two rows of buildings, with the caption:

California Street, usually filled with iconic cable cars, is seen mostly empty in San Francisco, California on March 17, 2020.

And I was annoyed. Cable cars are not iconic! Neither are movie stars, or shoes, or apartment buildings, or the Space Needle, or the Grand Canyon. “Iconic” is not another word for famous or recognizable or familiar. That’s not what it means.

I know, I know, that is what it means now, because usage is what counts, but it isn’t, and I hate it.

I saw one yesterday that also set me off: it was on an ad for a flashy new apartment building in Seattle, of which some 5 million have been built over the last few years.

As the tallest residential building in Seattle, this iconic tower is home to a collection of ultra luxury apartment residences.

What’s iconic about it?! They don’t say. Here it doesn’t even mean “familiar”; it’s just a fancy word for expensive.

So I was ranting about it and a friend handed me this to keep me quiet for a few minutes:

Can we please give the word “iconic” a rest? These days, you can’t pick up a newspaper, click on some website, turn on a f*%$@* TV without reading about something or someone that is iconic. Once upon a time, the now infernal word (hey, let’s use “infernal” more) was relegated to the lexicon of overzealous art history professors who used words like “musculature” while they groped a Greek sculpture on display at the university art museum. Those were the days.

This is what I’m saying. It was an art history word. It had a particular, narrow meaning, and it didn’t come up more than a couple of times a year. People weren’t running around talking about their iconic new espresso machine or puffa jacket.

Type the word “iconic” into your favorite search engine and voila, nearly 200,000 articles about an “iconic gadget,” “iconic comedian,” “iconic art,” “Jamie Foxx’s iconic thriller,” “iconic summer,” “Madonna’s iconic pose,” “Miami’s iconic hotels,” “England’s iconic chimney stacks.”

How about England’s iconic toilet flusher pulls? Now those are iconic.

I’m kidding; they’re not.

Webster’s Dictionary defines iconic:

1. Relating to, resembling, or having the character of an icon or (Fine Arts & Visual Arts / Art Terms) (of memorial sculptures, esp those depicting athletes of ancient Greece) having a fixed conventional style

2. A conventional religious image typically painted on a small wooden panel and used in the devotions of Eastern Christians

To do with an actual, literal icon, in short.

I’m not alone in my revulsion toward “iconic,” either. Even the venerable British tabloid The Telegraph selected “iconic” among their list of “words that should be banned because they have lost their meaning and have become useless.” But that was nearly five years ago, and instead of retiring the word to the rafters, millions of unworthy icons or iconic people have appeared… like locusts. Just watch Inside Edition any day of the week and “follow Miss USA as she fulfills her life-long dream of recreating an iconic scene from Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” followed quickly by Deborah Norville speaking with iconic film producer Harvey Weinstein.”

They don’t call Harvey Weinstein iconic any more, but that’s not because they’ve found out what the word means.

You were worrying that bankers wouldn’t be among the first to get the vaccine, weren’t you. Well worry no more!

Wall Street could get a shot in the arm in the coming months, while much of Main Street waits months for their COVID inoculations.

Lenders, bank tellers and traders could jump ahead of most Americans for vaccines, after such remedies receive emergency authorization by the Food and Drug Administration, potentially putting financial industry workers ahead of those aged above 65, adults with medical issues and the rest of the U.S. population.

Bankers are important! How do we know? All that money they have. Stands to reason.

Essential workers are in the second group, after front-line health care workers and residents in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Bankers are essential!

[T]he DHS defines essential workers as those who conduct a range of operations and services that are typically essential to continue critical infrastructure operations, and normally have included firefighters, teachers and grocery workers.

And not so much bankers, which is a shocking and unreasonable oversight.

Trump lost 5 cases in 2 hours today.

Update: oops make that 6.

This is surprising.

A T.D. is a Teachta Dála, a member of Dáil Éireann, the lower house of the Irish parliament, so comparable to a Congressional Representative or an MP.

Yes, surprising.

Why we can’t have interesting things.

A group of young men claiming to be Christians have posted a video of themselves tearing down a mysterious monolith that had appeared atop a California mountain and replacing it with a cross.

The monolith had been built near the town of Atascadero and sparked huge interest after the appearance of a similar silvery metal-faced monolith that had been discovered in the deserts of Utah.

The one in Utah was torn down by some random people.

Now the Atascadero monolith has met a similar kind of fate, according to a report in the San Luis Obispo Tribune newspaper.

In a video, which was livestreamed and posted online, the group of young men drive from southern California to tear down the structure. Under cover of darkness, they hike up to the structure and tear it down while chanting “Christ is king!”. They then erect a homemade wooden cross in its place and drag the remains of the monolith down the mountain to their car.

During the video, the men also make offensive comments and drink substantial quantities of energy drinks, while also referencing Donald Trump and the QAnon conspiracy theory and their mission is to demonstrate “how much we love Jesus Christ”.

Oh that kind of christian – the Trump-loving asshole kind.

The vandalism angered local officials.

“We are upset that these young men felt the need to drive five hours to come into our community and vandalize the monolith,” Atascadero’s mayor, Heather Moreno, said in a news release. “The monolith was something unique and fun in an otherwise stressful time.”

Energy-drinking Trump-loving young men have to ruin everything.

Those damn turkeys.

Americans couldn’t resist the urge to gather for Thanksgiving, driving only slightly less than a year ago and largely ignoring the pleas of public health experts, who begged them to forgo holiday travel to help contain the coronavirus pandemic, data from roadways and airports shows.

The nation’s unwillingness to tamp down on travel offered a warning in advance of Christmas and New Year’s as virus deaths and hospitalizations hit new highs a week after Thanksgiving. U.S. deaths from the outbreak eclipsed 3,100 on Thursday, obliterating the single-day record set last spring.

Vehicle travel in early November was as much as 20% lower than a year earlier, but it surged around the holiday and peaked on Thanksgiving Day at only about 5% less than the pandemic-free period in 2019, according to StreetLight Data, which provided an analysis to The Associated Press.

Oh ffs. That’s pathetic. I know people like to get together but is it really that urgent? Especially if they’re just going to do it all over again in a month? We give ourselves a double whammy here by having two mandatory Family Holidays instead of one. I would think Thanksgiving could be made optional for just this one year.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has urged people to stay home for the holidays, but officials acknowledged that many people would not heed that advice and advised them to get tested before and after trips. Friedman said that this year’s holidays presented “tough choices” for many families.

But not all that tough if only 5% of us decided to skip it.

[I]nfections, even from small Thanksgiving gatherings, have begun to stream in around the country, adding another burden to health departments that are already overwhelmed.

“This uptick here is really coming at a time when everyone’s exhausted,” said Don Lehman, a spokesman for the Warren County Public Health Department in upstate New York.

The county concluded that Thanksgiving gatherings or travel likely caused 40% of the 22 cases it reported in the last two days. That means contact tracers have to figure out where people came from or traveled to and contact health officials in those places. Lehman said it adds “a lot of legwork” to the contact-tracing process.

Yes but pumpkin pie.

Let’s see if we can figure out how this works, or if it works.

There’s something that I see GC people saying a lot, JKR said it, and they’re right

“If you cannot name your injustice or oppressor, then you can’t fight it”

And then they try to stop people saying transphobe, TERF, even cis. They try and shut down all discussion of transphobia

I don’t know what Montgomerie has against periods at the end of sentences…Maybe it’s a sly joke about the fact that trans women don’t have periods?

Anyway, I think I have figured it out, and it doesn’t work. You have to name the injustice and the oppressor accurately. They both have to be real. We’re well familiar with people shouting about “injustices” that aren’t real at all – look at Trump for example. Look at angry White Pride demonstrators. Look at men who are furious that they can’t find a woman who wants to have sex with them. And yes look at the kind of trans activist who tweets “KILL ALL TERFS” and the like.

It’s not an injustice or a form of oppression that a man thinks he is a woman inside, or that a woman thinks she is a man inside. It may be a lot of other things – a misfortune, an unhappy situation, a misery – but it’s not an injustice, because justice doesn’t come into it. Injustice and oppression require agency, which means they require agents, and there are no agents behind this feeling of being the other sex. It’s just something that happens (at least according to the accounts people give – it’s so subjective and so quick to change shape that it’s hard to know), as opposed to something that someone did.

Is it unjust and oppressive that we don’t all believe that sex is a matter of self-description as opposed to fact? No, because it can’t be, because we need to know which is which for a long list of reasons.

So the truth of “If you cannot name your injustice or oppressor, then you can’t fight it” doesn’t apply to what Montgomerie is talking about. Trump should stop saying that dead people voted, because it’s a lie and he’s engaged on a criminal attempt to steal an election and destroy what’s left of American democracy. Montgomerie should stop talking about “transphobes” and “cis people” because those are not real categories and they are used to bully and ostracize feminist women.

Nailed it.

Amnesty International and Liberty are joining forces to say that oh yes children should definitely be put on puberty blockers if they’re not loving their experience of puberty.

Amnesty International UK and Liberty are disappointed to see the High Court’s judgment on the use of puberty blockers. We are concerned not only for what this means for the health and well-being of trans young people, but the wider implications this will have on the rights of children and young people of all genders, particularly on consent and bodily autonomy.

Children don’t have “rights to bodily autonomy.” They’re not old enough.

Puberty blockers have been a reversible intervention used for decades to pause precocious puberty. Young trans people have been able to access puberty blockers under medical supervision since the late 1990s as a way to put on hold the physical changes of puberty, alleviate gender dysphoria and allow young trans people to flourish as their full selves. For many young trans people, or those questioning and exploring their gender identity, puberty blockers allow more time to make important decisions.

And for many others they’re a huge mistake which leaves them wishing they’d never done it – like Keira Bell for example. Why don’t AI and Liberty give a shit about that? Why are they trotting along with the stupid trans dogma as if they were moody adolescents instead of grown-up organizations?

For those who decide to fully transition, puberty blockers allow them to live in the correct gender as adults much more easily, by avoiding physical changes that are very difficult to reverse.

Speaking of difficult to reverse…the effects of postponing puberty can be very difficult to reverse too. What about that? What about “first do no harm”?

Young trans people should not have their access to healthcare restricted simply because they are trans.

That’s so stupid. It’s not “simply because they are trans”; it’s not because they’re trans at all, it’s because blockers mess with the body and children under 16 aren’t equipped to grasp all the consequences.

What a trainwreck.

A November 27 letter from Canadian Women and Sport to the CEO of World Rugby implores him to repeal the “ban” on trans women playing on women’s teams.

Dear Brett, Canadian Women & Sport and the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES) are writing to express our strong opposition to World Rugby’s ban on Transgender Women Athletes. In doing so, we join 84 academics, Athlete Ally, Egale Canada and others in urging World Rugby to repeal their recent ban preventing transgender women from participating in women’s rugby.

The ban violates the human rights of transgender and gender diverse women, forcing them out of sport and denying them the benefits it brings. The discriminatory ban perpetuates the harmful and marginalizing practice of gender policing in women’s sport.

What are “gender diverse” women? As far as I know they’re not excluded from women’s teams – not wearing skirts would not be a reason to ban a woman from a women’s team.

More basically, not letting men who identify as women play on women’s teams doesn’t “violate their human rights” – and arguably it does violate the human rights of women to let them play on women’s teams. Men who identify as women are still men, and they shouldn’t be leveraging their discomfort with being men to take everything away from women.

The ban is not based on sound scientific evidence. In their letter to World Rugby, 84 notable academics from around the globe stated, “there is no peer-reviewed scientific evidence to justify a ban which would only be harmful to transgender and gender diverse people.” The letter also voices their opposition to the exclusion “of an entire population group from playing women’s rugby: non-binary people assumed male at birth and transgender women … .”

It’s women’s rugby. Of course it “excludes an entire population group,” because that’s the nature of being women’s rugby (or men’s rugby). Nursery schools exclude an entire population group: people over the age of 5; that’s the nature of nursery schools. It’s not invidious or mean or discriminatory, it’s just how sports are organized because of the fact that women and men have different kinds of bodies.

Maybe climate change is making people’s brains to hot to operate correctly.

So that’s one bit of good news.

You mean there’s a limit???

AP reports:

The official serving as President Donald Trump’s eyes and ears at the Justice Department has been banned from the building after trying to pressure staffers to give up sensitive information about election fraud and other matters she could relay to the White House, three people familiar with the matter tell The Associated Press.

snicker

That is, a spy Trump tried to plant at the Justice Department has been told to gtfo after she tried to bully staffers into helping her spy.

Heidi Stirrup, an ally of top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, was quietly installed at the Justice Department as a White House liaison a few months ago. She was told within the last two weeks to vacate the building after top Justice officials learned of her efforts to collect insider information about ongoing cases and the department’s work on election fraud, the people said.

Did they think she was going to be an honest “liaison”?

Stirrup is accused of approaching staffers in the department demanding they give her information about investigations, including election fraud matters, the people said.

The surprise here is that they were able to get rid of her.

Stirrup had also extended job offers to political allies for positions at some of the highest levels of the Justice Department without consulting any senior department officials or the White House counsel’s office and also attempted to interfere in the hiring process for career staffers, a violation of the government’s human resources policies, one of the people said.

She really sounds like a lot of fun.

Earlier this week, Attorney General William Barr told the AP that U.S. attorneys and the FBI had looked into allegations of election irregularities and found no evidence of widespread voting fraud that would change the outcome of the election.

“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” he said on Tuesday.

Trump shot back at Barr on Thursday, saying the Justice Department “hasn’t looked very hard” and calling it a disappointment. But he stopping short of implying Barr’s future as attorney general could be cut short.

Well what do you mean “short”? He’s only got 7 weeks as it is.

“Ask me that in a number of weeks from now,” Trump said when asked if he still has confidence in Barr.

Dude in a number of weeks you’re out of there and looking through the subpoenas from the New York prosecutors. You’re not canning anybody in “a number of weeks.”