Jesus god. I want this nightmare to END.

Smirk smirk smirk goes Trump. His fans scream.

See also:

Hur hur. Political violence is such a hilarious joke.

CNN has more details on the dangerous and terrifying actions by Trump fans in big trucks on a busy freeway:

The Biden campaign bus was traveling Friday from San Antonio to Austin as part of a push to urge Biden supporters to cast their ballots on the state’s last day of early voting.

According to a source familiar with the incident, the vehicles were a “Trump Train group.” These groups are known in parts of the state and organize events that involve their cars with flags and Trump paraphernalia and drive around to show support for President Donald Trump. The group began yelling profanities and obscenities and then blockaded the entire Biden entourage.

At one point they slowed the tour bus to roughly 20 mph on Interstate 35, the campaign official said. The vehicles slowed down to try to stop the bus in the middle of the highway. The source said there were nearly 100 vehicles around the campaign bus. Biden staffers were rattled by the event, the source said, though no one was hurt.

This is early brownshirts territory. Early brownshirts weren’t plotting extermination camps, early brownshirts were engaging in political violence against everyone to the left of the brownshirts.

It seems that Trump vigilantes were out in force in Texas.

Multiple videos posted to social media on Saturday morning apparently show Trump supporters in trucks and cars harassing a Joe Biden and Kamala Harris campaign bus in Texas, causing the campaign to cancel a planned event in Central Texas.

Harassing as in surrounding it on the freeway, tailgating it, and sideswiping a smaller vehicle.

A Biden campaign spokesperson told Forbes that the Trump supporters “attempted to slow the bus down and run it off the road.” And one local Democratic Party leader, Katie Naranjo, tweeted photos and said Trump supporters “followed the Biden bus throughout central Texas” and “ran into a person’s car, yelling curse words and threats.”

…

Texas State Rep. Rafael Anchía wrote on Twitter that the Trump caravan was encouraged by Eric Trump on Facebook and claimed that some of those involved were armed.

The police refused to intervene.

Trudeau says “Yes but.”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau defended free speech on Friday, but added that it was “not without limits” and should not “arbitrarily and needlessly hurt” certain communities.

“We will always defend freedom of expression,” Trudeau said in response to a question about the right to show a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed, as France’s Charlie Hebdo magazine did.

But. But but but but but.

“But freedom of expression is not without limits,” he added. “We owe it to ourselves to act with respect for others and to seek not to arbitrarily or unnecessarily injure those with whom we are sharing a society and a planet.”

And what does “respect for others” mean? Does it require respecting all their beliefs and taboos and dogmas and fantasies? I ask because if it does, we really don’t have free speech at all.

We do not have the right for example to shout fire in a movie theatre crowded with people, there are always limits,” he argued.

Gee, did he think of that all by himself? I’ve never heard it before.

Distancing himself from the position of French President Emmanuel Macron, Trudeau pleaded for a careful use of free speech. “In a pluralist, diverse and respectful society like ours, we owe it to ourselves to be aware of the impact of our words, of our actions on others, particularly these communities and populations who still experience a great deal of discrimination,” he said.

Like girls married off at 12? Like women murdered for talking to a man or not wearing hijab? Like people slaughtered for “apostasy” and “blasphemy”? Or like the people who murder them. You can’t do both, and I’d rather respect the victims.

Glosswitch had a shrewd observation on this.

More of this evil:

A Greek Orthodox priest was shot Saturday while he was closing his church in the French city of Lyon, and authorities locked down part of the city to hunt for the assailant, authorities said.

The priest, a Greek citizen, is in a local hospital with life-threatening injuries after being shot twice in the abdomen, a police official told The Associated Press. The attacker was alone and fired from a hunting rifle, said the official, who was not authorized to be publicly named.

…

The reason for the shooting was unclear. It happened two days after an Islamic extremist knife attack at a Catholic church in the French city of Nice that killed three people, and amid ongoing geopolitical tensions caricatures mocking the Muslim Prophet Muhammad published in satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

…

Antoine Callot, the pastor at another Greek Orthodox church in Lyon, identified the wounded priest as Nikolas Kakavelakis, a 45-year-old father of two. Callot told The Associated Press that the Greek Orthodox community in Lyon has not received any threats, but said he immediately asked police for security protection at his church after the shooting. “We are anxious and anguished. It’s really horrible,” he said. “Now we need to hide and be careful.”

…

Seeking to calm tensions and to explain France’s defense of the prophet cartoons, President Emmanuel Macron gave an interview broadcast Saturday on Arabic network Al-Jazeera. Macron also tweeted that “our country has no problem with any religion. They are all practiced here freely! No stigmatization: France is committed to peace and living together in harmony.”

Therefore bang bang.

Emma Kelly in the Independent (Ireland):

LGB (Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual) Alliance Ireland launched a Twitter account, claiming to fight for the rights of lesbian, gay and bisexual people in Ireland. For the casual social media user, this may seem pretty great. Of course we need people continuing the fight for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. However, note that the T for transgender has been dropped.

What does that mean, “dropped”? Is there some law that says the T must always be yoked to the L and G? No there is not. Lesbians and gay men are allowed to talk about lesbian and gay issues; they are not required to include trans people whenever they do so. Also: take careful note: the two are not the same. In some ways they’re contradictory. Trans dogma as it is currently promulgated is often in tension with lesbian and gay rights – like for instance when it insists that attraction should be to “gender identity” rather than to sexed bodies.

The LGB Alliance Ireland, an offshoot of the LGB Alliance founded in the UK in 2019, wants to “draw a line against the imposition of gender identity theory, which prioritises subjective ‘gender’ over biological sex”, which they believe “undermines the rights of people whose sexual orientation is towards others of the same sex”.

What I’m saying. Straight women don’t necessarily want to have sex with trans men, and lesbians don’t necessarily want to have sex with trans women. None of us should be bullied for it.

Allegations of transphobia are batted away when someone tweets ‘men aren’t women’ or that trans women shouldn’t have access to women’s-only spaces, under the guise of wanting trans people to have rights, but for their rights not to infringe on women’s rights, or that they don’t want children being forced to transition.

Well, I’m here to inform you – trans women are women. Trans men are men. A trans woman being treated as the woman she is does not infringe on my rights as a cisgender woman (that is, I was assigned as female at birth and identify as such) or a queer woman.

She can “inform” us all she likes, but that doesn’t make her claims true. Trans women are in fact not women, but men who identify as women. It’s quite simple, and can’t be vanished out of existence by a mere “are.”

A trans woman being granted refuge in a women’s-only space is not of harm to cisgender women. 

Unless it is.

Where these smug twerps get their confidence is beyond me. I guess Emma Kelly is confident enough that she’ll never need refuge in a women-only space to make such a fatuously sweeping claim, but lots of women don’t have that luxury. Emma Kelly doesn’t know that all trans women are safe around women, nor does she know that men won’t pretend to be trans for the sake of getting into women-only spaces. She can’t know that. Women’s safety isn’t hers to give away in that breezy fashion.

Statistically speaking, Trump’s rallies have probably killed about 700 people.

US researchers have suggested that a series of recent Trump rallies probably produced more than 30,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and “likely led to more than 700 deaths”.

The study, released on Friday by scientists at Stanford University, looked at “the effects of large group meetings on the spread of Covid-19 by studying the impact of 18 Trump campaign rallies” over “up to 10 post-rally weeks for each event”.

“Our estimate of the average treatment effect across the 18 events,” they wrote, “implies that they increased subsequent confirmed cases of Covid-19 by more than 250 per 100,000 residents.

“Extrapolating this figure to the entire sample, we conclude that these 18 rallies ultimately resulted in more than 30,000 incremental confirmed cases of Covid-19. Applying county-specific post-event death rates, we conclude that the rallies likely led to more than 700 deaths (not necessarily among attendees).”

Heads of state inevitably make things happen, including causing deaths and saving lives. Policies have consequences. But holding rallies for one’s own personal benefit while flouting all medical advice on how to prevent contagion during a pandemic…that’s not inevitable, nor is it an outcome of government policy.

Trump decided it would be a clever wheeze to accuse doctors of falsely reporting COVID cases for $$$$$$$$$$.

President Donald Trump on Friday baselessly claimed that doctors are inflating the coronavirus death count for monetary gain while cases, hospitalizations and deaths surge across the country.

“Our doctors get more money if someone dies from Covid. You know that, right? I mean our doctors are very smart people. So what they do is they say ‘I’m sorry but everybody dies of Covid,’ ” Trump said, without citing any evidence, at a rally in Waterford Township, Michigan.

More money how? How does that work? Where are the stats?

There is no evidence for the President’s claim and the statement represents a stunning attack on medical workers as the country faces its worst public health emergency in more than 100 years. As of Friday evening, more than 90,000 Americans have been diagnosed with Covid-19, a new daily high, and at least 929 deaths have been reported, according to a count from Johns Hopkins University. Two states, South Dakota and Wyoming, reported their highest daily death tolls on Thursday.

All so that doctors can take vacations in Paris and Florence…unless there’s too much COVID there of course.

The American Medical Association, without naming the President, condemned claims that physicians inflate the number of Covid-19 patients they treat — calling such rumors “malicious, outrageous, and completely misguided.”

Name him, or at least name his job title. There’s no point in being polite to a deranged evil crap like him.

“The suggestion that doctors — in the midst of a public health crisis — are overcounting COVID-19 patients or lying to line their pockets is a malicious, outrageous, and completely misguided charge,” Dr. Susan Bailey, president of the American Medical Association, said in a written statement.

“Throughout this pandemic, physicians, nurses, and frontline health care workers have risked their health, their safety and their lives to treat their patients and defeat a deadly virus,” Bailey added.

Maddow’s show last night took us inside an ICU in Montana and showed a long heartbreaking soliloquy by a nurse on how emotionally painful it is for the staff. This guy –

God rot Donald Trump.

Updating to add the clip

Ah he’s got a Facebook post on the subject too. Glutton for punishment this guy.

His profile has Seattle Pacific University right at the top. SPU is at the bottom of the hill from me (north side, away from downtown) and across the canal from Fremont, which is now Google city. It’s small, and Christian, and a little bit creepy. I always see invisible scare quotes on the “university” bit.

So I found the controversy button on social media. Pretty neat feature. There were some helpful comments at the beginning of the post. After that, Zuckerberg let the monkeys out.

No, Zuckerberg doesn’t assign people to comment on your posts, chum.

Here is what the Bible teaches. Ephesians 5:23 says, “The husband is the head of the wife.” It also says in verse 28: “Husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself.” The husband should love his wife as he loves himself. This means the husband is responsible for his wife and must take care of her as himself. This means he is responsible for how she votes. The husband should not be abusive or a jerk about this authority and he should seek counsel from his wife on elections. But at the end of the day he is responsible and should make sure she votes just like he does.

Here is what Middlemarch teaches, here is what To the Lighthouse teaches, here is what King Lear teaches, here is what the number 10 bus schedule teaches. Writing is just writing, and it’s useful to keep in mind who wrote the writing, and why, and when, and to what end. The Bible is just another book, compiled from a lot of smaller books, and it’s not something that anyone has to obey the way we have to obey the flight attendants when the plane is about to make a hard landing. It’s just a damn book. I don’t care what Ephesians number number says, and it doesn’t give anyone the right to tyrannize over other people.

The Bible also teaches that the wife is to submit to her husband. Titus 2:5 says: “Wives are to be obedient to their own husbands.” And Ephesians 5:24 says: “Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands” (ESV). Notice the language there: wives should submit in everything. That is really clear language. The wife should submit in voting issues.

“Blah blah blah blah look it’s right here IN THE BOOK.” We don’t care, sunshine. Act like an adult. Better yet, treat your wife like an adult. Do both.

Brothers, a friendly reminder for life: don’t tell women what to do.

“Make sure” how? Issue her express orders? Order her to show you her ballot before putting it in the drop box or the slot at the polling place?

The husband is not responsible for how his wife votes. Women are not children or dependents; women are responsible for themselves just as men are. The husband is not responsible for how his wife votes at the end of the day or the beginning of the day or at lunch time or at 3 a.m. Adults are adults, and adult couples are not half boss half slave.

Husbands don’t “let” their wives vote one way or another; it’s not their choice to make. Women don’t need permission from men to do normal adult things.

After that he goes into a bunch of boring Jesus crap. What a goon.

Aaron Rupar also following Trump’s on the road lies:

Kayleigh McEnany explained about the ballots in a river way back at the beginning of the month.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports that Meagan Wolfe, director of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said during a news conference this week that “no Wisconsin absentee ballots were found” in a mail bag that was discovered last week in a ditch in Greenville, Wisconsin, although she said she didn’t know if any out-of-state ballots were caught up in the mail bag.

McEnany sparred with Fox News Radio reporter Jon Decker on Thursday when he asked her about Trump claiming that his voters’ ballots were being thrown into an unspecified river, and she responded by saying that the president actually meant the ditch in Greenville.

Coulda had outa state ballots in it. From Hawaii maybe, or Alaska, or Vermont. We JUST DON’T KNOW. So let’s assume it did, and vote Trump accordingly. Makes sense.

Daniel Dale has fact-checky snapshots from Trump in campaigning mode.

Going up is not rounding the corner.

God damn scum bag. We blame him BECAUSE HE INCITES IT, KNOWING IT WILL HAPPEN. He could shut his fucking mouth about Whitmer, but he doesn’t, because he wants them to chant misogynist abuse despite the fact that there was an active plot to kidnap and murder her.

What is the world coming to when you can’t get the news media to report on a fake scandal made up by a criminal fraud to tarnish his non-criminal opponent?

Yes, how unreasonable that there’s a lot of reporting on a major pandemic.

Tss, everybody knows the name, it’s Ballotswastebasket River. Old Iroquois name I think.

The cavalry has arrived! Just in time to be swept into the ditch.

How poignant to see Kent garagiste Nigel Farage interfering in the US election, much in the way a drop interferes in the ocean. Farage is appearing at the odd rally for his emotional support president, Donald Trump, which tells its own story about where the US leader is at, psychologically speaking, for the final days of his campaign. On Wednesday, Trump gibbered to a crowd: “I’m glad I called him up.” So is Nigel’s agent.

Nigel was brought on stage in Arizona by Donald, where the latter introduced him as “the king of Europe”.

Certainly, and Trump is the emperor of Antarctica.

Farage rubed his way on to the rally platform and took the microphone to declare Trump was “the single most resilient and bravest person I have ever met in my life”.

Well, you know, that kind of thing – it always depends on the person who says it. It may be true of Farage, who may have a very circumscribed and jejune set of people on his list of “ever met.” But if we take it less literally as a general statement about Trump? No. Trump is neither resilient nor brave.

Also, Trump’s courage and resilience aren’t all that’s required. For the job Trump presumes to do he needs other qualities – intelligence, discipline, responsibility, empathy, collegiality, basic decency. Uh oh.

[Farage] was giving it his best Lord Haw-Haw, informing Trump’s crowd: “You’ll be voting for the only leader in the western world with the real courage to stand up to the Chinese Communist party.” Stand up to them? He pays more tax to them than he does to the US. Later, Nigel justified his media credentials by explaining to Daily Telegraph readers that Trump had “what Americans call ‘the big M’ – momentum”. Is that what Americans call momentum? We’ll have to take this latterday Alistair Cooke’s word for it, I suppose.

I can help with that! No, we don’t. Maybe some goons in Hollywood do, but as a people, no.

It would be nice if Trump and Farage joined forces after Trump loses, as a song and dance act playing towns like Knoxville and Sioux City and Abilene.

Thought for the Day: Marketing Harry Potter-themed underwear=advocating violence against “trans folx.”

An alert observer asked “So these are officially licensed, correct? Meaning that JK Rowling does profit from me purchasing them? Love the prints, but out of principle I have to pass, unless a portion of proceeds were donated to supporting trans charities.”

So this Elizabeth Tobey person is saying JK Rowling advocates violence against trans people – which of course is a defamatory lie.

Why do people do this?

It must be because the real casus belli is so weak, right? If it were strong, there would be no need to tell gross defamatory lies of this kind.

So it appears that in some sense the “allies” realize The Cause is weak. In some sense they get that it’s not all that important that Bob or Bill or Ben can’t get everyone to “validate” his “identity” as Betsy. They may think it is all that important themselves, but they spy in the distance the fact that not everyone does and that that will probably never change, because the fact is that it’s not important. It’s Luxury Grievance is what it is. It’s Grievance for people who don’t actually have any real grievance so they have to work something up. “I’m a prosperous straight white man and I’m sick and tired of acknowledging the oppression of other people – I want some of that for me!” So the Luxury Grievance is born.

It turns out men are stronger than women. Who knew?

Earlier this year, World Rugby caused somewhat of a stir when its draft proposals to ban biological men from playing at the top level of women’s rugby were reported by The Guardian. The proposals were of particular interest because they were in sharp contrast to the rules of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which has loosened its requirements to focus on athletes’ testosterone levels. World Rugby was also the first international sporting federation to indicate such a move, which led to immediate criticism from some quarters that the proposals were “harmful” despite the fact the they were aimed at safeguarding players’ health.

Which never made any sense, seeing as how we’ve always known that men have considerable physical advantages over women. It’s no use pretending this is a brand new concept, because we all know damn well it’s not.

Earlier this month, World Rugby released the final version of its Transgender Guidelines document, confirming that biological men would be barred from playing at the top level of women’s rugby. The reasoning was based on two primary factors that had emerged from the scientific research into the issue: first, the unacceptable risk of injury to female players; and second, the existence of significant performance advantages.

Aka it would be totally unfair and a disaster because men would win everything and they would break women’s necks in the process. It’s really pretty damn simple.

Rugby is a full-contact sport that involves frequent collisions, and there are particular risks to players’ heads and necks. The nature of the sport means that injuries are frequent and, very sadly, they occasionally result in life-altering disabilities. With that in mind, the conclusion reached by World Rugby should not be entirely surprising. However, the pioneering research that underpinned the final decision was compelling and is likely to send shockwaves throughout the sporting world.

The research set out not only the distinct biological advantages that men had over women (including increases in muscle density and increased heart and lung size), but went on to consider the effect that these advantages had in athletic performance. The research showed that men generally had a 30-60 percent advantage over women in strength, around a 33 percent advantage in terms of power and a 10-15 percent advantage in running speed. Even after taking testosterone suppressants (as per the IOC guidelines), the performance advantages remained significant, with only a fractional reduction in the males’ existing ability.

Why would this send any shockwaves through the sporting world? It’s not news!

Ross Tucker, the science and research consultant for World Rugby, acknowledged the “struggle” in considering the many aspects involved in the decision, saying that it was not possible to balance inclusion, safety and fairness.

It’s also not necessary or desirable. “Inclusion” of men on women’s teams should not be a goal in the first place. Think of adult men demanding “inclusion” on children’s teams. Nobody would think that has to be “balanced” along with safety and a fair shot at winning. Women are just supposed to suck it up I guess.

Andrew Copson at Humanists UK:

This morning, three civilians were murdered in France – stabbed to death and beheaded – by an Islamic extremist. It was a shocking and despicable act, but not an isolated one.

It comes just a fortnight after state school teacher Samuel Paty was murdered for teaching his class about freedom of expression and the attacks on Charlie Hebdo. France responded then in the only way a human rights-loving republic should. It defended the right to free expression, including to publish materials which may cause offence.

Sickeningly, today’s murders have been portrayed as a retaliation for that defence of free speech and secular education and it feels like this is a situation spiralling out of control. If it does, we must remember that there is fault only on one side here. Freedom of speech and freedom of belief are not crimes. But murder most definitely is.

Furthermore, the fact that someone somewhere said or drew something about a religion is a very minor fact about a minor incident, while hacking that someone’s head off is very major. There’s a disparity in proportion here. One the one hand: some people don’t believe in or defer to Religion X; on the other hand believers in Religion X rip the heads off people who don’t believe in Religion X. That’s not a match. Nobody has to believe in your fucking religion. It’s a religion: it provides no real reasons for believing in it, only fake ones. Just give up on this stupid murderous project to force all 7 billion people on the planet to bow to your fucking religion. The more you threaten the more we think your religion sucks.

[W]e have no reason to believe those who say that laws against offending religions will stop the violence. Countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Bangladesh are home to this kind of violence all year round, precisely because blasphemy laws give legitimacy to any vigilante targeting humanists, Christians, Ahmadis, or other minorities, safe in the knowledge that enough people believe violence is an acceptable response to those who offend you to offer them impunity.

That belief rests on the prior belief that submission to their religion is and should be mandatory. If your god thinks belief in him (women need not apply) is mandatory he’s an asshole; away with him.

iknklast’s comment on the fabrication post

You know, there seems to be a rather common thread running through all of this: wealth. It seems most of the “self-ID” people lead comfortable to wealthy lives. Maybe it’s that old thing where rich people used to crave living the “more authentic” lives of poor people; this is the new version of that, only you don’t actually have to give anything up or sleep in a less comfortable bed to do it. You just say “I am woman”, “I am black”, “I am Chicana”. Voila! Instant tourism into an oppressed status.

reminded me of this classic Monty Python reversal.

Oh does he.

That was 12. Let’s see the beginning.

But talking about a religion is not comparable to walking up to one person and picking a fight.

But never mind all that, let’s talk about women and why it’s necessary to go on treating them as inferiors.

No. Freedom for women was never limited to the right to vote in elections. That’s back of the cereal box history and it’s wrong.

Well all righty then! Men are stronger than women therefore men should dominate and persecute women. Powerful logic!

Dang. This started off being about Islam and tolerance of religious differences, but the guy seems to be pruriently obsessed with uppity women and…their naughty bits. WHAT IS BEHIND THAT STRING???

He says, showing utter disrespect for the values of others.

And then came the “right to kill millions of French people” tweet.

The death toll in the Algerian war was hard to pin down.

Historians, like Alistair Horne and Raymond Aron, state that the actual number of Algerian Muslim war dead was far greater than the official French estimates, but was fewer than the 1 million deaths claimed by the Algerian government after independence. Horne estimated Algerian casualties during the span of eight years to be around 700,000. Uncounted thousands of Muslim civilians lost their lives in French Army ratissages, bombing raids, or vigilante reprisals. The war uprooted more than 2 million Algerians, who were forced to relocate in French camps or to flee into the Algerian hinterland, where many thousands died of starvation, disease, and exposure.

It’s true that European and American colonizers have killed a lot of Muslims; it’s not true that that fact equates to a “right” to kill an equivalent number of non-Muslims. It’s even less true that cutting off the head of a history teacher is a way to redress the wrongs.

Labour has suspended Corbyn.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has suspended Jeremy Corbyn from the party over his reaction to a highly critical report on anti-Semitism.

The human rights watchdog found Labour responsible for “unlawful” harassment and discrimination during Mr Corbyn’s years in charge of the party.

But Mr Corbyn later said the scale of anti-Semitism within Labour had been “dramatically overstated” by opponents.

Labour said he was being suspended “for a failure to retract” his words.

I think Corbyn should think very seriously about coming out as trans now. I can’t think of anything else that would save his hide.

Sir Keir, who became Labour leader in April, said the publication of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) report had brought “a day of shame” for the party.

The report found Labour responsible for three breaches of the Equality Act:

Political interference in anti-Semitism complaints

Failure to provide adequate training to those handling anti-Semitism complaints

Harassment, including the use of anti-Semitic tropes and suggesting that complaints of anti-Semitism were fake or smears

The EHRC found evidence of 23 instances of “inappropriate involvement” by Mr Corbyn’s office, included staff influencing decisions on suspensions or whether to investigate a claim.

Yes that seems pretty inappropriate.