Oh no – Native Americans are destroying our Western way of life, at least so says Liz Cheney.

On a momentous day for Tribal Nations, Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY), the House Republican Conference Chairwoman, stated that the successful litigation by tribes and environmentalists to return the grizzly bear in Greater Yellowstone to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) “was not based on science or facts” but motivated by plaintiffs “intent on destroying our Western way of life.”

Our Western way of life? Whose Western way of life? White people’s? Republicans’? White Republicans’? Cheneys’? Because from what I remember – correct me if I’m wrong – white people did quite a lot to ruin Native Americans’ way of life back in the day, and something tells me Liz Cheney doesn’t feel a whole lot of compunction about that.

In other words it takes quite a lot of gall for pale Republicans to complain about Native Americans spoiling any way of life.

One of the largest tribal-plaintiff alliances in recent memory prevailed in the landmark case, Crow Tribe et al v. Zinke last September, when US District Judge Dana Christensen ruled in favor of the tribes and environmental groups after finding that the Trump Administration’s US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) had failed to abide by the ESA and exceeded its authority in attempting to remove federal protections from the grizzly. Tuesday, USFWS officially returned federal protections to the grizzly.

…

“So, in striving to protect our culture, our religious and spiritual freedoms, our sovereignty and our treaty rights – all of which are encapsulated in the grizzly issue – we are ‘destroying’ Cheney’s idea of the ‘Western way of life’?” questioned [Tom] Rodgers. “I would remind the Congresswoman that at the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition an estimated 100,000 grizzly bears roamed from the Missouri River to the Pacific Coast. That was all Indian Country. Now there are fewer than 2,000 grizzly bears and our people live in Third World conditions on meager reservations in the poorest counties in the US. Does she really want to talk about ‘destroying’ a ‘way of life’?” asked Rodgers.

Yes but you see her way of life matters and yours doesn’t.

That seems to be the new rule.

Also the president of the US takes to Twitter to mock Elijah Cummings for having an intruder break into his house.

“Really bad news! The Baltimore house of Elijah Cummings was robbed. Too bad!” Trump tweeted Friday morning.

Trump’s tweet came less than 24 hours after a report from WJZ, the CBS affiliate in Baltimore, that Cummings’ home had been burglarized early Saturday morning, hours before Trump launched a Twitter attack on the congressman.

He had another fascist rally yesterday.

At a raucous rally in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Thursday night, Trump continued to drag the city of Baltimore through the mud ― and extended his attacks to Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Trump claimed that Baltimore’s homicide rate was “significantly higher than El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala,” then asked his audience for more suggestions to embellish the comparison.

At one point, before protesters interrupted his speech, Trump also suggested that Democrats were at fault for murders in Chicago. And he blamed Democrats for the violence that plagues various urban areas, saying they “squeezed the blood” out of those places.

And so on and so on. It’s an early-stage fascist regime. It will continue to get worse.

Updating to add: The article is from August 2016 so obviously the inspiration must be the other way around. H/t clamboy for noticing.

Yaniv has inspired imitators. Of course.

A transgender woman in Charlottetown has filed a complaint with the P.E.I. Human Rights Commission alleging she was refused service at a local salon because of her transgender status.

Kristen McKay says she went into Carrie’s Esthetic Salon in downtown Charlottetown on Tuesday afternoon to get her nails and makeup done and for makeup lessons.

Behold the transgender woman in question:

Krystalle Ramlakhan/CBC

McKay said a woman at the salon informed her that she didn’t do services for men, and when McKay replied that she’s not a man but a transgender woman, McKay was still refused service.

“I felt like I was a piece of garbage. I was worthless,” said McKay.

I don’t believe he felt anything of the kind. I think he felt happy about his chances for getting into the papers.

If you go to a supermarket and ask them to fix your car, you don’t get to complain of feeling worthless if they say they don’t provide that service.

In a written statement, salon owner Carrie MacFadyen said she would serve a transgender customer if she felt safe and secure in a room alone with them.

McKay said MacFadyen tried to give her an address for another salon to get her nails done, but McKay refused. She left, filed a complaint with P.E.I. Human Rights Commission and went to the media with her story.

Of course, because going to another salon wouldn’t be any fun, and wouldn’t give him the chance to play Civil Rights Hero Like John Lewis or Elizabeth Eckford.

“It is discrimination. I’m a human being. I have rights and people should know what people’s rights are and if you’re going to run a business you should know what rights are,” said McKay.

Nobody said he wasn’t a human being. He’s the one who should know what people’s rights are. This isn’t the Greensboro Woolworths lunch counter and he isn’t a black person denied a public service on racial grounds. He’s a stubbly white man who wants to make life unpleasant for women in the service industry.

Also, he’s been stalking the salon owner.

“It is unfortunate that the situation is being referred to as a transgender issue when the only issue is about my safety. I have absolutely no issues with transgender people and support their cause,” MacFadyen said in the statement.

It goes on to say that McKay is often standing or sitting on the street where MacFadyen parks her car and that — along with the fact that McKay then showed up at her work — made her uneasy.

Gee, I wonder why.

The dictator strikes again:

Navy officials said Wednesday they are pulling achievement medals from prosecutors who argued the case against a decorated Navy SEAL who was acquitted in the death of a wounded Islamic State captive after President Donald Trump intervened.

Trump tweeted earlier Wednesday that he had directed the secretary of the Navy and the chief of naval operations to “immediately withdraw and rescind” the Navy Achievement Medal from prosecutors who argued the case against Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, who was acquitted by military jurors earlier this month. “The Prosecutors who lost the case against SEAL Eddie Gallagher (who I released from solitary confinement so he could fight his case properly), were ridiculously given a Navy Achievement Medal,” Trump complained, adding, “I am very happy for Eddie Gallagher and his family!”

And so it was done.

Navy spokesman Cdr. Jereal Dorsey said that on Wednesday, after Trump’s tweet, Navy Secretary Richard Spencer rescinded the awards. As secretary, he has that authority, Dorsey said.

The move appeared to be a highly unusual presidential intervention in a case Trump had personally championed and drew immediate condemnation. Former Pentagon spokesman David Lapan, a retired Marine colonel, said the move represented the “further politicization of our military” and was a “ludicrous” move “in the face of so many more important and pressing personnel issues.”

Dictators gotta dic.

A seller of guns seeks new customers by putting targets on lefty brown women in Congress:

A gun shop owner in North Carolina put up a billboard that is more of an attack than an advertisement. The sign, about one mile away from Cherokee Guns in Murphy, North Carolina, shows four congresswomen of color — who have become known as “the Squad” — with a disparaging message.

“The 4 Horsemen Cometh,” the sign reads, with the word “Cometh” scratched out and replaced with “are idiots.”

Below are the faces of Reps. Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley, who were the subject of a barrage of racist tweets by President Trump.

What could possibly go wrong.

He’s giving away free bumper stickers with the same image.

“You may come by the shop (next week) and get your very own FOUR HORSEMEN COMETH STICKER…simple…eat a piece of bacon…tell us you’re voting for Trump in 2020…then get your limited edition bumper sticker!! (While supplies last!) Snowflakes and Liberals are not eligible…sorry…” he wrote on Facebook.

It’s only Snowflakes who think it’s bad to put up billboards inciting murder of specific individuals.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Can you affirm my gender at 3 p.m. Tuesday?

The “gender affirming” bit is key. It seems to be what all of these fights are about, or at least most of them.

Yaniv wants these spas to give her treatments that will supposedly “affirm” her in her gender. (I’m more than a little suspicious that this is Yaniv’s only or even her main motive, but let that go for now.)

Trans women athletes want to compete with cis women because it will “affirm” their gender to be in the “women’s” event. (Again, I’m being charitable and assuming that they’re not motivated by a desire to win awards and scholarships.)

Same for arguments about having birth certificates changed — it seems to be about getting the state, or other people or businesses, to “affirm” their gender.

And… is that an appropriate thing to ask? I think other civil rights movements have wisely focused on concrete, meaningful rights that directly affect people’s lives: the right to employment, housing, legal benefits of marriage, and so on. In fact, in the gay marriage debate, it was the anti-SSM side that insisted that the liberals were gonna make you renounce your religious views about homosexuality and swear fealty to our new gay overlords. Marriage equality advocates generally kept the focus on “no, we just want the same rights as everyone else. You can think our marriage is stupid or immoral or illegitimate in your eyes or God’s, just as we have opinions about some straight people’s marriages. Just give us the damn legal rights.”

Purely as a matter of public persuasion, I think it’s a big ask to demand that the state, or people generally, certify that someone’s perceived gender identity equals their gender. I also suspect that it would be a poor legal strategy, as it opens up some possible First Amendment (in the U.S.) implications regarding compelled speech and religious freedom.

Pink News rushes to the defense of J Yaniv:

Jessica Yaniv says she has received huge backlash from journalists and on social media for asking salons to give her a Brazilian wax as a trans woman, with some calling it “sexual assault.”

Is that true? For asking? Not for suing when turned down? Can it really be called “asking” when the response to “no” is a lawsuit? Looks more like demanding, to me.

Although there has been a focus on Yaniv’s requests for a Brazilian wax, she told PinkNews that the coverage “has not been fair nor accurate,” and that she was in fact requesting many different services which would be “gender-affirming” for her.

And we can be completely confident that Yaniv is telling the truth? Based on what?

Also, since when is “gender affirmation” a service that salons are required to provide? Why can’t Yaniv affirm his own goddam gender?

She said: “I reached out starting in March 2018 to businesses advertising over Facebook Marketplace gender-affirming care services like facials, haircuts, manicures, pedicures, head massage, full-body waxing, Brazilian waxing, arm waxing, leg waxing, and was refused service.”

Because it’s not possible to feel like a laydee without facials, haircuts, manicures, pedicures, head massage, full-body waxing, Brazilian waxing, arm waxing, and leg waxing? But then why be trans at all?

Yaniv provided PinkNews with screenshots of her conversation with one of the salons she has filed a complaint against.

The person from the salon said (spelling corrected for clarity): “Sorry I’m not trying to be rude or anything it’s just that I don’t feel comfortable doing this and I know you have the right it’s just that you’re a man into a lady but you’re still a man right but into a lady.”

And? Pink seems to think that’s very damning but it isn’t. Male bodies are male bodies.

In recordings heard by PinkNews, one salon told Yaniv when she enquired about the price of a wax, that she was a “fucking bastard,” and that she was “mentally sick” and that if she called again they would give her number to the police.

Could that be because Yaniv was harassing and threatening the salon?

Yaniv told PinkNews: “These are basic services that I am requesting as a transgendered person. There is no excuse nor reason that I should be denied service.”

Basic? What does he mean basic? They seem pretty extra, to me.

Yaniv said: “Trans people need these services! We’re like any other woman out there.

“To deny us these rights is denying our existence.”

No, it is not. It may be contradicting your claims about yourselves, but that’s not the same thing as denying your existence.

Pink News doesn’t give a rat’s ass about women, does it.

Meanwhile, about the Uighurs…

China has detained an estimated 1 million to 2 million Uighur Muslims in the region of Xinjiang, and millions more live one step away from detention under the watchful eye of the Chinese Communist Party.

Why it matters: It has been two years since the internment camps first came to light internationally, and a series of reports from Xinjiang have made vivid the scale of the abuses. Yet foreign governments and corporations are content to pretend it isn’t happening.

“If right now, just about any other country in the world [were] found to be detaining over 1 million Muslims of a certain ethnicity, you can bet we’d be seeing an international outcry,” says Sophie Richardson, china director for Human Rights Watch.

• “Because it’s China, which has enormous power in international institutions these days, it’s hard to muster any response at all.”
• “There has been this almost childlike hope that as China gets wealthier and more secure it would change” and adapt to international norms, Richardson says. Instead, China is using its economic clout and influence at the UN to undermine those norms.

A rabid opponent of federal land management has been put in charge of…federal land management. Of course he has.

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt on Monday signed an order making Wyoming native William Perry Pendley acting head of the Bureau of Land Management. The bureau’s holdings are sweeping, with nearly one out of every 10 acres nationally, and 30% of minerals, under its dominion, mostly across the U.S. West.

Pendley, a former midlevel Interior appointee in the Reagan administration, for decades has championed ranchers and others in standoffs with the federal government over grazing and other uses of public lands. He has written books accusing federal authorities and environmental advocates of “tyranny” and “waging war on the West.” He argued in a 2016 National Review article that the “Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold.”

In other words he’s a fanatical “everything should be private property” crank, and he’s now acting head of the BLM. That’s cute. It’s kind of like making a Mafia boss head of the FBI, or a tobacco CEO head of the FDA.

In tweets this summer, Pendley welcomed Trump administration moves to open more federal land to mining and oil and gas development and other private business use, and he has called the oil and gas extraction technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, “an energy, economic, AND environmental miracle!”

Conservation groups called the Pendley appointment an alarming choice, while Western ranchers called it a welcome move that shows the Trump administration is serious about opening public lands to all uses, including mining and ranching.

So that’s not really “all uses.” If you open public lands to mining and ranching then they’re no longer open to hiking and camping. If you open public lands to profit-making resource extraction then they’re no longer open to public enjoyment, and they’re also no longer open to the birds and reptiles and other animals that were living on them.

The Trump people have already moved BLM headquarters from DC to Colorado and spread employees all over the Western states, in what looks like a prelude to zeroing out the agency altogether.

An analysis of six new BLM proposed management plans by the Pew Charitable Trust, which calls itself a nonpartisan research center, for parts of six Western states found they significantly reduce protections that have been in place for decades and open up new land for mining and oil and gas. They include Alaskan lands known as nesting habitat for peregrine falcons and Montana rivers homes to the westslope cutthroat trout.

That’s ok, they can all just move to Canada.

A reminder to consider the likely impacts:

The “unregulated roll-out” of gender self-identification in Scotland has taken place with weak or non-existent scrutiny which could be putting women and girls at risk, according to new research.

University of Edinburgh academics Dr Kath Murray and Lucy Hunter Blackburn argue that decision-making on sex and gender identity issues has been directed towards the interests of a specific group, “without due regard” for the wider population.

Published on Monday in the university’s journal Scottish Affairs, the study claims that policy makers have been over-influenced by those lobbying for the rights of trans people to the “detriment” of women and girls.

Why is that? Why has it been so quick and easy? I don’t suppose I’ll ever really understand it.

Within the last two years, proposals by the Scottish and UK Governments to reform the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) to allow people to change their legal sex based only on making a legally-registered self-declaration have sparked an intense debate on how sex and gender identity should be defined in law and policy.

Equalities Secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville announced last month that the government’s plans for reforming the 2004 Act – which would make it easier for transgender people to get legal recognition of their “lived gender” – would be delayed and consultation reopened.

The report’s authors state: “It is clear that here, and elsewhere, public authorities have repeatedly failed to assess properly the impact on other groups who have specific protections under the Equality Act 2010, as the Act requires, and that little thought has been given to the possibility that such policies might be open to abuse by individuals with malign intent, irrespective of gender identity.

Which amounts to believing in magic, when you think about it. Normally public authorities are well aware of the existence of individuals with malign intent, but here somehow that awareness simply left the building. “Yes, darlings, any man who wants to can simply declare himself a woman and be legally recognized as such, because what could possibly go wrong?” It seems so obvious what could go wrong, and yet…

“On one analysis, the analysis simply reflects that women remain, as a class, less powerful than men.

“From another perspective, it is a story about policy capture that demonstrates how a small number of influential actors appear to have secured a monopoly on how sex and gender identity are understood within Scottish policy-making.”

And most of those influential actors are men, so the two analyses or perspectives are connected.

Originally a comment by latsot at Miscellany Room 3.

Have we done this one yet? So many of these things turn up in my labyrinthine feeds that I sometimes have trouble keeping track.

[Answer: no, we haven’t. I saw it last week and made a couple of attempts to read it but found it way too long for purpose as well as excruciatingly annoying so I turned my back on it.]

Anyway, as the URL suggests, the title is Dear Philosophers, You Can Trust the Feminist Consensus: Gender-Critical Radical Feminism is Bogus

It seems to be all over the place and since today I reached peak procrastination, I finally started to read it.

It’s written by a philosopher to philosophers. We know that because he inserts “dear philosophers” into every other paragraph. It’s also an excellent reason to ask “what is it with all these philosophers” and a house-bankrupting fallacy bingo card.

I won’t go into the fallacies here in any detail, they are far too tedious. But I feel compelled to convey the general dishonesty and I will paste the guy’s mission in writing the article. What’s that lesson we’re all supposed to learn about hubris, again?

First he has a droning preamble about how people might think gender critical people have a point and that we should be able to discuss this stuff in an adult fashion, all the time clumsily telling any of us foolish enough to believe that that we’re naive and wrong. He says he, too, once thought as common swine but lo he had an epiphany and now he’s superwoke. While he was reticent in the past about telling feminists how to feminism because he’s a man, now his post-epiphany status as a member of the wokinati means that he’s practically obliged to do it. He’s doing those misguided women a service, after all.

Then he picks three points we’ve all been talking about (it really doesn’t matter which ones) and says:

I’m going to try to show not just that these are wrong, but that they are baseless, rooted in some combination of conceptual confusion and factual error, and hold together as an ideology only because of the organising power of anxiety, confusion, or hostility to trans people.

Oh rilly? Anyone else here get the feeling that he’s going to completely misrepresent arguments and just say they’re wrong, possibly throwing out a few fallacy bombs in his shambling wake like a fugitive dropping scent bombs to confuse pursuing dogs?

Well spotted, but it’s hardly like we need a spidey-sense at this stage, is it?

Part 1: Do Trans People Reinforce Gender Stereotypes? (No)

Well, if the answer’s no, there’s no need to read further, obviously. But if you did you’d see that he picks an illustration of a point (gleefully from the gendercritical subreddit and claiming that means he – superwoke as is he – is incapable of bias)…. and then of course completely misrepresents it and staples strawmen (transstrawmen?) all over it.

He misrepresents the point of the image and then uses baited language to misrepresent the point of this part of the debate because he wouldn’t be sufficiently insufferable otherwise. The image is this one:

The idea that people transition in order to better fit gender stereotypes is, as best I can tell, just false.

And with that brilliant stroke of logic, that whole argument is bogus now and for all time and we shouldn’t even talk about it. Even though he is talking about it. Shut up, he’s superwoke and allowed and you are neither.

In case you’re worried about spoilers, don’t. He has pages and pages to say on the matter. I’m not an expert on fallacies, really, but he’s setting the bastards off like fireworks. He finishes – I can barely type this – with an appeal to his “dear philosophers” to use the tools of philosophy when discussing this issue, which – he insists – they are not allowed to do because he says so, citing “reasons”.

Part 2: Are People Being Pressured to Transition? (No)

He quotes a comedian (Robert Webb) saying that he was gender non-conforming as a child and that it would be wrong to tell children that because they were non-conforming they must be trans.

Philosopher-dude leaps on this using what seems to be his favourite word: “all”. He turns every argument everyone has ever made into absurdity by quoting a fairly reasonable and innocuous statement like that then saying “well, it’s just not true that all children are being told that!!!!!”

Nobody – not even Robert Webb – ever said anything of the sort. People – including Robert Webb – have said that it might be a bad idea and that’s pretty much it.

Part 3: Does Admitting Trans Women Make Women’s Spaces Less Safe? (No)

He understands the issue here, no doubt about it. He makes it very clear that he knows what the gender critical argument is. But…

Well first he says that “the most respectable” gender critical philosophers aren’t claiming that – his favourite word again – “all” trans women are predators, implying that anyone at all is saying they are.

And there are plenty of people out there making that crude and obviously transphobic argument!

Citation? Nope. He invents some scenarios about how sex segregation might work in bathrooms without ever seeming to understand that…. this already happens. It happens all the time. It has happened throughout all living memory without much difficulty. And to compound matters, he also invents a scenario in which women demand to see people’s ID before they are allowed to use the facilities and if the accused non-women refuse, they are assaulted by their accusers.

This is so transparently bullshit that it looks like satire, which is the very signature of this fallacious crap.

I’m too exhausted to talk about the conclusions and there are dozens of delicious fallacies you can hunt out for yourselves.

This is the standard of argument we get and everyone still rolls over. As Josh said recently, the trans movement has done zero work for this. The LGB and feminist movements did all that work and that’s where we live now. Arse.