This guy is fascinating. He just can’t stop telling women what to do.
It seems there was a Mumsnet thread discussing surrogacy that included harsh remarks about him, and Justine Roberts of Mumsnet took it down after he complained about it.
Well is it? Justine?! I’d like an answer please!
Who the hell does he think he is? It’s no wonder Pink News is so awful, when he’s the CEO of it.
Speaking of Trump’s refusing to accept the election result…
President Donald Trump on Wednesday would not commit to providing a peaceful transition of power after Election Day, lending further fuel to concerns he may not relinquish his office should he lose in November.
“Well, we’re going to have to see what happens,” Trump said when asked whether he’d commit to a peaceful transition, one of the cornerstones of American democracy.
As if “American democracy” is something to boast of at this point.
His reluctance to commit to a peaceful transition was rooted in what he said were concerns about ballots, extending his false assertion that widespread mail-in voting is rife with fraud.
“You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster,” Trump said at a press briefing at the White House, presumably referring to mail-in ballots, which he has baselessly claimed will lead to voter fraud.
Of course we know that, and we know he’s been doing it because he’s laying the groundwork for saying the election was stolen.
Trump has previously said his rival Joe Biden would only prevail in November if the election is “rigged,” and suggested earlier in the day it was likely the results of the election would be contested all the way to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court full of friends of Trump.
So, about this election…
If we are lucky, this fraught and dysfunctional election cycle will reach a conventional stopping point in time to meet crucial deadlines in December and January. The contest will be decided with sufficient authority that the losing candidate will be forced to yield. Collectively we will have made our choice—a messy one, no doubt, but clear enough to arm the president-elect with a mandate to govern.
As a nation, we have never failed to clear that bar. But in this election year of plague and recession and catastrophized politics, the mechanisms of decision are at meaningful risk of breaking down. Close students of election law and procedure are warning that conditions are ripe for a constitutional crisis that would leave the nation without an authoritative result. We have no fail-safe against that calamity.
And we do have a lot of very worked-up angry resentful heavily armed people, mostly on the right, especially the heavily armed ones.
A lot of people, including Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee, have misconceived the nature of the threat. They frame it as a concern, unthinkable for presidents past, that Trump might refuse to vacate the Oval Office if he loses. They generally conclude, as Biden has, that in that event the proper authorities “will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”
The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that uncertainty to hold on to power.
It’s long and it’s scary.
H/t YNnB
Well you see it’s like this…
Male same-sex couples can’t reproduce. It’s that simple. They don’t need reproductive healthcare services because of the not being able to reproduce thing. Female same-sex couples can’t reproduce on their own either, but the fix for that is technologically quite simple and quick and entirely non-invasive. It’s very different from pregnancy that way. The obstacles that exist for male couples that don’t exist for straight couples are all about the presence or absence of a uterus. That’s not because of unfair laws or homophobia, it’s just how female and male bodies work.
Harrop puts it the way he does because he wants us to think that access to female reproduction is there for the asking, or taking.
He’s a medical doctor.
Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi has defended 17-year-old Illinois double murder suspect Kyle Rittenhouse as a “little boy” who was merely “trying to protect his community” during the shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin last month.
Bondi appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to discuss new video footage released by Rittenhouse’s attorney which paints the suspect in a favorable light and suggests his actions were justified in the “war zone” which had broken out in Kenosha in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
“You have got a 17-year-old out there trying to protect his state,” Bondi said, despite the fact the teenager traveled from his hometown in Antioch, Illinois, to attend the protests on August 25.
Well it’s the megastate of Illiconsin, or is it Wisckinois.
This morning former Florida Attorney General and outspoken Republican Trump supporter Pam Bondi called Kyle Rittenhouse “a little boy out there trying to protect his community.”
So, to review:
A 17-year-old black kid walking home from the store with a bag of Skittles, who had done absolutely nothing wrong? A criminal who deserved to die.
A 17-year-old white kid who illegally crossed state lines with assault weapons and murdered two people? Little boy hero.
That’s America, right there.
That’s the Republican Party, right there.
And THAT’s the goddamn problem, right there.
And it’s taking over.
Ah you see it’s a long-term relationship, not at all a rent a woman’s uterus situation.
(First of all, the inelegance of the grammar – “us “demanding” a random woman is our surrogate” – ick. Should be “our ‘demanding'” because gerunds are nouns, but much more…demanding a woman is our surrogate? Come on. That’s what the subjunctive is for. Demanding that something is just makes no sense: who needs to demand it when it already is? If you hate the subjunctive too much to use it then make it “demanding a woman should be” but NOT “demanding a woman is.” Guy’s barely literate.)
But the substantive part is this “it’s building a long-term relationship with someone as a friend and a member of our extended family who [gestates a baby to give to us] for altruistic only reasons.”
I’m trying to picture how that’s going to work. I wonder if they’re working on such a relationship now, and if so, if the woman they’re grooming knows that’s what’s going on. I wonder – do they not already have woman friends? No, probably not, given how obviously Benjamin Cohen hates women. But so then how do they expect to be able to start now, when Benjamin C is being so frank about their plans? What kind of long-term relationship as a friend and a member of their extended family would they be able to create when their goal is not friendship and extended family but the opportunity to exploit the body of their “friend”?
In short how fucking creepy is that? What woman in her right mind would ever want anything to do with this guy?
The discussion continued.
Oh look, he said the Forbidden Words – adult female. He said it in quotation marks, but he forgot to tell us the words are forbidden, and transphobic, and terfy, and deserving of punishment.
He doesn’t think he has a right to a specific surrogate, but he does think he has a right to a surrogate in general.
Which is quite an extraordinary thing to think, and all the more so for a man who despises women so thoroughly in every other context.
Because he’s a man and she’s a woman. That’s how it works.
Oh no, a reporter asked him a question about the more than 200 thousand deaths. How dare she.
Trump is in Chynah did it mode:
Tensions between the US and China came to the fore of the annual UN General Assembly in New York, with US President Donald Trump blaming China for the spread of coronavirus.
He called for China to be held “accountable” for the pandemic.
The one he calls “the China virus.”
[A]s often is the case for speeches to the assembly, President Trump used his address to tout his achievements and tear into a rival.
It’s all he knows how to do – say how magnificent he is and pick fights with other people. He’s not a talented guy.
But Laura Trevelyan explains that it’s a campaign move.
This was a stump speech by President Trump, who faces re-election in 40 days time. He had Beijing firmly in his sights – blaming what he and his followers call the China virus for taking countless lives.
Mr Trump is trying to deflect attention from his own handling of the pandemic by heaping opprobrium on China, while emphasising US efforts to find a cure.
…For good measure, Mr Trump lumped the UN’s World Health Organization into his critique of China – saying the international body, which he’s withdrawing US funding from, is virtually controlled by China, blaming it for spreading what he called misinformation about the virus.
This was not a subtle speech. It was a clear attempt to shift blame as Americans are already voting in the presidential election.
Has Trump ever given a subtle speech?
Cory Booker is not impressed by Trump’s move to whip up his audience by saying the words “suburbia” and Cory Booker!!” together yesterday. Oooooooh Cory Booker gonna move into your suburbia and make it all SCARY and not white so be afraid be very afraid.
Trump was out flapping his lips yesterday.
Oh look at that now, it turns out women are needed for some things.
(This guy is the CEO of Pink News, scourge of ‘TERFs.”)
How casual is his “for gay male couples starting a family through surrogacy” – that is, for gay male couples renting a woman’s body to gestate a baby for them. It doesn’t sound quite so tidy and clinical and impersonal now, does it. “Through surrogacy” is such a brisk way of dismissing a woman’s nine months of increasing discomfort and fatigue ending in X hours of extreme pain.
And he says “if we were straight” but that’s not the issue. The issue is that they are both men, and two men can’t produce a baby no matter what they do. Neither can two women, but what women require from a man is a lot shall we say simpler than what men require from a woman.
It’s interesting that the CEO of Pink News carefully doesn’t utter the word “woman” in this complaint about how difficult it is for two men to make a baby.
Speaking of “a woman” with accompanying ( ) gesture to explain what a woman is, this is not the most intelligent headline I’ve ever seen.
Via Sister Outrider
This guy.
Check the gesture at 11 seconds.
(There’s also the bizarre riddle of why he says the same thing 4 times in 15 seconds, but that’s a distant second to that gesture.)
John Roberts has opposed voting rights for decades. It was a lost cause for the first 3 decades and more, but now he’s getting somewhere.
Among other things, Roberts dismantled much of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), and he’s joined decisions making it much harder for voting rights plaintiffs to prove they were victims of discrimination. On the basic question of who is allowed to vote and which ballots will be counted, the most important issue in any democracy, Roberts is still the same man who tried and failed to strangle the Voting Rights Act nearly four decades earlier.
…
As originally enacted, the Voting Rights Act required jurisdictions with a history of racist voting discrimination to “preclear” any new voting-related laws with the Justice Department or with federal judges in Washington, DC. But this preclearance provision was initially scheduled to expire five years after the law was signed in 1965.
That meant that in 1970, while Richard Nixon was president, Congress had to decide whether to extend the preclearance requirement or allow it to expire. And, because Congress never made the preclearance requirement permanent, Congress also chose to extend this requirement again in 1975, in 1982, and in 2006.
A Republican president every time.
As Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) told Reagan in October of 1981, conservative lawmakers feared that “anyone who seeks to change” an expansive voting rights renewal that had already passed the House “will risk being branded as racist.”
But now – it’s cool to be racist again!
As Edward Blum, a wealthy anti-civil rights activist who would go on to be the driving force behind the Supreme Court case that gutted preclearance in 2013, complained in a 2006 National Review article, “Republicans don’t want to be branded as hostile to minorities, especially just months from an election.”
But that was then! Yay! We’ve got our racist on!
It’s not hard to imagine the frustration conservative Republicans must have felt each time the act was renewed. Those Republicans elected sympathetic presidents, and they had every reason to believe that those presidents and Republican lawmakers would hear their concerns. And yet, in each case, a Republican president sided with liberals over their own conservative supporters.
Justice Antonin Scalia gave voice to this frustration during oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Roberts Court case that quashed preclearance. The Voting Rights Act, Scalia claimed, was a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” and “whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.”
Only…it’s not a perpetuation of racial entitlement; it’s not an entitlement at all. It’s not a Special Favor Just For You; it’s the removal of Special Obstacles Just For You.
Roberts’s majority opinion in Shelby County posits that the United States simply isn’t racist enough to justify a fully operational Voting Rights Act.
There was a lot of heated dissent to that claim at the time and has been ever since. It’s fucking ludicrous.
Preclearance — requiring states to get federal permission before changing their own voting laws — was an “extraordinary” measure adopted to “address an extraordinary problem,” Roberts claimed. Yet, nearly a half-century after the Voting Rights Act first became law, “the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.” Black voter turnout “has come to exceed white voter turnout in five of the six States originally covered by” Section 5, Roberts claimed.
It worked, so let’s stop using it.
There are a number of fairly obvious criticisms of this argument. One of the most famous was raised by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissenting opinion: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
Another problem is that nothing in the Constitution suggests that the Supreme Court gets to decide whether the United States is racist enough to justify extraordinary measures to halt that racism. To the contrary, the Fifteenth Amendment provides that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” and it gives Congress the “power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
But the conservative justices ruled otherwise, so now voting rights are being mangled in the previous condition of servitude states.
So we get a flamingly racist criminal as president.
The Post on TrumpBarr’s provocation:
Following a memorandum that President Trump issued earlier this month, the Justice Department published a list of cities that the White House wants to get more aggressive on civil unrest in the wake of police shootings and killings.
“We cannot allow federal tax dollars to be wasted,” Attorney General William P. Barr said in a statement. “It is my hope that the cities identified by the Department of Justice today will reverse course and become serious about performing the basic function of government and start protecting their own citizens.”
He’s an enforcer for the guy who has failed to protect us by failing to deal with the pandemic responsibly, to the tune of many thousands of needless deaths.
The Trump administration was unsuccessful in a similar funding-cut move against New York and other cities over their immigration policies. A federal appeals court ruled that the move violated the separation of powers spelled out in the Constitution.
They can still perform their little play though.
The three cities the Justice Department identified are the same ones listed in the president’s original memorandum. Local officials have accused the federal government of worsening tensions in their cities by advocating angrier confrontations between law enforcement officers and protesters, and in the case of Portland, by sending heavily armed federal agents to quell street clashes.
…
In recent weeks, Barr has urged federal prosecutors to aggressively pursue cases against those committing violence amid the protests. In a conference call with prosecutors, he suggested that they consider parts of a rarely used law against sedition, if they find evidence matching the law’s language criminalizing the use of force to oppose the government.
Trump’s crimes however are merely harmless pranks.
Wait a minute though.
Wait.
Religion is about beliefs. It’s also about practices, rituals and so on, but beliefs are important. Beliefs influence how people think, and what people think – high court justices included.
How can we evaluate Supreme Court nominees if we’re not allowed to evaluate their beliefs?
It’s a nice little racket the religions have worked out for themselves in the US: their freedom (of religion) is inscribed in the Bill of Rights, so Catholic bishops have the “freedom” to do their best to police women’s bodies while women do not have the freedom to say that a Catholic Supreme Court justice might have a Catholic view of abortion.
How can we evaluate potential justices’ beliefs if we can’t evaluate them?
Jo Bartosch explains those arrests in Leeds yesterday:
Yesterday, when the group Standing for Women tried to assemble at Victoria Square in Leeds to discuss the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act (2004) (GRA) their meeting was broken-up by the police. Three of the sixteen women were arrested, including the event organiser Kellie-Jay Keen. A lengthy risk assessment had been completed and submitted ahead of the event to ensure the group were Covid-19 compliant, and the police were kept fully appraised of the group’s plans. After the event Kelly-Jay Keen explained that she knew [she] was likely to be arrested, part of the reason she refused to give her details to the police was in order to have the opportunity to voice her concerns in court.
Despite the current draconian regulations prohibiting public gatherings, there is an exemption for political events. Thanks to this, protests such as Black Lives Matter have been allowed to go ahead unimpeded. But according to West Yorkshire Police, women’s rights are not a political cause. A police officer told Kelly-Jay Keen that Standing for Women “failed to meet the legal definition of a political organisation”, though he himself seemed unable to explain what the legal definition of a political organisation was.
Says it all, doesn’t it. There are such things as oppressed groups…it’s just that women aren’t one of them. Women are meant to be subordinate. Women really are inferior. Women are the second sex.
It seems no-one can quite decide whether Standing for Women is political. In July Network Rail removed a billboard reading “I ♥ JKR” that had been paid for by the campaign group. This statement was in support of the children’s author J K Rowling, who has been accused of transphobia for raising concerns about gender self-identification. Network Rail stated that it had received complaints and somewhat bizarrely concluded that “I ♥ JKR” was a political statement. A freedom of information request revealed there were no emails requesting the poster be taken down, but that there were 158 complaining about its removal.
Yes but the complainers were all women, or doing the bidding of women, and women really are inferior, so of course Network Rail did the right thing.
Whether an innocuous poster or a socially distanced protest, it seems statements in support of women’s rights are deemed threatening, branded either “too political” or “not political enough” and shut down using whichever method is most expedient. Speaking after her arrest and release Kellie-Jay Keen said:
It is not really the right of the state or the police to tell people they are not allowed to assemble to discuss their rights … everyone should have the right to assemble in this country, it is the foundation of our democracy and the fact it’s being cancelled by over-zealous police forces should concern us all.
Feminists occupy a strange “no-man’s land” in the culture wars, hated as ‘TERFs’ (trans exclusionary radical feminists) by the mainstream left and sneered at as identity-obsessed faux victims by the right. But defending the rights of 51% of the population should not be seen as a niche concern; struggling to end the violence of men at home is every bit as political as campaigning for peace in foreign nations.
Yes but if you keep in mind that women really are inferior, you get to count them as only a small fraction of a person, so actually the 51% is more like 10%. Ok? Clear enough now?
Updating to add a demonstration of how it works; SW is Professor Stephen Whittle.
H/t guest
Huh. Suddenly I live in an outlaw city, banished by the Feds into outer darkness.
Statement from the Department of Justice:
Department Of Justice Identifies New York City, Portland And Seattle As Jurisdictions Permitting Violence And Destruction Of Property
Identification is Response to Presidential Memorandum Reviewing Federal Funding to State and Local Governments that are Permitting Anarchy, Violence, and Destruction in American Cities
I guess they mean this presidential memorandum:
The DoJ continues:
The U.S. Department of Justice today identified the following three jurisdictions that have permitted violence and destruction of property to persist and have refused to undertake reasonable measures to counteract criminal activities: New York City; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle, Washington. The Department of Justice is continuing to work to identify jurisdictions that meet the criteria set out in the President’s Memorandum and will periodically update the list of selected jurisdictions as required therein.
The list was published on DOJ’s website today in response to President Trump’s memorandum of September 2, 2020, entitled “Memorandum on Reviewing Funding to State and Local Government Recipients That Are Permitting Anarchy, Violence, and Destruction in American Cities.”
“When state and local leaders impede their own law enforcement officers and agencies from doing their jobs, it endangers innocent citizens who deserve to be protected, including those who are trying to peacefully assemble and protest,” said Attorney General William P. Barr. “We cannot allow federal tax dollars to be wasted when the safety of the citizenry hangs in the balance. It is my hope that the cities identified by the Department of Justice today will reverse course and become serious about performing the basic function of government and start protecting their own citizens.”
When will Barr tell Trump to become serious about performing the basic function of government and start protecting his own citizens? Over 200 thousand dead of COVID-19, many of whom would not be dead if Trump had taken the pandemic seriously from the beginning. There are bound to be others dead indirectly because of the pandemic, from stress or grief or isolation or destitution or all those.
