And here’s a bad idea in the making:

An advocacy organization says it wants to map hatred and discrimination across Canada in a move that is prompting warnings of caution from one civil liberties group.

The Vancouver-based Morgane Oger Foundation has issued a call for volunteers to help build the Canadian Atlas of Populist Extremism, to be known as CAPE.

Founder Morgane Oger said the mapping tool would tie together extremist groups and people regularly associated with them, and also map incidents involving hate across Canada.

Is it actually an organization, or is it just Morgane Oger?

The idea is to shed light on how hatred is propagated, she said, while being mindful that allegations can’t be tossed out willy-nilly.

“We can’t say someone is a murderer unless they are in fact a murderer, but maybe it would be interesting to see it’s always the same dozen people who are doing anti-trans advocacy in the (B.C.) Interior or the white supremacy groups are working with each other,” said Oger, a former provincial NDP candidate and a member of the party’s executive.

Oooh nice poisoning of the well, although I have to say it’s a little too obvious. “Let’s talk about murderers, wouldn’t it be interesting to see who is doing “anti-trans advocacy” and by the way aren’t they exactly like white supremacists?”

What Oger means is “let’s make it even more impossible for women to defend their own rights by covertly calling them murderers and white supremacists.”

Oger said the project is in its infancy and the foundation has not yet determined exactly what types of actions, groups or individuals would be documented, but it believes the data could be useful to academics, law enforcement and others.

It could include a rating system to categorize incidents by severity, she said, giving hate-motivated murders and discriminatory graffiti as examples that would receive different grades.

How very scrupulous.

I think Morgane Oger is pretty much the last person in the world who should be doing this.

The SPLC is back in the news, and not in a good way. Its president Richard Cohen resigned yesterday. The New Yorker has a bandaid-rippingoff article on the truth behind the myth by Bob Moser, who was a staffer there from 2001 to 2004.

In the days since the stunning dismissal of Morris Dees, the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, on March 14th, I’ve been thinking about the jokes my S.P.L.C. colleagues and I used to tell to keep ourselves sane. Walking to lunch past the center’s Maya Lin–designed memorial to civil-rights martyrs, we’d cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King, Jr., etched into the black marble—“Until justice rolls down like waters”—and intone, in our deepest voices, “Until justice rolls down like dollars.”

In short: the SPLC is extremely rich, and a lot of that wealth goes to the top staff, who are almost all white men.

Moser was surprised first of all by the headquarters, a new, vast, modernist glass-and-steel fortress.

The entrance was through an underground bunker, past multiple layers of human and electronic security. Cameras were everywhere in the open-plan office, which made me feel like a Pentagon staffer, both secure and insecure at once. But nothing was more uncomfortable than the racial dynamic that quickly became apparent: a fair number of what was then about a hundred employees were African-American, but almost all of them were administrative and support staff—“the help,” one of my black colleagues said pointedly. The “professional staff”—the lawyers, researchers, educators, public-relations officers, and fund-raisers—were almost exclusively white. Just two staffers, including me, were openly gay.

He forgot something. He forgot women. It’s strange how regularly people forget that. He gets to it later in the piece but it’s odd to leave it out at the beginning. The professional staff were almost exclusively white and male.

In the decade or so before I’d arrived, the center’s reputation as a beacon of justice had taken some hits from reporters who’d peered behind the façade. In 1995, the Montgomery Advertiser had been a Pulitzer finalist for a series that documented, among other things, staffers’ allegations of racial discrimination within the organization. In Harper’s, Ken Silverstein had revealed that the center had accumulated an endowment topping a hundred and twenty million dollars while paying lavish salaries to its highest-ranking staffers and spending far less than most nonprofit groups on the work that it claimed to do. The great Southern journalist John Egerton, writing for The Progressive, had painted a damning portrait of Dees, the center’s longtime mastermind, as a “super-salesman and master fundraiser” who viewed civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals. “We just run our business like a business,” Dees told Egerton. “Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same.”

It’s not that they don’t do any good work, but it is that the people at the top got rich doing it, which donors probably don’t realize.

Co-workers stealthily passed along these articles to me—it was a rite of passage for new staffers, a cautionary heads-up about what we’d stepped into with our noble intentions. Incoming female staffers were additionally warned by their new colleagues about Dees’s reputation for hitting on young women. And the unchecked power of the lavishly compensated white men at the top of the organization—Dees and the center’s president, Richard Cohen—made staffers pessimistic that any of these issues would ever be addressed.

Now he’s remembered about the women; good.

“I expected there’d be a lot of creative bickering, a sort of democratic free-for-all,” my friend Brian, a journalist who came aboard a year after me, said one day. “But everybody is so deferential to Morris and Richard. It’s like a fucking monarchy around here.” The work could be meaningful and gratifying. But it was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.

Then Morris Dees was fired.

One day later, the Los Angeles Times and the Alabama Political Reporter reported that Dees’s ouster had come amid a staff revolt over the mistreatment of nonwhite and female staffers, which was sparked by the resignation of the senior attorney Meredith Horton, the highest-ranking African-American woman at the center. A number of staffers subsequently signed onto two letters of protest to the center’s leadership, alleging that multiple reports of sexual harassment by Dees through the years had been ignored or covered up, and sometimes resulted in retaliation against the women making the claims. (Dees denied the allegations, telling a reporter, “I don’t know who you’re talking to or talking about, but that is not right.”)

Emperors tend to expect access to the females of their choice, without any backtalk.

Read on.

Here’s a thought: how about nobody recommends anybody gets killed? Radical, I know, but worth a try?

Ahmadi Muslims for instance: let’s nobody recommend they be executed for apostasy.

A [London] mosque has received an official warning after leaflets calling for the killing of a sect of Muslims were found on display.

Piles of the flyers, which say Ahmadis should face death if they refuse to convert to mainstream Islam, were found in Stockwell Green mosque.

…

A BBC investigation found the leaflets were authored by an ex-head of Khatme Nabuwwat, a group based in Pakistan which lists the mosque as its “overseas office”.

Previously a mosque trustee said he had never seen the leaflets before and suggested they were fakes or had been left there maliciously.

Islamic missionary group Khatme Nabuwwat believes Ahmadis are apostates, commonly defined as people who have abandoned their religion.

The leaflets said those who refuse to convert to mainstream Islam within three days should face a “capital sentence” – or death penalty.

Well that’s not just an “Islamic missionary group” then, is it. It’s something more extreme, aka murderous, than that. Missionary work is inherently…what to call it, imperialist or colonialist or we know better than you-ist, but it’s not all murderous. A “missionary” group that says convert or die is pushing the missionary envelope too hard.

Stockwell Green mosque claims there is no connection with Khatme Nabuwwat, despite sharing the same name and evidence suggesting the Pakistani organisation had control over its Imam.

The mosque was unable to disprove its links to the Pakistani organisation, according to the Charity Commission.

In short, the mosque is lying (that is, the people running the mosque are lying).

So, that’s eccentric.

President Trump undercut his own Treasury Department on Friday with a sudden announcement that he had rolled back newly imposed sanctions on North Korea, appearing to overrule national security experts as a favor to Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader.

The move, announced on Twitter, was a remarkable display of dissension in the Trump administration and was a striking case of a White House intervening to reverse a major national security decision made only hours earlier by the president’s own officials.

He really did.

It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea. I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2019

The Treasury Department announced new sanctions on Friday against Iran and Venezuela, but not against North Korea.

However, economic penalties were imposed on Thursday on two Chinese shipping companies suspected of helping North Korea evade international sanctions. Those penalties, announced with news releases and a White House briefing, were the first imposed against North Korea since late last year and came less than a month after a summit meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim collapsed in Hanoi, Vietnam, without a deal.

Yebbut Trump doesn’t want to hurt Kim’s feelings.

Current and former Treasury Department officials were stunned by Mr. Trump’s decision on Friday. Some said they wondered if the move was planned in advance, as a gesture to Mr. Kim. Others feared that the United States’ vaunted sanctions regime had been compromised.

“For an administration that continues to surprise, this is another first — the president of the United States undercutting his own sanctions agency for imposing sanctions on Chinese actors supporting North Korea,” said John E. Smith, the former director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, who left the department last year. “It’s a win for North Korea and China and a loss for U.S. credibility.”

But at least Donnie still has his buddy in North Korea. Or, you know, maybe not, but he thinks he does, and that’s what counts.

H/t Acolyte of Sagan

Yet again I can’t find enough swears.

Sorry there are so many repetitions, the threading was messed up. Or Thread Reader App is easier, I’ll put that tweet at the end.

Thread: A selection of images of a book distributed to all Grade 7 classrooms in Nova Scotia, Canada.

These students are 11-12 years old.

Transphobia: deal with it and become a gender transcender by j wallace skelton (2016)

1/8 pic.twitter.com/3zR46NdKWC

— ShootingStar (@turnthetide2018) March 22, 2019

This is from a scenario given as a quiz to help readers see if they can recognize transphobia in action.

Students quickly learn it is highly undesirable to be known as a lesbian. pic.twitter.com/33wCOjavNd

— ShootingStar (@turnthetide2018) March 22, 2019

https://t.co/IyS25UDQmb

— ShootingStar (@turnthetide2018) March 22, 2019

In a quiz to find out if you’re a transphobe, students in Grade 7 learn what thoughts and opinions are acceptable for them to think. pic.twitter.com/EQ4o8iUEXF

— ShootingStar (@turnthetide2018) March 22, 2019

https://t.co/IyS25UDQmb

— ShootingStar (@turnthetide2018) March 22, 2019

More advice on unquestioning acceptance of males in female locker rooms. pic.twitter.com/Xug6L7STF0

— ShootingStar (@turnthetide2018) March 22, 2019

Throughout the book, students are reminded that discrimination is against the law in Canada. They’re advised to align with supportive adults to help them if they go to the police with reports of transphobia. pic.twitter.com/zPnPTXOX9j

— ShootingStar (@turnthetide2018) March 22, 2019

https://twitter.com/threadreaderapp/status/1109194565834231813

Remember the charming Peyton Rose, who wants to see “TERFs” punched in the throat? Trans Pride Scotland issued a statement on Rose’s ugly threats:

We at Trans Pride Scotland were today asked to comment on the activity surrounding a tweet made by one of our performers, Payton Rose. In our statement, we made clear that we have a policy against violence and harassment at our events, and while that remains true, we feel some clarity is needed after today’s press releases.

We believe that Payton has been unfairly represented by her detractors and the press, especially those who have a history of transphobic activity. While her tweet was certainly inflammatory and may have caused concern for many people, we stand by her response that is was a “tongue in cheek” comment, made in a state of vulnerability and stress and in self defence.

See this is, among other things, one of the ways the conditioning comes into play. We see all those “hers” and we are conditioned into thinking of Peyton Rose (of the pretty flower name) as vulnerable in the sense women are vulnerable. But Peyton Rose is a trans woman and so doesn’t have a vulnerable female body. Peyton Rose has the kind of body that is a threat to people who do have vulnerable female bodies…but the wording has done its bit to erase that from our unconscious minds.

The world is not kind to trans people, especially trans women.

Same again. Really? The world is more unkind to trans women than to trans men?

Groups like For Women Scotland and A Women’s Place and activists who share their values consider themselves allies to the trans community, but nothing could be further from the truth. These groups continue to spread the rhetoric that we are nothing more than dangerous men, that trans kids don’t exist, and that our rights to legal recognition should be undone.

But it’s not rhetoric. Trans women are men and as such have the potential to be dangerous to women, which is not something women should be bullied into forgetting or trying to ignore. When a man talks about throat punching women, it’s not fair to tell women to shrug it off or even feel guilty over it. But Trans Pride Scotland does just that.

Payton has not been removed from Trans Pride Scotland. After lengthy discussion with our committee, she has taken the decision to withdraw for her own safety, as we were becoming concerned at the level of harassment she was recieving on and offline. This includes some anti-trans activists finding her address, her deadname and pictures of her pre-transition. This is transphobic abuse and is a clear indicator that these people do not care about her wellbeing or her comments, but instead have used her in an attempt to discredit and undermine our movement as a whole, and we now believe that we have a duty as a community to come together at this time in solidarity, and protect one of our own from ongoing hate.

Our march and event is continuing. We invite all trans people and true allies to attend and join with us in protest and celebration of 50 years of activism since the Stonewall riots, where trans women of colour were at the vanguard of the movement that brought us here today. We hope to see you in Dundee on the 30th.

In love and solidarity,

Trans Pride Scotland

Never mind Peyton Rose’s fantasy about throat punching women, because those women deserve it. In love and solidarity, Trans Pride Scotland.

More on Prince Jared’s casual entitled disregard for all the rules and laws and restrictions:

According to a Feb. 22, 2017, directive from the White House Counsel’s Office, all White House personnel are required to “conduct all work related communications on your official EOP email account” except under “emergency circumstances.”

Early last year, White House lawyers warned West Wing staffers in mandatory ethics training sessions not to use encrypted messaging apps. Kushner attended one of the sessions, The Washington Post reported at the time.

But hey, they all of them were indifferent enough to ethics and laws that barred them from working for Daddy’s administration to work in it anyway, so how much attention are they going to pay to some weird ethics training session?

Questions about Kushner’s use of WhatsApp come in the wake of the revelation that Trump last year directed that his son-in-law receive a top-secret security clearance, despite objections by career intelligence officials.

What I’m saying. Kushner shouldn’t be part of the administration at all; he shouldn’t have a security clearance at all, let alone a top-secret one; he is and he has; they don’t care about any of it.

In his letter Thursday, which was first reported by Politico, Cummings said Lowell also told him in their December meeting that Kushner’s wife, presidential adviser Ivanka Trump, was continuing to receive emails related to White House business on her private email account and did not always forward them to her White House account.

The Post reported in November that Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails in 2017 to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules.

In his letter Thursday, Lowell said he was referring to Ivanka Trump’s email practices before September 2017, when White House lawyers discovered the extent of her personal email use.

A White House review found that Ivanka Trump used personal email at a particularly high rate, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the situation.

The president was angry with both Kushner and Ivanka Trump over using private emails in the fall of 2017 when it was first reported, the officials said.

It was too soon after But Her Emails.

Today for the second day Charlottesville public (state) schools are closed because of threats.

Police said in a statement that the online threat was directed at Charlottesville High School .

Authorities declined to further describe the threat, but images circulating on Reddit and other social media sites referred to a post on 4chan, an anonymous online messaging board. The post included a racist meme, used slurs for blacks and Latinos, and threatened to attack students of color at Charlottesville High.

…

The threat was another jolt to a community still strained by the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017 that turned Charlottesville into the site of America’s largest white-supremacy gathering in decades.

This week’s online episode did not surprise members of Charlottesville High’s Black Student Union, who say it is symptomatic of persistent issues in Charlottesville City Schools, including excessive police presence in schools and a lack of black students in advanced classes.

There’s not much to say, is there. This stinks.

Yesterday Trump signed an executive order to do with free inquiry at universities.

At a signing ceremony at the White House, Mr. Trump said he wanted to give notice to “professors and power structures” seeking to prevent conservatives “from challenging rigid, far-left ideology.”

In a background briefing call with reporters on Thursday morning, a senior administration official said grant-making agencies would work with the Office of Management and Budget to make sure that institutions receiving funding promote free speech rights within applicable law. The issue has become a cause célèbre among conservatives, who argue that their voices are being silenced on liberal campuses.

While their voices are being very loudened in government and on Fox News.

Mr. Trump was not much more specific in his own remarks. He said agencies would use their control over grants “to ensure that public universities protect, cherish, protect the First Amendment, First Amendment rights of their students or risk losing billions and billions of dollars of federal taxpayer dollars.”

It’s so cruel of them to quote him verbatim. Let’s look at that again, with the repetitions highlighted.

He said agencies would use their control over grants “to ensure that public universities protect, cherish, protect the First Amendment, First Amendment rights of their students or risk losing billions and billions of dollars of federal taxpayer dollars.”

Ouch. The aphasia is progressing rapidly rapidly.

PEN America has some concerns.

The directive that federal agency heads, in coordination with the federal Office of Management and Budget, take “appropriate steps” to ensure that institutions receiving such funds “promote free inquiry” and comply with federal law and policy is vague and overbroad. Neither “appropriate steps” nor “free inquiry” are defined, opening the door to interpretations that could impinge upon academic freedom or insert the government into decisions that are properly made by faculty and university leadership. “Free inquiry” must not mean that discredited theories or pseudoscience need to be given a forum on campus.

All U.S. academic institutions are required to uphold the law, and oversight and enforcement mechanisms already exist to ensure such compliance. It is not clear that any additional steps would be appropriate for the federal government to guarantee that an individual university promote the White House’s concept of “free inquiry.” The idea that scientific research or educational grants could be tied to prevailing political winds is anathema to the academic enterprise.

In other words, “free inquiry” means different things to researchers as opposed to political people. That’s the thing about electoral (aka democratic) politics: the people in charge are inevitably political, because they have to get elected before they can be in charge. That makes them accountable, good, but it also means they have to keep one eye on public sentiment at all times, not always so good. Researchers often have to be somewhat political too, because of the struggle to get funding, but as a class their motivations and scruples tend in another direction. To put it crudely, the two sets have a different orientation toward truth.

Truth and free speech aren’t always fighting on the same side. Free speech and inquiry can mean free for cranks, frauds, liars, trolls, bots, hacks, marketers. There’s a cherished liberal piety that says free inquiry always gets to the truth, sometimes with the qualifier “eventually” or “ultimately” – which is meaningless, because there is no “eventually” or “ultimately,” there’s only this moment then this one then this one. The cherished liberal piety is wrong.

And back to the specific, PEN points out that Trump is no friend of free speech and inquiry in any case.

The First Amendment protects all speech regardless of political party or ideological leanings. Yet this Administration has a pronounced pattern of using its muscle to protect certain viewpoints, while either encouraging or even exacting reprisals against speech it finds objectionable or critical. Whether it is in response to protesters at a campaign rally, NFL or college football players taking a knee on the field, or journalists asking tough questions, the Administration has resorted to taunts and intimidation in order to suppress the speech of those with whom it disagrees. The President has even crossed the line into threats and acts of retaliation against journalists whose news coverage he disapproves of, violating the First Amendment (see PEN America v Trump). The President’s decision to announce this Executive Order at a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee underscores the concern that it represents an effort to put an ideological thumb on the scale of federal free speech protections.

Remember when they took Jim Acosta’s press pass away? Remember how Trump simply stopped doing press conferences? And Sarah Sanders has mostly stopped doing press briefings? Remember Trump’s calling the news media “the enemy of the people” repeatedly? Yeah, Trump as guardian of free inquiry is laughable.

More language creep.

Are you a playwright who identifies as female? Are you are Mum? We want your scripts for the Motherhood Plays.

We’re keen to programme a week of play(s) by the most brilliant mother playwrights from 2 – 6 July.

Here is how to submit :https://t.co/ODDPro3QIs#503Motherhood pic.twitter.com/ceixkzs0sS

— theatre503 (@theatre503) March 21, 2019

Why “who identifies as”? Why not just ask “are you a mother?”?

We’re specifically looking for female identifying mothers. But, we have several other call outs that are live as well as this one, which we are welcoming male playwright submissions. ^J

— theatre503 (@theatre503) March 21, 2019

Oh look, they gave it away completely there. Women are “female identifying” while men are just male. I guess that’s because men are real people while women are just some kind of figment of every passing imagination?

Devin Nunes in 2010:

BREAKING: Video of Devin Nunes defending protestors who yelled the "n-word" at US Rep John Lewis: "I think people have every right to say what they want. If they wanna smear someone, they can do it." Nunes is terrible. Dug up @TheDemCoalition. From 2010. pic.twitter.com/lk51mSSGW8

— Democratic Coalition (@TheDemCoalition) March 21, 2019

Kimberly Nixon hopes it will send a message.

A transgender woman whose case against Canada’s oldest rape crisis centre was dismissed by the courts says she hopes the City of Vancouver’s decision to refuse the shelter funding will help change policies.

Kimberly Nixon, 61, filed a human rights complaint against Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter in 1995 after she was refused training to work as a volunteer peer counsellor on the basis she did not share the life experience of someone born female.

And lost the case, and was ordered to pay costs to Vancouver Rape Relief ten years ago, and still has not paid a cent.

Hilla Kerner, spokeswoman for Rape Relief, said women who are born female and socialized to submit to male domination do not feel comfortable around women who may appear and sound like men and don’t share the same life experience.

And men who claim to be women should get that, and see the force of it, and sympathize, and not want to brush it off for the sake of their own Validation. It’s very male to brush it off for the sake of their own feefees.

Morgane Oger, who chairs the Trans Alliance Society, said she has been advocating since 2013 for Rape Relief’s municipal funding to be stopped.

And he’s proud of it.

Adrienne Smith, a human rights lawyer in Vancouver, said all of Smith’s clients are transgender and some of them have said they have been turned away from Rape Relief after a sexual assault.

“Rape Relief takes the position that transgender women are men in dresses and that there’s something inauthentic about them,” Smith said. “Their followers repeat this messaging and it’s fundamentally hurtful to my clients and to trans and non-binary people.”

Smith said Rape Relief has stuck to the same message even as society has changed.

Trans women are sexually assaulted at four times the rate of non-trans women, often by other women, Smith said.

Women often sexually assault trans women? Really? Any examples? Any at all?

British Columbia provides about $600,000 in annual funding to Rape Relief, which has a budget of about $1.1 million and opened its doors in 1973.

Nixon said provincial funding should also be reconsidered.

Nixon owes them money.

They’ve whatnow?

Tell @screenscots what you think of their female erasure. Womxn is an insult. We should be able to define ourselves on our own terms. #WarOnWomen https://t.co/Cd8JTbgMVF

— Joan McAlpine (@JoanMcAlpine) March 21, 2019

A platform for #films by womxn – meaning what? A platform for films by women and trans women? Then say that – or better, don’t do that. Don’t make women share everything with trans women. Have a platform for films by women and one for films by trans women or trans people. Above all, stop erasing women by using that stupid stupid stupid not-word.

Fool responds:

What in the name of god are you doing? Government is for all citizens. Show some responsibility. How dare you try to whip up a mob against trans-inclusive organisations. Shame on you @joanmcalpine. https://t.co/xdAkEKfyA6

— CSbungo (@CSbungo) March 21, 2019

Government is for all citizens; well no shit, why is that a reason to stop naming women?

I don’t know…I see why they had this impulse, but I’m not sure it was a good idea. A university in Calgary canceled a talk by an ex-Muslim, though it said it would welcome him at a later time.

Armin Navabi, who lives in British Columbia, was being brought in by the Atheist Society of Calgary to share his journey and discuss the reasons he doesn’t believe the Islamic faith can be reformed.

But now he says he’s disappointed he won’t get a chance to engage in some passionate discussions with staff and students, including those who still practice Islam, because of MRU’s last-minute decision.

But it’s not even a week yet. Emotions are raw. I get that. I don’t think I would have felt very comfortable giving an atheist talk in Charleston a week after that massacre. But I’m not sure cancellation is the right move.

The Atheist Society of Calgary says it was hoping to provide a safe space for open communication and a chance for people to learn more about atheists, from Navabi’s perspective.

The group says it was also an opportunity to let some people know they are not alone.

“There are people that really resent the ex-Muslims, the ones who have been Muslim and left, they are in a really tough position, and we just wanted to give them, and students that might be in the same position, in the closet, an opportunity to communicate and to explain to people where they are coming from and why,” said Lois Edwards, who is a board member of the Atheists Society of Calgary, and an atheist contact with the Interfaith chaplaincy at MRU.

In other words atheists and exes can have raw emotions too.

Navabi says he always struggled with his Islamic faith growing up, even attempting suicide at age 12, as a way to try to escape his fears.

Eventually he left Islam, became an atheist, and began sharing his journey with others through his podcast, a book, and talks across the globe.

He says his goal is not to convert people, but to show them that people can disagree and still get along.

“If I don’t really don’t like Islam that means I hate Muslims, that’s what people think. But we show them, no we are very much against Islam but we get along with Muslims the same way they very much dislike atheism but they can get along with us. And by showing them that they say, like, ‘Hey look, disagreements are just that[:] disagreements,'” said Navabi.

…

A statement to CBC News reads: “Universities are diverse and inclusive places where people should always feel respected and where there is free exchange of ideas. The tragic event that occurred in Christchurch less than a week ago has had a large impact on many members in our community. We made this decision in light of that impact and we would absolutely have the speaker come to our campus at another time.”

Navabi is still scheduled to speak at C-Space King Edward, an arts centre at 1721 29th Ave. S.W., at 7:30 p.m. Thursday night.

If people could stop massacring others that would be great.

Trump says the same damn thing three times in the first 23 seconds of this clip: he uses Twitter to get the word out because the news media are fake. Three times.

I didn’t listen to the rest of the seconds, which are Fox News.

pic.twitter.com/UhTjBuWY2h

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2019

Now here’s a surprise: for once it’s the violence-threatener who has backed out.

The headline act of a transgender event in Dundee has pulled out after calling on people to “throat-punch” radical feminists.

Peyton Rose, a transgender singer-songwriter from Edinburgh who was to top the bill at the Trans Pride Scotland event in Dundee next week, posted the tweet last Friday.

Above an image of a leaflet distributed last summer by For Women Scotland, a women’s rights group, she wrote: “If you catch one of these assholes in the act, please undo their work or throat-punch them.”

She deactivated her Twitter account afterwards and has since withdrawn from performing at the event.

A spokeswoman at For Women Scotland said that “gender-critical feminists”, who campaign against people being able to self-report their gender and highlight conflicts between the rights of biological and transgender women, often receive such threats.

Including on the walls of an exhibit at the San Francisco Public Library.

Ms Rose described the tweet as a “tongue-in-cheek comment” written in anger and retracted the use of “terf”, although she declined to say whether she still considered For Women Scotland transphobic. “I have decided not to do Trans Pride and will be taking a step back for the foreseeable future to work on my mental health,” she said.

Saying it was tongue-in-cheek and saying it was written in anger is contradictory. It can be one or the other but not both. If it’s in anger it’s not really jokey.

A Police Scotland spokeswoman said: “On March 19 police in Edinburgh received a report of threats being made via social media and email, and inquiries are ongoing.”

Trans Pride Scotland did not respond to a request for comment.

You astonish me.

If the Smithsonian declines to display your enormous lurid ugly painting, do you have a legal case against it for declining? My guess would be no, because there is no obligation in law to display all paintings that are offered. Just think what art museums and galleries would be like if there were.

An artist called Julian Raven thinks otherwise.

A Trump portraitist whose lawsuit against the Smithsonian Institution and National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet was thrown out in December is appealing the district court’s decision, arguing that his work deserves to be shown in the hallowed institution.

Yeah see I don’t think that’s something you can argue in a legal sense. I don’t think that’s a legal category.

“It’s remarkable. It is dramatic. And I believe it has the fingerprints of divine providence upon it,” said artist Julian Raven in a homemade video explaining why he was inspired to create a 300-pound, 16-foot-long painting of president Donald Trump.

Well there you go – what if the Smithsonian doesn’t have 16 feet of wall space available? What if the floors aren’t up to a new 300 pounds? Fingerprints of divine providence notwithstanding?

After 600 hours of labor, Raven’s opus, Unafraid and Unashamed, was complete, and it has been making the rounds at Republican rallies for the past few years. Most recently, it appeared at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) where it lit up the Twittersphere, served as the literal backdrop for the right-wing meetup.

Raven believes that his work deserves national recognition, and should hang alongside paintings of other presidents in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. The artist has been mired in a legal battle with the Smithsonian since 2017, claiming that the government institution is violating his First Amendment rights.

No. I’m not a lawyer, obviously, but I know the First Amendment ≠ national museums are required to display everything that is offered to them. Everybody knows that.

According to court documents, Raven first applied to have his portrait displayed as part of Trump’s inauguration in 2017. When he was rebuffed by the Rockwell Museum (an affiliate of the Smithsonian), he contacted the National Portrait Gallery’s director, Kim Sajet.

In the filings, Raven describes a hostile conversation that ended with rejection on the grounds that his magnum opus painting was too big, too pro-Trump, and not a very good painting.

That’s putting it very politely. It’s a hideous painting.

See for yourself.

Pro-Trump artist Julian Raven is waging legal war against the @smithsonian for rejecting his magnum opus: https://t.co/JXAQQrsGkc pic.twitter.com/JhYp7mudpC

— artnet (@artnet) March 14, 2019

Julie Bindel on why abused women need women-only shelters:

My first ever volunteer post was back in 1980, at a Women’s Aid refuge for victims of domestic violence. I will never forget the sight of those women coming in through the doors, crying with desperate relief at having escaped abusive husbands; finding comfort in the company of other women who had experienced the same.

Those services saved many lives, Julie says, but now, between the Right defunding them and the Left forcing them to serve trans women, they’re in peril.

This is not actually [a] new problem. It may be a new front in the transgender turf wars in the UK. But Vancouver Rape Relief (VRR) a women’s support and campaigning NGO in Canada, has been victimised by transgender activists since the mid 1990s. Now after their long struggle, this small, grassroots, volunteer-led organisation is under threat of losing its funding.

I first heard of VRR in December 2003 when I saw a news report about a long-running legal battle that the organisation had with a transgender person, Kimberly Nixon.

In 1995 Nixon, a former airline pilot who had lived as a man until the age of 33, applied to VRR to train as a counsellor for women who had experienced sexual violence. Nixon was rejected because, since she had not had the experience of growing up as a girl, she would not understand the impact of male violence and misogyny on the lives of the women who sought support from VRR.

So she filed a formal Human Rights Complaint supported by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal. VRR tried to appease her, to no avail.

Nixon rejected the offers, and pursued the group through various stressful and expensive legal proceedings until it was finally resolved in 2007. In 2009, the Supreme Court awarded VRR costs, but Nixon has not, to this day, paid a cent.

I didn’t know that.

What’s the difference between that and common or garden misogyny? I can’t see any, myself.

Some are more equal than others:

Green and other activists for transgender rights view it as deeply offensive to deliberately use the wrong pronoun for a trans person. Doing so could be an offence under the Malicious Communications Act, which makes it a crime to send messages that are indecent or grossly offensive, threatening, or contain information which is false or believed to be false, if the purpose for sending it is to cause distress or anxiety.

People can view anything as anything; that doesn’t make it true. People can “view” something as deeply offensive when it isn’t, or when reasonable people would agree it isn’t, or when reasonable people would disagree over whether it is or isn’t, and so on. “Deeply offensive” is an opinion word, and also an emotion pump. We’re supposed to feel an extra flush of anger because of the “deeply” – the offensiveness must be at the level of blasphemy or similar.

The reality is that many activists for transgender rights have made a lot of things “deeply offensive” by shouting about them for a long time without stopping. Sometimes when people do that it’s a good thing: slavery is “deeply offensive”; genocide is “deeply offensive”; white supremacy is “deeply offensive”; rape and sexual abuse are “deeply offensive.” But other times when people create a new category of “deeply offensive” it’s not a good thing. Whether and when and in what circumstances and for what reason someone “uses the wrong pronoun for a trans person” can vary, plus of course the claim that the pronoun is “wrong” is already debatable.

With all that, and more that one could say, it’s a little dubious to accept the claim that it in fact is “deeply offensive” to use a disfavored pronoun in a world where calling women cunts is laughed off.