Trademarks for wedding dresses, sunglasses and child care centers

Jan 22nd, 2019 9:53 am | By

Disgusting as ever: Princess Ivanka is still corrupt.

vanka Trump has been granted five trademarks from China for her currently defunct company as her father’s administration continues negotiating with Beijing over trade.

Trademarks for wedding dresses, sunglasses and child care centers were approved on Sunday, the Associated Press reported. An additional trademark regarding brokerage, charitable fundraising and art valuation services was approved earlier this month.

Although the applications were filed in 2016 and 2017, the process for the trademarks has moved forward this month as trade talks between White House negotiators and China have appeared to progress. As long as there are no objections, the trademarks will now be finalized within the next three months, according to the AP. Ethics experts have previously raised concerns about the Trump family’s business dealings and how they could appear to benefit from the administration’s foreign policy.

It’s not simply a matter of appearing to benefit from the administration’s foreign policy, it’s actually benefiting from the administration’s foreign policy.

Ivanka Trump announced last summer that she would shut down her company to focus on her role in the White House, where she serves as a close adviser to her father, The Hill reported. But with her trademarks moving forward in China, it appears that she may intend to reopen her business at a later time. Considering the first daughter also regularly meets with foreign leaders, her international business dealings have raised concerns from ethics experts in the past.

They are grifters, enriching themselves while they push the country as a whole into a deep sewer.

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Let’s redefine “woman”

Jan 22nd, 2019 9:37 am | By

And then there’s Alex Sharpe writing at Diva:

Are some feminists asking the wrong question about who counts as a “lesbian”?

Why are there scare quotes on the word “lesbian”? Are we treating that as some sort of “problematic” or tendentious or confusing or reactionary word now? Are we holding it out with tongs because lesbians say no to penis?

Kathleen Stock, a Professor of Philosophy at Sussex University, and enfant terrible of gender critical feminism, has recently asked: “can a biological male be a lesbian?” Of course, framing the question in this way tends to suggest a particular conclusion, one Stock wants us to draw, which is that trans women cannot be lesbians.

And framing the question as “Are some feminists asking the wrong question about who counts as a ‘lesbian’?” also tends to suggest a particular conclusion.

Yet, this conclusion only follows if we accept the proposition that “woman” must be defined by reference to reproductive biology alone (Stock does not insist on “reproductive capacity” for obvious reasons), so that “lesbian” desire becomes the desire of two women who share reproductive body parts…

But we know better, right? We know it’s all in the feelings, it’s all in how we “identify,” it’s all in the Lived Experience (of feeling like a woman in our heads). We know that if a man pretends he’s a woman hard enough for a long enough time (a week? two weeks?) then he is a woman, and gets to call himself a lesbian from that time forth. We also know that mere in-the-body women don’t get to resist this, and mere in-the-body lesbian women don’t get to say no to dick, and mere in-the-body lesbian women don’t get to say who counts as lesbian. They have to be Inclusive of superior in-the-head women, on pain of shunning and non-stop threats of violence. Ah brave new world, that hath such creatures in it.

[A] more inclusive definition is open to us and we should embrace it. Not because of scientific or metaphysical “truths”, but because the question of who counts as a “woman” is, as feminist philosophers Lorna Finlayson, Katharine Jenkins and Rosie Worsdale rightly note, “a political or ethical question”.

One that should be decided by men superior in-the-head women.

Before turning to a more inclusive definition of “woman”, let us be clear about what is at stake in the “woman” question and for whom.

Can someone point me to the literature on more inclusive definitions of “man”? I can’t seem to find anything. Surely it can’t be only “woman” that needs a more inclusive definition…can it? Wouldn’t that seem kind of sexist? One rule for the boys and an opposite rule for the not-boys?

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Or another gender

Jan 22nd, 2019 8:37 am | By

Judith Butler explains that being a woman is optional.

In the last few years, protests in Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere have objected to an “ideology of gender”. Elections in France, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Brazil have pivoted on a candidate’s account of gender roles. In the US, both Catholics and evangelicals have opposed a host of political positions linked elsewhere with “gender theory” or “gender ideology”: the rights of trans people in the military, the rights to abortion, lesbian, gay and trans rights, gay marriage, feminism, and other movements in favor of gender equality and sexual freedom.

That’s a lot of disparate concepts thrown into the blender and served up as “gender equality.” It also puts feminism last, which is odd when you remember that women are half (or slightly more than half) of all people, except in places where selective abortion has slashed their numbers. I don’t consider feminism a minor part of a grab bag movement for gender equality and sexual freedom; I consider feminism a stand alone movement for an end to the patriarchal subordination of women.

Arguably, this backlash against “gender ideology” took shape in 2004 when the Pontifical Council on the Family wrote a letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church signaling the potential of “gender” to destroy feminine values important to the Church; to foster conflict between the sexes; and to contest the natural, hierarchical distinction between male and female upon which family values and social life are based.

What, because until 2004 the Catholic church was all for feminism? Don’t be ridiculous. Popes and their councils have been cranking out blather about the proper role of women since forever.

In The Second Sex (1949), the existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote: “One is not born a woman but becomes one.” This claim created space for the idea that sex is not the same as gender. And in the simplest formulation of this notion, sex is seen as a biological given, gender the cultural interpretation of sex. One may be born as female in the biological sense, but then one has to navigate a series of social norms and figure out how to live as a woman – or another gender – in one’s cultural situation.

So gently she slips that “or another gender” in there, between two dashes as if it were just an aside. Relax, honey, it will only hurt for a second. But it’s not just an aside, it’s a fucking reversal. Living “as a” woman while resisting the rules for women is feminism; living as “another gender” i.e. a man is the opposite of feminism, it’s a god damn cop out. People can see this with no trouble when it comes to race, but somehow now with “gender” it’s the hip thing to do. Imagine the reaction to “One may be born as black in the biological sense, but then one has to navigate a series of social norms and figure out how to live as a black – or another race – in one’s cultural situation.” What does “or another race” mean in that sentence? That one perfectly legit and healthy way to escape the “social norms” of living as black, to wit racism, is to transfer to the privileged aka dominant race. What does that say? It says a viable alternative to combating racism is just to stop being the despised race you are and become the race of the despisers. That leaves racism untouched but simply pretends it’s voluntary, because people can always simply announce that they are white and bam, they are freed from racist oppression.

It’s obviously both ludicrous and insulting, not to mention regressive, but it’s what Butler is saying to and about women.

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An inclusion too many

Jan 21st, 2019 5:34 pm | By

Women’s March London…

“A fully inclusive intersectional feminist movement”…meaning, they include people who aren’t women, and they avoid the word “women.” You can’t have feminism while treating the word “women” as if it has political cooties, and you can’t have feminism while trying to bully women into being “inclusive” of people who aren’t women. Just like other people, women are allowed to organize around the concerns of women; they are under no obligation to be “inclusive” of people who have different concerns. Feminism is allowed to be about women – and if it isn’t about women it isn’t feminism.

Trans issues are separate from feminism; non-binary issues are separate from feminism; feminism has enough to deal with, it shouldn’t be pushed and pressed and bullied into being about trans and non-binary issues along with (and more and more instead of) women’s issues. Go make your own movement. Feminism is about women, and that’s that. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

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Apt

Jan 21st, 2019 4:57 pm | By

Exactly.

Image may contain: one or more people and text

H/t Katrina

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Guest post: On MLK Day

Jan 21st, 2019 4:55 pm | By

Originally a comment by TheDudeDiogenes on Capitalism thrives on the exploitation of the poor.

Since the USA has a holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr, it is good to notice how sanitized and sentimentalized our cultural memory of this great man has become.

Although he no doubt believed “that no matter what the color of our skin or the place of our birth, we are all created equal by God”, that is ultimately a de-fanging and banal understanding of what he was truly about.

This year, remember that what MLK had to tell us should not make us feel comfortable. We ought to be distinctly uncomfortable that we have so greatly failed to achieve what he believed that our country could truly accomplish!

Shortly before he was murdered, Dr. King proclaimed: “We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor — both black and white, here and abroad.” (Emphasis mine)

“He went on to boldly declare that, ‘The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and racism. The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.’” (Source)

King also said: “Many white Americans of goodwill have never connected bigotry with economic exploitation. They have deplored prejudice but tolerated or ignored economic injustice. But these two evils have a malignant kinship.”

You certainly won’t often hear quotations of King like this from most of our elected officials, or even from most of our mainstream media.

It is, therefore, all the more imperative to remember the depth and profundity of King’s critique of American society, which is, sadly, perhaps as relevant as when he delivered to us his magnificent oratory.

Audio of the “Three Evils of Society” speech:

Transcript of the speech

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The dynamics of power and control

Jan 21st, 2019 2:47 pm | By

Of course they did.

Without fanfare or even notice, the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women made significant changes to its definition of domestic violence in April. The Obama-era definition was expansive, vetted by experts including the National Center for Victims of Crime and the National Domestic Violence Hotline. The Trump administration’s definition is substantially more limited and less informed, effectively denying the experiences of victims of abuse by attempting to cast domestic violence as an exclusively criminal concern.

The previous definition included critical components of the phenomenon that experts recognize as domestic abuse—a pattern of deliberate behavior, the dynamics of power and control, and behaviors that encompass physical or sexual violence as well as forms of emotional, economic, or psychological abuse. But in the Trump Justice Department, only harms that constitute a felony or misdemeanor crime may be called domestic violence. So, for example, a woman whose partner isolates her from her family and friends, monitors her every move, belittles and berates her, or denies her access to money to support herself and her children is not a victim of domestic violence in the eyes of Trump’s Department of Justice. This makes no sense for an office charged with funding and implementing solutions to the problem of domestic violence rather than merely prosecuting individual abusers.

But it makes a lot of sense for an administration that has contempt for women.

A domestic violence relationship rarely begins with physical violence, much less violence that rises to the level of a crime. If you were punched on a first date, odds are there wouldn’t be a second. Intimate partner abuse is insidious: Emotional and psychological abuse escalates to physical violence as an abuser’s need and/or ability to exert power and control increases. In the United States today, more than half of female homicide victims are killed by an intimate partner. If we do not acknowledge the “small” things—yelling or screaming, name-calling, and controlling or monitoring communication and social media—victims may not realize they are in danger until it is too late.

It is too early to assess the full impact of the Trump administration’s definitional change. The Office on Violence Against Women engages in a broad array of activities in its implementation of the Violence Against Women Act. Perhaps grants that support community efforts to combat domestic and sexual abuse will be restricted to agencies serving victims of crime, leaving survivors without critical resources. If OVW’s training, education, and technical assistance curriculum is revised to adhere to the new definition, those experiencing “mere” emotional, economic, or psychological harms may no longer be considered victims. (It is further noteworthy that OVW simultaneously altered the definition of sexual assault, with the new definition containing a similar criminal justice focus.) What is clear is that these seemingly semantic changes, even if not yet embodied in official law or policy, are part of a broader trend toward the devaluation of women by this administration and this president.

Only those crazy libbruls value women.

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Mister Wall goes visiting

Jan 21st, 2019 12:06 pm | By

Very brief. How brief?

Two minutes.

About the time it took for Pence to make that wildly obnoxious claim.

Most of us don’t think King considered a massive wall built to keep brown people out of White Man’s Country anything to do with the promises of democracy, to put it mildly.

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A Catholic hierarchy that did little to protect them

Jan 21st, 2019 11:16 am | By

Priests will be priests:

Across India, the nuns talk of priests who pushed into their bedrooms and of priests who pressured them to turn close friendships into sex. They talk about being groped and kissed, of hands pressed against them by men they were raised to believe were representatives of Jesus Christ.

“He was drunk,” said one nun, beginning her story. “You don’t know how to say no,” said another.

At its most grim, the nuns speak of repeated rapes, and of a Catholic hierarchy that did little to protect them.

Well it’s a male hierarchy, isn’t it, organized around a male god and another male god and a bird-thing representing a male Spirit. It’s all about the males. Women are a mistake, and a sex implement.

The Vatican has long been aware of nuns sexually abused by priests and bishops in Asia, Europe, South America and Africa, but it has done very little to stop it, The Associated Press reported last year.

Because it’s only women. From Covington Catholic High to Georgetown Prep to the Vatican, women are trivial, secondary creatures who owe men sexual access.

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Capitalism thrives on the exploitation of the poor

Jan 21st, 2019 10:56 am | By

Let’s observe Martin Luther King day via a piece by Tavis Smiley in December 2017:

On Aug. 31, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech entitled “The Three Evils of Society” at the National Conference of New Politics.

Since it’s not the “I Have A Dream” speech, most of my fellow citizens are unacquainted with the text of this particular address, delivered just eight months before his assassination in Memphis, April 4, 1968. And, even if we were familiar with it, it’s not exactly the kind of speech that the corporate media would be quoting with enthusiasm.

Consider what King had to say that day:

“We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice,” said King. “The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor — both black and white, here and abroad.”

Let’s hear Mike Pence tell us again that Trump is like King. Let’s hear Trump tell us again that “we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for standing up for the self-evident truth Americans hold so dear, that no matter what the color of our skin or the place of our birth, we are all created equal by God.”

He went on to boldly declare that, “The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and racism. The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.”

See what I mean? Who really wants to wrestle with that? Anyone? Anyone?

A radical redistribution of political and economic power.

By the time King gave this speech, he was no longer on the list of most admired Americans. The radical King was now being ridiculed by fervent foes and former friends. The truth he was telling was too hot to handle.

He was getting too close to the money. They’ll give up even the racism before they’ll give up the money.

Even as a bullet with his name on it chased him all around America in his final year, King kept reminding us that the inseparable twin of racial injustice is economic injustice.

“Many white Americans of goodwill have never connected bigotry with economic exploitation. They have deplored prejudice but tolerated or ignored economic injustice. But these two evils have a malignant kinship.”

As they bear witness to the increasing racial unrest in our nation, and some even denounce white supremacy, our national leaders in Washington still haven’t made the connection, the “malignant kinship” between poverty and race.

And they’re not going to, because the poverty is too precious to them. The divine right to pay workers as little as you can possibly get away with is sacred.

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A word from Mister Wall

Jan 21st, 2019 8:47 am | By

No, I don’t think so.

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Guest post: It’s a maze of twisty little passages, all alike

Jan 20th, 2019 5:33 pm | By

Originally a comment by latsot on A fate worse than.

It’s a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. We shouldn’t be altogether surprised when a Grue turns up.

I have tremendous sympathy for people who feel alone, unloved and unrepresented. We have systematically failed those people for as long as we’ve been people and we don’t appear to have learned much along the way. People are feeling desperate about gender identity? I sympathise. Heaven fucking forbid that we try to fix societal expectations, though. It’s obviously far better to reinforce that gender bullshit by mutilating children and.. well… what then?

Seriously. Many of the things I do for a living require that I keep really quite complex and usually inconsistent models in my mind and then reason about them. I’m quite good at it. I’ve written papers about it in fancy journals and everything. But I cannot keep track of this shit. I can not follow any path of reasoning through this mess, regardless of any conceits, fudge-factors or straight up dimwitted logic blindness. There is just no way to render this position in a tractable number of dimensions.

I know we know this and my frustration is kind of abstract. But there are children who are being THE OPPOSITE OF HELPED. I don’t know what to do about it because every attempt is scooted into the TERF bin before anyone has bothered thinking about it.

We didn’t have this problem when we were complaining about religion or homeopathy, did we? There was always a bloc of people who couldn’t be turned, a bunch of (as we leaned, mostly obnoxious) people on our side, a few fence-sitters who could occasionally be turned and a lot of places to feel smug about our skepticism.

We knew where we were in those days. We skeptics turned out to be proper arseholes for the most part but we could probably do with a bit more old-skool randi-ish skepticism about the place. Only without the misogyny. And the bullying.

Ah fuck it, I have no idea what to do. But I hate it that children are becoming weapons in a battleground absolutely nobody understands.

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A rival account

Jan 20th, 2019 5:21 pm | By

The smiling kid in the video has given a statement about what happened, one which I gather is corroborated by other, longer videos.

I am the student in the video who was confronted by the Native American protestor. I arrived at the Lincoln Memorial at 4:30 p.m. I was told to be there by 5:30 p.m., when our busses were due to leave Washington for the trip back to Kentucky. We had been attending the March for Life rally, and then had split up into small groups to do sightseeing.

When we arrived, we noticed four African American protestors who were also on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I am not sure what they were protesting, and I did not interact with them. I did hear them direct derogatory insults at our school group.

They are apparently part of a group well known to people in DC, kind of the way Hari Krishna people used to be well known, only less benign.

The protestors said hateful things. They called us “racists,” “bigots,” “white crackers,” “faggots,” and “incest kids.” They also taunted an African American student from my school by telling him that we would “harvest his organs.” I have no idea what that insult means, but it was startling to hear.

Because we were being loudly attacked and taunted in public, a student in our group asked one of our teacher chaperones for permission to begin our school spirit chants to counter the hateful things that were being shouted at our group. The chants are commonly used at sporting events.

Ok – but a lot of them were wearing the god damn MAGA caps. Those things stand for something, and it’s not a benign something. School spirit chants in MAGA caps give off a different vibe from school spirit chants not in MAGA caps. That probably has a lot to do with why his smile looked provocative. But, yes, gullibility probably also has something to do with it.

At no time did I hear any student chant anything other than the school spirit chants. I did not witness or hear any students chant “build that wall” or anything hateful or racist at any time. Assertions to the contrary are simply false. Our chants were loud because we wanted to drown out the hateful comments that were being shouted at us by the protestors.

After a few minutes of chanting, the Native American protestors, who I hadn’t previously noticed, approached our group. The Native American protestors had drums and were accompanied by at least one person with a camera.

The protestor everyone has seen in the video began playing his drum as he waded into the crowd, which parted for him. I did not see anyone try to block his path. He locked eyes with me and approached me, coming within inches of my face. He played his drum the entire time he was in my face.

I never interacted with this protestor. I did not speak to him. I did not make any hand gestures or other aggressive moves. To be honest, I was startled and confused as to why he had approached me. We had already been yelled at by another group of protestors, and when the second group approached I was worried that a situation was getting out of control where adults were attempting to provoke teenagers.

I believed that by remaining motionless and calm, I was helping to diffuse the situation. I realized everyone had cameras and that perhaps a group of adults was trying to provoke a group of teenagers into a larger conflict. I said a silent prayer that the situation would not get out of hand.

Fair enough, but it’s also true that he and his (all male) classmates were there to advocate for taking away women’s right to make decisions about their own bodies. They’re not all that benevolent. I realize they’ve been trained into it, but still, that’s what they were there for.

I cannot speak for everyone, only for myself. But I can tell you my experience with Covington Catholic is that students are respectful of all races and cultures. We also support everyone’s right to free speech.

But they don’t respect women’s rights over their own bodies.

On the other hand if he’s telling the truth then Nathan Phillips lied when he (NP) said the kid blocked his escape. Not cool.

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Can’t agree with you there, Mike

Jan 20th, 2019 4:53 pm | By

Oh go put your head under a truck wheel, Pence.

In a Sunday interview with CBS News, Vice President Mike Pence likened President Donald Trump to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Sure, don’t you remember how King clamored for a Wall? A Wall keeping black kids out of white schools? A Wall keeping black people from sitting at the Woolworth’s lunch counter? A Wall keeping black people out of white neighborhoods? A Wall keeping all the good jobs for white people and the ones that promise hard labor at low pay for black people? Wasn’t that a time.

“And honestly,” he opined, “the hearts and minds of the American people are thinking a lot today about [this] being the weekend we remember the life and work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

“One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was, ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of Democracy,’” Pence continued. “You think of how he changed America, he inspired us to change through the legislative process, to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on the Congress to do, come to the table in a spirit of good faith.”

And agree to build a giant Wall to keep brown people out of White Man’s Country.

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A condition

Jan 20th, 2019 4:34 pm | By

This seems strange. It’s an entry on the NHS website, under the subhead Conditions, for Gender Dysphoria. Most of the conditions under that subhead are quite medical – you know, sciencey. The GD one isn’t so much.

Gender dysphoria is a condition where a person experiences discomfort or distress because there’s a mismatch between their biological sex and gender identity. It’s sometimes known as gender incongruence.

Biological sex is assigned at birth, depending on the appearance of the genitals. Gender identity is the gender that a person “identifies” with or feels themselves to be.

That, for instance. Notice the scare quotes on “identifies” – yes quite, so why use it? Identifying with something isn’t a medical term. What it means to identify with a gender is hotly contested and not a settled scientific or technical description.

This mismatch between sex and gender identity can lead to distressing and uncomfortable feelings that are called gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is a recognised medical condition, for which treatment is sometimes appropriate. It’s not a mental illness.

Recognised by whom? Medical condition in what sense? How can it be confirmed or falsified? How is it not a mental illness? How is “identifying as” anything but mental?

It’s just…weird, seeing all this politicized, contentious, dubious stuff on a governmental information site.

The first signs of gender dysphoria can appear at a very young age. For example, a child may refuse to wear typical boys’ or girls’ clothes, or dislike taking part in typical boys’ or girls’ games and activities.

Well there you go then. Little Sally likes to climb trees and hates dresses, therefore she has a medical condition called Gender Dysphoria. They’re from the government and they’re here to help.

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Look over there

Jan 20th, 2019 1:06 pm | By

Lawyers and tv explainers Joyce Vance and Mimi Rocah explain what Rudy Giuliani is up to. (Spoiler: it’s not lawyering.)

During an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Wednesday night, Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, seemed to acknowledge that there was collusion between one or more people involved in the Trump campaign and Russia — but just not involving his client, President Trump. Giuliani, who, along with Trump, has spent the last year telling the public that there has been no collusion, suddenly shifted gears and claimed he “never said there was no collusion between the campaign or between people in the campaign” only that there was “no collusion” on the part of “the president of the United States.”

Now why would he do that. Hmm. Oh, I know! If there is about to be news that there was collusion.

Let’s be clear, Giuliani’s conversation with Cuomo does not represent a subtle, nuanced shift in position. This is an admission by the president’s lawyer that when the president said “no collusion” and when he himself claimed there was no collusion by anyone, let alone “the top four or five people in the campaign,” they were not telling the truth.

Of course, if the position had always been that maybe there was collusion, but Trump wasn’t involved, the response to the special counsel’s investigation would have been to fully cooperate. Any rational leader in this position would want to know who the bad actors were in his or her campaign. But that was not the response, because that has not been the position — until now.

Which seems surprising in a former prosecutor, but Giuliani isn’t wearing his lawyer hat these days.

Giuliani is technically Trump’s lawyer. But the strategy he has been running since he joined the team in April 2018 is a political one, not a legal one. None of what he does is meant to convince a judge or a jury. It is meant to confuse the issues, to inoculate people against shocking news before it arrives, and to retain the president’s good standing with his base.

He’s not doing law, he’s doing PR, using his lawyer hat to make it more convincing. Nothing sleazy there at all.

Giuliani’s “defense strategy” for Trump has morphed over time, in response to evidence he and Trump’s other legal advisors could not refute, from 1) there were no contacts with Russians during the campaign, to 2) there were no election-related contacts with the Russians, to 3) there may have been contacts but it wasn’t collusion, to 4) collusion isn’t a crime, to 5) even if there was collusion and even if it was a crime, Trump himself didn’t participate or know anything about it.

Which would be sort of funny, if Trump weren’t…you know.

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A fate worse than…

Jan 20th, 2019 12:23 pm | By

Andy Lewis, Le canard noir, tweeted an interesting letter:

Can you read it? Don’t forget to zoom in if it’s difficult.

The first point is that puberty blockers leave the young person in developmental limbo, without the pubertal hormones or secondary sexual characteristic that would tend to consolidate gender identity. One particular puberty blocker “promotes a continued desire to identify with the non-birth sex” while 73 to 88% of GD patients who don’t get blockers “eventually lose their desire to identify with the non-birth sex.”

What caught my attention there is the fact that that loss of desire to identify with the non-birth sex is seen by trans activists as a surrender, a loss, a cop-out, a capitulation to…some equivalent of The Bosses, The Man, The Power. But…why? Why is it seen as more woke to cling to GD than to wait a few years to see if it wouldn’t be easier and simpler just to go with it and fight the sexist stereotypes without surgery and lifelong meds?

It seems like dysphoria at existing at all, or at maturing. There are difficulties in all that, obviously, but Resistance is Futile. We can’t stay 15 or 20 forever, so what about accepting that and moving on and doing something useful? Just a thought.

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Packets of anti-feminist literature

Jan 20th, 2019 10:56 am | By

Meanwhile in South Carolina –

A request to hang a group photo of the General Assembly’s female lawmakers in the State House led to an uncomfortable debate Tuesday in which a pro-life activist urged lawmakers not to endorse such symbols of “destructive and evil” feminism.

The 10-member State House Committee, made up of nine men and one woman, rebuked Columbia Christians for Life director Steve Lefemine, shutting down his testimony after three minutes.

Jeez, a guy can’t even testify about how evil feminism is any more, it’s political correctness gone mad.

By then, Lefemine had passed out packets of anti-feminist literature, expressed his view that the Bible says women are not fit for public office, and read aloud from an article titled, “The Feminism of the Mothers is the Destruction of the Daughters.”

It’s all because of his last name. He’s an embittered man.

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This behavior is opposed to the Church’s teachings

Jan 20th, 2019 10:39 am | By

So we’re seeing play out yet another example of “religion is thought to make people better but guess what IT DOESN’T (necessarily).”

The entitled young male shits who bullied Nathan Phillips are all students at a Catholic boys’ school, so that doesn’t speak very well for how Catholic boys’ schools educate their boys, does it. Teaching basic decency isn’t really the role of schools, and probably shouldn’t be, but at the same time, schools by their nature collect children together into a small space for hours every day, so in that sense teaching / enforcing basic decency is their responsibility. They have a responsibility to see to it that the students don’t brutalize each other, which means they have a duty to convey to the students that brutalizing people is not ok; there’s your basic morality right there.

The reporting I’m seeing is that CovCath (as they call it) is notorious for being a swamp of entitled bullying shits. What does that remind me of? Oh yes, Brett Kavanaugh’s school, and Brett Kavanaugh himself, and Brett Kavanaugh’s entitled bullying shits of friends.

Could this be a common pattern?

Easily. Why? Because one thing religion does is make people think they’re better than people not inside the magic religious circle. Those bullies from CovCath were in Washington to advocate for making women prisoners of their own bodies; they were there to campaign for taking away the rights of people who are not like them – people who are not male. No doubt they have all been carefully trained to think and say they’re there to Rescue the Fetus, but that’s gilding. They can’t Rescue the Fetus without forcing the fetus’s host to continue hosting it – inside her body – against her will. They’re campaigning for a law to compel all women who get pregnant to continue being pregnant whether they want to or not. They’re campaigning to take a basic right to bodily autonomy away from the half of humanity that they are not. That’s a bully move in itself. It’s a bully move when the pope does it and it’s a bully move when they do it.

The Catholic Conference of Kentucky has a statement put out by the school and the diocese (they don’t want us to forget that this is all Catholic business – ok then, we won’t):

The Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School have issued the following statement:

We condemn the actions of the Covington Catholic High School students towards Nathan Phillips specifically, and Native Americans in general, Jan. 18, after the March for Life, in Washington, D.C. We extend our deepest apologies to Mr. Phillips. This behavior is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person.

The matter is being investigated and we will take appropriate action, up to and including expulsion.

We know this incident also has tainted the entire witness of the March for Life and express our most sincere apologies to all those who attended the March and all those who support the pro-life movement.

They mean the anti-women’s rights movement, the take women’s bodily autonomy away movement.

Which raises the question – what do they mean “the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person”? What teachings? Is that what Catholicism is all about? Has it ever been?

I say cut the bullshit. Catholicism historically was all about what shit humans are and how far they fall short of the glory of god. The duality was central. “You are fallen and wicked; God alone is great”: that was the Church’s Teaching for most of its history. They put it a little more gently now, but only a little, and the emphasis is on obedience and submission, not dignity and respect.

There are of course many Catholics and other believers who are better than that, and who filter out the cruel oppressive stuff to make a church and ideology to match. But don’t go thinking Catholic schools as such teach their students “first, do no harm” or anything like it.

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The order of the smirk

Jan 19th, 2019 2:43 pm | By

Updating to add: see the competing account by the kid in the cap.

More on the high school bullies who mobbed a Native American drummer in DC yesterday.

The images in a series of videos that went viral on social media Saturday showed a tense scene near the Lincoln Memorial.

In them, a Native American man steadily beats his drum at the tail end of Friday’s Indigenous Peoples March while singing a song of unity for indigenous people to “be strong” in the face of the ravages of colonialism that now include police brutality, poor access to health care and the ill effects of climate change on reservations.

Surrounding him are a throng of young, mostly white teenage boys, several wearing Make America Great Again caps, with one standing about a foot from the drummer’s face wearing a relentless smirk.

It’s the bro smirk, the smirk of dominance. Trump smirks a lot.

Nathan Phillips, a veteran in the indigenous rights movement, was that man in the middle.

In an interview Saturday, Phillips, 64, said he felt threatened by the teens and that they suddenly swarmed around him as and other activists were wrapping up the march and preparing to leave.

The teenagers started chanting “Build that wall” and Phillips decided to get out of there.

“It was getting ugly, and I was thinking: ‘I’ve got to find myself an exit out of this situation and finish my song at the Lincoln Memorial,’ ” Phillips recalled. “I started going that way, and that guy in the hat stood in my way and we were at an impasse. He just blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat.”

…

The encounter generated a wave of outrage on social media less than a week after President Trump made light of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre of several hundred Lakota Indians by the U.S. Cavalry in a tweet that was meant to mock Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D), who Trump derisively calls “Pocahontas.”

Oh did he. I missed that.

Yes he did.

Some of the teens in the video wore sweatshirts from Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills, Ky., which sent students to Washington to participate in Friday’s antiabortion March for Life event, according to an archived page of the school’s website that was taken down on Saturday.

Well, you know, they were probably on a high from marching to take women’s rights away, so they felt like celebrating by threatening another subordinate group. Kid Smirk thinks he’s going to inherit the world and maybe he will, maybe he’ll be another Brett Cavanaugh. Cavanaugh too is a woman-humiliating boy from Catholic school. They go far.

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