What Trump is destroying:

Scientists behind some of the most important breakthroughs in Northwest scientific research over the past two decades have left their jobs in the wake of budget cutting by the Trump administration.

The federal government has terminated science experiments, canceled research contracts, set spending limits for travel and purchases to $1 and created uncertainty at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, a flagship of scientific research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

I pass that flagship quite often on the bus. It’s near the Arboretum and the University, and right next to a Yacht Club. NOAA itself is a few miles northeast, on Lake Washington.

The science center has lost about 30 people, according to Nick Tolimieri, president of the fisheries chapter of the IFPTE Local 8A (a union leader for about 200 center employees in the bargaining unit). While science still continues at the center, many of those lost were scientists with significant experience.

The Trump administration had offered buyouts to agency staff to encourage early retirements as it seeks to cut the federal workforce.

To cut just for the sake of cutting, without taking into account the value of what they were throwing out.

Options to take early retirement, finalized last week, represent the loss of thousands of hours of research expertise honed in the Northwest’s rivers and urban streams, and probing the lives of the most revered wildlife species, including salmon and southern resident orcas.

The Times interviewed five of these scientists.

• Sarah Morley built a deep understanding of the food web and hydrology of urban streams and Northwest rivers.
• Mike Ford revealed just how inbred the southern resident killer whales are, a never-before understood element in their struggle to survive.
• Lynne Barre helped lead the world’s first successful rescue of a stranded baby killer whale, even returning the animal to her pod, where she has since gone on to bear two calves.
• George Pess has been a leader in fisheries science and management since 1989 and the “papa bear” — as he is lovingly referred to — of the interdisciplinary team of scientists gathering data on the Elwha River before dam removal, then the world’s largest, to be able to understand the impacts of a historic intervention for fisheries recovery.
• Nat Scholz helped crack the code on which chemical in tire dust is killing coho in urban streams before they spawn.

Penny wise and pound foolish much?

Many of the retired scientists are now seeking to continue their work — as volunteers, if the paperwork needed to do so will be approved by new leaders at NOAA, Morley said. But will it? To her these budget cuts weren’t about reducing spending at all, but shutting down the science itself, making their work, even done for free, unwelcome.

“These cuts have nothing to do with saving money,” she said. “It is about silencing people and destroying science.”

Penny stupid and pound foolish.

Ya it’s always encouraging to see public safety unions shouting that men are women and that women should shut up.

The interim guidance is unworkable, unhelpful and will only lead to an increase in discrimination for workers, including in fire stations and in control rooms. Trans people are not a threat. Gender-based violence and misogyny are.

Trans ideology is misogyny, and it triggers violence against women.

Gary Lineker was talking to Oliver Brown at the Telegraph when he said that stupid thing. He said a lot of stupid things in that talk.

And for Lineker, the subject of right and wrong is simpler than it may be for others.

“You either have empathy or you don’t,” he says. “It’s more important now than ever before that people raise their voices, because we live in dangerous times. I’ll definitely continue pushing humanitarian issues. Sometimes they cross over with politics, although I’ve never been overly loud with my politics. Nobody knows who I vote for – I’ve voted for lots of different parties over many years. You feel sometimes like you’re fairly helpless, like you can’t really do anything. But you have to live with yourself. That’s the important thing.”

Ah. That would explain a lot. No, that’s not the important thing. Self is not the important thing when talking about injustice to other people. It’s the other people who are the important thing. Not you, them.

One other area where Lineker has been noticeably silent is a subject where centrist-dad equivocations are difficult: men masquerading in sport as women. This has been front-page news in his own realm, with the Football Association forced this month to ban males from all levels of the female game, honouring the Supreme Court’s ruling that the definition of a woman was based on biological sex. And yet Lineker has consistently swerved it. When his podcast, The Rest Is Football, tried a public question-and-answer experiment last November, Martina Navratilova, Sharron Davies and hundreds of other women asked him what he thought of the FA banning a teenager – revealed by The Telegraph last weekend as Cerys Vaughan – for asking a transgender opponent: “Are you a man?” Even under pressure from a nine-time Wimbledon singles champion and a celebrated Olympic swimmer, he neglected to engage. Why?

“Ugh,” he sighs, slumping so far forward in his chair he nearly hits the table. “You can’t cover that subject properly in a post. It’s too nuanced. I don’t actually think, in terms of sport, that it will ever be a real issue. Sport, as it’s already doing, will sort it out and work out rules. Like they did in boxing, when they realised they couldn’t have heavyweights against little fellas.”

Is it not blindingly obvious, however, that sport will not simply “sort it out”? It has taken many determined female campaigners a punishingly long time to undo the damage of gender ideology, compelling sports to prioritise fairness for women rather than vacuous mantras about inclusion. Amid broad acceptance that the rights of half the population should trump the view of a small, vocal minority of men that they are entitled to colonise women’s sport, Lineker makes it clear where his sympathies lie. “They’re some of the most persecuted on the planet, trans people. You’ve got to be very careful not to have bigoted views on that. I genuinely feel really badly for trans people. Imagine going through what they have to go through in life. Is there even any issue? It’s the same swimmer, the same weightlifter, the same boxer. They’re the only people I ever see.”

Well there you go. He thinks trans people are some of the most persecuted on the planet, so he thinks the women they shove aside are not their victims but their persecutors. Same old crap in same old words.

It’s so fascinating to see men say they just can’t see why women matter.

Gary Lineker surprisingly admitted that he doesn’t see the transgender sport bans as “a real issue” and that the controversy will resolve itself by the relevant authorities. The polarising BBC host described transgender people as “some of the most persecuted on the planet” and admitted that he feels sorry for them amid recent sporting banishments.

More persecuted than women? More persecuted than the women they themselves persecute? Are they? Really?

I wonder if men think this because it’s a sort of worst nightmare thing to them – waking up to find yourself metamorphosed into a [shudder] woman. Creepy doesn’t begin to describe it. Is that it? Poor sad tragic men stuck being [shudder] women – there isn’t enough sympathy and pampering in the world to make up for it. Is that it?

Or is it just garden-variety stupid.

But the nonsense train rumbles on regardless.

An NHS board has failed in its attempt to prevent the public from watching a tribunal about a trans doctor allowed to use a female hospital changing room.

NHS Fife asked the judge overseeing the case brought by the nurse Sandie Peggie to remove public access to an online live stream of the employment tribunal’s proceedings.

Gee I wonder if that’s because NHS Fife is aware that it looks like a pack of women-hating bullies.

But it is understood that Sandy Kemp, the tribunal judge, has ruled that the public should be allowed to watch the case, in line with the principles of open justice. He is also said to have rejected an application by NHS Fife to ban an open justice campaign group from posting live social media updates about the case on X.

…

The first part of the Peggie tribunal was held two months before the Supreme Court ruled in a separate case that access to female-only areas should be based on biological sex.

And now the rest of it will be held after that ruling. Am I gloating? Of course I am.

This week, Ms Peggie welcomed the ruling and challenged NHS Fife to dump its policy of “permitting any man who identifies as a woman access to female-only, single-sex spaces”.

For Women Scotland, the feminist campaign group that won the Supreme Court case, said it was delighted that the tribunal judge had “upheld the principles of open justice” by allowing the public to continue watching proceedings.

Trina Budge, one of the group’s directors, said: “NHS Fife has behaved appallingly in seeking to have the remainder of this case heard behind closed doors.

All this bullying and sneaking and lying and whining in aid of men who pretend to be women. Just imagine if women had ever had a tenth of the support that men in lipstick have been rejoicing in for years.

Silly me, I thought I had already posted about this hours ago, promptly after listening to it. I thought wrong.

Foreign man allowed to go out in public again.

A federal district court judge in Virginia ordered the release of Georgetown University scholar Badar Khan Suri on Wednesday, marking at least the third time a detained student or academic targeted by the Trump administration because of their protest activity or affiliation was released from immigration detention.

Khan Suri was detained by masked federal officers outside his home in Rosslyn, Virginia, in March. Khan Suri was moved across multiple state lines shortly after his arrest and has been held in custody in a Texas detention center.

Well obviously we don’t want students and scholars in this country, so no crossing of state lines is too much to punish them. Also the masking is fine because it just is.

He is an Indian national postdoctoral fellow and was in the United States on a valid visa before his arrest. He is married to a US citizen.

That’s no excuse! Having a valid visa is not good enough! You have to have at least ten of them, and be missing an arm.

Suri has not been charged with a crime, but the Trump administration revoked his student visa and accused him of having ties to Hamas, a terrorist organization.

Khan Suri’s attorneys filed multiple motions with the court challenging the legality of his detention, arguing their client was targeted in part because his wife is a Palestinian American. Khan Suri’s wife, Mapheze Saleh is also a former employee of the Qatari-based news network Al Jazeera, according to court documents.

Saleh said she posted on social media to show her support for the people of Gaza after the start of the Israel-Gaza war, court documents show.

Therefore it was necessary to drag her husband from Virginia to Texas and lock him up and throw away the key. What a beacon of human rights we are.

Originally a comment by Papito on Dragging more people into the maelstrom.

The trans ideology is at its worst when it draws the line of battle with women and the same-sex attracted right across the bodies of children.

The idea of “trans children” came about because adult men who modify themselves surgically to look more like women never pass as women, so they think if only they had started the modification before puberty they’d pass. So they project their inner turmoil, self-hatred, and sexual kinks onto other people’s children. Children are easy to manipulate, and the nerdy ones are always looking for an explanation as to why they don’t fit in. Throwing them a glitter party and calling them brave if they say the reason is because they’re trans is irresistible to many. Some of the parents are likewise gullible and will become boosters of their own children’s sterilization and mutilation; some are not, and this cult may break those families.

The next step after convincing a kid to say they’re trans is to elevate that statement above any other. A kid can say they want to be a musician and the parents say that’s great, let’s get you lessons, knowing that by the time college graduation rolls along the kid will likely have found a profession that pays. A kid can say they want to be an astronaut and parents will say that’s great, you have to study calculus and get in shape. A kid can say they’re emo, not goth, and the parents will say super, we’ll save on white pancake makeup. Anything a kid identifies as, parents understand it might change, and in the long run it doesn’t matter, a kid has to go through a lot of different phases, and can be motivated to learn things from any of them. But the job of the trans cult is to make sure the kid never grows out of saying they’re trans, which they would without intervention.

That’s what the gender centers are for, and the puberty blockers. Their stated function is to prevent the puberty that would develop secondary sex characteristics, and thus make the eventual trans adult pass better. Their practical function is to prevent the adolescent brain from growing, and prevent the kid from growing out of the phase where they identify as trans. Can we lock in a poet phase, or a scout phase, or a train-lover phase? No, but we can lock in a trans phase, medically. And we can train a generation of doctors to lie to children and parents and say they will kill themselves if we don’t.

Every day a new family is thrown into years, and perhaps a lifetime, of pain because someone has sold the trans lie to their child. There will never be a righting of this wrong, there will never be accountability for all the doctors and teachers and therapists who pushed this snake oil, who decided the line of battle for a kink ideology had to be fought over the bodies of children.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on How to make a right.

There is no such thing as specifically “trans” rights. There can’t be, because “trans” is a fiction, and because making that particular fiction a basis for rights would obliterate women’s rights as well as lesbian and gay rights.

A big part of the problem stems from people’s mistaken conception of “trans people” as a fixed subset of the population — directly analogous to gay people: a small group of individuals who were born with an innate and harmless condition that caused them to be discriminated against and persecuted by the rest of society — when in fact “trans people” are an open identity group whose membership can grow or shrink depending on its appeal at any given time or place, just like political movements, religious movements, and subcultures like hippies and punks.

The number of people who loudly announce themselves to be transgender (or who quietly drop the label) is directly dependent on the pros and cons of doing so. Every time you change a policy to make it “more trans inclusive,” you’re not easing the burden on a small, fixed group of people who can’t help but be innately “trans” and who would otherwise struggle to cope with their day-to-day lives without the concessions that supposed trans “rights” offer. Instead, you’re incentivizing more people who’d otherwise have carried on just fine to hop aboard the trans train.

You can see how the conflation of “trans rights” with gay rights came to be. It was a very clever marketing ploy by the trans activists to hitch their wagon to the gay rights movement:

There have always been men and women who, in the privacy of their minds, were far more attracted to members of the same sex. Some of them found the prospect of opposite-sex relationships to be completely unbearable to the point of impossibility, whereas others managed to carry on “in the closet” and go through the motions of heterosexual life, despite their private longings. The number who “came out” publicly was correlated to how well society included and accommodated them. But the number of people who were innately homosexual never actually changed. And no one has been able to identify any drawbacks to legally and culturally incorporating them into society.

The same cannot be said for the following groups of “closeted” people:

There have always been straight men who, in the privacy of their minds, find it sexy and appealing to imagine themselves as women and who would love to make everyone else imagine them as women, too. There have always been men who secretly enjoy crossdressing. There have always been men who fantasize about getting naked in women’s locker and shower rooms. There have always been men who predate sexually on children and who dream of having the kind of unsupervised access to children that women are freely granted and that men are prohibited from.

There have always been teenage girls who long to be boys — to escape from the ever-present burden of objectification. There have always been lesbians who long to move through the world free of the everyday grind of homophobia and misogyny they’re subjected to, simply for looking and acting the way they naturally do.

There have always been gay boys and young men with naturally feminine attributes, for whom the thought has crossed their minds, “If only I were a beautiful young woman, hunky young men would find me attractive instead of repulsive, and I’d be so much more popular! I’m so ashamed to be gay. I feel like a freak…”

There have always been social chasers, people who need to be at the centre of the party, who get unbearable FOMO at the sight of a big glittery rainbow parade they weren’t invited to.

None of these people are innately transgender. None of them need special sex-denialist privileges in order to carry on with their lives. None of them. In fact, everyone — all of society — is far better off if none of them are designated as a separate class of special people who are granted special “rights” to force everyone else pretend not to see their sex. Automatically granting “trans rights” to some of these groups of people poses an immediate threat to the safety of women and children: making “trans” a no-questions-asked all-access pass to women’s safe spaces does just that. Granting “trans rights” to others undermines women’s rights and gay rights by disincentivizing society from its responsibilty to address the burdens of societal prejudice unfairly carried by women and gays, and instead pushes unhappy women and gays to simply modify themselves and irreversibly damage their bodies in order to conform to the status quo. This is what the bogus concept of “trans kids” does.

These supposed “trans rights” are just dragging more people into the growing maelstrom. It’s threatening to drown us all.

Classic Trump.

“It’s a great gesture from Qatar,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer. I mean, I could be a stupid person and say, ‘No, we don’t want a free, very expensive airplane.’”

Point completely missed SIR. Point not even within striking distance SIR.

To put it another way, you’ve just gone on the record as happy to accept any and all bribes from any and all parties.

The issue is not whether or not you would like a free lavish gift. We know you would love a free lavish gift. We know you’re greedy. We know you’re corrupt. We know you’re reckless. We know your brain is a puddle of grease. You don’t need to tell us any of that.

The issue is that you’re not allowed to accept bribes. The issue is that you’re especially not allowed to take bribes from other countries.

This is a bribe, you dumb fuck. It’s not a loving present from people who admire you, it’s a massive public bribe. It’s not a “free airplane”; it’s a hook lodged deep in your throat for Qatar to reel in whenever it chooses.

The Society for Women in Philosophy UK is not for women in philosophy. It’s for that other thing – the opposite.

It offers a “statement of solidarity and support in response to the recent UK Supreme Court ruling and EHRC guidance” which is not a statement of solidarity with women but rather a statement of solidarity with men who call themselves women.

(There’s no link to the statement because apparently they don’t do links; just scroll down – there’s not much on the page.)

What’s their philosophical take?

The Society for Women In Philosophy UK (SWIP UK) condemns the recent Supreme Court ruling on 16 April 2025 determining that the term ‘woman’ in the Equality Act 2010 refers to a binary and biological notion of ‘sex’, and the subsequent interim guidance published by the EHRC on 25 April 2025. 

Ah yes a “notion” – a peculiar eccentric addle-pated notion that sex refers to sex. Silly Supreme Court; if only they studied the works of professional trans ideologues like “India” Willoughby instead of relying on sexual dimorphism for their definition.

This ruling and the guidance undermine the human rights and safety of trans, non-binary, and intersex people and are also detrimental to cis women. Trans women are women, and belong in feminist organisations. There is no fight against sexism and misogyny separate from the fight against cissexism and transmisogyny.

In what way is it detrimental to women to know what women are? In what way is it not detrimental to women to pretend that men can be women? Deep philosophical questions which the Gang for Women in Philosophy don’t bother to answer, or even ask.

SWIP UK membership, in line with our recognitions and aims, has for many years been open to trans women and to other trans and/or non-binary people who feel the category of ‘woman’ is relevant to their experiences, and this will not change under any circumstances. 

Oh. Really? So it’s not the Society for Women in Philosophy. Why do they call themselves that while they disavow it? If it’s not for women why do they say it’s for women?

Ironically, that’s about the most obvious contradiction one could come up with, and philosophers are supposed to be alert to contradictions, and avoid them. It seems kind of cringey to feature and underline one right there on their website.

If you’re a woman and a teacher in the UK you don’t have a union that looks out for your interests.

Britain’s largest teaching union has voted to campaign against the Supreme Court ruling on gender, insisting trans women in schools must be allowed to use ladies’ toilets.

The Left-wing National Education Union (NEU) resolved on Saturday to advocate for trans teachers to continue to choose toilets according to ‘gender identity’.

Which is a massive “fuck you” to women.

The judgement, which states a woman is defined by biological sex, effectively means a male-born trans person can be excluded from female-only spaces.

However, the NEU’s resolution means it may now intervene to provide legal assistance for trans teachers if they are banned from female toilets or girls’ changing rooms.

Not legal assistance for women who don’t want to take their clothes off with men in the room, but legal assistance for men who want to take their clothes off with women in the room. Solidarity Forever eh what?

Daniel Kebede, General Secretary, said: ‘The NEU is looking carefully at the Supreme Court ruling and its implications for employment. A toxic climate has been created in recent years in which trans people, a small community, are treated as if they are a risk or threat to others.’

Go to hell, Mr Kebede. Men are a threat to women if they’re insisting on invading women’s spaces and watching them take their clothes off. Men who are not a threat to women don’t want to do that. Do you get it now? The adamant insistence on intruding on women is a guy thing, and it’s revolting to see men lining up to defend it and encourage it.

The 52 executive members, mostly regional reps, voted in favour of a motion called ‘trans rights are human rights’.

The motion says the ruling ‘contradicts human rights and dignity of trans and other gender-diverse staff and encourages discrimination, harassment and hate crimes’.

What about the human rights and dignity of women?

It’s so interesting how they simply take for granted that “trans rights” get to cancel women’s rights.

Wrong.

That little nugget of wisdom is floating around on social meeja. It’s idiotic.

There is no erosion of the human rights of trans people, i.e. the human rights that everyone has. There is no such thing as specifically “trans” rights. There can’t be, because “trans” is a fiction, and because making that particular fiction a basis for rights would obliterate women’s rights as well as lesbian and gay rights. It’s unworkable to make it a “right” for men who pretend to be women to force everyone else to agree. It’s unworkable because it’s not true and it drives a tank through women’s rights.

Imagine if trans ideology faded out, to be replaced by an ideology that claims people are whatever military rank they say they are. If I say I’m an admiral, I’m an admiral. Would that be workable? No. How about an ideology that claims people can fly if they say they can? I suppose we could shrug and say “Ok whatever” because it would harm only the roof jumpers, but what if they started taking babies up onto that roof? So, no again.

The slogan sounds cute to people unaccustomed to thinking, but it’s not workable.

Welcome to Racism Import Theater.

The first group of White South African refugees arrived in the U.S. on Monday under President Trump’s executive order mandating they be prioritized for resettlement — even as the broader refugee program remains largely on hold.

The 59 Afrikaners, descendants of mainly Dutch colonists, underwent expedited reviews that took months, were brought to the U.S. on a government-chartered flight, and were greeted at Dulles International Airport by federal officials — all unconventional steps for the refugee resettlement program, which can take years to process.

In other words, refugees don’t normally get expedited reviews, they don’t normally get here on a government-chartered plane, and they are not normally greeted at Dulles by federal officials. It seems fair to assume that the “unconventional steps” are a way to rub our noses in the fact that the Trump regime welcomes white racists and has contempt for their victims.

Nose duly rubbed. We get it. You hate us and you love racists. You’re going to do all the harm you can in the next four years, and that will be a lot of harm. We can’t do a damn thing about it. We get it.

Among his first executive actions, Trump temporarily paused the refugee resettlement program. Various agencies including the State Department have also paused disbursing funding for critical services such as the home, job and school assistance the Afrikaners are poised to receive.

The pause sent the refugee resettlement agencies into turmoil as refugees already cleared to arrive in the U.S. received notice their flights had been cancelled.

Among those left in limbo were Afghans who worked with the U.S. military, a move that some Republicans have criticized. Judges have ordered the government to at least resume the refugee program for those who had already been approved to travel, but the administration is fighting the court order.

Fighting the court order while ostentatiously parading Afrikaner “refugees” from post-apartheid South Africa. Noses rubbed.

Just shameless lies in the Guardian.

The article is a toe-curling pile of flattery of a fantasy writer called Jessica Townsend, so of course it has to fling some sewer scrapings at Rowling in the process.

Townsend is going into her press tour for Silverborn at a time when the world’s most famous children’s author, JK Rowling, is publicly railing against the rights of trans people.

Liars liars liars. No she is not. She is publicly railing at attacks on the rights of female people, and explaining how trans ideology is incompatible with women’s rights.

“I’m very happy to be quite blunt about it: I’m gutted. It is so upsetting and it’s so perplexing, and I will never understand it,” she says. But Rowling’s ugly crusade has only reinforced Townsend’s innate sense of duty towards the “tiny brains and hearts” in her audience.

The tiny brains and hearts that are all in the wrong bodies, no doubt.

Solidarity for…whatever, but for sure not women.

Britain’s largest teaching union has voted to campaign against the Supreme Court ruling on gender, insisting trans women in schools must be allowed to use ladies’ toilets.

In other words insisting that women must lose their rights to privacy and safety. For the union makes men strong.

Daniel Kebede, General Secretary, said: ‘The NEU is looking carefully at the Supreme Court ruling and its implications for employment. A toxic climate has been created in recent years in which trans people, a small community, are treated as if they are a risk or threat to others.’

No, men are acknowledged to be a potential threat to women in small enclosed spaces with their pants down. It is the case that some men – far too many men – do take advantage of settings like toilets to spy on or photograph or assault women. The NEU should look carefully at that.

The court ruling, on April 16, came too late to be debated at the NEU annual conference – so it was instead discussed at a meeting of the National Executive at the weekend.

The 52 executive members, mostly regional reps, voted in favour of a motion called ‘trans rights are human rights’.

The motion says the ruling ‘contradicts human rights and dignity of trans and other gender-diverse staff and encourages discrimination, harassment and hate crimes’.

And what about women?

Pffff. Obviously the union doesn’t give two shits.

Oh has he now.

That teacher is in the wrong job then. The very very very wrong job. Teachers are not there to teach the children how to focus all their attention on the teachers’ idenninies. That’s not what school is for. Teachers are conduits for learning, not the subjects of learning. Nobody should be burdened with having to remember someone’s luxury idenniny, and that goes triple for children in school.

And that’s true times a billion when what the teachers are trying to force the children to learn is a pack of lies, and personal narcissistic look-at-me lies at that. Teachers should no more be telling children about their idenninies than they should be telling them about their sex lives or their cocaine habits or their grudges against their parents. Grade school is not a theater, it’s school.

And no, the child should not be gently reminded of the preferred idenniny of this adult; the subject should never come up at all.

Bill Kristol on Trump and emoluments:

I’m old enough to remember when this was a republic. A proud republic. We were proud to be different from the principalities and powers of the old world. We were confident of our superiority to the hereditary aristocracies and monarchies that had dominated political life everywhere on the globe, and that still did in many places.

…

Now, the president of the United States is boasting of receiving as a gift a luxury Boeing 747-8 plane from the Qatari royal family. The plane will be upgraded to serve not as the Air Force One but as his Air Force One, since it will only be available for use by the government of the United States during his time in office. It will then revert to him—well, nominally to his presidential library, but it will of course be totally at his disposal—after he leaves office.

This sure seems like a “present” or “emolument” to a person holding “an office of trust” from “a King, Prince, or foreign state.”

But not to worry. Attorney General Pam Bondi—once a registered lobbyist for Qatar, as it happens—has concluded that the transaction is permissible under U.S. law and the Constitution.

Interesting. Are we to conclude that AG Pam Bondi nudged Qatar into bestowing this tiny negligible blink and you’ve missed it bribe on Trump?

Trump can’t really conceal his contempt for the old republican ways. Last night, he posted this on social media:

So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE, of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. 

Note that he even points out that the “gift” to the Defense Department is only temporary. He doesn’t point out that it’s actually a permanent gift to him, which the DD gets to use only while he’s squatting in the Filthy House.

This is the voice of old-world autocracy. Those who take seriously the constraints and requirements of republican government are fools. Those who care that our republican government not be dependent on foreign states, that our elected leaders not take favors from foreign princes, they are losers.

It’s the voice of the old-world autocracy stripped of any semblance of nobility or basic dinner-table manners. It’s the voice of old-world autocracy quacked out by a psychotic puppet.

BBC Woman’s Hour today talked to trans “woman” Robin Moira White about the Supreme Court ruling on whatisawoman. The chat is the first in what it says will be a series of such chats. I have to wonder why the Beeb starts this series with a man who pretends to be a woman. Why is he at the head of the queue? Why not talk to women first and men last? Or indeed why talk to men at all?

So anyway, obviously I’ll have to listen to the whole annoying thing and share the worst bits.

First question – what’s his opinion on the Supreme Court ruling that woman means woman?

Well – I don’t think the Supreme Court ruling will survive a trip to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. … What we have is a situation now where that recognition is not effective and will need to be corrected

Nuala McGovern: But on what grounds would the court on human rights potentially overrule the judgement?

White: Well if you are a trans person that acknowledgement of your changed gender has to allow you to live appropriately and with dignity and if you go to the cinemar or the supermarket and you are forced to use facilities that are not appropriate to your gender, then firstly

Ok wait. Before we hear what happens “firstly” let’s interrogate this issue of being forced to use facilities that are not appropriate to your gender. Here’s the problem with that: if the Robin Moira Whites get to use what they consider facilities appropriate to their magic notional fictitious gender, then actual women are forced to use facilities that are NOT appropriate to their actual sex. Men in dresses win, women lose. Why should men in dresses get to win??? Why does his “appropriate” matter more than ours?

He goes on:

Your rights to privacy are compromised, and your rights to live in dignity are compromised.

See above. What about our rights to privacy and dignity, you oblivious selfish shit?

McGovern sort of hints at this little problem and they go back and forth a bit. RMW sums up:

The problem is, that it’s all very well having fundamental human rights, but if in your workplace you’re forced to go – you’ve very specifically rejected your birth gender, and now you’re forced into facilities that reflect that, that is devastating.

Slightly muddled, as live conversations can be, but he means forced into facilities that reflect that other wrong rejected gender. So anyway – it’s the same thing again. Yes, and if you’re not forced into those facilities, then women are forced to put up with you in their facilities. Why does your distress matter more than theirs? There’s one of you and more than one of them, and also, you’re a man and they’re women. Why does your distress matter more than theirs???

Cheeringly, McGovern does make this point.

I mean – there are people who would say it is devastating to have to share facilities – same sex facilities – with a biological man.

His response is frankly incoherent. The solution is additional accommodations, he drones. Yes that will work: all those “additional accommodations” will just spring into being, at no expense or inconvenience or loss of space needed for other things. That’s why this has been happening all along oh wait no it hasn’t.

Then he goes on to bleat about people being “unpleasant” by which he means calling a man a man. He sounds quite…dim. Pompous, because he has the voice for it [a male attribute by the way, and he deploys it without apparent shyness], but fatuous.

Then he calls Stephen Whittle and someone else “eminences grises” pronounced “eminence greezez”. Hahahahahasorryhahahahaha

Then McGovern asks him about calling Sex Matters “evil” and he squirms a bit and that’s the end. He has a little talent in the department of talking slowly in a gravelly voice so that he sounds thoughtful (and deeply male, to underline the point), but he wasn’t even slightly persuasive.

Completely normal. Not corrupt at all. No risk of favors in exchange for a tiny gifty. Just a kind gesture from a dear friend. Clean as a whistle.

Trump to accept luxury jet from Qatar to use as Air Force One

Sure; why not? Heads of state accept little prezzies from other countries all the time. A huge luxury airplane isn’t worth much at all – not as much as a nice dinner at the local Chipotle.

Given the massive value of a Boeing 747-8, the move is unprecedented and raises substantial ethical and legal questions. A Qatari official said the plane is technically being gifted from the Qatari Ministry of Defense to the Pentagon, describing it more as a government-to-government transaction instead of a personal one. The Defense Department will then retrofit the plane for the president’s use with security features and modifications.

All totally impersonal. It’s about like donating some concrete slabs to the Pentagon to patch a sidewalk.

The plan is for the plane to be donated to Trump’s presidential library after he leaves office, ensuring he can continue to use it, according to a person familiar.

You what? He gets to keep it?

Stone the crows. That’s a bribe.

Democrats quickly condemned the news Sunday, with the Democratic National Committee describing it in a news release as “Trump’s latest grift.”

“Nothing says ‘America First’ like Air Force One, brought to you by Qatar,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote in a statement. “It’s not just bribery, it’s premium foreign influence with extra legroom.”

And solid gold plating.

Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the potential move is a sharp departure from the playbook presidents have followed to ensure they stay in line with the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause, which bans foreign payments to a sitting US president.

“We’ve never seen something on the level of a $400 million plane,” he said. “It is a scale well beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.”

That’s Trump for ya. From nothing to a luxury jumbo jet in one jump. Tentative he is not.