Weirdo Kennedy can’t get a date for the prom.

On August 23, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. suspended his presidential campaign. Citing the war in Ukraine and the “war on our children,” as well as “relentless, systematic censorship and media control,” the scion of the famous Democratic political family announced his support for the Republican candidate.

“These are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump,” he added.

In reality, Kennedy had tried just a week earlier to sell his support to the Harris campaign in exchange for a position in her cabinet, preferably as Secretary of Health and Human Services. After getting laughed out of the room, Kennedy decamped to Team Trump, where the candidate wouldn’t commit to a cabinet post, but was at least willing to appear publicly with him.

Attaboy Junior! He won’t dance with you but at least he’ll let you hold his…er…flowers.

“In about 10 battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler, I’m going to remove my name, and I’ve already started that process and urge voters not to vote for me,” Kennedy said that day in Phoenix.

In fact, Kennedy is working hard to be a spoiler for Harris, fighting to keep his name on the ballot where it could harm the vice president’s campaign and to remove it where his appearance might hurt Trump. It’s a remarkably shameless ploy for a man who spent his career as an environmental attorney and is now willing to get in bed with a politician who thinks windmills cause cancer and fossil fuels are the future.

They match up well though. Spoiled, entitled, empty. A pair of greedy conceited hacks with no morals.

JD Vance wants to make medical insurance Great Again.

“You also want to implement some deregulatory agenda so that people can choose a health care plan that fits them. A young American doesn’t have the same health care needs as a 65-year-old American. A 65-year-old American in good health has much different health care needs than a 65-year-old American with a chronic condition. We want to make sure everybody is covered, but the best way to do that is to actually promote some more choice in our health care system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach that puts a lot of people into the same insurance pools, into the same risk pools, that actually makes it harder for people to make the right choices for their families.”

Jesus christ. How stupid do you have to be? That’s how insurance works: everyone pays in; not everyone needs to use it; it’s there for the people who do need it. Universal health care/insurance=everyone pays in and not everyone needs it. The one-size approach is the one that works; any other approach is just back to pay as you go, which does not work.

By invoking a “deregulatory agenda,” Vance is pitching a return to the bad old days when people with preexisting conditions couldn’t get coverage. Harris put this in personal terms during her debate with Trump: “I don’t have to tell the people watching tonight, you remember what that was like? Remember when an insurance company could deny [coverage] if a child had asthma, if someone was a breast cancer survivor, if a grandparent had diabetes?”

But Vance and his horrible friend want to go back to that.

“Any slave girls you may own,” he says.

Soapy Molly and the furious tantrum:

Somebody who calls xirself “Pride in Labour” exclaims:

STATEMENT: Our Response to Labour Councillor’s Transphobia

Transphobia according to whom? The person or people exclaiming, of course.

Between the headline and the piece there’s a shiny banner screaming “Labour must take immediate action against Laurie Burton”. Oh yeah? Maybe Laurie Burton should take action against Pride in Labour.

The pomposity of them is a sight to behold.

Pride in Labour is aware of incidents of transphobia by a Labour councillor in Southend Council. The councillor in question has made deeply transphobic remarks towards the Scottish political activist, Sophie Molly on Twitter/X, and made comments more widely about the trans movement. It is clear there is an issue with transphobia within the party.

Ooh, aware, is it? Well I’m aware of incidents of stupidity by Pride in Labour. Now what do we do?

Who decides what remarks are transphobic? Who decides what remarks are deeply transphobic? Who appointed the deciders? Who asked for any of this?

The councillor has been posting transphobic remarks, including referring to trans women as “blokes”, engaging with people known to push hateful ideology against trans people, and reposting content from the LGB Alliance.

So?

Trans women of course are blokes. Women are women, and trans women are blokes. That’s what “trans” means.

What does “engaging with people” mean? What business is it of Pride in Labour what people a councillor “engages with”?

The claim about “hateful ideology” is of course just their enraged name-calling, which gets less credible the more they do it. It’s neither ideology nor hateful to say that men are not women.

Nobody needs the permission of Pride in Labour to share content from LGB Alliance.

We recognise that people are entitled to their views on any matter

Like hell they do. That’s exactly what they don’t recognize. They think they get to tell us what views we can have.

but when those personal views turn toxic and become harmful to another person who is protected under the Equality Act, disciplinary action must be taken.

And what exactly is Pride in London’s method of determining when personal views “turn toxic”? How does it know when such views “become harmful to another person”? Which person are they talking about?

Pride in Labour will be writing to Southend Council to lodge a formal complaint and will also lodge a complaint with the Labour Party itself. There is no room in the Labour movement for transphobia, and it is important the party acts immediately.

So Pride in Labour doesn’t recognize that people are entitled to their views on any matter. It says it does but it then instantly demonstrates that it doesn’t. Quite a pointless exercise.

Oh good, another luxury idenninny.

Germany’s parliament will be reviewing proposed amendments submitted by a pro-pedophile group tomorrow, sparking concerns from child safeguarding advocates. Krumme-13, a lobby group which advocates for lowering the age of consent and legalizing child pornography, is seeking to add language to the constitution which would establish “pedosexuality” as a protected sexual identity.

Can we spot the problem here? I think we can. I think it’s pretty god damn obvious. Children are children. Adults raping children should not be legalized. The age of consent is necessary because children are not born with adult brains.

Dieter Gieseking, the founder of Krumme-13, announced the upcoming vote to his supporters in a post made to the group’s website last week.

“K13online calls for a ban on discrimination against gays and lesbians AND pedophiles in the constitution,” reads the statement. “The vote… will be broadcast live on Parliamentary TV.”

Not the same thing. “Gays and lesbians” refers to adults. Men who want to rape children are not comparable to lesbians and gay men.

Gieseking, a 68-year-old former Federal Border Guard official, founded K13 in Trier in 1993 and promoted the group as a “self-help” organization for “pedosexuals.” He has been repeatedly charged with the possession of child pornography.

In 1996, Gieseking was sentenced to eighteen months, for which he served one year in prison, on charges related to operating a mail order child pornography service from a van. In 2003, Gieseking again appeared in court accused of possession of child sexual abuse materials obtained between July 1999 and January 2001. The pornography was found on Gieseking’s computer after a search of his residence in August 2001. His devices contained a total of 216 image files of naked children, and he was sentenced to eight months in prison.

But but but his sexual idenninny makes him want child pornography which means children have to be sexually tortured for his enjoyment, because it’s his idenninny you see, which should be protected.

Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Remains.

So, to sum up:

1. Over the last few decades, Catholic “special educational” institutions the world over have been exposed at best (at *best*) as safehouses and private gardens for pedophiles, and at worst as infanticide factories where the mothers of neglected-to-death babies were also enslaved for years, most famously in Ireland but really in every country where the Catholic Church has any presence at all. (Germany’s own pedophile scandal hit in those halcyon days of 2021 and caused a large number of lapsed Catholics to actually strike their names from the Church’s rolls, which in this country means the government finally stopped giving the Church taxes on those peoples’ behalf.)

2. In the wake of George Flloyd, and on the back of decades of First Nations activism and many scandals within Canada itself (such as multiple reservations being so horribly mismanaged they didn’t, and probably still don’t, have reliable access to potable water), some activists and academics revived Canada’s longstanding conversation over its own Christian-run “residential schools”, the last of which closed down less than thirty years ago. It’s notable that the State allowed the Catholic Church to run more than half of these, in a country that also had policies discriminating against Catholics into the 1960s that effectively barred them from becoming public servants or working in large private companies (except within the province of Quebec, of course, where there weren’t enough Protestants to staff the required positions).

3. These activists and academics gathered some anecdotes and made inferences based on the Catholic Church’s horrible track record in other countries, and began speculating quite…forcefully…on the probable existence of mass graves in Canadian residential schools on a scope and scale of the Irish “mother-and-baby homes” aka infanticide factories. As part of their speculative research, they organised ground-penetrating radar of residential school grounds which indeed showed that those grounds were not uniform.

4. The Canadian government, at the same time it was classifying protesters against COVID restrictions as domestic terrorists, took the foregoing speculations and hypotheses and dubious evidence as dispositive, and publicly toyed with the idea of criminalising any public or private statements against the existence of mass graves in residential schools in an analogy to Holocaust denial, which itself was only made illegal (at least in the context of “promoting antisemitism”) in Canada in 2022 on the same wave of woke religious fanaticism.

5. Wherever these putative “mass graves” have been actually excavated, no evidence for any human remains has been identified. Not one single time. And as this process has gone on, the claims have been walked back from “mass graves” to “unmarked graves”, some of which may well exist, possibly because any original markings had at some point been removed or worn away without having been replaced.

I am no friend at all of the Church (Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise), and I am certainly not a “conservative Catholic”, but I admit to raising a bit of a skeptical eyebrow when the government demands, on pain of imprisonment, that I have to affirm belief in facts which are not in evidence simply because they affirm a general narrative that is currently in-vogue with a bunch of people drunk on their own sense of righteousness.

Notwithstanding the dubious justness of their own cause, they don’t seem to understand that one day the winds will shift again, and the positions they insist are true today will one day be vilified as calumny. It would be wise if, at such a time, those villains did not have a precedent of having been thrown in prison for saying things the governing regime insisted (based on very little evidence) were false. It seems to me plainly obvious that dismantling our hard-won norms of free speech, giving all-too-human governments the power to arbitrate what is true, is simply a terrible idea destined to backfire and redound to the detriment of everyone, very much including its proponents.

But perhaps that makes me a “right-wing extremist”, after all.

Be careful what you like where others can see you.

In 2023 the playwright David Greig had to apologise to staff at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, where he was artistic director, for being “careless and harmful” after “liking” two tweets that a writer alleged were transphobic.

Yes children that’s right, there are people monitoring what you “like” (i.e. what you register your liking of or agreement with or respect for by clicking the “Like” button on one social media platform). Who knew anyone had the time? Let alone the inclination? Let alone the malice and stupidity and feeling of entitlement to tell all of us what we can and can’t say or even “like”?

From the Department of Things No 5-year-old Ever Said:

But what if you identify as benefiting from chiropracty?

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Some people may find this phrasing awkward.

… a clinical health psychologist and clinical director of the Transgender and Intersex Specialty Care Clinic at Mayo Clinic.

Oh great, medically promoted forced teaming. My understanding is that the preferred and/or technically correct term is DSD, and that “intersex” was considered insulting and misleading. But here we have the MAYO CLINIC using it in order to lump it in with transgenderism, in accordance with the bullshit “Sex is a spectrum!” tenets of gender ideology. DSDs are, in my understanding, a range of discreet, sex-specific ways in which human development fails to achieve the goal of producing one of two types of healthy, functional reproductive tissues and systems that normal development is, ideally, supposed to build. While the occasionally ambiguous or confusing external genitalia may lead to an incorrect “assignment at birth” to the wrong sex*, with subsequent complications resulting from the psychological baggage that comes with socially imposed gender roles, the DSD condition itself has nothing whatsoever to do with putative “gender identity.” To suggest there is some connection (which this teaming up is designed to suggest, like some genderist version of Eyes, Ears, Nose, and Throat) is deceptive.

Where do these two completely different phenomena overlap? Nowhere, as far as I can tell. What commonalities of treatment are there? I would think very few. I can only conclude that this yoking together of such disparate conditions is a politically motivated [tactic], not medical. Who gains from this arrangement? Trans ideology. Who suffers? Anyone suffering from a DSD condition, as their actual physiological needs have been coupled to the demands of a delusional belief system that is completely unrelated to DSDs, and may be almost entirely psychological. Have they updated their obstetrics and midwifery centres to shackle them to departments dedicated to studying and promoting the important roles played by storks and cabbage leaves in human reproduction? It would make as much sense as this linkage between transgender “medecine” and the care of people with DSDs.

*The use of which terminology is one of the sole reasons, along with the imputation of sex being a “spectrum” through abuse of the whole “intersex” idea, that transgenderism has ever concerned itself with people who have DSDs. The politically expedient appropriation of concepts germane solely to DSDs is the only point of the operation, the only reason they’ve been dragged under the “trans umbrella” in the first place. This unethical appropriation provides a good chunk of the supposed “science” that genderists claim to have supporting their ideology. Take that away and they’re left with even less justification and proof for their contentions.

The Mayo Clinic blog in September 2022:

Is chestfeeding the new breastfeeding?: Explaining gender-neutral medical terms.

Articles or online posts — even other articles on this blog — are now often using phrases like “person with a uterus,” “pregnant person” or “anyone with a prostate,” instead of the words “woman” or “man.”

Some people may find this phrasing awkward or wonder why it is used — believing that the words “men” and “women” are simpler. The change in language could even feel challenging or threatening.

The change in language could even feel like, and be, part of a ferocious campaign to push women out of sight in every possible context.

“Controversy is created when people feel like gender-neutral terms are erasing the gender binary. And that’s when we get a little bit of pushback, because some say, ‘Well then, you’re basically saying that men or women don’t exist,’ ” says Cesar Gonzalez, Ph.D., L.P. (he/they), a clinical health psychologist and clinical director of the Transgender and Intersex Specialty Care Clinic at Mayo Clinic. “That’s not what we’re saying.”

No, he/they, that’s not what we say. What we say is that you’re linguistically deleting women from everything to do with women, for the sake of pretending that men can be women. We also say that medics of all people should not try to convince us that some men are women.

The purpose is to use terms that are accurate and apply to you no matter your sex or gender identity.

Think about pregnancy, which is often viewed as being an exclusively female phenomenon. It’s easy to use the term “pregnant women” without a second thought.

But there are transmasculine individuals who may become pregnant, and they don’t feel that the term “pregnant women” applies to them. The more neutral term “pregnant person” can apply to someone who is male, female or nonbinary, and everyone is included.

But “transmasculine individuals” who “become” pregnant are women, whether they feel that the word applies to them or not. It’s not the job of medics to prop up people’s fantasies, especially fantasies about something as basic and medically relevant as which sex they are.

Using exclusive terms can be harmful. As an example, contraception is sometimes defined as ways for women to prevent pregnancy, says Dr. Davidge-Pitts.

No, it’s always defined as that, because that’s what it means. Think about it. Contra. Ception. Get it now?

But that definition excludes transmasculine individuals, Dr. Davidge-Pitts says, who then might not feel that they need contraception. And even if they are aware that they need contraception, they may not be comfortable asking for it if they don’t feel that their provider will be accepting of their identity.

Then they need to grow the fuck up. They do not need to change the language for everyone for the sake of their fragile breakable feeble idennniny.

“By not acknowledging inclusivity, we’re adding to health inequity, we’re adding to further discrimination, and we’re adding to people not being comfortable seeking medical care, which then relates to poor well-being and health long term,” Dr. Davidge-Pitts says. “It has this domino effect.”

Hey, guess what, Doc, it works the other way too. I’m not comfortable seeking medical care from medics who talk this kind of drooling pathetic bilge. I want adult medical care thank you very much.

“People who don’t fit into boxes are the ones who experience the most stigma, the most discrimination, the most harassment, the most health disparities,” Dr. Gonzalez says.

Really? Really? Are you sure about that? Not immigrants? Poor people? Homeless people? Addicts? People of color?

I think Dr. Gonzalez just made all that up. A homemade on the spot statistic, which seems highly unlikely to be true.

Suzanne Moore on Labour’s indifference to women:

On the conference floor, grumblings of winter fuel allowances, the cruel two-child benefit cap and assisted dying rumble under the surface. But the big issue Labour [has] yet to get its head around is that of people like me: women who believe, shockingly, that biology is real. 

This is the first year that the Labour Women’s Declaration (LWD) movement has been allowed into conference and it has a stall and some terrific events. The LWD believe that women and girls are subject to discrimination and oppression on the basis of their sex, have the right to single-sex spaces and are not to be intimidated for discussing this. 

Such a zany belief, yeah?!

But The LGB Alliance, which was founded in opposition to Stonewall’s policies on transgender issues, is still verboten. When I asked their spokeswoman why, she said they are never given any explanation. Why lesbian, gay and bisexual people cannot organise without including the many diverse groups now under the cover of the trans umbrella, many of whom aren’t same sex-attracted, is simply ridiculous.

Well, if Labour won’t explain, we’ll have to explain it for them. They’re misogynist and homophobic. If they don’t want to be called that, they should stop performing it.

It’s fine for women with status to stick their necks out – which these days simply means insisting that biological sex exists – but others in the room told us that if they speak up at their local Constituency Labour Party (CLP) meetings they are met with hostility.

The institutional capture of radical trans ideology may slowly be beginning to crumble top down but it is still deeply embedded in our schools, the NHS and universities. And that’s a challenge.

Most Labour people will say this is not a priority. There is too much other stuff to sort out. But at some point even the dimmest of them could join the dots between this dismantling of women’s rights and the fact that male violence is rising and that most of those who present with gender dysphoria are teenage girls who reject the burgeoning signs that they are turning into women. 

If it were anyone else it would be a priority, but it’s just boring tedious women so we have to sort all the other stuff out instead.

Wait.

Isn’t this parody? Everyone is yelling at it but surely it’s parody. Isn’t it?

Another thing about those residential “schools” –

Residential school students did not receive the same education as the general population in the public school system, and the schools were sorely underfunded. Teachings focused primarily on practical skills. Girls were primed for domestic service and taught to do laundry, sew, cook, and clean. Boys were taught carpentry, tinsmithing, and farming. Many students attended class part-time and worked for the school the rest of the time: girls did the housekeeping; boys, general maintenance and agriculture. This work, which was involuntary and unpaid, was presented as practical training for the students, but many of the residential schools could not run without it. With so little time spent in class, most students had only reached grade five by the time they were 18. At this point, students were sent away. Many were discouraged from pursuing further education.

So in fact they weren’t even schools, they were prisons with forced labor. It’s all so very Goldenbridge.

Abuse at the schools was widespread: emotional and psychological abuse was constant, physical abuse was metred out as punishment, and sexual abuse was also common. Survivors recall being beaten and strapped; some students were shackled to their beds; some had needles shoved in their tongues for speaking their native languages. These abuses, along with overcrowding, poor sanitation, and severely inadequate food and health care, resulted in a shockingly high death toll. In 1907, government medical inspector P.H. Bryce reported that 24 percent of previously healthy Indigenous children across Canada were dying in residential schools.  This figure does not include children who died at home, where they were frequently sent when critically ill. Bryce reported that anywhere from 47 percent (on the Peigan Reserve in Alberta) to 75 percent (from File Hills Boarding School in Saskatchewan) of students discharged from residential schools died shortly after returning home.

75 percent!!!

Says celebrity trans person Brianna Wu:

Here is why I am frustrated with non-binary people. In 1979, the protocol came out to legally change genders. There’s been a serious public policy effort to educate not just medical providers but the public and legislators. This has been a moderate political movement, strategically nonpartisan with lots of science to back it up. Then about five years ago, this non-binary trend exploded. Their main political tactic has been to conflate my medical condition with their identity even though there’s zero evidence this is the same thing. Rather than legitimate activism through the political process, they mostly just Hector and shame people that cannot magically intuit their pronouns.

One, hilarious, obviously, but two, “with lots of science to back it up”? Show us on the doll exactly where the science is.

I’m looking for some background. Here’s some from something called Indigenous Foundations with an arts.ubc.ca address, i.e Arts at the University of British Columbia:

The Residential School System

The term residential schools refers to an extensive school system set up by the Canadian government and administered by churches that had the nominal objective of educating Indigenous children but also the more damaging and equally explicit objectives of indoctrinating them into Euro-Canadian and Christian ways of living and assimilating them into mainstream white Canadian society. The residential school system officially operated from the 1880s into the closing decades of the 20th century. The system forcibly separated children from their families for extended periods of time and forbade them to acknowledge their Indigenous heritage and culture or to speak their own languages. Children were severely punished if these, among other, strict rules were broken. Former students of residential schools have spoken of horrendous abuse at the hands of residential school staff: physical, sexual, emotional, and psychological. Residential schools provided Indigenous students with inappropriate education, often only up to lower grades, that focused mainly on prayer and manual labour in agriculture, light industry such as woodworking, and domestic work such as laundry work and sewing.

Residential schools systematically undermined Indigenous, First Nations, Métis and Inuit cultures across Canada and disrupted families for generations, severing the ties through which Indigenous culture is taught and sustained, and contributing to a general loss of language and culture. Because they were removed from their families, many students grew up without experiencing a nurturing family life and without the knowledge and skills to raise their own families. The devastating effects of the residential schools are far-reaching and continue to have a significant impact on Indigenous communities. The residential school system is widely considered a form of genocide because of the purposeful attempt from the government and church to eradicate all aspects of Indigenous cultures and lifeworlds.

And, I would think, because of something perhaps less tangible, but more basic and destructive: the foundational assumption of the whole thing is that the children are being removed (or rescued) from something profoundly inferior. It frames the children’s own families and neighbors, their communities in the very literal sense, as bad, harmful, diseased, broken, horrific.

It’s painful to think about, really. The more obvious harms are bad enough – separation from family and everyone they knew, separation from familiar surroundings, imprisonment among a lot of nuns and priests – but the slightly less obvious messages about the life they knew are…well, they’re making me flinch.

From the 1990s onward, the government and the churches involved—Anglican, Presbyterian, United, and Roman Catholic—began to acknowledge their responsibility for an education scheme that was specifically designed to “kill the Indian in the child.” 

It has the structure of a myth or fairy tale. The child lives with parents who are poor and humble but loving and protective; the child is “rescued” and removed to relatives who are rich but cold and distant. We all know the happy ending doesn’t involve forgetting all about the loving parents.

The early origins of residential schools in Canada are found in the implementation of the mission system in the 1600s. The churches and European settlers brought with them the assumption that their own civilization was the pinnacle of human achievement. They interpreted the socio-cultural differences between themselves and Indigenous Peoples as “proof” that Canada’s first inhabitants were ignorant, savage, and—like children—in need of guidance. They felt the need to “civilize” Indigenous Peoples. Education—a federal responsibility—became the primary means to this end.

You can see why they would think that. Look at us! We got here from way over there because we made this fabulous technology! Obviously we’re the pinnacle!

In the 1880s, in conjunction with other federal assimilation policies, the government began to establish residential schools across Canada. Authorities would frequently take children to schools far from their home communities, part of a strategy to alienate them from their families and familiar surroundings. In 1920, under the Indian Act, it became mandatory for every Indigenous child to attend a residential school and illegal for them to attend any other educational institution.

In short every Indigenous child was sentenced to prison. Quite the interesting law.

I suppose part of the obsession with mass burials is that (if they exist) they’re something tangible and real in the here and now. It’s not possible to shout at the people who passed the 1920 Indian Act, but it may be possible to find some mass graves, some day, if only we can find them.

People can be so absurd. Some of them think just saying loudly that you won’t let anything go wrong=nothing will go wrong.

A transcript from a key meeting at the firm behind the ill-fated Titan submersible has revealed the CEO said in 2018: “No-one is dying under my watch – period.”

Like that. He couldn’t know that. Bravado isn’t magic. The fact that it was his watch was not a magic safety guarantee. Saying “period” was not a magic safety guarantee.

It captures a heated exchange between OceanGate chief Stockton Rush and his former director of marine operations, David Lochridge, plus three other staff.

The log shows Mr Lochridge raised safety concerns, to which Rush responded: “I have no desire to die… I think this is one of the safest things I will ever do.”

But people who knew anything about it knew it was one of the least safe things he could do. The dangers were well known and very real.

People can and do convince themselves of anything. Men can be women and a submersible won’t implode under pressure of 375–400 atmospheres.

Fella wants to make what he considers “spewing bigotry” a jail-worthy crime.

An additional peculiarity is that he considers it “vile hate speech” to say that a man is not a woman.

It’s interesting that he has no understanding of human rights or freedom of speech, and that he thinks men can be women. Wrong on the concepts and wrong on the facts.