Jeffrey Toobin reminds us to be outraged:

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin called President Trump’s cries of “TREASON” on Friday morning “reckless and irresponsible,” adding that it’s yet another norm the President has broken.

“And treason is a crime for which death is a potential penalty,” Toobin said on CNN’s “New Day.” “It is so reckless and irresponsible to talk that way. One of the things that this president has done has violated so many norms.”

“It’s not illegal to say what he said, but the idea of a president accusing people of any crime — remember, he accused  Michael Cohen’s in-laws of crimes. A president, who is the head of the Justice Department, the head of the FBI, accusing people of crimes, much less crimes punishable by the death penalty, is really a grotesque abuse of power,” he added. “It’s gone on for so long now, that we’re kind of, oh, well, you know, it’s just another tweet. But it is worth pausing to recognize how reckless that is.”

It is. It always is.

Wait.

Discussions on women’s rights must include ALL women, including trans women, and move beyond outdated, exclusionary understandings of feminism. #NoTERFsonourTurf” [4/4]

— Liberation at EdUni (@EdUniLiberation) May 7, 2019

Discussions on women’s rights must include ALL women and “TERFs” must be kept out. So discussions on women’s rights must include ALL women but not the women who disagree that men can be women. So discussions on women’s rights must include men who say they are women and the women who love them but not women who refuse to agree that men who don’t “identify as” men are therefore women. So ALL women but not ALL women. Mkay.

H/t Holly

https://twitter.com/aytchellesse/status/1129408007564140544

The Liverpool Echo reported a few days ago:

Two women have been charged after a woman was threatened with a hammer during a shocking road rage incident in a car park.

Footage from the incident shows two small groups coming to blows at Stonedale Retail Park in Croxteth on Wednesday night (May 8).

Initially the groups can be seen shoving and pushing each other before a woman retrieves a hammer from the boot of a car.

At one point the video shows a woman swinging the hammer towards another, younger woman, who tries to defend herself with a shoe.

A 19-year-old woman suffered head injuries, which are believed to be from a punch and was taken to hospital for assessment, say police.

A spokesperson for Merseyside Police told the ECHO: “We can confirm that two women have been arrested following an incident in Stonedale Retail Park on Wednesday night, 8 May.

“At around 7.15pm, officers were called to Stonedale Retail Park on East Lancs Road to reports of an altercation in a car park near to KFC, and threats being made by a woman in possession of a hammer.

“A third woman, aged 19, was reported as having sustained a head injury, believed to have been from a punch. She was taken to hospital for assessment.”

Carol Lea, 55,  from Bosworth Road in St Helens has been charged with possessing an offensive weapon in a public place and threatening behaviour and released on conditional bail pending further enquiries.

Merseyside Police also confirmed on Twitter:

We can confirm that two women from #StHelens have been arrested following an incident in Stonedale Retail Park on East Lancs Rd on Wed night, after reports of a woman in possession of a hammer. Contact @MerPolCC, call 101 ref 19100230164 or @CrimestoppersUK on 0800 555 111 pic.twitter.com/p0eW8MKazr

— Merseyside Police (@MerseyPolice) May 10, 2019

There’s just one slight problem.

https://twitter.com/JarvisBoatOwner/status/1127919685121585153

The perp with the hammer in action:

https://twitter.com/SmithGinge/status/1126503936775450624

Oops. Wokey McWokerson made a little mistake.

https://twitter.com/MJB_SF/status/1129045483157110785

Yaaaaaaay inclusivity, no mention of women, just “uterus holding individual”! Utopia is nigh!

Oh but wait though, what’s that ugly thing in the line above? “Men”? That can’t be right. On the one hand men, on the other hand uterus holding individuals? Do these rules apply only to women?

Woking every day is not easy.

Playing the pretend-knowledge trick: I am an expert in this made-up Thing (field? discipline? ideology? campaign?) so I get to say anyone who disputes said made-up Thing has no right to do so because No Expertise.

Like trans-activist Ugla Stefanía Jónsdóttir for instance:

Experts on trans rights and people who have been working in the field for decades are being pitted against almost anyone with a negative opinion about trans people – regardless of who they are. This seems to be a trend among anti-trans campaigners; they’re given a platform despite their lack of knowledge or experience of the discussion they’re taking part in. As an example, in a controversial move, Scottish MP Joan McAlpine has just invited Canadian writer Meghan Murphy, founder of the blog Feminist Current, to speak at the Scottish Parliament about ‘how transgender ideology affects women’s rights’.

Murphy’s blog has long been known for its strong anti-trans stance and regularly publishes material that advocates against trans rights and discusses the alleged dangers of the ‘transgender lobby’. It is a go-to-site for strong anti-trans campaigners.

It would be safe to say that Murphy herself has no expertise, qualifications or experience with transgender rights.

But would it? No, it wouldn’t. Murphy has, for instance, abundant experience with the way the more belligerent trans activists work hard to silence Murphy and other feminists. And while we’re on the subject, what expertise, qualifications or experience does Ugla Stefania have with women’s rights? Other than battling them?

Her invitation to this discussion therefore seems quite out of touch, such as if a climate change denier was invited to discussion about how to stop the catastrophic damage we are doing to our planet. Or if a representative of the Flat Earth Society was invited to a discussion about an upcoming space expedition by NASA.

Oh no you don’t. There is a mountain of Actual Science dealing with climate change, and the same goes for cosmology and engineering. Transery isn’t a body of knowledge, or any kind of knowledge at all, it’s mere declaration of identity. Trans ideology insists with great ferocity that it is entirely a matter of self-identification, so it can’t possibly also be a matter of specialist knowledge. “A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman” – how many times have we been told that, usually with menaces? There’s  nothing to know, no expertise or qualifications or experience required. It’s all about the assertion, and the fact that it is all about the assertion is the very thing we’re attacked and shunned for questioning. So no: it’s not even slightly like climate change denial.

People who fundamentally do not believe trans people are the gender they know themselves to be, and who deliberately and repeatedly misgender and misrepresent people’s identities and personhood, can never be seen as reasonable representatives of this debate. Trans people are who they say they are, and any conversation that doesn’t acknowledge this is inherently flawed and biased.

See? She says it herself. “Trans people are who they say they are” so what expertise can there possibly be?

These groups and individuals are disguising themselves as protectors of the rights of ‘women and girls’, but it’s time we see them for what they truly are: misguided people with conservative and fundamentalist views about sex and gender. They do not want equality, but supremacy.

Interesting, that’s what anti-feminist men have been saying about feminism since before Mary Wollstonecraft learned to read.

I hadn’t heard of Miriam Toews until I read this New Yorker profile of her.

Toews, who is fifty-four, is one of the best-known and best-loved Canadian writers of her generation. She grew up in Steinbach, a town founded by Mennonites in the province of Manitoba, for which the colony in Bolivia was named. (“Toews,” which rhymes with “saves,” is as recognizably Mennonite as “Cohen” is Jewish.) Her fiction has often dealt with the religious hypocrisy and patriarchal dominion that she feels to be part of her heritage, and with a painful emotional legacy, harder to name but as present as a watermark. Her father and her sister both died too young, and she sees a certain Mennonite tendency toward sorrow and earthly guilt as bearing some responsibility for their deaths.

Her father and sister both committed suicide, we find out later.

One segment of my family tree is Mennonite, which I find deeply weird. My maternal grandfather moved from farm to town (in Iowa) and he must have left the Mennonite part decisively behind, because I don’t remember even hearing the word in childhood. Not so with Toews.

Over a lunch of butter-chicken rotis, the conversation turned to Toews’s novels. An Elvira-like figure appears in just about all of them, pragmatic, comical, full of good sense, though some of these incarnations are more fictional than others.

Elvira is her mother.

“I have no secrets left, and that’s O.K.,” Elvira said. “I stand behind Miriam one hundred per cent. She has a mind I don’t have, and I know that. And with what they call your coming-out story—”

“Coming-of-age story,” Toews said. “ ‘A Complicated Kindness.’ ”

The novel, published in 2004, is narrated by sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel, who has begun to rebel against the repressive religious culture of her small Mennonite town. It won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and became a best-seller, the kind of book that gets assigned in school and included on lists of novels that “make you proud to be a Canadian,” and it turned Toews, a niche, indie sort of Canadian writer, into a famous one. It is a master class in schputting; not even Menno Simons, for whom the faith is named, gets away with his dignity intact, and many Mennonites took offense.

Do I want to read a novel narrated by a teenage girl who has begun to rebel against the repressive religious culture of her small Mennonite town? Oh hell yes.

Of course there was angry reaction.

“It was Marj who also really helped me a lot, who told me, ‘Listen, people are going to come after you, people will be angry,’ ” Toews said. “She told me to say this thing I’ve said for so long, and so often, which is that it’s not a critique of the Mennonite faith or of Mennonite people but of fundamentalism, of that culture of control. I wish that people who felt that they were being personally attacked could step back and say, ‘Maybe she is really talking about the hypocrisy of the intolerance, the oppressiveness, particularly for girls and women, the emphasis on shame and guilt and punishment.’ ” Her voice was catching. “We all have a right to fight in life.”

This happens with all religions. They all treat women as dangerous rebellious contaminants, and they all control and punish them harshly. We all have a right to resist.

It is not lost on Toews that her separatist ancestors’ fates have depended on those who wield worldly power, or that their pacifism has often been contingent on the conquest of other peoples. The founders of Steinbach came from Russia in the eighteen-seventies, at the invitation of the newly formed Canadian government, which offered them land that had been wrested from people of the First Nations. The newcomers belonged to a particularly punitive sect of Mennonites. Harmonizing while singing hymns was considered sinful, and so was dancing. Trains might encourage contact with the outside world, so Steinbach had no station. Someone who was thought to have done or said something unacceptable could be shunned by the church, and cast out of the community.

By the time Toews was born, in 1964, shunning was no longer official practice, but the atmosphere remained oppressive, nosy, censorious. “It’s a town that exists in the world based on the idea of it not existing in the world,” Nomi Nickel says.

Rather like spending your whole life committing suicide.

Biden is so full of shit.

“History will treat this administration’s time as an aberration,” Biden told an Iowa ballroom-full of supporters last week. “This is not the Republican Party,” he continued, noting his longstanding ties to “my Republican friends in the House and Senate.”

If this is not the Republican Party, why is it occupying all those Republican seats and passing all those Republican votes and protecting Donald Trump no matter what he does? If it’s not the Republican Party why don’t they all quit, or vote with the Democrats to hobble and then impeach Trump?

Indeed, as The New York Times has reported, “in the Obama White House, he was known as the ‘McConnell whisperer’ for his skills in striking agreements with the often recalcitrant Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell.”

And how well that worked! Don’t take my word for it: Ask Supreme Court Justice Merrick Garland. Behold how many Republicans voted to uphold the Affordable Care Act once it was bringing affordable health care to tens of millions of their compatriots. And note the swarms of Republicans who opposed the Trump tax cut for directing a trillion or so dollars to the already super-rich.

For real.

Biden should not be running at all. It’s sheer entitlement and it needs to die.

The barmaid hits a nerve.

Lindsey Graham told Don Junior to break the law. Seems a bit flaky for a US senator.

[W]e ought to reserve some surprise for occasions like Monday, when the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, himself a lawyer, told a private citizen to defy a Republican senator and to break the law. And that’s what Graham did when he advised Donald Trump Jr. to ignore a subpoena from the Senate Intelligence Committee, run by his Republican colleague Richard Burr. We should pause to be horrified. For the record, in the past Graham claimed that both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton could be impeached for defying subpoenas. But that was in the b.t. era: before trump.

…

Burr has questions, and observers in both parties say they’re not likely to be frivolous. It should be underscored: He heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, so his concerns likely have to do with issues of national security; Lindsey Graham doesn’t even sit on that committee. Burr is one of the so-called “Gang of Eight,” the eight congressional leaders empowered to learn about the most sensitive details of threats to the US and intelligence operations; Graham is not.

…

Maybe the worst thing to happen Monday, in terms of the rule of law, was Attorney General William Barr’s decision to open an investigation into the origins of the investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 election. Trump is also trying to get information and possible assistance from the new Ukrainian government in investigating allegations against Hunter Biden as well as his father, former vice president Joe Biden…

In other words it’s all terrible and getting worse, and no one seems to be able to stop it.

Newsweek reports:

Alabama’s bill banning virtually all abortions in the state is a “violation of human rights,” Amnesty International said on Wednesday.

Which is true as far as it goes, but it’s more specifically a violation of women’s rights. If Amnesty talked about police shootings of black people it wouldn’t call that “violation of human rights,” it would call it a violation of black people’s rights, because it’s that specific issue. Somehow though the rules are different when it comes to women.

“Alabama’s vote is the latest in a string of abortion bans specifically designed to strip away people’s reproductive rights. These bans will be deadly, endanger pregnant people’s lives and criminalize doctors and health care providers for simply doing their jobs and providing care,” Tarah Demant, the Director of the Gender, Sexuality and Identity Program at Amnesty International USA, said in a statement. [emphasis added]

Wouldn’t it be nice if the Director of the Gender, Sexuality and Identity Program at Amnesty International USA didn’t try to erase women? She did manage to spit out the word at the end, but only at the end.

“These bans reinforce violence against women by victimizing survivors of rape and sexual violence twofold by denying their right to access abortion.”

In future say it from the beginning of the statement.

Amnesty’s brilliant decision to use Alabama’s murderous ban on abortion as an opportunity to ignore women by saying

Abortion bans like the one passed in Alabama are a violation of human rights. These bans will be deadly. They will endanger pregnant people’s lives.

is not going over well. Replies are uniformly furious.

Amnesty – you are part of the problem.

You are erasing women. It’s is women’s rights that are being attacked.

Name the problem. Or be part of the problem.

— Andy (@lecanardnoir) May 15, 2019

"pregnant people" FFS.

Women. Say it: "women".

— Alan Henness (@zeno001) May 15, 2019

They will endanger WOMEN's lives. WOMEN. It is not a dirty word.

— AquatintDeliberatelyDefiantandDistasteful (@Aquatint) May 15, 2019

https://twitter.com/ThatMidwife/status/1128744618462470146

https://twitter.com/Creagh_Dubh/status/1128740299281448960

Guest post by Josh Slocum

The contemporary worship of the concept of being “inclusive” is in direct opposition to drawing boundaries. Personal boundaries, conceptual boundaries, physical boundaries.

It’s not merely a soft-hearted plea to be more helpful to others. It’s a disguised attack on the right of people to have any personal, emotional, or intellectual space. It’s an attack on the idea of judgment and discernment.

It’s an attack on the most basic foundations of being a healthy, confident person.

I posted about Councillor Gregor Murray a couple of times last year, in reference to his habit of calling women “utter cunts” and “roasters” and similar. Now it’s gotten him suspended for two months.

Gregor Murray, who represents [Dundee’s] North East ward, was called before the Standards Commission for Scotland on Wednesday but did not appear in person.

The hearing panel found the councillor – who quit the SNP this week amid claims of “institutional transphobia” in the party – also broke ethical standards by using abusive and vile language to and directed at members of the public.

The councillor was alleged to have used “terms that were insulting and offensive during twitter exchanges with a member of the public, on gender related issues, in January and July last year and, as such, behaved in a disrespectful manner”.

In their judgement the panel said the councillor had abused the complainer by referring to her as a TERF (a pejorative term which stands for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’).

Announcing the decision, panel chairwoman Ashleigh Dunn said Gregor Murray had broken the Councillors’ Code of Conduct in all complaints made.

Isn’t that interesting – they agree with us TERFs that “TERF” is a pejorative, and a harsh one at that. (If it were mild they probably wouldn’t have suspended him, I’m thinking.)

In a statement in response to the ruling, Gregor Murray pledged to take legal advice “as to what my next steps are, for when my health permits”.

The councillor said: “I am severely disappointed in the decision made today by the Standards Commission, which I believe to be a miscarriage of justice.

“I entirely accept that it is not appropriate for me to swear – I have apologised for this on numerous occasions, and have already accepted sanctions for doing so. I am also extremely worried by the precedent they have set that TERF is an offensive term.”

Oh yes? What about the precedent set by the innumerable tweets promising violence against “TERFs,” images of guns and knives and wire-wrapped baseball bats aimed at “TERFs,” banners and posters and T shirts threatening mayhem against “TERFs”? I guess he doesn’t worry about that at all? Useful to be male, isn’t it.

Updating to add:

My statement in response to Cllr Gregor Murray's suspension by the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life. pic.twitter.com/9wP1rhnnIk

— Joan McAlpine (@JoanMcAlpine) May 15, 2019

God damn Amnesty.

Abortion bans like the one passed in Alabama are a violation of human rights.

These bans will be deadly.

They will endanger pregnant people’s lives.

They will re-victimize survivors of rape and sexual violence by denying them their rights.

We must not go back.

— Amnesty International USA (@amnestyusa) May 15, 2019