Not a misogynist dude at all.

Sorry if you’re sick of McKinnon, but the combination of sports cheat and philosophy instructor and pugnaciously misogynist trans activist is just too special.

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1111590043108421632

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1111590859903041536

“You are CIS even though you reject that label; also, too, you are trying to control us.”

Currently he’s bragging about picking a fight with Paula Radcliffe.

So we’ve got philosophy instructors publicly fantasizing about women dying in grease fires and we’ve got presidents calling Congressional representatives “pencil neck.”

“Little pencil neck Adam Schiff,” he says, to cheers and applause.

TRUMP: "Little pencil neck Adam Schiff. He has the smallest, thinnest neck I have ever seen. He is not a long-ball hitter." #BeBest pic.twitter.com/NW7oU3z4Il

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 28, 2019

He goes on to say Schiff has the “smallest, thinnest neck” he’s ever seen. Are we supposed to assume “neck” is a euphemism for “dick”? No doubt we are. But keeping it above the waist…is a wide neck better than a thin one? Really?

Trump has plenty of neck, for sure. Trump’s neck is as wide as his head, so you get a solid block down to the shoulders. But…is that a good thing? I’m not seeing it, particularly. Is it supposed to bespeak manliness? I’m not seeing that either.

Looks like an ok neck to me.

Meanwhile McKinnon – who teaches philosophy, let’s not forget – is still defending the “die in a fire” brand of rhetoric.

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1111596918449278977

Haw haw. Yes, so funny, so wry, so sophisticated. Of course it’s also true that mouthy feminist women tend to be targets of a great deal of “voicing of violent revenge fantasies” of that kind on Twitter and other social media, and it has been known to drive some of them off social media altogether, which means they are silenced in that particular medium…but let’s giggle about it amongst ourselves anyway, because we know better than those stupid cis women who are too uncool to pretend to be the other sex.

Finally.

It is great to see straightforward, non ideological, answers to common questions that have respect for established science and the paucity of evidence around gender incongruity. pic.twitter.com/uWyDZVITcf

— Andy (@lecanardnoir) March 29, 2019

“It is not possible to change biological sex.”

It takes only eight words.

“There is no agreed scientific basis for someone having the mind of someone from the opposite sex or being born in the wrong body.”

Bam.

The corrupt self-dealing sleazy treasonous shits on the Trumpian side of Congress are whining that Adam Schiff should resign as chair of the House Intelligence Committee. The hell he should.

The House Intelligence Committee’s Republican minority demanded Thursday that Rep. Adam Schiff, the panel’s Democratic chairman, resign from that role over his handling of Russia investigations involving President Donald Trump.

Schiff, who has been one of special counsel Robert Mueller’s leading advocates, laid out what called the “evidence of collusion” in a fiery response.

The call for Schiff to step down, submitted during a hearing in a letter signed by all nine of the committee’s Republican members, came hours after Trump tweeted Thursday morning that Schiff “should be forced to resign from Congress!”

Trump should be forced to resign from the presidency and then locked up in a damp oozing smelly cell with corn cobs to sleep on and lutefisk to eat for the rest of his life.

“Your actions both past and present are incompatible with your duty as Chairman of this committee,” the Republicans tell Schiff in the letter. “As such we have no faith in your ability to discharge your duties in a manner consistent with your Constitutional responsibility and urge your immediate resignation as Chairman of this Committee.”

What a pack of loathsome compromised hacks.

Sports editor dude at not-NY Times explains to women athletes why it doesn’t matter if trans women shove them aside:

I’m writing this knowing that most of the people reading it will disagree, knowing that the responses will likely be aggressive. But I’m writing it because I feel the other side deserves a voice. This does not make me right. This does not make me wrong. But in the debate over transgender athletes there has been one dominant narrative, so this is an attempt to try to change a few minds.

He means the women. You know, the historically dominant sex, historically in charge of all the narratives. He’s hoping to be able to be heard over the domineering roar of all these powerful women who’ve had it their own way for so long.

Sharron Davies explained in an interview with The Times about why she wants the IOC to take a stance over transgender women competing alongside people who were born women. She is not alone in feeling strongly about this, concerned that women’s sport is under threat and that there will no longer be a level playing field.

She and Martina Navratilova are important, influential voices who speak for many women on this topic. They, like most of us, are not experts though.

All right then.

We @IndexCensorship are seriously concerned about apparent rise in police intervention on issues of legal speech in UK, particularly apparent confusion between speech that social media platforms might choose to outlaw under their terms of service and legally permissible speech. https://t.co/PdoFyQm5ta

— Jodie Ginsberg (@jodieginsberg) March 28, 2019

We are discussing this with @Twitter and have raised with @Law_Commission as it reviews hate crime law, and with @HumanRightsCtte. We will also raise with @PoliceChiefs.

— Jodie Ginsberg (@jodieginsberg) March 28, 2019

Good. Carry on.

McKinnon promoting the cause again:

Originally a comment by latsot on A much-debated topic in Menlo Park.

In defense of we socially clueless techy fools, the problems Facebook has with this kind of thing are mostly due to three things:

1. A disconnect between policy makers and technical people.

This can cause any number of problems and I’ve seen them all a hundred times. A classic one (and Facebook does this a lot) is when policy makers ask the tech people whether they can do X and the tech people say “no, X is either practically or fundamentally impossible” and the policy people say the tech people are just being negative or not trying hard enough or that some technology that eats poorly-defined policies and shits out magic will probably happen at some point in the future and we should plan for that. Providing the people who have already told them it’s impossible will just try hard enough, of course. What’s wrong with those socially clueless techy fools, anyway? It’s not as though we pay them to think, what else have they got to do but even more impossible things than we’re already demanding?

Another is the aforementioned poorly-defined policies and protocols. When they are put to the software people we say “yeah but…. look at all these holes. Look at the instances when it won’t work. Look at the fact that we can’t measure the things you want us to measure” and so on. Policies are one thing, protocols and engineering are quite another. I’ve been in dozens and dozens of meetings about this sort of thing. The policy makers think they can just say “make it do this sort of thing” and everything will work out fine. From their point of view, they’re absolutely right because we techies get the blame when the software behaves in exactly the poorly-specified way that was asked for. But we are really good at turning policies into protocols when there’s mutual respect. There never is.

There are lots and lots of other examples, but the problem isn’t either camp, it’s the failure of the camps to work together. These days this is rarely (in practice) the fault of the people trying to build the architecture and write the software so much as it is the way the organisation is structured. Even today there’s a widespread attitude that the tech groups ought to be subservient to everyone else and should just “GET IT THE FUCK DONE” regardless of reality or budget, which brings me to:

2. Inability to let software and architecture experts do their jobs

Give we socially clueless techy fools a set of requirements and enough time and money to do it and we’ll turn them into something that actually constitutes a set of requirements. Tell us to build a bridge to the moon (and some of what the non-tech divisions of Facebook regularly ask is genuinely about as ambitious) and we’ll do what we do and eventually say “but what you really want is this” and often “but we can’t do that, we can do this” or “we can do that but it will cost all the money in the world and won’t work anyway”.

Most of the time in big companies some enormous sum of money will be signed off to make that happen (yay!) but within a fortnight large amounts of that budget will be pulled, but we’re still supposed to deliver the same thing on the same timescale. We say that we can deliver less or deliver later but not both….. and hear nothing. We’re supposed to make that decision so that the policy people don’t get the blame when it all goes wrong.

Inevitably (seriously, on every software project anyone has ever done ever) we’re told that we can take the budget and time we need out of the testing budget. We all knows what happens then: the software doesn’t get finished and it doesn’t get tested properly, either. Besides, someone will long ago have seen this big, lovely testing budget sitting around not being used yet and plundered it. Every. Single. Time.

3. They’re lying

What Facebook has become is exactly what it wanted to be. The ‘problems’ are its business plans. The things it’s claiming to fix are what it wanted to happen in the first place, not the accidental consequences of a platform that somehow got away from itself. It was the business types and the policy types who made that happen, not the techy types. I’m damn sure they asked the software people about it and they told them what the consequences would likely be and were ignored. Again and again, I’d stake my life on it.

Oh and I should throw in a 4. Don’t ever consider that Zuckerberg is anything like a veteran of software and architecture developmet. He demonstrates his technical idiocy on a daily basis. He couldn’t write “hello world” on his own cock.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve said several times here that software developers are often idiots about… well, most things, especially women, equality and not being a dick.

But what’s happening with Facebook is deception. It’s a company built on deception by people concerned with money more than technology. And the difficulties they are facing with being a terrible company and treating everyone including their users, people who are not their users and entire fucking democracies as subservient to their requirements are not due to we socially clueless techies or the technically clueless policy makers but to the capitally rapacious business types and their failure to learn about how technology – and the businesses that rely on it – scale.

In other words, the main problem is that our governments blithely allowed companies like Facebook to become de facto and then actual monopolies and pretended not to know what would happen.

Alex Miller at Rolling Stone talked to Cecile Richards, former head of Planned Parenthood. One subject was the Princess and Prince.

I want to talk about your meeting with Ivanka and Jared, because that was an extraordinary episode [in your book].Can you talk a little bit about that meeting? They invited you to a Trump golf course?
Yes.

You must have had some hope that the meeting could go well, or you wouldn’t have taken it.
Well, let’s be honest: We didn’t have a lot of options. And that was actually kind of what Jared Kushner said. He said, “Look, we control everything. We control Congress, we control the White House. So I’m kind of your only avenue.” I felt like if there was an avenue to talk to two of the most influential people in this administration about the work that Planned Parenthood does and how devastating it would be for millions of people if they were in fact to defund us, then I’ll go talk to anyone.

And they basically were like, “Your hands are tied. Stop doing abortions or else.”
It was clear that it was not actually a meeting about, “OK, how can we solve this problem? How can we actually protect the ability of people, and particularly women in this country, to get access to health care?” It was, “How can we, Jared Kushner and the administration, score a political win?”

And that, to me, seems to be their entire mode of operating since they’ve been elected — the lack of empathy or care for people that their policies are impacting, from family separation to putting children in cages. There seems to be zero interest in that. There wasn’t anything about like, “Wow, well, this is going to be really hard on women.”

In other words, they’re not just every bit as bad as you always thought, they’re even worse than that.

We were all holding out hope that Ivanka was going to be a messenger of empathy and reason. I think we’ve all been disabused of that opinion.
I mean, her concern was that I had not been appropriately thankful to her father, because he had said nice things about Planned Parenthood in his campaign.

While also saying he was going to shut down Planned Parenthood.
Yeah, exactly. I said, “Well, I’m not sure where I was going to get that ‘thank you’ in.”

“Before I was out of a job.”
Yeah. I felt like, for her it was all personal. It was all about her father. And that seems to be the way they operate. It’s not about what’s good for this country or what’s good for the people that they’re, frankly, supposed to be representing.

That is of course exactly why governments aren’t supposed to be family affairs, and why Trump never should have given his daughter and her husband jobs in his administration, and why they should have been prevented from taking those jobs, and why they should be thrown out now. They’re not supposed to be there to enrich and aggrandize themselves.

It also shows and underlines what awful shits they are.

Do you think the administration is trying to force the hand of organizations like Planned Parenthood in the hope that, in order to continue to get funding, they’ll just stop doing abortions? Or did they just want to shut them down?
You know, in a strange way, I wish that I thought someone was actually thinking about it that carefully. But yes, in that meeting, I think the most chilling thing was when Jared Kushner said, “I just want to read a headline that says, ‘Planned Parenthood Quits Providing Abortion Services.’” As if that was going to be the political victory that he was looking for, with absolutely zero regard for what that would mean for the health care of women.

Royalty doesn’t have to worry about things like that.

Vanity Fair has a big long piece about how Facebook attempts to deal with abuse.

To my surprise, the person in charge of it isn’t some socially clueless techy fool, she’s a former prosecutor from the Obama administration.

But when it comes to figuring out how Facebook actually works—how it decides what content is allowed, and what isn’t—the most important person in the company isn’t Mark Zuckerberg. It’s Monika Bickert, a former federal prosecutor and Harvard Law School graduate. At 42, Bickert is currently one of only a handful of people, along with her counterparts at Google, with real power to dictate free-speech norms for the entire world. In Oh, Semantics*, she sits at the head of a long table, joined by several dozen deputies in their 30s and 40s. Among them are engineers, lawyers, and P.R. people. But mostly they are policymakers, the people who write Facebook’s laws. Like Bickert, a number are veterans of the public sector, Obama-administration refugees eager to maintain some semblance of the pragmatism that has lost favor in Washington.

*the name of a meeting room

You’d think they’d be a little more able to figure things out than Zuckerberg types, but…

Facebook has a 40-page rule book listing all the things that are disallowed on the platform. They’re called Community Standards, and they were made public in full for the first time in April 2018. One of them is hate speech, which Facebook defines as an “attack” against a “protected characteristic,” such as gender, sexuality, race, or religion. And one of the most serious ways to attack someone, Facebook has decided, is to compare them to something dehumanizing.

Like: Animals that are culturally perceived as intellectually or physically inferior.

Or: Filth, bacteria, disease and feces.

That means statements like “black people are monkeys” and “Koreans are the scum of the earth” are subject to removal. But then, so is “men are trash.”

See the problem? If you remove dehumanizing attacks against gender, you may block speech designed to draw attention to a social movement like #MeToo. If you allow dehumanizing attacks against gender, well, you’re allowing dehumanizing attacks against gender. And if you do that, how do you defend other “protected” groups from similar attacks?

Erm. They seem to have missed the whole power-imbalance issue completely. It can’t be just “about race” or “about gender” – it has to do with hierarchies as well as categories.

Another idea is to treat the genders themselves differently. Caragliano cues up a slide deck. On it is a graph showing internal research that Facebook users are more upset by attacks against women than they are by attacks against men. Women would be protected against all hate speech, while men would be protected only against explicit calls for violence. “Women are scum” would be removed. “Men are scum” could stay.

Problem solved? Well … not quite. Bickert foresees another hurdle. “My instinct is not to treat the genders differently,” she tells me. “We live in a world where we now acknowledge there are many genders, not just men and women. I suspect the attacks you see are disproportionately against those genders and women, but not men.” If you create a policy based on that logic, though, “you end up in this space where it’s like, ‘Our hate-speech policy applies to everybody—except for men.’ ” Imagine how that would play.

Oh ffs. It’s hopeless.

In truth, “men are scum” is a well-known and much-debated topic in Menlo Park, with improbably large implications for the governing philosophy of the platform and, thus, the Internet. For philosophical and financial reasons, Facebook was established with one set of universally shared values. And in order to facilitate as much “sharing” as possible, no one group or individual would be treated differently from another. If you couldn’t call women “scum,” then you couldn’t call men “scum,” either.

If you take a step back, it’s kind of an idealistic way to think about the world. It’s also a classically Western, liberal way to think about the world. Give everyone an equal shot at free expression, and democracy and liberty will naturally flourish.

I don’t see it as idealistic so much as uncomprehending, blind, privileged. It’s just dense to think that the rules already and always work exactly the same way for everyone. “Everybody gets to call everybody a cunt; that’s freedom.” Except that it harms women no matter who is the target, but hey, liberty will naturally flourish.

This is a horror to watch.

This is a government room in a government building for government business. It is not a church.

I walked off the House floor in protest during today’s prayer led by a GOP member. This fire and brimstone Evangelical prayer was before the swearing in of the PA House’s first ever Muslim woman. It epitomizes religious intolerance. Below is the video. https://t.co/pq34UmK2Nn

— Rep. Kevin J. Boyle (@RepKevinBoyle) March 25, 2019

Meanwhile, the NRA is opposing the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act.

Wouldn’t it be great if women could “identify” our way out of violence?

The National Rifle Association is preparing to punish lawmakers for voting to protect women from their stalkers and domestic abusers. The gun lobby announced this week that it will dock its grades for politicians who vote to renew the Violence Against Women Act. The legislation, first passed in 1994, is up for reauthorization this session — augmented by a provision that could give law enforcement officials the power to confiscate guns from men who hurt or menace women.

NRA spokesperson Jennifer Baker told the National Journal that this “red-flag” provision — intended to protect women against gun violence from men who are exhibiting violent or dangerous behaviors — is an unacceptable encroachment on individual gun ownership rights.

Sure. The “right” to own guns is much more important than the right not to be murdered.

The case for stripping domestic abusers of their guns is powerful. An abused woman is five times more likely to be killed if the abuser is a gun-owner. When a domestic violence assault involves a firearm, it is 12 times more likely to end in the death of the victim. Laws like the red-flag provision proposed for VAWA save lives: In states adopting laws permitting confiscation of firearms from domestic abusers, intimate partner homicides have dropped by 7 percent.

“A gun in the house increases the chances that you’ll be killed in a domestic violence incident by an extraordinary ratio,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told Rolling Stone recently. “The most important mythology that the NRA proffers is that you’re safer if you buy a gun. That’s just not true,” Murphy said. “Having a gun in your house is more likely to get you killed than it is to save your life.”

Oh well, it’s only women.

A press release from West Coast LEAF:

Today, the BC Human Rights Tribunal (“BCHRT”) released its decision on a complaint arising under the BC Human Rights Code’s (“the Code”) prohibition against discriminatory publications. The case, Oger v Whatcott, was heard in December 2018.

The BCHRT found in favour of the complainant that Mr. Whatcott violated s. 7 of the Code and engaged in hate speech.

In 2017, Morgane Oger ran for political office as an MLA for the Vancouver-False Creek riding. She was the first trans-identified candidate to run for election in the provincial legislature. Bill Whatcott produced and published pamphlets and made comments online attacking Ms. Oger on the basis of her gender identity. Among other things, Mr. Whatcott questioned the existence of Ms. Oger’s identity as a trans woman, calling her an “impossibility,” and linked transgender identity to an increased propensity for contracting diseases and for domestic violence.

Ms. Oger filed a complaint under s. 7 of the BC Human Rights Code, which prohibits publications that indicate discrimination or an intention to discriminate or which expose a person or class of persons to hatred or contempt. She described Mr. Whatcott’s pamphlets as harmful to her personally, and as exposing other trans people to discrimination, hatred, and contempt.

West Coast LEAF intervened to make submissions on how the Tribunal should interpret the Code’s prohibition against discriminatory publications in light of Charter values, including Ms. Oger’s right to the equal protection and benefit of the law, and the purposes of the Code.

“This decision affirms that the rights of transgender people to safety and dignity are essential human rights,” says Kasari Govender, Executive Director of West Coast LEAF. “Hate speech that vilifies and attempts to erase trans identity and to deny the dignity of transgender people is an attempt to dehumanize them. The Tribunal clearly states that denying the reality of transgender people is at the root of most discrimination against them.”

She adds, “West Coast LEAF is deeply committed to a broad vision of gender equality – one that includes the rights of all women, transgender, and gender-diverse people. This decision is an important affirmation that transgender people are equal in our society and have a right to be treated with dignity.”

What is West Coast LEAF?

About West Coast LEAF

West Coast LEAF is a non-profit organization formed in 1985, the year the equality guarantees of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms came into force. West Coast LEAF’s mandate is to use the law to create an equal and just society for all women and people who experience gender-based discrimination in BC. In collaboration with community, we use litigation, law reform, and public legal education to make change. For more information, visit http://www.westcoastleaf.org.

Hmm. For all women and people who experience gender-based discrimination…what exactly is “gender-based discrimination” then? Apparently it’s not sexism, or they would have just gone with “for women”…so what is it?

Anyway. I haven’t seen Whatcott’s pamphlets; maybe they were mean and hate-mongering and deserve censure. But referring to “hate speech that vilifies and attempts to erase trans identity and to deny the dignity of transgender people” makes hate speech a very broad category. We’ve seen over and over again that “erase trans identity” simply means not agreeing that a man who says he “feels he is” a woman is in fact literally a woman in every sense. If tribunals are going to label that “hate speech” then what next? Room 101 for all of us?

And “a broad vision of gender equality – one that includes the rights of all women, transgender, and gender-diverse people” is so broad that it erases and deletes feminism. What about our “dignity” then? What if feminist women don’t want women folded into a larger, sloppier category that now includes women who “identify as” women but are not in literal fact women? What if we want to have our own movement to do away with patriarchy and think that won’t be possible if we’re forced to share it with men?

And Oger in particular, since he’s the guy who is doing his level best to destroy Vancouver Rape Relief.

Editing to add today the next day:

https://twitter.com/HarryTheOwl/status/1111150160632078336

Hull Daily Mail has the full statement from the Humberside police about their Friendly Conversation with Harry:

A Humberside Police spokeswoman said: “A phone call was made to the complainant by Inspector Wilson to update him on his complaint to the Force, which is standard procedure.”

So far so good. “Phoning to update you on your complaint, sir.” Fine; proceed.

“There was never any suggestion he shouldn’t engage in politics or debate around the subject in question, he was just asked why he would want to, knowing it would cause distress and upset to others in society.

“The complainant was also advised if he felt his Human Rights had been breached, he may want to seek legal advice.”

Mkay. The thing is…the police, being the police, must be well aware that what they say to members of the public while on duty is perceived as…coming from the police. You know? I can’t quite figure out how to make it clearer, or why they need it made clearer, when it’s the whole point of them. They’re not phoning Harry as the victim of a crime but as the perp of a non-crime but all the same they are looking into it wink wink nudge nudge. I have trouble understanding why they think it will pass muster to say “never any suggestion” and then go on to say the rest. The cops don’t have any idle curiosity about the motives of random citizens. They don’t; they have too much other stuff to do. There is no reason a cop would ask “But why would you want to?” apart from an attempt to discourage the subject from continuing his legal but “upsetting” practice of discussing political subjects.

In the UK cops joke about not telling people they can’t do something but just asking why they would want to, and in the US Republicans in Congress joke about climate change because mass migrations and crop failures and wildfires are so hilarious.

Clad in a sharp, dark-colored suit, former president Ronald Reagan cuts a striking figure. But his attire isn’t what makes him formidable. He’s riding a velociraptor, which has a tattered American flag clutched in its talons. With a rocket launcher strapped to his back, Reagan fires a machine gun at an unseen foe.

The fantastical depiction of the 40th president of the United States may sound like a hallucination, only it’s not. On Tuesday, thanks to Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), the artwork made its debut on the Senate floor amid debates over the Green New Deal.

Well you see the “fantastical” part was his whole point: the Green New Deal is as silly as Reagan on a velociraptor. Serious business up in there at the Capitol.

His tie isn’t even loosened. Impressive.

Throughout his roughly 14-minute address, Lee referenced images of Luke Skywalker from “Star Wars” riding a tauntaun, a fictional species of snow lizard; Aquaman on a 20-foot purple sea horse; and Utah Gov. Gary R. Herbert’s (R) cameo battling sharks with a tennis racket in “Sharknado: The 4th Awakens.”

Mike Lee, having a normal one pic.twitter.com/dY07FEAX3D

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 26, 2019

Though Lee acknowledged that he would likely be met with criticism for “not taking climate change seriously,” the rest of his argument against the Green New Deal continued in a similar vein — full of sarcasm and accompanying posters.

“Let’s be clear . . . climate change is no joke, but the Green New Deal is a joke,” Lee said, before offering an alternative recommendation to combat environmental issues: have more babies.

More babies to grow up to deal with migration wars and famines and fires enveloping entire regions. That’ll fix it.