Part two of The Open University’s censorship and punishment of Dr Almut Gadow:

Dr Gadow had alleged that the university’s equality, diversion and inclusion (EDI) department announced plans to “incorporate its political ideologies” across the curriculum in the 2021-22 academic year. She claimed she voiced concerns that a criminal lawyer’s role “is to present facts” and that “sex is a relevant fact for offences involving perpetrators’ and/or victims’ bodies”.

The academic also argued that “no offender should be allowed to dictate the language of his case in a way which masks relevant facts”. Dr Gadow said she was told that her posts on the online staff forum amounted to “serious insubordination” because she had been told it was not the place for such discussions.

Sex is a relevant fact for a whole lot of disciplines. It’s a relevant fact for daily life, too. It’s really not something we should be systematically lying about, let alone persecuting other people for not lying about.

She was informed by the university that her persistence in posting comments on issues relating to gender identity, paedophilia, and sex offending amounted to “serious bullying and harassment”.

The content of several of her posts was a breach of the university’s transgender staff policy because they may “create an environment in the forum that isn’t inclusive, trans-friendly, or respectful”, Dr Gadow was also told.

I wonder if the OU ever paused to think about an environment in the forum that isn’t women-friendly. (I don’t really – of course they didn’t. Women are the nasty dominant people who persecute memmers of the trans communinny.)

In a statement following the settlement from the Open University, Dr Gadow claimed her experience illustrated that EDI policies at universities often place undue pressure on staff and teaching.

“Much needs to be corrected in this area, where EDIdeology dictates the content of OU teaching at the expense of academic freedom. My case has highlighted the extent to which EDI-fied and ‘liberated’ curricula violate not only the university’s obligations to uphold academic freedom but the human rights of its members,” she said.

And the rights of the students to be taught truth rather than trendy drivel about magic gender.

It can be expensive to fire academics for knowing and saying that people can’t change sex.

A law lecturer who was sacked by the Open University after expressing gender-critical beliefs has been handed a payout from the institution. Dr Almut Gadow was dismissed for gross misconduct in November 2022 after she criticised changes to the curriculum based on gender identity in an online forum. She claimed the university was introducing requirements to “indoctrinate students in gender identity theory”.

The lecturer, who taught law at the university for almost a decade, claimed she had raised concerns about new teaching requirements, including making students use offenders’ preferred pronouns.

Brilliant. Requiring teachers to require students to lie about the sex of offenders – so if they’re discussing a rape case and the Offender claims to be a woman, the teacher and the students must all call him she/her. The OU might as well require teachers to tell students that money grows on trees and elephants can fly and Trump is an intelligent thoughtful compassionate fella.

The terms of the settlement have not been disclosed, including the financial sum awarded to Dr Gadow. It amounts to an about-turn for the university, which previously told The Telegraph it would “vigorously defend” itself before a judge.

The institution also accused the academic of making “spurious allegations” about the circumstances surrounding her dismissal and said it looked forward to presenting its own version of events at an employment tribunal.

Well it totally did look forward but it turned out it was getting its hair done that day so it had to settle.

In a statement, Dr Gadow accused the university of agreeing “to pay me an undisclosable amount of money to avoid a public airing of the facts”.

“After long claiming it could not wait for the truth to come out in court, that it would fight this case ‘vigorously’ and ‘robustly’ all the way, the OU [Open University] – while making no admission as to liability – has resolved the matter by way of payment of an undisclosable sum of money.”

Can we all guess why? I think we can.

Shouldn’t that be “inseminated thing”?

DemocratIC Governor. “Democrat” is a noun, not an adjective. The adjective is “democratic.”

But anyway – the determination to erase women continues. Men can’t be inseminated, so there’s no point in changing “pregnant woman” to “inseminated person.” If women who claim to be men are offended by “pregnant woman” that’s just too bad.

Tom Nichols at the Atlantic:

President Trump tonight began a purge of the senior ranks of the United States armed forces in an apparent effort to intimidate the military and create an officer corps personally loyal to him. The president fired General C.Q. Brown, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a remarkable move but also one that Trump and his MAGA allies signaled was coming.

…

The chairman is the most senior officer in the United States and by law the principal military adviser to the president. He does not direct military forces and is not in the chain of command. Normally, the chairman serves a four-year term; the position, like that of FBI director, is meant to bridge across administrations rather than change with each incoming president—specifically so that the chairman (again, like the head of the FBI)  does not become a partisan political appointment.

Obviously, Trump has no use for such conventions, and believes that every senior official in the United States should be a personal appointee of the president—so long as that president is him.

…

Trump loathed Brown’s predecessor, General Mark Milley, and has floated the idea that Milley should be executed for actions he took at Chairman. (This idea came to him shortly after the publication of this magazine’s profile of Milley, by editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, which detailed how Milley protected the Constitution from Trump.)

Trump and Hegseth have announced their intentions to fire several other senior officers—and perhaps even most ominously, including the head lawyers of each of the services. Now that Trump has captured the intelligence services, the Justice Department, and the FBI, the military is the last piece he needs to establish the foundations for authoritarian control of the U.S. government. None of this has anything to do with effectiveness, or “lethality,” or promoting “warfighters,” or any other buzzwords. It is praetorianism, plain and simple.

Terrifying enough yet?

CNN reports the latest insanity:

In an unprecedented purge of the military’s senior leadership Friday night, President Donald Trump fired the top US general just moments before his defense secretary fired the chief of the US Navy and the vice chief of the Air Force.

Trump announced he was dismissing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown and replacing him with Air Force Lt. Gen. John Dan “Razin” Caine – an extraordinary move since Caine is retired, according to an Air Force official, and is not a four-star general.

Trump called Brown a “fine gentleman” and an “outstanding leader,” while hinting at the firings to come. “Finally, I have also directed Secretary [of Defense Pete] Hegseth to solicit nominations for five additional high level positions, which will be announced soon,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Minutes later, Hegseth released a statement announcing he’d fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the chief of the Navy.

The removal of the second Black man to serve as America’s most senior general and the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff appears to send a strong signal from an administration that has outlawed diversity and inclusion efforts across the military and wider government.

Hegseth called Franchetti a “DEI hire” in his 2024 book, in which he wrote: “If naval operations suffer, at least we can hold our heads high. Because at least we have another first! The first female member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — hooray.”

Hegseth on Friday also said that Gen. James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force, had been fired, and that he was “requesting nominations” for the Judge Advocates General for the Army, Navy and Air Force, indicating they will be replaced.

Systematically firing a woman and a Black man for being a woman and Black respectively.

This is hell, nor are we out of it.

John Cleese in 2018:

My American friends are asking me about President Trumps’s observation that the British ‘like him’.

I regret this is quite unfounded.

The explanation for this canard is that Trump is pronoid.

Pronoid is the opposite of paranoid. A paranoid person thinks, without any basis in reality, that everybody is out to get them. A pronoid person is someone who thinks, without any basis in reality, that everybody likes them.

The fact is that the British loathe Donald Trump

This is because he is the polar opposite of a ‘ Gentleman ‘, who has qualities the British admire. A fine example is Gareth Southgate.

To the British, a ‘ Gentleman ‘ is a man who is modest, well-mannered, self deprecating, quietly intelligent, considerate of other people’s feelings, and well-informed.

He is not vulgar, inflated, vain, boastful, noisily ignorant, sleazy and common as muck.

I hope this clears up any confusion.

[Photo not included.]

Unite Scotland turns out to be not all that unitey.

I’m especially impressed by that breezy “Unite believes that the strengthening and protection of the rights of trans people does not mean the rights of others will be diminished or affected.” Well that’s nice, but they offer no explanation of how that claim can possibly be true. How can it be true that “rights” such as the “right” for men who say they are trans to have everything that belongs to women and go everywhere that women go will not diminish or affect the rights of women? It can’t; the claim is absurd. Just making boastful assertions is not enough; you have to explain how your claim can be true.

They don’t bother with thinking or explaining or giving reasons, these goons, they just make Grand Statements consisting entirely of threadbare assertions we’ve all heard a billion times. They might as well stand around ringing a cowbell all day.

Julia Carrie Wong chats with “scholar” Sophie Lewis about those evil women who dare to call themselves feminists even though they don’t think men are women.

…just three weeks into Trump’s second term, the man responsible for stripping women in the US of the right to an abortion was declared a “feminist kween”, “feminist hero” and “feminist icon” by several prominent feminist writers in the UK.

The occasion for these declarations was Trump’s all-out assault on trans rights. Since taking office, the president has used executive orders to attempt to restrict the ability of trans Americans to travel, work, receive medical care, serve in the military, attend school and participate in women’s sports.

Are trans Americans foreigners who claim to be American but aren’t?

What this dishonest “journalist” is talking about of course is not letting people do all these things with fake identities and/or with the aid of cross-sex hormones. Newsflash: nobody gets to travel or work or serve in the military with fake ID. The whole point of ID is to make sure you are who you say you are.

How did we get here? How have we arrived at a place where self-identified feminists ally themselves with a man who has so extravagantly dedicated his personal and political lives to the humiliation, domination and degradation of women and girls?

I brought this question to Sophie Lewis, whose new book, Enemy Feminisms, out this week in the US, seeks to understand how and why some forms of feminism have diverged so fundamentally from others as to become, well, enemies.

Ya it’s a good question – how did you fuckers get your “feminism” so twisted that you celebrate men in skirts who take everything that belongs to women, while you demonize women who object? Please do tell us all about the thought process.

“It is difficult – I would say impossible – to say that [Terfism] is not feminism, that the philosophical and movement roots of their whole deal is not feminism,” Lewis said. “That’s the bad news. But the good news is that there were always other feminists fighting them tooth and nail.

“It hurts and confuses us to imagine that there are anti-liberatory feminisms, but I think when we do allow that and we do conceptually break that possibility open, that’s when it becomes possible to stake out our ground as an anti-colonial, proletarian, trans feminism,” she continued.

She continued, implying that feminists who think feminism is for women are also colonialists and anti-worker.

In Enemy Feminisms, Lewis also takes on the anti-pornography turn that some radical feminists took in the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of the Islamophobic femonationalist (“death by drone bomb is better (and more feminist) for women than life is under sharia law”)

So genuine feminism is Islamophilic? How does that work exactly? Islam does not repeat does not return the love.

Lewis is not the first to connect Terfism to the rising power of the global far right. The philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler has warned for years of the growing movement against “gender” – and the damage that feminist transphobia does to the coalition building needed to combat fascism. “Continuing the ‘anti-gender ideology’ discourse places contemporary ‘radical feminists’ in a position of woeful complicity with the key aims of new fascism,” they wrote in the 2024 book Who’s Afraid of Gender.

Butler wrote it therefore it’s obviously true, yeah? No.

Butler wrote a lot of things

Meanwhile, Bannon…

Steve Bannon has been accused of making a “Nazi” salute while giving a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday.

The incident occurred soon after Elon Musk, another top ally of Donald Trump, was accused of giving a Nazi salute on stage during an event celebrating the president’s January inauguration.

There’s a clip, and I gotta say, it’s a pretty feeble “Nazi salute” if it is one at all. It’s not as energized as Musk’s was – it’s more like a wave than a Nazi salute. But I’m not going to quibble. It’s not as if either of these guys is a staunch opponent of Nazi-style messages.

H/t NightCrow

Time for some Steve Bannon news.

He’s not a fan of the unelected overlord from South Africa.

Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former White House chief strategist, has renewed his feud with Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and a top Trump adviser, calling him a “parasitic illegal immigrant” in an interview published online on Tuesday.

Mr. Bannon made the comments in an interview with UnHerd, a British news site, that took place last week.

“Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. He wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values or traditions,” Mr. Bannon told the interviewer.

Of course Trump too wants to play-act as god etc etc.

Despite his dramatic and fractious departure from the White House in 2017, Mr. Bannon became close with Mr. Trump again in the final year of Mr. Trump’s first term. Mr. Bannon is still a close ally and, more significantly, a popular figure within the Trump movement: His show, War Room, is watched closely by a number of Trump allies, as well as the president himself.

Musk and Bannon are like the two hit men in Fargo. Musk is the babbling jittery hyper guy played by Steve Buscemi, and Bannon is the huge sullen silent Swedish guy who axes him.

By all means follow the plot, guys.

This is an angle that doesn’t get enough attention.

To spell out the obvious, that’s a doctor who misunderstands some very basic things about the human body. It’s also a doctor who is self-obsessed enough to pretend to be the other sex and to impose that fantasy game on patients. Why would anyone want that from a doctor?

Wes Streeting objects.

Wes Streeting has raised concerns after a Telegraph investigation found that doctors who change gender are able to have past wrongdoings scrubbed from the public record.

The Health Secretary said the General Medical Council (GMC), which regulates doctors, should urgently overhaul its practices, adding the situation should “not have been allowed”.

The GMC holds a public register of all doctors, allowing the public to check whether a medic has been subject to restrictions or suspensions, or has been struck off.

However, on Thursday the watchdog admitted that it erases the public disciplinary history of doctors who change their gender identities.

It raises the prospect that medics seeking to hide a chequered disciplinary history could exploit the system by choosing to change their gender identity in order to erase their past. It also means a female patient who specifically requested a female doctor would be unable to find out if their [her] doctor was born a man [and thus is a man].

On Thursday night, Mr Streeting demanded immediate changes from the regulator. He told The Telegraph: “This is extremely concerning, and should not have been allowed to happen.”

But but but trans people are special so of course it should have been allowed to happen.

WHAT?!!

Doctors who change gender are allowed to scrub past wrongdoing from public record

Because changing gender=a new and improved doctor who has never done any harm to anyone?

Sandie Peggie’s case against NHS Fife for alleged harassment after the nurse raised concerns about a trans colleague has caused alarm among women and campaigners across the country. The NHS, she claims, was prioritising the rights of Dr Beth Upton, a trans doctor who was born male but insisted on using the women’s changing room, over her rights to a single-sex space.

Now, it can be revealed that the General Medical Council (GMC), which regulates doctors, takes an even more extreme stance on trans medics – effectively scrubbing the public disciplinary history of doctors who change their identities in this way.

“If a doctor had received a historical sanction [i.e. the suspension is no longer in place] prior to transitioning, this information would not be available on their new public-facing record on the medical register,” says a GMC spokesman. The GMC confirms that Dr Upton is one of 62 doctors to have been given new registrations under different GMC numbers.

It’s reminding me of The Church and the concept of sainthood. Swapping gender=sainthood.

Except of course that it doesn’t. Rather the opposite: it encourages narcissism, bullying, dominance, entitlement, and similar repellent qualities. Look at Upton just for one.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Congress is supine.

Musk warned Republican lawmakers in December that he was compiling a “naughty list” of members who buck Trump’s agenda. He also pledged shortly after Election Day that his political action committee would “play a significant role in primaries” next year.

A Republican senator told The Hill that Musk’s wealth makes primary threats “a bigger deal.”

One hopes that at some point, it will become a badge of honour to have opposed Trump. Unfortunately, that time is not now. What America needs are Republican members of Congress who realize Trump is destroying the country. They have to stop being okay with that. By supporting a man who famously refused to show his own tax return, you’ve surrendered the tax information of all Americans to his attack dog. It shouldn’t make a difference whether the billionaire digging through this information to which he should not have been given access is named Soros or Musk; trespass is trespass. Trump does not own the “property” to which he has given Musk free admission. Republicans have to learn to care for their country’s future more than their own political career. They have to stand up, and stop being cowards. I know, a tall order. But your options and opportunities are running out; the more obvious and likely ones have been all missed or wasted. We’re all clinging to hopes and dreams that become increasingly improbable with every day and every Trump transgression of tradition, norm and law. Once you’ve run out of horses, it’s perfectly natural to keep praying for unicorns. But there comes a time when you have to stop wishing and start walking. The road isn’t going to get any shorter.

These are not normal times. This is not a normal president. Republicans have made a choice, and it’s the wrong one. Trump has taken over their country. The longer they go along with him, the harder it will be for anyone to take it back. How long before it’s too late is anybody’s guess. The current batch of Republicans still thinks they’re on a pleasure cruise. They need to take a closer look the tour itinerary. Do they really want to go where it’s heading? Is this what they signed up for?* Is this what they swore to protect? They’ll think that everything is great so long as it’s their opponents who are being thrown to the sharks. They are not pampered guests and passengers, they are rubber-stamping dupes and hostages. In reality, if they get in the Captain’s way, they’re next up to be chum. They need to wake up and smell the fascism. Time to put down the cocktails and step away from the buffet. Before long you’re going to try to hide that photo of which you’re so proud, you sitting there, smiling at the Captain’s table.

It’s going to be hard, but they’re going to have to think again. They have to imagine that they’re storming the beach of a hostile, occupying power, because that’s what Trump is. Liberation won’t happen if the troops are all milling about on board the landing craft, too afraid to be the first to step and wade ashore because they might be primaried. It’s criminal that the service and sacrifice of millions of Americans who fought against tyranny is being defiled by odious cowards trying to save their pensions or book deals, all in the service of a vile monster like Trump.

*Yes, I know that for far too many of them, this is exactly what they signed up for. Trump’s malignancy was not news.

A joke but not a joke.

Donald Trump has called himself a king.

In a post to Truth Social on Wednesday, Feb. 19, the president, 78, praised his own efforts in attempting to revoke revoking New York City’s recently reinstated congestion pricing system.

“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan and all of New York, is SAVED,” he wrote, adding, “LONG LIVE THE KING.”

Hur hur, so funny, he’s such a card, hur hur.

Weird that other presidents haven’t made that joke though. Maybe they thought it would be inappropriate, unfunny, narcissistic, trashy?

Also of course you don’t save Manhattan by promoting more and more and more traffic. Manhattan isn’t built for a lot of traffic. It’s a skinny island: there isn’t room for a lot of traffic, so the more of it you have the more gridlocked it gets.

Shortly afterwards, the official White House Instagram account shared a fake Time magazine cover, depicting Trump wearing a crown. In place of the magazine’s title was Trump’s name in big letters — and again, at the left corner, read the words, “Long live the king.”

He’s not the king, he’s the hitler.

H/t iknklast

More terrifying (and terrorizing) every day.

Robert Reich:

Musk and his associates have not only burrowed into the Treasury’s payments system; they are now burrowing into the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration.

They are gaining access to the most sensitive personal information about Americans available anywhere, along with computer code capable of altering that information and those systems. The Muskrats have been able to turn off government funding without Congress’s consent, even in the face of federal court orders to turn the funding back on.

This is blatantly illegal, yet Congress remains silent.

Congress is supine because Republicans are in charge, and Musk has also become Trump’s hatchet man — threatening Republican members of Congress if they deviate from Trump.

Iowa’s Republican Senator Joni Ernst was firmly set against Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense until Musk hinted that he’d finance a primary challenger to Ernst, who’s up for reelection next year. Presto: Ernst supported Hegseth.

Indiana’s Republican Senator Todd Young expressed concern about the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence until Musk tweeted against him. A besieged Young spoke with JD Vance, who arranged a call with Musk. Presto: Young announced he would back Gabbard.

Musk warned Republican lawmakers in December that he was compiling a “naughty list” of members who buck Trump’s agenda. He also pledged shortly after Election Day that his political action committee would “play a significant role in primaries” next year.

A Republican senator told The Hill that Musk’s wealth makes primary threats “a bigger deal.”

Musk’s financial and political power have been enough to intimidate even the mainstream media. An advertisement set to run in The Washington Post yesterday calling for Musk to be fired from his role in government was abruptly canceled, according to Common Cause, one of the groups that had ordered the ad. When asked why the Post had pulled the ad, the Post said it was not at liberty to give a reason.

When and if America ever wrests back control of our government, we must remember this: The combination of great wealth and great power — epitomized by Elon Musk — is destroying American democracy.

Oligarchy is the enemy of democracy.

And the enemy is well dug in.

A news flash from Jonathan Gallant:

President Trump has issued an executive order, cancelling the name of the FDR Drive along the east side of Manhattan in New York City.   Asserting that FDR deserves no special recognition for leading the USA through World War II, President Trump asserted that there wouldn’t have been a world war at all if he had been president.  “The Poles just brought it all on themselves when they provoked Germany by signing a military alliance with Britain,” he said.  “Poland could have made a deal with Herr Hitler, by turning over Danzig and the Polish Corridor to him, and then there wouldn’t have been any war.” 

  President Trump added that FDR’s administration had prolonged the war by sending Lend-Lease military aid to Britain after hostilities broke out.  He added that it was stupid to provide all that support without its being secured by the promise of US property rights to key British resources, such as Cornish tin, Welsh slate, and Marmite.  

Lies Social

Liberal party will allow women to tell the truth.

The Liberal Democrats have been forced to allow women’s rights campaigners who believe in biological sex to have equal footing with other groups after claims that they had been “vilified and censured” for their beliefs.

Except they’re not beliefs, they’re facts.

Facts are beliefs in the banal sense that people may believe them, but it’s misleading at best and dishonest plus manipulative at worst to call facts “beliefs.” It’s not a mere belief that jumping off a tall building will cause death. It’s not a mere belief that fire burns, that rain is wet, that Antarctica is chilly. Women’s rights campaigners don’t “believe in biological sex”; we know that biological sense is real and that trans identity is a nebulous hodgepodge of stupid ideas.

Sir Ed Davey’s party have agreed to “draw a line under this period of intolerance” and allow Liberal Voice for Women (LVW) — the gender critical section of the party — to be allowed to hold events, have exhibition stands and place adverts after a previous ban.

A previous ban on women who know that men are not women, and refuse to say that men are women. In a party that calls itself liberal. You couldn’t make it up.

Zoe Hollowood, the chair of the Liberal Voice for Women, said: “For too long gender critical members have been vilified and censured in the party for their ordinary belief in the immutability and importances of sex.”

Or rather their ordinary recognition of the immutability and importance of sex. If we approach the edge of a cliff we don’t believe it would be dangerous to keep going, we know it would.

The agreement was confirmed in a letter to LVW from Mike Dixon, the party’s chief executive, who wrote: “The Liberal Democrats recognise that Liberal Voice for Women is entitled not to be discriminated against in respect of the lawfully held protected beliefs”.

Except they’re not beliefs, they’re just ordinary humdrum reality. Pretending that men can be women relies on a belief; not doing so is just recognition of reality.

The wording matters, obviously. Trans ideology is all about lies and fiction and fantasies while rejection of trans ideology is just a matter of everyday facts that we all know, even if some of us pretend we don’t know.

A Liberal Democrat spokesman said: “We are proud to be a liberal party where our members have a range of views on all sorts of issues, but come together to discuss them in a friendly and constructive way. That’s what Lib Dem conference is all about.

Well, I gotta say, the Liberal Party shouldn’t be proud to have a range of views on whether or not men are women.

Side with the aggressor much?

President Trump escalated his attacks against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday by calling him “a dictator without elections.”

Why it matters: The smear marks a new low in the deteriorating U.S.-Ukraine relationship. It comes as the Trump administration is negotiating a deal with the Kremlin to end Russia’s war in Ukraine without Kyiv’s participation in the talks.

Remember when FDR negotiated a deal with Hitler to end Germany’s war in Europe without Europe’s participation in the talks?

 “A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered.”

…

Trump has never called Russian President Vladimir Putin a dictator.

Never has and never will.