Links - 19th August 2022 (2)

Why Renaissance Paintings Aren’t as Green as They Used to Be - " “Noli me tangere,” which hangs today in a gallery of the Louvre, is one of many Renaissance paintings that features a copper-based pigment called verdigris. When fresh, its shade of bluish green is rare and luminous. But like many pigments popular in the 15th through 17th centuries, verdigris is toxic and unstable... To anyone living in the 21st century, it might not be obvious that Renaissance paintings were once much more colorful than they look now... the charismatic green can be spotted in several works by Sandro Botticelli, such as the resplendently verdant “The Mystical Nativity,” which depicts—you guessed it—Christ and the Virgin Mary. DiFuria also suspects that Jan van Eyck’s green-sheened “Ghent Altarpiece” uses verdigris. The greens in these paintings are presumably less prismatic than they would have been several centuries ago, but they still, somehow, seem to glow."

Tokyo's 'oldest man' had been dead for 30 years - "He was thought to be the oldest man in Tokyo - but when officials went to congratulate Sogen Kato on his 111th birthday, they uncovered mummified skeletal remains lying in his bed.  Mr Kato may have been dead for 30 years according to Japanese authorities.  They grew suspicious when they went to honour Mr Kato at his address in Adachi ward, but his granddaughter told them he "doesn't want to see anybody".  Police are now investigating the family on possible fraud charges... Mr Kato's relatives told police that he had "confined himself in his room more than 30 years ago and became a living Buddha," according to a report by Jiji Press.  But the family had received 9.5 million yen ($109,000: £70,000) in widower's pension payments via Mr Kato's bank account since his wife died six years ago, and some of the money had recently been withdrawn."

Did We Mishear Neil Armstrong’s Famous First Words on the Moon? - "Armstrong insisted that he actually said, “That’s one small step for a man.” In fact, in the official transcript of the Moon landing mission, NASA transcribes the quote as “that’s one small step for (a) man.”... problems in speech perception can arise when those kinds of cues are missing, especially when pitch and rhythm are used for non-linguistic purposes, like in music. This is one reason why misheard song lyrics – called “ mondegreens” – are common. When singing or rapping, a lot of the speech cues we usually use are shifted to accommodate the song’s beat, which can end up jamming our default perception process...  Over the years, researchers have tried to comb the audio files of Armstrong’s famous words, with mixed results. Some have suggested that Armstrong definitely produced the infamous “a,” while others maintain that it’s unlikely or too difficult to tell. But the original sound file was recorded 50 years ago, and the quality is pretty poor"

Dual-flush toilets 'wasting more water than they save' - "Campaigners have warned for years that dual-flush toilets, introduced as more efficient alternatives that were expected to use less than half the amount of water per flush, are more prone to leaks."

Meme - Worker: "The plant I've worked all my life has shut down and my home town is dying"
Liberal: "Lmao learn to code"
Liberal: "I spent 4 years getting a useless degree and now I'm thousands of dollars in debt"
Worker: "Lmao learn to weld"

The shift in the American public’s political values - "The interactive chart below illustrates the shift in the American public’s political values over the past two decades, using a scale of 10 questions asked together on seven Pew Research Center surveys since 1994. The share of Americans with ideologically consistent values has increased over this time and these political values also have become more strongly associated with partisanship. These shifts are particularly pronounced among politically engaged Americans. Use the controls below to see more detail about ideological consistency in the American public since 1994"
This has a convenient median line that you can monitor as a measure of polarization.
In 2014, 2015 and 2017, the median Republican was equally conservative, though from 2004 to 2014 the median Republican became more conservative (from 1994 to 1999 then 2004, the median Republican became more liberal)
OTOH, the median Democrat became more liberal from 1994 to 1999, stayed constant through 2004 and 2011, became more liberal in 2014, stayed constant in 2015 and then became even more liberal in 2017
So despite the "fact checks" on Elon Musk's meme on the left self-radicalising, it is supported by the data

If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals
On individual issues too, Democrats have been radicalising, while Republicans have become less partisan, stayed more or less the same or become only slightly more partisan

Why Does Your Nose Get Stuffy One Nostril at a Time? - "your nostrils split their workload. Throughout the day, they each take breaks in a process of alternating congestion and decongestion called the nasal cycle. At a given moment, if you're breathing through your nose, the lion’s share of the air is going in and out of one nostril, with a much smaller amount passing through the other... There are at least two good reasons why nasal cycling happens.  One, it makes our sense of smell more complete. Different scent molecules degrade at different rates, and our scent receptors pick up on them accordingly. Some smells are easier to detect and process in a fast-moving airstream like the decongested nostril, while others are better detected in the slower airstream of the congested nostril. Nasal cycling also seems to keep the nose maintained for its function as an air filter and humidifier. The alternating congestion gives the mucous and cilia (the tiny hairs up in your nose) in each nostril a well-deserved break from the onslaught of air and prevents the insides of your nostrils from drying out, cracking and bleeding."

Pictured: Taxi driver 'who locked suicide bomber in his car' outside Liverpool hospital - "A hero taxi driver has been credited with saving many lives after locking an alleged suicide bomber inside his cab just moments before the vehicle blew up outside a hospital in what police and MI5 are now probing as a Poppy Day terror attack.  The explosion turned David Perry's cab into a fireball outside the Liverpool Women's Hospital, seconds before the 11am minute's silence was due to take place"
The Volkswagen ad was supposed to be a joke

“Potentially Hazardous” Asteroid The Width Of 2,000 Ferrets To Whizz Past Earth Tomorrow
Somehow superior Imperial measurements are never good enough for Americans

Meme - "Chocolate Easter bunnies are hollow to represent God's promises"

Meme - "Quran Says... "
"You can't understand Quran. you misquoted the verse."
"Islamic teaching says..."
"This is not true islam. You must learn Arabic to know islam."
"Believers do...."
"They are not true believers. You must speak to the people who are islamic scholars."
"A scholar says...."
"They don't represent Islam."
"A sahih Hadith says..."
"This hadith is weak & fake."

Meme - "Every time I have a programming question and I rly need help, I post it on Reddit and then log into another account and reply to it with an obscenely incorrect answer. Ppl don't care about helping others but they LOVE correcting others. Works 100% of the time"

Cat on a fast train roof holds up London to Manchester service - "The tabby was spotted curled up on top of an Avanti West Coast train about half an hour before it was due to depart for Manchester at 9pm and refused to move.  Passengers were transferred to a replacement train with only a slight delay and the train was taken out of service so staff could coax the cat down from its precarious perch, where it was perilously close to the 25,000 volt overhead lines.  After a two and a half hours, the standoff came to an end when a bin was pulled up beside the carriage, giving the animal a platform on which to disembark."

Meme - "In the UK right now a train is delayed as a Cat is sitting on the roof and refusing to come down."
"It says west coast on the front of the train. America"

Snowstorm leaves customers, employees at Denmark IKEA stranded inside - "A severe snowstorm forced customers and employees to spend the night together inside the showroom of a northern Denmark IKEA store.  After 12 inches of snow fell Wednesday night, 6 customers and nearly 2 dozen employees inside the Aalborg, Denmark furniture store were left trapped inside...  the employees all had a good time during the sleepover where they watched television and ate together... it was not the only store in the area to house employees overnight as a result of the storm.  A toy shop next door also housed employees overnight."

Colorado State Board Drops ‘Sex Offender’ Term, Calling It A Negative Label - "The way sex offenders are labeled is changing in Colorado. The board that sets state standards voted today to change the term “sex offenders” to reflect so-called “person-first” language...   “Client” is one of five options the board considered.  Supports of the change in terminology argue it will reduce recidivism. Opponents say it will only reduce accountability, noting victims and survivors live with their label for life.  In the end, the board voted 10-6 to go with “adults who commit sexual offenses.”...   Jessica Dotter with the Colorado District Attorneys’ Council worries the change won’t end with the Sex Offender Management Board, “I’m concerned that the use of person-first language generally is an intent to remove accountability from offenders and to diminish the experience of the victims”. Last year, lawmakers considered a bill that would have, among other things, eliminated the term “sexually violent predator” from statutes but they ended up pulling it. Meanwhile, a task force charged with sentencing reform is considering asking the legislature to change terms like “defendant,” “convict,” and “felon” to “justice-involved people.”  Ironically, the Sex Offender Management Board will not drop “sex offender” from its name because only the state Legislature can change the name of the board."
The "myth" of the slippery slope

Sunbathing Woman Run Over At The Beach By Florida Deputy's SUV - "Deputy Todd Brien’s marked Chevrolet Tahoe SUV was parked as he spoke to pedestrians on the beach before being dispatched to investigate a 911 hang-up call at a different location... Brian “made a right turn” as he took off and drove over a 23-year-old woman “while she was lying on her back in the sand,” the sheriff’s office said. She was identified as Robin Diffenderfer.  “The front driver side tire of the Tahoe drove over Diffenderfer’s right side and mid to upper back area,” the sheriff’s office said. She sustained “non-life threatening injuries” and was transported to the hospital"

Irish girl sunbathing... No not her : funny

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Moral Authority of Organised Religion - "‘I think the problem that the church has goes beyond the scandals over sexual abuse and its behavior as an institution, I think it's lost moral authority more generally. And that's because it's largely stopped talking about personal responsibility, which is the essence of moral behavior. And instead it has fallen in far too much with the ideologies promoting hyper individualism’...
‘I suppose you seem to share this this view of humanity that Rousseau had that we're kind of we're all innately good but you know, I used to be a teacher. I understand how inherently evil children can be, they can be little demons’...
‘About 50 years ago, there was a culture of deference towards the clergy and perhaps even less than that, and that's the sort of thing that you know, priests would be believed over other people. That's absolutely not the case now. I mean, it happens to me sometimes. I wear a collar, I walk down the street, people wind their window down and abuse me because I wear a collar, people will shout pedo in the street to me, if I wear a dog collar... the idea that you know that people are doffing their caps to the local Vicar. That's not what's causing this’"

Meme - "THIS IS NOT OUR TRADITIONAL DRESS *full face veils*
INDIA BOSNIA IRAQ AFGHANISTAN SYRIA UA EMIRATES YEMEN EGYPT PAKISTAN IRAN SOMALIA INDIA SYRIA PAKISTAN BOSNIA UA EMIRATES IRAN IRAQ YEMEN SOMALIA AFGHANISTAN MALAYSIA
THIS IS"

Meme - "Wildly overstating the practical value of paid test prep
Test prep company marketing
Leftist weirdos"

Meme - "Yummy fruit *dies*"
"correlation does not equal causation *all die*"

Book excerpt: The Canada I fell in love with is gone - "Canada, with its declared agnosticism about blood and belonging — agnosticism that came through the front door officially with Pierre Elliott Trudeau but had many earlier traces — is of the Enlightenment, although by birthday of its confederation she is rather Victorian. The person writing these lines also understood herself to be a child of the Enlightenment, intent on proving with her own life that we can abandon blind obedience to traditions and re-examine our life and everything we’ve known, and become part of a new society — community even — based on shared ideals and the conscious choice to belong. Now she is not sure anymore that that’s how things work.  Something’s been happening with the we. I am beginning to suspect that there are fewer and fewer of us believing in the “great solidarity” across ethnicity, class, and time. My adoptive country and my city are becoming unrecognizable. Conversations in the public sphere are changing, as are those in the media and the culture. Public speech increasingly must be premised with a recitation of pronouns — this is now even required of lawyers before B.C. courts and their clients — and land acknowledgements. What should those who do not share those religious and ideological beliefs do? Are we always already letting the side down even before we’ve said anything? The internet speaks American and so, increasingly, do we, importing wholesale the culture wars as they happen in the U.S., adopting the diagnoses of American problems as universally relevant. There is this elaborate vocabulary of political contestation all around us, why not use it? the thinking goes. We apply the American framework of irreconcilable ‘black’ and ‘white’ difference to Canada and harden the settler and Indigenous split. Where this paradigm is not available, the cleaving is along the lines of ‘white’ and ‘BIPOC,’ a strange acronym unifying all Black, Indigenous and people of colour, as if they all have something in common, as if not being ‘white’ automatically groups them into the same category. Over the last five years in particular, people running Canadian cultural institutions and media have put all of their chips on irreconcilable differences. There is no Canada for all, no political cause for all, and no arts for all. There is no individual outside ethnic determinism: there are bits and bobs of inter-regional and inter-ethnic resentment. What happens to class analysis under those circumstances? What happens to arts? Art criticism? The possibility of “great solidarity”? Freedom of expression?  Free speech used to be a liberal-left cause when The Body Politic magazine existed, Little Sister’s bookstore had its literature stopped at the Canada-U.S. border, NDP MP Svend Robinson questioned the need to refer to a God in the Canadian Constitution, and further back, when Manitoba’s United College fired Prof. Harry Crowe over an expressed political opinion, the NDP opposed the War Measures Act, Doris Anderson edited Chatelaine, and further back still, when William Lyon Mackenzie was publishing the Colonial Advocate. Freedom of speech is not a top-drawer value for the left and liberal centre in Canada any longer. It’s not just that Canada has forgotten it used to think of itself as a liberal democracy. Illiberalism in the chattering classes is one thing. Sometimes liberalism leaves the society open to illiberal developments by its own constitution. It shies away from questions about a good, fulfilled life worth living, and limits itself to offering one type of freedom — freedom from interference  —  and not giving enough space to positive freedom, the capacity building and real options for its citizens. I live in a city, and a country, where car drivers and house owners decide what living in the city and country is going to be like for everybody. Where only those who are upper-middle class (and up) can give a career in the arts, literature, or journalism a go. Where only citizens with that kind of solvency can count on having consistent access to psychotherapy. Toronto 2022 is a hybrid of Dubai (endless luxury condominium towers) and Vancouver (extreme housing costs). It’s also a place of people who are compelled to work and hustle more than ever, who have stopped reading books, are screen-bound, and increasingly lonely. If a certain liberal and democratic mettle is necessary for liberal democracy to be accomplished and carried over into the future, do we have enough of it? Can that political ideal survive without the kind of citizens who can be relied on to have a degree of independence of spirit, curiosity, capacity for deep concentration, and freedom from fear and penury?"

Stop calling people ‘toxic’. Here’s why - "Over the past few years I’ve noticed a rise in the label “toxic” as a response to difficult or destructive behavior. Media outlets from Psychology Today to Harvard Business Review run articles on how to identify or avoid toxic people. Politicians like Mitch McConnell use the term to describe their adversaries. Even academic psychologists have begun to take up the language... Now clinicians and laypeople proliferate endless self-help and pop psychology content about how in every job interview, family of in-laws, or pool of prospective dates lurk so-called toxic people. Like many colloquial terms characterizing psychological phenomena, toxicity is unspecific. Toxic people are bullies or victims, overly involved or overly removed, too negative or too positive. While seductive, this kind of blanket labeling comes with a lot of problems. The entire premise is based on dubious science and elicits unhelpful and fatalistic behavior from people on both sides of conflict... Personality pathology, though treated as legitimate in mainstream discourse, is hotly debated by actual clinicians.  For example, narcissistic personality disorder is so contested that it was almost removed from a 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the official US psychiatric disorders reference), partly because clinicians couldn’t agree what exactly it is. References to psychopathy, like toxicity, pervade pop culture despite the fact that there is no such diagnosis in official psychiatric manuals. The clinical tools for assessing psychopathy are fishy, yet this clinical flimsiness hasn’t diminished the concept’s prevalence.  Psychiatrist and historian Jonathan Metzl has extensively documented the ways that clinical categories develop and morph as culture changes. If YouTube self-help gurus and TV crime dramas tell stories about narcissism, psychopathy, or toxicity, we start to recognize the categories in real courtrooms, clinics, cubicles, and in our own lives. So if narcissist and psychopath aren’t necessarily stable scientific categories, what do we know about people with difficult personalities? In general, people are malleable, and variations in context and experience can elicit highly varied behavior. Research suggests that even difficult personality styles can change over time, rather than being fixed and immovable. Intractable conflict experts don’t focus much on bad actors in part because they know that dynamics and situations are toxic, not people... So if the science is dubious, why call each other toxic? Partly because it’s emotionally satisfying to blame other people for our distress; people actually get addicted to the feeling of grievance."
I notice the ones who call everyone else "toxic" are the toxic ones

Meme - ANISA @aaaanisaxx: "when I was 19 I had to apply for a job and couldn't be arsed writing a cover letter so I made a fake job ad for the job I was applying for on gumtree and like 200 people applied and I picked the best cover letter as my own"

Nasa to send nude photos to space to ‘attract aliens’ - "This won’t be the first time that we have sent nude depictions and messages into space. In the 1970s, the Pioneer 10 and 11 missions included plaques that had drawings of naked humans.  Many critics have been concerned about the dangers of reaching out to intelligent civilisations in the cosmos."

How the humble 'cai fan' is now all the rage in epicurean Hong Kong - "In a city pummelled by two years of political upheaval, economic downturn and seemingly endless pandemic controls – a ban on dining in after 6 pm. just lifted late last month – two-dishes-and-rice places have become a lifeline...   There are now at least 353 businesses selling two dishes and rice across the city, according to a crowdsourced map. No census exists of how many existed before, but Hong Kong food scholars and diners agreed there were far fewer before the pandemic...   Two dishes and rice had long been overlooked, or dismissed as the realm of broke students or the working class. In both format and quality, it recalls Panda Express in the United States. In Hong Kong, some jokingly referred to it as “cursory rice,” to reflect their low expectations.  “It was seen as food for commoners, people with low incomes,” said Siu Yan Ho, a lecturer who studies the city’s food culture at Hong Kong Baptist University... Many Hong Kongers also do not cook, in a city where groceries are expensive and tiny apartments may not have kitchens...   Chefs at ailing cha chaan tengs — traditional Hong Kong sit-down eateries — quit to open two-dishes-and-rice shops. A popular local hot dog chain started its own two-dishes-and-rice offshoot. Seafood banquet halls wheeled out a few pans of ready-made dishes at night as takeout options when the dine-in ban kicked in. So did coffee shops better known for their latte artistry... To distinguish themselves among all the competition, some shops offer whole steamed fish or lobster for a few additional dollars. Others throw in free soup. One spot in the Yau Ma Tei neighbourhood includes truffle chicken, red rice and quinoa to lure younger customers...   Like all food trends, this one is likely to end. It may already be in its sunset days: On the day the 6 p.m. dining-in ban was lifted, Andrew Wong, the Facebook fan group’s founder, posted, “The All-Hong Kong Two Dishes and Rice Thanksgiving Festival has officially ended.” Many members wrote how excited they were to sit down at dim sum parlours with friends again.  Still, many said there would always be an appetite for the rice boxes – both among the converted, and those who had long depended on them.   That includes Lo Siu-ying, 64. Peering at the day’s selection at Kai Kee, Lo, dressed in a pair of rubber work boots, said she’d been eating there for years. It was the easiest option for herself and her husband, both of whom left home at 8am for their job as building cleaners and returned past midnight."

Granny wields stick to fend off vulgar wedding pranks for grandson and his bride - "The incident, which went viral, happened in Guizhou province in southwest China and was recorded by the groom’s father, who thought the memory would be worth capturing... “Many of our local young adults like wedding horseplay, which our family despises,” said the father, the older Jiang. “After seeing some people attempt to play tricks on my son, his grandmother became enraged and picked up a stick to escort the couple all the way from the bride’s home to our home,” he added.  As seen in the father’s video, the grandmother told the crowd, “If anyone dares to touch my grandson, I will hit them with the stick!” as she walked ahead of the couple... “She said, ‘you are still young, and you cannot offend people by forbidding them from the tradition, but I am over 70 years old, and no longer care.”... In 2018, a groom, surnamed Xia, became disabled after losing his balance and falling with his arms and legs tied up, the consequence of a wedding prank that went a bit too far.  Last year, a groom was repeatedly whipped after being tied to a tree by his guests. And the harder he screamed, the more excited the people lashing him became, as it was considered to be a blessing for the newlyweds.  Local governments in Zunyi, Guizhou, where the couple live, issued notices at the beginning of this year to encourage people to report vulgar wedding practices to curb the custom."

Meme - "You could do anything on 2007-2012 twitter. I showed ppl how to cook crack in da microwave and nothin happened. Now I can't even call a fat bitch fat"

Frustrated Beekeeper Tricks Pesky Bear Into Doing Market Research - "  When life gives you bears, trick them into doing market research.  A bear named "Big Boy" was raiding honey production facilities near Turkey' Trabzon-Surmene province.  They tried everything to keep the bears from destroying the hives, including cages for the hives and leaving out treats for the bears, but nothing seemed to work.  So, agriculture engineer Ibrahim Sedef came up with a brilliant idea... In multiple double blind trials, Big Boy always preferred the rare, expensive Anzer honey, followed closely by Chestnut, Flower, and Pine Wood. Big Boy noticeably steered away from the low quality supermarket Cherry Jam made with corn syrup."

Psy says he initially did not want to upload 'Gangnam Style' on YouTube - ""I didn't even know what YouTube was back then," began Psy. "Some friends of mine told me to upload the MV, but I said that it would be a humiliation if the views were too low, since I didn't have any international fans. So, I told them 'Let's not upload this'.""

20-year-old Swiss man hospitalised after tearing his lung from masturbating - "Pneumomediastinum can be caused by physical trauma to the lungs or oesophagus. It can also spontaneously arise when a sudden increase in pressure within the chest cavity causes a tear in certain lung membranes, allowing air to leak out."

Goodbye, 5BX: Army’s new strength-training exercises look to halve soldier injuries, improve form
There was so much salt. It's clear that to many people the point of NS is to suffer rather than to effectively defend the country

Andrew Cuomo ordered to return pandemic book profits to state - "New York’s top ethics panel on Tuesday ordered disgraced ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo to pay the state $5.1 million in book profits he made on the backs of taxpayers amid the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic."

Anti-5G necklaces found to be radioactive - "there have been attacks on transmitters by people who believe they are harmful."

Imeimei - "“If he writes her a few sonnets, he loves her. If he writes her 300 sonnets, he loves sonnets” - my english professor"

Covering up your camera could damage your laptop: Apple - "Don’t cover your camera, Apple has warned MacBook users — it could break your display."
Superior Apple engineering!

Luck saved Cantor CEO Howard Lutnick on 9/11, then he saved the company - "On the morning of September 11, 2001, Howard Lutnick of Cantor Fitzegerald tweaked his schedule to drop his son off at school. It saved his life. His 658 colleagues, who were in office when the first plane hit, were not so lucky... Cantor Fitzgerald was making a million dollars a day. After 9/11, it started losing the same amount in a day. Lutnick took an unpopular decision to stop the salary of those who had perished. Instead, he paid their families a 25 per cent share of the company’s earnings and took care of their healthcare for ten years.  But for a while, Lutnick was a reviled man... Lutnick also decided to keep the company going, despite the daily 7-figure losses, and the fear and pessimism in the air.  “We have two choices,” he told Pix 11. “We can close the firm and go to our friends’ funerals. Or, we’d have to work harder than we’ve ever worked before so that we could help the families of those who we’d lost.”  In about five years, Cantor Fitzgerald paid bereaved families approximately $180 million in all. It also hired the children of some of the victims.  “We got 60 children of people who died working here”"

Meme - "I love the new sacrifice to the sun god emoji *Facebook care*"

Confrontation in Chile - The New York Times - "Chile is mired in its worst political and economic crisis since Salvador Allende's Marxist‐dominated Popular Unity coalition came to power two years ago, backed by only 36 per cent of the voters. If President Allende persists in his attempt to impose a pervasive socialism, now clearly opposed by a majority of Chileans, he will risk provoking civil war or a military coup. Either would be disastrous.  Dr. Allende blames “fascists” for his mushrooming difficulties at home, and he accuses the United States waging international economic warfare against Chile. Fascist‐type organizations do exist in Chile; both Washington and private American businesses have blundered in ways that have bolstered, rather than weakened, the Allende Government. But Dr. Allende's troubles derive mostly from his efforts to plunge ahead with a drastic socialist revolution for which he has no clear mandate. These efforts have accomplished a near‐miracle uniting all major opposition parties in a Federation Democracy, which will present a single slate of candidates for Congress in elections next March. Chile's largest party, the Christian Democrats, tried initially to cooperate with Dr. Allende, but was driven by his extremist policies to link up with the conservative National party and factions of the radicals in the anti‐Government Federation. In the prevailing climate, the anti‐Marxist coalition would be certain to win the elections, possibly with a majority large enough to remove Dr. Allende's Government legally. It is undoubtedly the fear of such a result that provoked the Government's repressive actions of recent weeks: the imposition of a state of emergency on seventeen of the 25 provinces, a 24‐hour seizure of all radio stations, the jailing of hundreds of striking truckers and threats of seizure against small businesses closed down in sympathy with the strikers."
Comment (elsewhere): "Learning a bit about Allende's time in office in Chile. After a year, when the food started to run out thanks to Marxist economics, apparently the truckers went on strike. What did Allende call these truckers? Fascist strikers lollollol Radical leftist scum calling anyone they don't like "fascists." Golly that sounds familiar, don't it fellow Canucks?"
Damn US sanctions, forcing Pinochet to execute a coup!

Ginger and anagrams

Another rejected iFunny image (maybe I need a new label for them):

"ginger / nigger / engrig / eggrin / egring / engrig / erggin / gergin / gregin / gegrin / gering / genrig / gingre / ginreg / grigne / negrig / eggirn / eggirn / gegirn
ginger"

Links - 19th August 2022 (1 - General Wokeness)

Racist threats in White Bear Lake were a ‘hoax’ to call attention to racist incidents at high school, officials say - "The hateful messages received last week by Black students at White Bear Lake Area High School were a “hoax,” sent by a female student who was trying to raise awareness of problems at the school...   The anonymous messages, sent last week through Instagram’s group chat to several Black students, contained death threats and repeated use of the N-word. They appeared to target students who formed a group for Black students at the school.  Students walked out of school Friday morning to demonstrate against racism in the school. Kazmierczak wrote in his letter that the school community is “united in supporting our students in speaking against racism and in support of our students of color.”  In a separate letter Wednesday, the superintendent said he regretted using the word “hoax” and that he didn’t mean to “minimize the impact that racism or racist acts has on students and families who have been marginalized throughout history and in White Bear Lake Area Schools.”"
Presumably fake hate crimes can never be hoaxes because racism is real and bad

Are fake hate crimes still motivated by racism? - The Spectator World - "When racist graffiti appeared on the walls of a dormitory at Albion College in Michigan, the college heads and student body were outraged. The graffiti, which included racial slurs, anti-Semitic remarks and multiple references to the Ku Klux Klan, prompted college officials to put forward a $1,000 bounty for anyone with information as to the perpetrator. Albion College President Mathew Johnson warned that ‘if they are Albion College students, they will also immediately be subject to the student conduct process — including the potential for suspension or expulsion’. Criminal charges would follow. More than 450 Albion College students and staff members marched across town to boycott the injustices they believed were happening on campus. Students complained that the college administration wasn’t taking the problem seriously enough and that they would file a civil-rights discriminatory lawsuit, with the help of some Albion College Board of Trustees members if students of color continued to feel unsafe...   Then, the police investigation found that the perpetrator of the crime had in fact been a 21-year-old black student. The college responded by removing him from campus while they conducted a full investigation as part of the student judicial process.  Rather than expressing relief that white supremacists hadn’t in fact been running amok on campus — the graffiti included the phrases ‘KKK’, ‘KKK White Power’, and ‘Albion is racist we do exist KKK’ — college officials simply doubled down on their assertions, declaring that the issue of racism at the school extended beyond the graffiti incident... As to the actual wording of the graffiti, is the college insinuating that it doesn’t really count as proper racism because the guilty party happened to be black? Which leads us to the thorny issue of whether people of color can ever be found guilty of racism; it’s a murky area of course and one that anti-racist advocates tend to steer well clear of, unsurprisingly perhaps when you consider the preponderance of racial epithets in largely black art forms such as hip-hop and rap.  Some of the graffiti on that now infamous dorm wall had been of an anti-Semitic bent, so would that have counted as legitimate racism even though the guilty party had been black? More murk. And what about the man’s intentions when scrawling said graffiti, do they count for anything?   Shaun Parker, who sits on the executive committee of the Albion National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) — an organization that has itself come under attack for using the term ‘colored people’ — claimed that ‘when we have incidents like this it makes people feel upset. It makes people feel uncomfortable. It makes people feel scared’. But did those same people feel any less scared and uncomfortable when they discovered that the entire incident had been a hoax? Not according to local activist Harry Bonner who claimed, ‘the race of the person responsible for the graffiti does not change the impact it had on the community’.But surely words become meaningless without some sort of intent and if the intention of the graffiti artist had been to highlight the evils of racism then one could argue that his intentions were honorable. Yes I suppose there’s the slim possibility that the perpetrator had a genuine hatred for his own race but my hunch is that he wanted to stir up yet more racial tension within an institution already on tenterhooks.  With so many schools now signed up to BLM’s aggressively anti-racist agenda which asserts that all racism is institutional, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. College officials are desperate to keep the racial fires burning in order to justify all those diversity and inclusion officers and unconscious bias training courses. Who knows, perhaps the graffiti artist had been conspiring with the governors."

The rise of hate-crime hoaxes on American campuses - "As political science professor Wilfred Reilly has shown, hate-crime hoaxes have become common, particularly on college campuses...   Along with outright intentional hoaxes, there are also false reports and cases of mistaken assumptions. Nooses that turned out not to be nooses, KKK visitations that turned out not to be, bags of dog excrement said to have been left as an insult — all have been mistakenly reported.  In one particularly ridiculous example, Oberlin College cancelled a day of classes in response to a report that a KKK member had been spotted in regalia on campus. It turned out to be a pedestrian wrapped in a blanket. While such reports may have been made in good faith, they raise questions of why ugly conclusions are so hastily arrived at and so quickly seized upon by campus officials and the media. Hoaxes and false reports typically receive a great deal of media attention during the accusation stage. Later, corrections and retractions may be picked up by the news, but the coverage is always quieter and briefer. In short, the accusations are treated as big news, the revelations of hoaxing typically are not.  The Albion hoax presents a characteristic case. Step by step, it followed a now familiar pattern. In the first place, the college immediately declared that racist acts had been perpetrated rather than declaring that it would begin an investigation. This lack of circumspection occurred despite the fact that numerous similar graffiti incidents have been revealed as hoaxes. Oberlin and St Olaf College provide two recent examples of smaller, Midwestern colleges being targeted by graffiti hoaxing...
Step #1: Declare the graffiti authentic before investigating. The university issues a boilerplate statement deploring the acts as authentic, stating that it is more committed than ever to diversity and inclusion and stands firmly with its students of colour. Nowadays, a certain amount of anti-racist activist jargon is blended into these statements.
Step #2: Distraction, disruption, uproar. Speeches are made, student groups draft lists of demands and issue declarations; marches, rallies, and demonstrations are organised; classes are cancelled, boycotted or disrupted; teach-ins, town halls, ‘listening’ hours and healing sessions are scheduled.
Step #3: The investigation is launched. In the case of Albion, its president Mathew Johnson assured the public that the FBI had been called in and the perpetrator, once found, would be prosecuted.
Step #4: The investigation concludes that the incident was a hoax. Except in extraordinary cases such as the Duke lacrosse-team fiasco, media coverage will now tail off. No more local-news videos. The facts may be reported, the investigation’s findings may find their way into one brief news cycle, but follow-up stories or extensive analyses are not to be expected. In the case of Albion, the Detroit Free Press, picking up the story from the Battle Creek Enquirer, reported that the student vandal had been caught. However, the paper of record in the state of Michigan did not report that the student was black, so that there was no way for readers of the story to know the event was a hoax. Perhaps the reporter filing the story was taking her cues from Albion itself, which also chose not to reveal the student’s race in its Twitter announcement.
Step #5: Announce the findings. This step is apt to produce some astonishing rhetoric. Privacy rules are cited and the perpetrator’s name is withheld. Talk of severe punishment for criminal acts suddenly disappears. Indeed, official expressions of sympathy for the perpetrator are not uncommon, and may be echoed in the media. The university statement quickly shifts attention to the institution, reclaiming guilt in some vague and generalised manner. Attention is turned away from the perpetrator and the costs of the crime are not enumerated.
The costs of such hoaxes are little reckoned with. In the first place there is the literal cost in money and time exacted by the investigations and demands on college employees. The days of protesting may have given students some practice in risk-free street theatre, but undoubtedly this came at the cost of their academic pursuits.  The psychic cost, the cost in misplaced emotional energy — these ought to be taken into account, too. As should the reputation of the college, which administrators seem surprisingly unwilling to defend. While it is a sure bet that some minority students hear racist words and some experience overtly racist acts during their college years, it is also true that American colleges and universities are among the most racially welcoming institutions on the planet... Those who perpetrate racial hoaxes are not interested in bettering the colleges that have admitted them. Particular motivations undoubtedly vary, and some hoaxers may well be suffering from mental illness. But it is reasonable to speculate that some, perhaps most, are purposely inventing something that they have not been able to find on campus: vulgar racism and serious expressions of white supremacy. What is crystal clear is this: hate-crime hoaxers seek to divide the races. Colleges should report on them openly, honestly and fully. Colleges should not be in the business of apologising for things that have not occurred."

Are hate crime hoaxes on the rise along with real hate crimes? - The Washington Post - "No serious researcher believes the majority of hate crime reports are false. Even Wilfred Reilly, a political scientist at Kentucky State University and author of “Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War,” believes that fewer than 2 out of 10 reported hate crimes are fabricated. Where academics disagree is on just how many hoaxes take place.  Reilly estimates that as much as 15 percent of the hate crimes reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation are falsified. Another researcher who has closely examined the subject — Brian Levin of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino — puts the hoax rate much lower, at less than half of 1 percent... Levin’s criteria exclude some incidents that others might classify as hoaxes. For instance, he does not count a wave of telephoned threats to Jewish community centers and institutions in the United States in 2017 that were later found to be the work of a Jewish, Israeli American man. Levin argued that case is not a hoax, noting that the victims were selected because of their religion — and because most bomb threats, even if they never materialize, still terrorize people."
The problem is that not all cases are resolved, so using all reported hate crimes as the denominator underestimates the prevalence of hoaxes

Hate Crime Hoaxes Are More Common Than You Think - WSJ - "Mr. Reilly eventually compiled a database of 346 hate-crime allegations and determined that less than a third were genuine. Turning his attention to the hoaxes, he put together a data set of more than 400 confirmed cases of fake allegations that were reported to authorities between 2010 and 2017. He allows that the exact number of false reports is probably unknowable, but what can be said “with absolute confidence is that the actual number of hate crime hoaxes is indisputably large,” he writes. “We are not speaking here of just a few bad apples.”... The Smollett case isn’t an outlier. Increasingly, it’s the norm. And the media’s relative lack of interest in exposing hoaxes that don’t involve famous figures is a big part of the problem."

Wilfred Reilly on Twitter - "In the past decade, hate crimes against Black Americans, who are 12% of the population, have far exceeded those reported against any other group, federal data shows. In 2020, more than half of the victims of hate crimes based on race were Black people."
"Lot of data games here, as re the focus on HATE crimes "based on race." Of 600-700K inter-racial violent crimes annually, 70-90% are B-on-W. Of 7,314 hate crimes in 2019, 1,930 did target Blacks, but 953 targeted the far smaller Jewish community, and 746 targeted open gays."

Priti Patel and the rise of left-wing racism - "Social media lit up with condemnation of the immigration raid. Howard Beckett, the assistant general secretary of Unite the Union, posted a tweet arguing that Indian-heritage home secretary Priti Patel should have been deported instead. After deleting the tweet, Beckett dug himself an even deeper hole. He tried to justify his response by saying he was angry that the Home Office was deporting Muslim refugees on the morning of Eid-ul-Fitr – the end of Ramadan – even though the two individuals detained were Sikhs.  Beckett has now been suspended from the Labour Party. His outburst is emblematic of a number of troubling features of the modern left. The racial abuse of non-white people who don’t hold left-wing beliefs has now been normalised. Often this is then justified on supposedly anti-racist grounds. The tepid reaction of the Twitterati to Beckett’s statement illustrated this perfectly. For instance, Guardian contributor Jason Okundaye limply described Beckett’s tweets as ‘misguided’. According to Okundaye, Beckett’s apparent confusion was ‘more a consequence of the inherent contradiction of an ethnic minority operating over a white-supremacist border regime’. Of course, one of the Indian-origin home secretary’s flagship policies has been the creation of a bespoke immigration route for Hongkongers escaping Chinese state oppression. This does not strike me as a particularly ‘white supremacist’ regime. The reality is that the hysterical use of terms such as ‘white supremacy’ and ‘white nationalism’ have drained them of their historical weight and significance.   The other problem Beckett’s statement revealed is the left’s tendency to conflate all non-white groups. Beckett’s attempt to exploit an Islamic religious holiday to excuse his abuse towards a British Hindu woman is a case in point. Similarly, both SNP first minister Nicola Sturgeon and justice secretary Humza Yousaf referred to Eid-ul-Fitr to justify the release of the two non-Muslim migrants.   The anti-racist credentials of the left and the trade-union movement have been seriously undermined in recent years, particularly given Labour’s anti-Semitism scandal. Less commented on is the growth of anti-Indian bigotry on the left.  Economically successful and socially integrated British Indian communities are an inconvenience for identitarian leftists. They demonstrate that stable family structures and a belief in self-reliance are integral to success in modern-day Britain. Indians are also the most pro-Brexit non-white ethnic group in the UK. Many are patriotic and have a strong attachment to British identity. That Indians are outperforming whites in the job market and in education undercuts the nonsense narrative of ‘white privilege’, which blames most inequality on racism.Finally, it is worth noting that a London-born home secretary is under no obligation to create a liberal immigration and asylum system simply because of her own family’s migration history. Such an expectation is rooted in identitarian bigotry."

Why they hate Priti Patel - "Everyone should be angry about racism, the left says. Unless the racism is being aimed at the home secretary Priti Patel. Then it’s fine. Or at least it is not something we should dwell on for too long. That is the creepy, disturbing and very revealing implication of the pushback against Patel yesterday by certain Labourites and identitarians after she emotionally spoke in the House of Commons about the racist abuse she has experienced in her life. The response to Patel’s revelation that she was frequently called a Paki was extraordinary. Patel talked about her experiences in response to Labour MP Florence Eshalomi, who had asked a question about Black Lives Matter and what the government intended to do to tackle racism. Eshalomi implied that the government – which was being represented in this discussion by Patel – did not understand racial inequality. And then Patel let rip.... The Labour MP Nadia Whittome shamefully stirred up racial antagonism by accusing Patel of using ‘her identity as an Asian person to silence Flo Eshalomi as a black person’. So when Eshalomi speaks about racism it is genuine and important, but when Patel does it, it is opportunistic and distracting. Whittome is getting very close to saying that Asian people’s experience of racism matters less than black people’s experience of it... Hindus (and others) contradict the racial myopia of left-wingers who insist that Britain is a hostile place for non-white people, and they will never be forgiven for that. This is why Patel gets so much abuse from the left and the chattering classes more broadly, far more than any other member of the Cabinet: because she is a successful daughter of immigrants who believes Britain is a generally good country. Non-white people are not meant to think like this... She’s an Uncle Tom, a coconut. She’s just one of those ‘ministers with brown skin wearing Tory masks’, as a Guardian writer put it. Patel mentioned this new, insidious woke racism in her comments in the Commons yesterday. She talked about the flak received by ‘those who don’t necessarily conform to preconceived views or ideas about how ethnic minorities should behave or think’. ‘This’, she said, ‘is racist in itself’. She is completely right. The woke lobby’s expectation that entire ethnic and racial groups should think in one way is explicitly racist. It reduces individuals to racial creatures, mere cogs in a racial mass, who must think and act in a way that leftists – very often white leftists – expect them to. It’s a contemptuous idea of political ownership, where the left sees ethnic minorities as theirs, as their political property. That many Indian-heritage people back the Tories makes them race traitors in the eyes of the contemporary left. In recent years we have seen very clearly that the supposedly anti-racist left has a serious problem with both Jews and Indians. It isn’t hard to see why."

Meme - "END THE STIGMA
WEAR YOUR POX WITH PRIDE
#PRIDEPOX"

Meme - "Your risk of getting Monkeypox 0 No risk-10 High risk
*0 - Donald Trump*
*5 - ???*
*10 - Buttigieg"
"Reported."

San Francisco Calls For State Of Emergency Because Of Surging Monkeypox - "“If there were any other community that was disproportionately impacted by monkeypox the way the gay community has been impacted, this whole country would be up in arms,” Breed pontificated... Tyler TerMeer, chief executive officer of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, ripped the federal government as he referenced the AIDS issue in the 1990s, saying, “We are once again in a moment of federal public health failure to cisgender and transgender men as well as nonbinary folks who have similar social and sexual networks.”"
Weird. I thought "stigma" was bad

Is It 'Stigmatizing' to Convey Accurate Information About Monkeypox? - "The vaccines are effective but scarce, with several hotspots limiting doses to gay and bisexual men ('men who have sex with men') with certain sexual habits.  As long as vaccines are hard to come by, that's...entirely appropriate, given that the risk pool for this disease overwhelming falls within those parameters.  So why are some people complaining about 'stigma'?... In certain LGBT circles, good medical advice is almost being treated as a hate crime... given their identity politics fixation, I don't think the Biden administration is dragging its feet out of callousness toward the LGBT community.  I think it's just their signature incompetence at work.  But there's no doubt that if the partisanship were reversed, every misstep and possible example of a lack of urgency would be loudly attributable by malice -- and LGBT activists would be loudly up in arms."

David Mack on Twitter - "just read the comments on this story i wrote and wheewwwwww. absolutely wild to be accused, as a gay reporter, of being anti-gay for reporting on *practical* health advice for a virus that is currently affecting MSM in 98% of known cases, including half a dozen of my own friends"

The WHO wants to give monkeypox a new name - "Monkeypox is poised to get a new name, the World Health Organization says, after scientists recently criticized the current name as "discriminatory and stigmatizing." The researchers say it's also inaccurate to name versions of the virus after parts of Africa...   As for what the virus should be called, the scientists suggest starting with hMPXV, to denote the human version of the monkeypox virus"
Apparently monkeys are discriminated against and face stigma

The Monkeypox pix reveal Western media’s double standards - "From the BBC to the New York Times, the Guardian to Reuters, coverage of the outbreak came with pictures of people of African descent, their exposed skin pocked with festering blisters. Crucially, the pictures were all old file photos, with some being from as far back as the 1990s. The only major news sites that didn’t use these photos were those not based in the West, like Qatari Al Jazeera... It’s hard to find other reasons for the tendency of Western media to gravitate to the lens of disaster porn in their treatment of Africa. Not even in their Covid-19 coverage, when they were ostentatious about being respectful everywhere else, could they shake it off.   Instead, they were overly enthusiastic every time it seemed as though Africa was about to take a turn for the worse, and palpably disappointed with every implosion of that expectation"
Privacy laws should be violated and photos of current patients used to prevent "stigma". Or there should be no photos so people won't know what monkeypox looks like and more people will be infected, because "racism" is bad
Apparently the media didn't breathlessly report about covid cases in the US or UK

Study finds 95% of monkeypox cases transmitted through sexual activity - "our work suggests that most transmissions so far have been related to sexual activity - mainly, but not exclusively, amongst men who have sex with men... Overall, 98 per cent of infected people were gay or bisexual men, 41 percent had HIV and the median age was 38.  Their median number of sex partners in the prior three months was five, and around a third were known to have visited sex-on-site venues such as sex parties or saunas within the previous month."
Liberal logic: 5% of monkeypox cases aren't spread through sexual activity, so we can't talk about preventing sexual transmission of monkeypox because of "stigma"

Two children test positive for monkeypox in the US, CDC confirms - "Dr Rochelle Walensky said the children both had contact with gay or bisexual men — the community where most cases are being detected in the current outbreak."

Meme = "When you ask the LGBT community how Monkeypox spread from adult homosexual men to underage boys
Love is love us
You're a homophobe
Stop calling us groomers"

Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 on Twitter - "One of the directors for George Soros' Open Society Foundations who specializes in public health, Sebastian Köhn, shares in the Guardian how he had sex with multiple men in a weekend for NYC Pride & contracted both #monkeypox & gonorrhea. He blames the system for failing him."
Replies: "How did society or the “the system” fail him? His own bio says he has focused on sexual health for the last decade. He knows about STIs and how to prevent them. He knows how to buy and use condoms. He knows about the risks of non-monogamous, non-exclusive sexual relationships."

Cracker Jack Changes Name To More Politically Correct Caucasian Jack | Babylon Bee

Actor Chris O'Dowd says religion is 'unacceptable' - "Actor Chris O'Dowd thinks following a religion will eventually become as offensive and unacceptable as racism."
Of course, he only means one religion

The withering email that got an ethical AI researcher fired at Google - "Jeff Dean, the head of Google research, emailed employees with his account of what happened. Dean said Gebru had issued ultimatum and would resign unless certain conditions were met/...
'Timnit co-authored a paper with four fellow Googlers as well as some external collaborators that needed to go through our review process (as is the case with all externally submitted papers). We’ve approved dozens of papers that Timnit and/or the other Googlers have authored and then published, but as you know, papers often require changes during the internal review process (or are even deemed unsuitable for submission). Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted.  A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication and were given feedback about why. It ignored too much relevant research — for example, it talked about the environmental impact of large models, but disregarded subsequent research showing much greater efficiencies.  Similarly, it raised concerns about bias in language models, but didn’t take into account recent research to mitigate these issues. We acknowledge that the authors were extremely disappointed with the decision that Megan and I ultimately made, especially as they’d already submitted the paper.   Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google.'"
When you hire grievance mongers

'Gays Against Groomers' vows to push back against radical LGBTQ activists who target children - "A new coalition, "Gays Against Groomers," aims to push back against those who have hijacked their community to target and sexualize children. Through social media, the group is raising awareness of the fact that most people who fall under the LGBTQ umbrella are not on board with the ideas espoused by radical activists... "Our community that once preached love and acceptance of others has been hijacked by radical activists who are now pushing extreme concepts onto society, specifically targeting children in recent years"... The group pointed out that the overwhelming majority of gay people do not accept the radical movement being pushed by activists in their name, accusing school boards, governments, the "woke media," and corporations of being complicit in spreading the ideas the activists espouse.  "Gays Against Groomers directly opposes the sexualization of children," they reiterated. "This includes drag queen story hours, drag shows involving children, the transitioning and medicalization of minors, and gender theory being taught in the classroom." They went on to lament the fact that their community, which once had a simple goal of integrating into society, has now been overrun by those who want to "restructure it entirely in order to accommodate a fringe minority, as well as seek to indoctrinate children into it their ideology."... The group highlighted the fact that the gay community "is not a monolith," and suggested that activists and their proxies in the media, schools, and governments are perpetrating "mass scale child abuse ... on an entire generation." Gays Against Groomers was founded in early June, marking f Month, by Jaimee Michell, who goes by @thegaywhostrayd... Jaimee said that Gays Against Groomers has amassed over 50,000 followers across Twitter and Instagram since it went live three weeks ago, and has received hundreds of messages from other gay people around the country and world wishing to start chapters in their area."

Pennsylvania gay pride event features shirtless instructor teaching children to pole dance
"This is not happening, and it's good that it is"
One cope was that this wasn't sexual. I wonder why it was at Pride, then

Inside the Woke Meltdown at One Domestic Violence Organization - "Women Against Abuse, brought in several diversity consultants to conduct a racial-equity audit. The goal of the audit, Women Against Abuse told staffers, was to become "a fully inclusive, multicultural, and antiracist institution."  By November 2020, the organization, which is ostensibly devoted to "serving all survivors," was offering to pay "BIPOC" employees more than their white counterparts and discouraging black abuse victims from calling the police. Its employees were also at war with each other, bickering over whether Jews are a persecuted minority group and whether there is such a thing as a non-racist white person. Those events prompted Nicole Levitt, an attorney with the group’s legal center, to file a discrimination complaint against her employer with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that it "berated, humiliated, and subjected" her to "mandatory thought reform efforts." "Women Against Abuse used to be liberal," Levitt told the Washington Free Beacon. "Now it’s illiberal."... the leading domestic violence nonprofit in Philadelphia descended into dogmatism and infighting, obsessing over identity as domestic homicides in the city reached an all-time high of 43 in 2021—more than double the previous year. That obsession manifested in avant garde policies that led the group far astray from its core mission. The policies weren’t just the product of employee activism, but of outside consultants—including Ragina Arrington, now the chief executive officer of the Clinton Foundation’s Global Initiative University, who since July 2020 has been helping Women Against Abuse conduct its equity audit.  Arrington began this work as a senior officer at Philanthropy Unbound, one of two diversity consultancies retained by Women Against Abuse in the wake of George Floyd’s death. The consultants soon injected race into every crevice of the organization, transforming it from the inside out... activist employees bring in well-heeled diversity consultants who in turn empower the activists... Women Against Abuse provides a panoply of services to abuse victims, from housing and legal representation to child care, case management, and crisis counseling. It is also the primary domestic violence shelter in Philadelphia, according to materials from the audit reviewed by the Free Beacon, and helps the city government coordinate efforts to address domestic violence, which surged across the country amid the pandemic.  After the consultants got involved, however, Women Against Abuse began hosting presentations on defunding the police, whom it discouraged non-white victims of domestic violence from calling. "It is often unsafe for Black victims, victims of color and immigrant victims to reach out to police for help," the group posted on its website in the summer of 2020, given the "inherent racism" of law enforcement.  "The police have never been the solution to violence against women," asserted one PowerPoint presentation, which staffers were required to attend in May 2021. The presentation—"Defund the Police: Safety Planning"—counseled a "restorative justice" approach to domestic violence that used "community-based organizations."  Women Against Abuse did not respond to a request for comment about whom victims should call instead of police. The group also jettisoned its membership in the Sanctuary Institute—effectively an accrediting body for domestic violence nonprofits—which outlines best practices for working with trauma victims. The audit found early on that those practices were a "safe harbor from confronting white supremacy," according to a July 2022 PowerPoint presentation summarizing the audit’s progress, because they focused on comforting people—not on holding them "accountable to things like micro-aggressions and white supremacy behaviors."... her employer had created a "racially hostile work environment"—in part by asking white staffers to sign a statement affirming that "all white people are racist and that I am not the exception." "In the name of ‘equity’ and ‘anti-racism,’" the complaint reads, Women Against Abuse "instituted race-focused programming under which employees are discriminated against, segregated, and barraged with negative racial stereotypes."... a member of the legal center circulated an article about anti-Semitism in the Black Lives Matter movement. Levitt chimed in to endorse the article, writing that, with anti-Semitic violence on the rise, "I hope as an organization we would stand against this as well."  Her email elicited a torrent of vitriol from her colleagues, one of whom called it "a slap in the face of every brown and black person."... Women Against Abuse solicited applications for a "Racial Equity Audit Task Force" to help Arrington and Crossroads "eradicate" bias. True equality, the group made clear, would require white members of the task force to earn less than others.  "All task force members will receive a small stipend every pay period," Women Against Abuse told staffers in a November 10 email. "Due to the nature of this process and the additional emotional labor of unearthing many biases that negatively affect individuals with their shared identity, Black, Brown, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) staffers will receive a larger stipend."  "I was astounded they would do something so blatantly illegal," said Levitt, who included the incident in her discrimination complaint. Multiple civil rights laws, including Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, prohibit pay discrimination on the basis of race. Responding to the complaint, Women Against Abuse told the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that it would be ending the race-based stipend scheme."

Facebook - "A President who is implicated in war crimes against his own people, a Head of State who looted his own country, should never be allowed into Singapore. There are many Singaporeans and Singapore families with roots in Sri Lanka. We risk stirring emotions unnecessarily if we let #GotabayaRajapaksha into our country."
I thought talking about dual loyalty was racist

Meme - Preme Taylorr" "A white girl w braids the same thing as a black girl w blonde wigs"
We knew "cultural appropriation" wouldn't stop at dreadlocks

Popular Video Game Is Getting An INSANE Politically Correct Makeover... - "Super Mario Brothers – the decades-old Italian video game characters – are coming under attack because one of the characters is wearing a sombrero. That’s right. A video game icon that is stereotypically culturally Italian is being attacked for appropriating Mexican culture by wearing a sombrero.  It got so bad that Nintendo – owners of the characters and the game Super Mario Odyssey – actually changed the artwork on the cover of the game to remove the evil headwear... Mexican gamers thought her complaints were idiotic and said they had no problem with the content and appreciated the recognition from Nintendo... One continues to wonder how nobody complains that Mario is an Italian stereotype and that’s not cultural appropriation …  Maybe Italians have better things to do than complain about how their culture is “appropriated” by a video game."
Meme - Rebecca C-Palacios @rebheartsyou: "Hey, it would be nice if we used this stereotype less"
Jass @Jassbec: "Mexican here, chinga tu madre. Don't try to speak for us, we Mexicans love this stuff and like seeing our culture in media. Pendeja."

Links - 18th August 2022 (2 - Trans Mania)

Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on Twitter - "EXCLUSIVE: I've obtained leaked video from Disney's upcoming show "Baymax," which promotes the transgender flag and the idea that men can have periods to children as young as two years old. It's all part of Disney's plan to re-engineer the discourse around kids and sexuality."
People were saying that just showing queer people wasn't grooming. Presumably this isn't either

Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on Twitter - "SHOCK: Disney+ promoted a drag queen special for children, encouraging kids as young as kindergarten to join the gender identity and trans activist organization GLSEN."

BREAKING: U.S. Air Force Base Hosts Drag Queen Story Time - "The U.S. Air Force is hosting Drag Queen Story Time at Ramstein Air Base Library in Germany."

Detransitioned teens explain why they regret changing genders - "“I was failed by the system. I literally lost organs.”  When Chloe was 12 years old, she decided she was transgender. At 13, she came out to her parents. That same year, she was put on puberty blockers and prescribed testosterone. At 15, she underwent a double mastectomy. Less than a year later, she realized she’d made a mistake — all by the time she was 16 years old...   “I can’t stay quiet,” said Chloe. “I need to do something about this and to share my own cautionary tale.”... between 2009 and 2019, children being referred for transitioning treatment in the United Kingdom increased 1,000% among biological males and 4,400% among biological females. Meanwhile, the number of young people identifying as transgender in the US has almost doubled since 2017, according to a new Centers for Disease Control & Prevention report...   Helena Kerschner, a 23-year-old detransitioner from Cincinnati, Ohio, who was born a biological female, first felt gender dysphoric at age 14. She says Tumblr sites filled with transgender activist content spurred her transition... “My dysphoria was definitely triggered by this online community. I never thought about my gender or had a problem with being a girl before going on Tumblr.” She said she felt political pressure to transition, too. “The community was very social justice-y. There was a lot of negativity around being a cis, heterosexual, white girl, and I took those messages really, really personally.”   Chloe Cole, a 17-year-old student in California, had a similar experience when she joined Instagram at 11. “I started being exposed to a lot of LGBT content and activism,” she said. “I saw how trans people online got an overwhelming amount of support, and the amount of praise they were getting really spoke to me because, at the time, I didn’t really have a lot of friends of my own.”   Experts worry that many young people seeking to transition are doing so without a proper mental-health evaluation. Among them is Dr. Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist specializing in gender, sexuality and identity. A transgender woman herself, Anderson has helped hundreds of young people navigate the transition journey over the past 30 years. Anderson supports the methodical, milestone-filled process lasting anywhere from a few months to several years to undergo transition. Today, however, she’s worried that some young people are being medicalized without the proper restraint or oversight.  “I’m concerned that the rise of detransitioners is reflective of some young people who have progressed through their gender journey very, very quickly,” she said. She worries that some doctors may be defaulting to medicalization as a remedy for other personal or mental-health factors. “When other issues important to a child are not fully addressed [before transition], then medical professionals are failing children.” According to an online survey of detransitioners conducted by Dr. Lisa Littman last year, 40% said their gender dysphoria was caused by a mental-health condition and 62% felt medical professionals did not investigate whether trauma was a factor in their transition decisions...    “I saw children being fast-tracked onto medical solutions for psychological problems, and when kids get on the medical conveyor belt, they don’t get off,” Evans said. “But the politicization of the issue was shutting down proper clinical rigor. That meant quite vulnerable kids were in danger of being put on a medical path for treatment that they may well regret.”  Indeed, transitions are getting younger and hastier. Puberty blockers are commonly administered at the first sign of development to children as young as 9, according to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Testosterone and estrogen injections are frequently prescribed at age 13 or 14, despite the Endocrine Society’s recommendation of 16. And serious surgeries like mastectomies are sometimes performed on children as young as 13. Although medical intervention for minors requires parental consent, many mothers and fathers approve surgery and hormone therapy at the recommendation of affirming medical professionals or even out of fear their child might self-harm if denied treatment... detransitioners frequently report that getting prescriptions is a breeze. A total of 55% said their medical evaluations felt inadequate...   In Helena’s case, all it took to get a testosterone prescription was one trip to Planned Parenthood when she was 18. She said she was given four times the typical starting dose by a nurse practitioner in less than an hour, without ever seeing a doctor.  Chloe said she was fast-tracked through her entire transition — from blockers to a mastectomy — in just two years, with parental consent. The only pushback she said she encountered came from the first endocrinologist she saw, who agreed to prescribe her puberty blockers but not testosterone when she was 13. But she said she went to another doctor who gave her the prescription with no trouble. “Because all the therapists and specialists followed the affirmative care model, there wasn’t a lot of gate-keeping throughout the whole transition process,” she recalled. “The professionals all seemed to push medical transition, so I thought it was the only path for me to be happy.”...   A variety of studies suggest that as many as 80% of dysphoric children could ultimately experience “desistance”— or coming to terms with their biological gender without resorting to transition...   While in the hospital she came to the realization that her transition was a mistake. “I saw a montage of photos of me, and when I saw how much my face changed and how unhappy I looked, I realized this was all f****d up and I shouldn’t have done it. It was a really dark time.”...  “I want my voice to be heard,” said Chloe. “I don’t want history to repeat itself. I can’t let this happen to other kids.”"
TRAs will still gaslight us that no one does sex change surgery on teens
"This is not happening and it's good that it is"
Gun nuts get very upset about the CDC tracking gun deaths because they'ren ot diseases. But TRAs don't get upset about the CDC tracking trans people
Liberals still claim that the rise in trans youth is entirely the result of previous underdiagnosis being corrected. They are literally saying that detransitioners who say they were groomed into it don't exist
Sadly more parents will be forced to "consent" on pain of having their children taken away before society wakes up to the horror of trans mania

Childhood Sexual Abuse, Gender Dysphoria, and Transition Regret: Billy's Story - "Childhood sexual abuse is an experience common to many of those who write me with regret about changing genders

Meme - "Finding out my entire middle friend group has detransitioned is sooo indescribable
we'd get so upset at the "issa phase" comments too"

Man suing the NHS over trans surgery he regrets has bravely waived anonymity to share his ordeal - "For Ritchie Herron, a bright and articulate civil servant from Newcastle, life over the past four years has become almost unbearable. It takes him ten minutes to empty his bladder, a process as painful as it is slow. Any sex drive is long gone. In fact, he says, his crotch is numb, ‘shell-shocked’ from the damage done to him under the apparent care of the NHS... Battling mental health issues – and after decades of suppressing his homosexuality – Ritchie, 35, had thought the answer was to become a woman. But instead, he says, he was fast-tracked into making ‘the biggest mistake of his life’ and left infertile, incontinent and with ongoing pain.  Not only had the NHS clinic failed to take into account his spiralling mental health crisis, he claims, but it had also failed to properly counsel him about the risks... His account raises serious questions about the safeguards in place at NHS gender clinics, which have seen a 1,700 per cent rise in referrals over the past ten years, accounted for mainly by children and young adults.  The speed at which Ritchie – who had been living as a woman called Abby – was diagnosed and subsequently referred for irreversible surgery is disturbing in itself.  In fact, he says, he had repeatedly turned down the procedure and had voiced deep misgivings to the clinic’s staff about having it.  His case, he believes, could spark a wave of further claims. ‘This is an avalanche waiting to happen,’ he tells The Mail on Sunday. ‘Transition is now being sold to people on a mass scale. It’s like PPI, but more sinister.  ‘In a few years, I’m sure we’ll have law firms asking people if they transitioned and would like to claim compensation.’  According to Ritchie, not one professional explored whether mental health issues may have led him to believe he was trans.  Today, he is one of a growing number of ‘de-transitioners’, living once again as a man and grieving his ‘mistake’. Much of his confusion was around accepting he was gay, he now acknowledges... According to Ritchie, he was diagnosed with ‘transsexualism’ after just two 30-minute appointments... In 2017, he was given another referral for surgery, to be performed at the Nuffield Health hospital in Brighton but paid for by the NHS. Ritchie refused it again – but says he was told that if he did not accept the referral he would be discharged from the service.  This sent him into a ‘tailspin’, he recalls. He believed it meant his therapy would also be withdrawn, which had been a ‘lifeline’. He had recently admitted he felt suicidal... patients like Ritchie faced ‘a lifetime of medical care and consequences’ and ‘cannot be put back together again’.  He adds: ‘My concern is clinicians failed to identify red flags and change direction. Proper consideration needs to be given to issues such as OCD, internalised homophobia, depression, drug use, sexual abuse and childhood trauma as potential reasons for patients rejecting their sexed body.’"
It's weird that in the US, the land of lawsuits, we're not seeing many trans lawsuits caused by trans mania leading people to mutilate their bodies

Doctors Have Failed Them, Say Those Who Regret Transitioning - "the first meeting in 2021 was held because "too many people were dismissing the stories of the detransitioners." O'Malley is a psychotherapist, a clinical advisor to the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, and a founding member of the International Association of Therapists for Desisters and Detransitioners.  "It's become blindingly obvious over the last year that...'detrans' is a huge part of the trans phenomenon," said O'Malley, adding that detransitioners have been "undermined and dismissed."  Laura Edwards-Leeper, PhD (@DrLauraEL), a prominent gender therapist who has recently expressed concern regarding adequate gatekeeping when treating youth with gender dysphoria, agreed.  She tweeted: "You simply can't call yourself a legit gender provider if you don't believe that detransitioners exist. As part of the informed consent process for transitioning, it is unethical to not discuss this possibility with young people." Edwards-Leeper is professor emeritus in the School of Graduate Psychology at Pacific University in Hillsboro, Oregon.  Speakers in the forum largely offered experiences, not data. They pointed out that there has been little to no study of detransition, but all testified that it was less rare than it has been portrayed by the transgender community.... the most common reasons for detransitioning were realizing that gender dysphoria was due to other issues; internal homophobia; and the unbearable nature of transphobia. Watson said the hardest part of detransitioning was admitting to herself that her transition had been a mistake. "It's embarrassing and you feel ashamed and guilty," she said, adding that it may mean losing friends who now regard you as a "bigot, while you're also dealing with transition regret."  "It's a living hell, especially when none of your therapists or counselors will listen to you," she said. "Detransitioning isn't fun."... Michelle Alleva, who stopped identifying as transgender in 2020 but had ceased testosterone 4 years earlier because of side effects, cited what she called a lack of evidence base for the effectiveness and safety of medical transitions.  "You need to have a really, really good evidence base in place if you're going straight to an invasive treatment that is going to cause permanent changes to your body," she said.  Access to medical transition used to involve more "gatekeeping," through mental health evaluations and other interventions, she said, but there has been a shift from treating what was considered a psychiatric issue to essentially affirming an identity.  "This shift was activist-driven, not evidence-based"... Most studies showing satisfaction with transition only involve a few years of follow-up, she said, adding that the longest follow-up study of transition, published in 2011, spanning 30 years, showed that the suicide rate 10-15 years post-surgery was 20 times higher than the general population.  Studies of regret were primarily conducted before the rapid increase in the number of trans-identifying individuals, she said, which makes it hard to draw conclusions about pediatric transition. Getting estimates on this population are difficult because so many who detransition do not tell their clinicians, and many studies have short follow-up times or a high loss to follow-up... "We need professionals that are prepared for detransitioners," said Alleva. "Some of us have lost trust in health care professionals as a result of our experience," she said.  "It's a huge feeling of institutional betrayal""
Disagree with any part of the trans agenda and you're supposedly denying that they exist. Yet they deny that detransitioners exist

Meme - Paul Embery @PaulEmbery: "Daughter tells me her class has been discussing LGBT issues. One friend has since defined as "non- another has since declared she is bisexual and has "known it for ages". The first is 12 years old; the second is 11. Genuinely wonder what is happening in our schools."
Sir John Robert Seeley @NxlAnglo: "Schools are problem but a bigger problem is culture in general. Kids are learning this stuff from Netflix just as much as teachers"

Meme - "LGBTQ+ after society won't play pretend with them:
*Daffy Duck shooting self*"

Meme - Man: "Wanna go on a date?"
Woman: "Sure"
Transwoman at window: "NOOO! You have to date transwomen! We're valid, we exist! WE ARE INDISTINGUISHABLE!"

Meme - Houston_IIluminati @HTX_illuminati: "There is a dating app called 'Her' which is specifically for lesbians -, women who like women... lesbians are complaining that "trans" profiles are now outnumbering the lesbians. This is what self-ID brings with it. Mentally ill predators."

Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) - "The notion that someone can be "born in the wrong body" is as scientifically absurd as the notion that someone can be possessed by demons. These are both supernatural religious explanations for observed phenomena. Some people may *feel* as though they were born in the wrong body, and as adults they may choose to medically transition to help ameliorate their discomfort. That's 100% fine.  But let's not wade into the realm of pseudoscience by interpreting "born in the wrong body" literally."
Replies: "At least the explicitly religious explanation is straightforward about what it claims to be"
"old religions die and a new faith is born"

Meme - "And what progressive parents are allowing to happen to their daughters. So sad They don't look too happy either."
"This doesn't look like a society that's "evolving" to me."

Meme - Eva Kurilova @eva kurilova: "Anyone else get ridiculously excited about finding good bra?"
Katy Montgomerie @KatyMont..: "Sounds pretty AGP"
Eva Kurilova @eva_xurilova Replying lo @KalyMontgomerie: "Sounds pretty AGP to be unable to imagine that not all excitement is sexual"
Autogynephilia strikes again
Aka Colin

Meme - ""I WANT TO BE A GIRL SO I CAN WEAR THESE"
*POSTS PICTURES OF SOCKS THAT NO WOMAN WOULD WEAR IN PUBLIC*"

Meme - Trans people and allies: "GOD IS JUST A FAIRYTALE AND NO ONE SHOULD EVER BE OBLIGATED TO INDULGE IN SOMEONE FLSE'S FANTASIES!!!"
Normal people: "Uh, ok...."

Meme - "So felt a little on my inside. And as soon as I get like maybe 3? Cm in. The inside Is literally just covered in hair.
I haven't really touched myself very much on the inside. I didn't notice It until now, And its just covered in hair. You can't even feel the skin. They sald they would remove the hair follicles an my penile skin. But I don't think they removed any of it? I as of right now regret the surgery so hard. I feel so ugly and disgusting. My inside is just covered with hair. I know this post will be spread over the internet among with my other posts that has been seen by millions of people by now. But is that even a bad thing? That people just spread the "truth". It's just so disgusting. I am so disgusting. They said I wouldn't have hair on the Inside. And they can't even remove it now. Because you can't do laser or diathermy on the inside of the vagina because you can't get the tools Inside. And Its just so deep in. All the way in, and I can't even remove it with a tweezer or anything. Is my only option getting another surgery to have my current vaginal canal removed and replaced with a piece of my colon? Right now honestly I feel like killing myself. This surgery has had so many negative effects on my life. And the only positive and thing left about the surgery is I can wear tight clothes. But all of this have not been worth it. I obviously don't pass naked. It doesn't look cis at all. I don't want to have sex anymore because I'm so disgusting. And I'm actually starting to really miss being a dick girl. I lost all of my value on the dating and sex market. I know some people say it's a good thing that chasers are no longer into me. But it actually really sucks that no one is interested"

Meme - Janet @twambammaam: "If you need a certificate to prove to you're a woman, you know you're not a woman. You're just a man with a certificate."

Meme - Melonie Mac: "Tomboy who wished I was a boy when I was a kid but grew out of it and love being a female w/ "boy hobbies" after puberty hit. Live and let live as an adult, but let kids be kids and don't put irreversible life choices on them that they're too young to consent to"

Meme - "PLAYING 'GUESS WHO' IN 2018"
"IS YOUR CHARACTER A MAN OR A WOMAN?"
"KEEP GUESSING YOU TRANSPHOBIC BIGOT... THERE ARE 59,734 GENDERS"

Meme - "Sweet baby Jeebus!! Bugs Bunny is Satan!! I cannot believe the Woke Left exposed children to Drag in 1952. *Elmer Fudd*"
"The joke was that the people Bugs Bunny was against were too stupid to not see through an obvious disguise. It was a punchline, not an expression of identity that you were a bigot for not acknowledging."

Meme - Josh Gardner: "Can anyone in this group define the word woman?"
Violet Turner: "Josh Gardner congratulations, here's your participation trophy
Achievement unlocked: Former member of Hey, I'm banned from that group!"
When you're in a cult, you're not allowed to question the ideology
How ironic that a group about getting banned is so happy to ban others. Presumably it's because it's full of intolerant liberals who got banned by other intolerant liberals, but are still intolerant and so are happy to ban others

Meme - ">be me, grow up a tomboy
>all my friends are guys
>in HS, hang out with nerdy jock guys, raging lesbian
>scissor with lots of confused girls in HS
>super cash
>find out what trans is in Junior year
>end up transpilling myself and transitioning in college
>everyone at school says I'm so brave
>still scissoring all day er day
>start to really look man like right around when I graduate
>move to san fran for a job after I graduate, live as a man
>women won't give me a second look now
>get literally laughed at in bars
>no matches on the swipe apps
mfw when I went from being a cute lesbian to a 5'3" manlet incel"

Church of England: There is ‘no official definition’ of a woman - "The Church of England has said that there is “no official definition” of a woman.  In a written reply to a question submitted to General Synod, a senior Bishop said that although the meaning of the word woman was previously "thought to be self-evident", "additional care" was now needed...   Rev Angela Berners-Wilson, England’s first woman priest, said that she is “not totally happy” with the answer, but added that the issue is “sensitive”...   The issue of defining what a woman is emerged in written questions to the General Synod, the Church’s legislative body, in which Adam Kendry, a lay member of the Synod and a representative of the Royal Navy, asked: “What is the Church of England’s definition of a woman?”... Jayne Ozanne, synod member and founder of the Ozanne Foundation in 2017 - which works with religious organisations around the world to tackle prejudice and discrimination of LGBTQI people - described the question as “passive aggressive”.   She said: “Mr Kendy's question is sadly a prime example of a passive aggressive question that is designed to upset the LGBT+ community and particularly the trans members in our midst.   “It's time these anti-LGBT attacks stopped and that we learnt to acknowledge that life is not quite as black and white as some appear to think it should be.”"
Cult ideologies cannot be questioned

Church of England says it has 'no official definition' of a woman - "The Church of England’s official website has 176 search results for the word “woman,” including the 2014 announcement of Rev. Libby Lane as the “the first woman bishop in the Church of England.”"

Meme - "How the hell do you identify as "neither?""
"... I just do."
"PFF! OK. I'm gonna identify as a helicopter!"
"I identify as a toaster! LMAOOO!"
"Youre gonna identify as "deceased" if you dont leave my friend alone."
TRAs can only get their way through force

Meme - Woman: "I'M GOING To HoLD MY BREATH UNTIL YoU SAY MEN CAN GET PREGNANT!"
Man: *indifferent*
Woman: *holds breath and flailing on ground*
Other Woman: "Stop it! You're KILLING her!"

Transgender swimmer Lia Thomas nominated for ‘Woman of the Year’ award - "Four months after becoming the first transgender athlete to win a Division I swimming title, University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas is in the running for the NCAA’s “Woman of the Year” award... Fifty-eight percent of U.S. adults support rules requiring trans athletes “to compete on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth,” while just 17% oppose them."

BBC ‘altered gender in trans rape claim’ | News | The Times - "The BBC changed the testimony of a rape victim after a debate over the pronouns of her transgender attacker... The woman referred to her alleged rapist as “him” but insiders said that her words were changed to avoid “misgendering” the abuser in an article on the corporation’s website... Some journalists argued that the quote should remain intact, while others said it should reflect the trans woman’s preferred she/her pronouns. It comes amid growing concern among BBC staff that an internal diversity team is influencing what journalists can report, preventing them from covering gender identity issues accurately and impartially... The article, which was the subject of thousands of complaints, cited a self-selecting social media study by Get The L Out, a lesbian campaign group, which questioned gay women about their sexual experiences with trans women. An anonymous participant told researchers: “I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so he was a ‘woman’ even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout, so I agreed to go home with him. He used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing his penis and raped me.” “They were originally all male references but the woke bros at the news website wanted to make them female because of misgendering,” said a person with knowledge of the matter. “It’s quite shocking. I can’t think of any other situation where we would change the words of an alleged rape victim.”... Diversity executives have long maintained that the department has no involvement in the BBC’s journalism. The style guide — in-house rules governing the use of language in BBC reporting — was updated in November 2020 with the diktat: “Where possible, use the term/s and pronoun/s preferred by people themselves, when they have made their preferences clear.” An internal document, seen by The Times, goes further in stating that the BBC should “normalise” the use of pronouns both “explicitly and implicitly” through programming. Angela Wild, co-founder of Get The L Out, said the BBC was wrong to change the quote in her study. “It’s really unethical and disrespectful to the victim,” she said. “It’s a form of gaslighting for a woman who has already been through sexual violence.”"

How the Trans Movement Hurts Victims of Sexual Assault – PJ Media - "Remember when the radical left was trying to convince us that “rape culture” was a thing in the United States? It wasn’t all that long ago. Though the theory originated in the 1970s, the #MeToo movement really brought it back into the public consciousness for a while...   Imagine being so brainwashed by the trans movement that you’d be okay with a male rapist being incarcerated with female inmates. Is that not enabling a rapist?  When a ninth-grade girl was raped in the girls’ restroom in Virginia’s Loudoun County last May, the school board actively tried to cover it up. The school did not report the assault to the police, choosing instead to handle the case in-house. Why? Because the assault was committed by a gender-fluid boy wearing a skirt. The girl’s father, Scott Smith, was furious, and the school called the police on him for “making a scene” over it.  Smith later told his daughter’s story during a Loudoun County School Board meeting to protest their plan to implement pro-transgender policies. But the school claimed to have no record of the assault, and a local leftist activist who also attended the meeting told Smith she didn’t believe his daughter’s story.  So much for believing victims, right?   It is a well-known fact that the vast majority of sexual assaults are committed by men. Yet, the moment a male rapist claims to identify as female or nonbinary, any skepticism is immediately dubbed transphobic. One could argue that the transgender movement is protecting rapists by denying their status as males.  Ezra Miller, who plays The Flash in the DC Extended Universe, has been accused of child trafficking and sexual abuse of a minor. Miller identifies as non-binary, so the media, apparently unwilling to acknowledge these crimes were perpetrated by a man, went to extraordinary lengths not to “misgender” him in its reporting. Variety even altered testimony from one of his victims, replacing male pronouns with they/them.   This is happening all over, not just in America. Last month, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) changed a rape victim’s statement. The BBC was concerned about backlash if they published the victim’s testimony verbatim, because she “misgendered” her rapist by using male pronouns."

Scottish civil servants warned of ‘farts’ in the workplace - "Women who question transgender ideology have been branded “farts” as part of equalities training offered to civil servants in Nicola Sturgeon’s Government, it has emerged.  Workers who attended a workplace “trans 101” course were told the term was an acronym for “feminism appropriating ridiculous transphobe” and that women who oppose inclusivity measures were part of a “trans hate group”.   Staff who attended the training session, run by the Scottish Government’s taxpayer-funded LGBTI+ internal staff network, were also urged to study claims that biological sex is a “falsehood” invented by the medical profession to “reinforce white supremacy and gender oppression”...   Civil servants were directed to claims that so-called “gender critical” women or “terfs” (trans exclusionary radical feminists) “hate all trans people” and have “an unhealthy fascination with trans kids”...   Other claims set out in the document are that “all research” shows there is “virtually no difference” between sporting performance of transgender women and natural women, which is inaccurate.  It goes on to state the idea that men and women have “inherent, unique and natural” distinct attributes based in biology is an “outdated understanding of sex”.   It calls on non-trans people to acknowledge their “cisgender privilege”, asserts that trans people’s biology and genetics match their gender identity, and says people should ask for a person’s pronouns in “everyday conversations” as it is “impossible to know a person’s gender just by looking at them”...   The Scottish Government has faced repeated accusations that it is unduly influenced by radical transgender ideology, and is currently pushing legislation through Holyrood which would allow Scots to self-declare their own legal sex.  The UK Government has ruled out a similar system for England and Wales and ministers are understood to be considering refusing to recognise Scottish gender recognition certificates issued under the new SNP approach.  The email directing staff members to the trans language dictionary was leaked to an online Scottish nationalist blog which was once supportive of the SNP, but is now hostile to the party under Ms Sturgeon’s leadership.   Other claims in the dictionary are that it is possible to be “polygender”, meaning a person can have multiple gender identities at once, and that colonialism has “erased or destroyed” the “indigenous understandings of gender and attraction”.  It is stated that “gender non-conforming people”, especially children, can be described as “gender gifted” to reflect “how amazing it can be to have a unique and/or non-normative gender”."
"Follow the science"

Mr Kipling maker to offer ‘trans inclusivity’ training in workplace shake up - "Mr Kipling maker Premier Foods is to offer 'trans inclusivity' training to all staff, in a further shake-up of workplace policies.  Premier Foods, which also makes Bisto and Batchelors brands, is launching "new modern workplace policies" which include providing online training for all 4,000 staff on menopause and how to cope with it, as well as practical tips for those working with colleagues going through menopause.   Menopause champions are set to host regular "menopause cafes" for colleagues to discuss their experiences, it said.   Premier Foods will also now provide paid time off for workers who are either going through menopause or having medical treatment relating to gender reassignment surgery. This leave will not be capped."
Of course, if you pay women who take long menopause leave less, that's sexist