Links - 27th August 2022 (2 - George Floyd Unrest)

Ford pressured to stop selling police cars, but it won't get out of the business - "Ford CEO Jim Hackett rejected employees' calls to get out of the police car business, saying the automaker can support the Black Lives Matter movement while selling the majority of America's police cars."

Unilever pauses Facebook and Twitter advertising for rest of 2020 - "Following Unilever’s announcement, Coca-Cola on Friday announced it will be pausing paid advertising on all social media platforms globally for at least 30 days... Following Coca-Cola’s announcement, Levi’s and Dockers said they will be pausing all advertising on Facebook and Instagram through “at least” July: “Facebook must take actions to stop misinformation and hate speech on its platforms. It is an unacceptable affront to our values. We and Dockers are joining the #stophateforprofit campaign and pausing all ads on Facebook.”   Hershey’s also announced Friday that it will be cutting advertising on Facebook and joining the #stophateforprofit boycott. “We do not believe that Facebook is effectively managing violent and divisive speech on their platform. Despite repeated assertions by Facebook to take action, we have not seen meaningful change”... In the week since a group of organizations called on Facebook advertisers to pause their ad spending during the month of July, more than 90 marketers including Verizon, Patagonia, REI, Lending Club and The North Face have announced their intention to join, according to a running list from Sleeping Giants. The group of organizations includes the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Sleeping Giants, Color of Change, Free Press and Common Sense.  The organizations said they’re asking Facebook to more stringently police hate speech and disinformation by taking a number of actions, including creating a “separate moderation pipeline” for users who say they’ve been targeted because of their race or religion, or to let advertisers see how frequently their ads appeared near to content that was later removed for misinformation or hate, and allow them refunds for those advertisements.   American Honda released a statement Friday, saying it would also pause advertising for Honda and Acura... Procter & Gamble, another major Facebook spender, said earlier this week it is reviewing all media channels, networks, platforms and programs it advertises on “to ensure that the content and commentary accurately and respectfully all people, and that we are not advertising on or near content we determine to be hateful, discriminatory, denigrating or derogatory.”... “As one of the largest spenders on Facebook’s platforms, Unilever’s decision to halt advertising and commit to our #StopHateforProfit pledge brings us a huge step forward in holding Facebook accountable for enabling hateful, denigrating and discriminatory content against Black people,” said the group’s president, Rashad Robinson."
Facebook cracking down on woke hatred presumably brings them less backlash than this, which hits them in the pockets. Until big business changes its definition of hate speech, of course (Unilever seems to have done that already)

Black Student Confesses To Racist Graffiti On College Campus Which Sparked Protests - "A private college in Michigan located a black student who was responsible for racist graffiti that targeted black people and Jewish people... Part of the college’s Facebook post stated, “But we know the acts of racism that have occurred this week are not about one particular person or one particular incident. We know that there is a significant history of racial pain and trauma on campus and we are taking action to repair our community. We will change and heal together as a community, because we are committed to doing the work.”...   Albion College’s president made news in January when he sent an email to the college community when he described the George Floyd protests as “peaceful activism in communities around the country.”...   Students at the college have been protesting for racial justice after the racist graffiti was discovered on campus.  Last week, students “boycotted” attending classes which they paid to attend in an effort to fight “racial injustice”... The “boycott” is happening during midterm week and students claim that they can’t be expected to focus on midterms when they are busy fighting racial injustice. “I’m tired of having to do these things. I wish I could get up like a regular kid, go to class, come home and do homework, but that’s not my reality,” the boycott organizer told WWMT."
Plus, talking nonsense about "mental health"

Opinion | George Floyd and the Fading Signs of Black Lives Matter - The New York Times - "Support for Black Lives Matter has diminished. Federal police reform and federal voter protection both failed to pass the Senate. And the founders of Black Lives Matter have been drawn into controversies about how they handled its money... Now not only are their allies reversing course on issues like police reform; the country is also facing a full backlash toward protest itself. Dozens of states have passed laws restricting the right to protest (just this week, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida barred citizens from protesting outside private homes), and more than a dozen have now criminalized teaching full and accurate racial history...   There is no example of this erasure more striking than the continual destruction, removal or slow vanishing of much of the street art produced in the wake of Floyd’s killing... many of those pieces have disappeared, sometimes because of exposure to traffic or the elements and sometimes because of deliberate attempts to erase them. Business owners quietly removed the graffitied planks from their storefronts. Some of the murals have been defaced... Further complicating the preservation efforts is the degree to which these pieces of art were politicized from the moment of their creation: Murals were going up as Confederate monuments in cities like Montgomery, Ala., continued to come down. It fueled the fears held by white supremacists that white people and white culture would eventually be superseded. In their zero-sum worldview, BLM’s pro-Blackness was inherently anti-white"
Liberals are terrified of the moral panic fading, since it threatens their radical agenda
Liberal graffiti is good, but if you draw new graffiti on liberal graffiti, that is wrong
Presumably statues of their Founding Fathers are "white supremacist" monuments too
Considering that they hate "whiteness" so much and see it as anti-black, this is deeply ironic

WaPo tweeted that George Floyd was "shot and killed in police custody," then attempted to cover it up 🤡 - "This is one of America's largest newspapers. And they just casually threw out a huge piece of disinformation over a large cultural flashpoint. Where's the Disinformation Governance Board when you need it???... Not a single acknowledgement of their error for anyone who might have been deceived by their false information. Nope, just a statement that the language was "changed" after "publish."... America is far worse off because of entities like WaPo that have purposely created division in this nation for money and power, pitting countryman against countryman in a hellish spectacle that stinks to high heaven."
Only the Daily Mail and Fox News are unreliable

Curtis Houck on Twitter - "Not only did The Washington Post mess this up in their tweet (left) about how George Floyd died, they did the same thing on their own website (right)"

Resist The Self-censorship Bug - "what we see on our movie and TV screens, in addition to what we read, must be devoid of what they deem to be racism, sexism, and “proto-fascism.”...   Gone with the Wind, as Stewart reminded us in an editorial announcing her new role as contextualizer-in-chief, remains not only the highest-grossing film of all time when adjusted for inflation, but the winner of eight Oscars—including a supporting- actress win for Hattie McDaniel, the first black actor to take home the coveted statuette... Among its many black defenders is Whoopi Goldberg, the actor and co-host of The View. Noting that the film was made at a different time, Goldberg warned that banning films like Gone with the Wind and shows like Cops was perilous. Censoring such films, she said, would mean that many popular “blaxploitation” films would also have to be banned.   Spike Lee, who used a celebrated sequence from Gone with the Wind in his own film, Black KKKlansman, told The View that students and other film buffs should be able to see such films, even those that are more openly racist. “I think that one of the most racist films ever, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, should be seen,” he said, adding that he showed the film in his class at New York University...   Why stop there? Let’s ban screenings of Al Jolson’s performances in black face, and reruns of Norman Lear’s brilliant All in the Family, the 1970s sitcom whose racist, sexist, homophobic, working class antihero, Archie Bunker, was must-see viewing. Let’s throw Shirley Temple movies under the bus. We can’t have doorman Bill Bojangles Robinson, one of America’s greatest tap dancers, teach little Shirley how to do a time step to the strains of “My Old Kentucky Home” in The Little Colonel. Forget about seeing the 1937 classic The Good Earth, whose apparently racist producers chose white actress Luise Rainer rather than Anna May Wong to play the sold slave and prostitute in her Oscar-winning performance. Should The Wizard of Oz be seen by impressionable Americans, given its portrait of dwarfs? PETA would surely object to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds for portraying our feathered friends as mass killers. And don’t The Godfather films suggest that Italian-Americans are in thrall to the mafia?"

As Shot Police Fight For Their Lives, Protesters Shout 'We Hope They Die' - "After a gunman opened fire on two Los Angeles County deputies Saturday night, protesters gathered to express hate for the police outside the hospital where the two “ambushed” officers still lie with life-threatening injuries. Police say they had to clear the protesters from blocking ambulances from bringing sick people into the hospital.  Videos from reporters on the ground show the protestors yelling at the police outside of St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, California, calling cops “pigs,” screaming “f-ck the police,” and “we hope they die.”"

If You Don’t Support Black Lives Matter, You're Fired - "The list of people who have lost their jobs or been suspended for criticizing or even questioning the BLM movement is long—and growing daily. Most prominent on the list is erstwhile New York Times opinion page editor James Bennet, who “resigned” under pressure from woke NYT staffers after he ran an op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton that made the uncontroversial case that the U.S. military should be deployed if police can’t get riots under control.  Then there was Stan Wischnowski, top editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, forced to resign over a headline of an architecture column that read, “Buildings Matter, Too,” which ran after scores of buildings in downtown Philly had been destroyed by rioters...   Claudia Eller, editor-in-chief at Variety, was forced to take administrative leave after she got into a Twitter spat with a woman of South Asian descent who thought a piece Eller wrote lamenting the lack of diversity at the magazine wasn’t obsequious enough.  On and on it goes. NBA announcer Grant Napear was fired from his sports talk radio program and resigned as the Sacramento Kings announcer after tweeting “all lives matter.” A professor at UCLA was placed on leave after refusing to cancel a final exam following the death of George Floyd. A reporter in Wales was forced to step down as Wales Book of the Year Judge after complaining that a BLM protest violated the government’s social distancing rules.  A cast member for MTV’s reality competition series “The Challenge” was fired after writing “people die every f–king day” in response to an Instagram comment about George Floyd. Professional soccer player Aleksander Katai was “released” by the LA Galaxy not for anything he wrote or said, but because his wife criticized BLM on Instagram. A former Canadian cabinet minister lost three jobs after saying on television that he didn’t think Canada was a racist country.
 That’s just a partial list.
 BLM Isn’t Interested In Free Speech, It Wants Power
Black Lives Matter as a political movement—as distinct from, say, thinking that black lives matter, which most Americans do because they aren’t racist—isn’t interested at all in ameliorating the state of black America, or fighting actual racism, or expanding liberty and justice for all under our constitutional system. This isn’t an evolutionary movement but a revolutionary one. It doesn’t draw on our tradition of constitutionalism but on Marxism. Its model isn’t the American Revolution but the French Revolution—hence the purges, which for now are confined to the workplace.  It’s fair to say the movement’s power and influence are based on ideological purges. Exposing supposed racists is its modus operandi, and what began on campus has now percolated through into the mainstream of American life. Apologies and counterarguments won’t help because the one thing the BLM movement cannot allow is honest discourse or the free exchange of ideas.  Consider the case of Harald Uhlig, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and lead editor of the Journal of Political Economy, one of the country’s top economics journals. A campaign is currently underway to get Uhlig fired for “trivializing the BLM movement” and then insufficiently apologizing for this supposed offense in a Twitter thread.   How did he trivialize the BLM movement? He wrote a blog post in 2017 defending the principle of free speech using the example of sympathetic media coverage of NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. Essentially, he posed a diagnostic question about the motivations of journalists. He did this in a somewhat clumsy but provocative way, asking whether these journalists would still defend the players if instead of kneeling during the anthem they waved a Confederate flag and donned Ku Klux Klan gear.  Uhlig’s point was that you’re only really defending the principle of free speech if you’re defending views you find despicable, like support for the Confederacy or the KKK. Since most journalists already agreed with the kneeling NFL players protesting police abuse, “this isn’t really an act of bravery”...   This isn’t some fringe incident in academia, by the way. This is an effort to oust the editor of a top academic journal for defending the principle of free speech. Yet among the mob calling for Uhlig’s head are powerful people like Paul Krugman of the New York Times, who has been lobbing baseless smears at Uhlig for days now on Twitter, misrepresenting what he said and cheering on the people trying to get him fired... you’re a racist if you don’t support BLM—and even if you do, you might be deemed a racist anyway. And in that case, you’re fired"

5 Statistics You Need To Know About Cops Killing Blacks - "1. Cops killed nearly twice as many whites as blacks in 2015...
Some may argue that these statistics are evidence of racist treatment toward blacks, since whites consist of 62 percent of the population and blacks make up 13 percent of the population. But as Mac Donald writes in The Wall Street Journal, 2009 statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reveal that blacks were charged with 62 percent of robberies, 57 percent of murders and 45 percent of assaults in the 75 biggest counties in the country, despite only comprising roughly 15 percent of the population in these counties... “The black violent crime rate would actually predict that more than 26 percent of police victims would be black,” MacDonald said. “Officer use of force will occur where the police interact most often with violent criminals, armed suspects, and those resisting arrest, and that is in black neighborhoods.”
2. More whites and Hispanics die from police homicides than blacks.
According to Mac Donald, 12 percent of white and Hispanic homicide deaths were due to police officers, while only four percent of black homicide deaths were the result of police officers...
3. The Post‘s data does show that unarmed black men are more likely to die by the gun of a cop than an unarmed white man…but this does not tell the whole story...
'The “unarmed” label is literally accurate, but it frequently fails to convey highly-charged policing situations. In a number of cases, if the victim ended up being unarmed, it was certainly not for lack of trying. At least five black victims had reportedly tried to grab the officer’s gun, or had been beating the cop with his own equipment. Some were shot from an accidental discharge triggered by their own assault on the officer. And two individuals included in the Post’s “unarmed black victims” category were struck by stray bullets aimed at someone else in justified cop shootings. If the victims were not the intended targets, then racism could have played no role in their deaths.'...
4. Black and Hispanic police officers are more likely to fire a gun at blacks than white officers...
5. Blacks are more likely to kill cops than be killed by cops. This is according to FBI data, which also found that 40 percent of cop killers are black. According to Mac Donald, the police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black than a cop killing an unarmed black person."

Marking down students for spelling mistakes is ‘elitist’, says university - "Marking down incorrect spelling, punctuation and grammar could be seen as “elitist”, a university policy says.  As part of efforts to “decolonise” the curriculum and ensure “equity of opportunity” between all students regardless of their background, professors and lecturers at Hull University have been advised against insisting on good written English in all circumstances.  It is one of a number of universities to have adopted “inclusive” marking policies, which cite fairness and equality between students as a reason why lecturers should be prepared to overlook spelling and grammar mistakes...   Worcester University also has a policy on how to assess students “inclusively” which asks lecturers to focus marking on “how well the student has communicated their understanding” of the subject rather than on spelling, grammar and punctuation where they are not central to the assessment criteria... The University of the Arts London tells academics to “actively accept spelling, grammar or other language mistakes” as long as they do not “significantly impede communication”. Lecturers are also warned to avoid imposing their own ideas about the “correct English” on students’ work."

Toymaker Lego Asks Retailers to Pull Promos for Police, WH Figures - "The Danish toymaker Lego has asked retailers to pull promotional materials for some play figures in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, including all police figures, firefighters, and accessories, and even the White House... while Lego’s decision is being praised, some are critical because they believe it is only temporary"

Multiculturalism is fuelling division - "The idea of the nation state seemed to die on the battlefields of Europe in the 1940s. Pride in national culture and history was no longer justifiable after Nazism and everything that went with it. What followed was a suspicion, and even repudiation, of national culture in favour of multiculturalist policies.  Multiculturalism, like so many ideas, sounds good in its intentions – placing all cultures and people equal before the law. But for cultures to be equal they need to be distinct. Thereby, in its very essence, multiculturalism encourages sectional and eventually sectarian divisions. Identity politics has been the unfortunate result.   Since the war, this country has undergone enormous change. People have become more atomised. The traditional family is in decline. Faith is dying – churches are empty and the Anglican clergy are more interested in politics than in God. So much for Burke’s little platoons of association.  Added to this is our failure to adapt to broader changes in society, particularly the loss of meaningful work among working-class communities and an increasingly diverse population. Frustration at the instability of identity caused by the disintegration of institutions both national and personal played a role in the Brexit vote, which was a way for many to reclaim a sense of self-determination. Without a common sense of what it is to be British, we risk falling into truly dangerous Weimar-like territory. Over the past two weeks, Black Lives Matter protesters have defaced war memorials and toppled statues. London mayor Sadiq Khan has ordered a review of the capital’s statues and other councils are following suit. Counter-protesters have come out in droves to defend statues of the likes of Baden-Powell. At the weekend, the far right stuck its ugly hat in the ring... The humanities as a whole are totally lost in the politics of division and oppression. This is true of both schools and universities. The history of oppressor and oppressed actively seeks division. It is accusatory... One of the great dangers of our current discourse is that it assumes a shared history with the United States. This simply isn’t true. We share a language, not a history. When race riots in Detroit brought America’s racial tensions to Bamber Bridge in Lancashire, in June 1943, the British public sided with the African-American troops. The US military police had tried to enforce a colour bar in the town’s three pubs as a way of extending their own army’s laws on segregation. In response, the landlords posted signs outside their pubs reading ‘Black Troops Only’... it highlights the loss of trust in a common sense of objective morality. Why did Lancashire farmers, knowing they were part of an empire that fed off the labour of minorities, line up with the same minorities against a similar political inequality? This was down to a sense of fair play. Identitarians can’t see this. Their obsession with quotas, diversity and equal representation assumes that, as individuals, we are only capable of respecting those who are exactly like ourselves. For them, the rebalancing of power in favour of minorities is the only way to keep an untrustworthy majority in check – an idea that can only ever be insulting to that majority."
Humans are tribal creatures. When nationalism ebbs, people look for new tribes, e.g. BLM

We should not bend the knee to BLM conformism - "Appearing on TalkRadio with Julia Hartley-Brewer, when asked if he would take a knee in support of Black Lives Matter, the foreign secretary said it ‘feels to me like a symbol of subjugation and subordination, rather than one of liberation and emancipation, but I understand people feel differently about it, so it’s a matter of personal choice’... Labour’s Lisa Nandy criticised Raab’s ‘flippant tone’. David Lammy said Raab was ‘insulting the Black Lives Matter movement’. Ed Davey, the acting Lib Dem leader, called on Raab to offer a ‘fulsome apology’. During BBC News’ unbiased and impartial coverage of what was apparently deemed an enormous news story, political editor Laura Kuenssberg called the comments ‘less than diplomatic’, adding that our politicians ‘might be advised to proceed with care’. It is difficult, however, to imagine exactly how much more care Raab could have proceeded with"

Blue Lives Matter - Posts | Facebook - "Colorado passed a law allowing departments to force officers to pay the families of suspects who were killed in legally-justified shootings."
Be a thug and either you get away with it or your family gets a payout if you are killed attacking the police. Win-win

Meme - "George W. Bush has a DUI Dick
Cheney has a DUI
Matt Gaetz has a DUI
Mike Crapo has a DUI
Beto O'Rourke has a DUI
But Rayshard Brooks had a DUI, couldn't get a job and was killed. This country's criminal justice system was built to incarcerate and kill black and brown Americans"
"I mean, I'm not justifying the shooting, but Brooks attacked the officers, stole a taser from one, and then fired it at an officer pursuing him. Kind of different situations..."

Data: 48 of America's 50 Largest Cities Hit By Black Lives Matter Riots - "The study itself speculated that public perceptions of riots were skewed by “political orientation and biased media framing” and “disproportionate coverage of violent demonstrations.” However, public perceptions may simply have reflected the wide geographic distribution of the violence.  The Princeton data set shows that nearly every major city in the United States experienced riots from late May to the end of August — even under the narrow definition that the study used to classify riots (as separate from events described as police violence against protesters)... Thus in the public imagination, the proportion that matters most may not be the 7% of protests that were violent, but the 96% of major urban areas that experienced rioting. Within the largest 100 cities by population, 74 experienced riots."
On the study claiming 93% of BLM protests were peaceful

Meme - Jack Tar's Revenge @tar_revenge: "If that man had been armed and defended himself, we'd all know the names of those two girls. Indeed, we'd be forced "to say their names" before every sporting event, and we'd be collectively asked to struggle with our privilege. But in reality, we'll never remember *his* name."
On Mohamed Anwar, the Uber driver killed by 2 black girls

Chicago police are no longer allowed to chase people on foot just for running away - "Chicago police officers will no longer be allowed to chase people on foot simply because they run away or give chase over minor offenses, the department said Tuesday, more than a year after two foot pursuits ended with officers fatally shooting a 13-year-old boy and 22-year-old man... Perhaps most significantly, the policy makes clear that the days of officers giving chase just because someone tries to avoid them are over.  “People may avoid contact with a member for many reasons other than involvement in criminal activity”"

Meme - White BLM: "The Right doesn't actually care about the unborn. It's all political for them."
Black woman: "Yeah. But man, I wish someone would do something about all the crime in my neighborhood!"
White BLM: "Unless that crime is done by red necks in klan hoods, keep that to yourself! Black on black crime doesn't poll with with suburban whites!"
The left strawman pro-lifers by claiming if they are pro-life they should fund social spending (confusing positive and negative rights), but black lives only matter if they are taken by the police

Wiffleball Tony 🇺🇸⚾️🏈🏒 on Twitter - "Serious question for both sides: how would the "It was an insurrection" left have reacted had diverse right-wing mobs rioted throughout summer 2020, causing $2B in damage, and killing ~30 people?  Would this have been treated as more or less serious than "One Six?""
"I think if right wingers were rioting in places like Portland and Seattle, their lousy mayors would’ve put a stop to it right away. Last Summer, Portland didn’t employ riot suppressing measures UNTIL a right wing group was staging a counter protest."

Michael Eric Dyson: White People Can Help BLM by Holding Racist Relatives 'to Account' at Thanksgiving - "Vanderbilt University professor Michael Eric Dyson suggested Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that white people could help the Black Lives Matter movement by holding their racist relatives “to account” at family gatherings such as Thanksgiving."

Author Brittney Cooper on Harnessing Rage, Right Now - The New York Times - "The “angry black woman” stereotype has been picked apart and widely condemned in recent years... But Brittney Cooper, a scholar and activist, has urged black women to reclaim the label rather than reject it entirely. “The clarity that comes from rage should also tell us what kind of world we want to see, not just what kind of things we want to get rid of,” Dr. Cooper writes in “Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower.”  The focus of Dr. Cooper’s writing — how anger can be a rational, revolutionary principle — has proved resonant in recent weeks amid nationwide protests against police brutality, discussions of systemic inequality and black Americans dying from Covid-19 at alarming rates... There’s very little investment in recognizing that black women are the sort of deep thinkers and theorists about how you actually build a society for the common good."
Imagine if someone was so admiring of white men

Dallas Shooting Shows Dangers of Politicizing Tragedy - "Three days after the Orlando shooting, the New York Times editorial board seemed to achieve the impossible, ignoring Mateen’s open pledge of loyalty to ISIS and insisting, against all evidence, that he was “driven” to murder by conservative ideology...  CNN commentator Sally Kohn can be counted on to offer the least logical, least consistent responses to breaking news on television; everything that happens in the world is further evidence that her political allies are good and her political opponents are bad. She did not disappoint today:
'Calling abortion clinics "baby killers" is rhetoric that incites violence.   Whereas #BlackLivesMatter message literally *opposes* violence.'
In pro-life eyes, to call an abortionist a “baby killer” is to state a simple, straightforward fact: the unborn child is a baby, and it is the job of the abortionist to kill babies. To suggest facts can incite violence is to contend we must all assent to a lie for the sake of peace. As for Kohn’s assertion that Black Lives Matter’s message “literally opposes violence,” outsiders aren’t so sure, mostly stemming from anti-police groups chanting “What do we want? Dead Cops! When do we want it? Now!” and “Time to Kill a Cop!” Perhaps those chanting such messages are an unruly fringe, unrepresentative of the whole movement. If so, pro-lifers, gun owners, and Republicans know exactly how Black Lives Matter activists feel right now. From the moment a conservative steps into the public debate, he learns, bitterly, that if there’s any nut job out there claiming to act in the name of a cause he supports — from opposing government overreach to opposing abortion — he and his political allies will inevitably have that figure used as a cudgel against them. There are liberals who still rotely insist that Timothy McVeigh was a “Christian terrorist,” even though he was a self-described agnostic and his agenda had nothing to do with Jesus Christ... To truly heed voices of sanity such as Zito’s, those on the left and the right will first need to acknowledge the good faith of their political opponents. And that can only happen if we find better leaders, ones with the decency to realize that disrupting a moment of silence isn’t the right way to make a point."
From 2016

Rantz: Man calls 911 on self to 'goad' cops into George Floyd incident, reports Black man with gun - "Arlington Police were called to a bus stop near a middle school after a report of a young Black man brandishing a handgun. That man, Tamon Leverette, later said “he was stopped and frisked” by police “for no reason” other than “‘being Black.'”  But police in Arlington, Washington, say their investigation showed it was actually Leverette who reported himself to 911. And it’s not the first time this has happened. While the motive is unclear, it appears the intent was to “goad” police into falsely accusing a Black teen of having a gun. The Arlington Police Chief even says Leverette’s Community Corrections officer explained, “the subject has mentioned that he (Leverette) could see himself in a similar situation as ‘George Floyd.'...   “Tamon pulled up his left pant leg, showing me a Department of Corrections (DOC) GPS tracking ankle band,” the officer writes in an incident report. “He informed me that he was not doing anything wrong, just waiting for the bus to come so he could go to his DOC check in with his assigned DOC Officer.”  The latter point proved to be true, as he was on his way to see the officer supervising him. Leverette is currently under DOC supervision. The report says he has an affiliation with the “Bloods,” a dangerous gang. The officer said he “wanted to understand why someone would call in with concerns that he was handling a firearm at the bus stop as described.” Leverette said he was unsure, did not have a weapon, and thanked the officers for their professionalism.  But the next day, Leverette told the DOC officer he was a victim of racial profiling.  According to the DOC officer, per the incident report, Leverette told him “he was stopped and frisked by ‘Everett Police’ for no reason the previous day because of ‘being Black.'”... The incident report accused Leverette of a similar incident in December 2020. He made the call under the name “Eric Johnson.””
When you turn Floyd into a hero, it's no surprise others want to spark another George Floyd incident
So much for no one wanting to be oppressed

Ridiculous Zuccs: Killing Teachers / Nuking

"so hence we should kill teachers to get the system to continue to perpetuate eternally. To me, this is not a matter of retaining teachers anymore. It is a problem with being a slave of the idol of money"
"just block em and nuke em"

A commentary on the Singaporean education system being unsustainable because it relies on paying teachers more (even if they still burn out) instead of more sustainable solutions is interpreted as calling for teachers to be killed.

Saying you should nuke cyberbullies is also non-kosher (apparently civilians have easy access to nuclear weapons, so this is clearly a threat too).

Links - 27th August 2022 (1 - Palestine/Middle East Peace)

Ali Express says it will not serve Palestinians beginning in 2022 - "The reason for the move is that the Palestinian Authority's mail services refuse to handle packages that have the word Israel in the address. Many Palestinians do not know this and write Israel rather than Palestine as the destination country, according to N12."
Of course many people commenting on a share of this article were blaming Israel

NPC Meme - "WE SHOULD PULL OUR TROOPS OUT OF SYRIA"
"TRUMP ORDERED OUR TROOPS TO WITHDRAW FROM SYRIA"
"ACTIVATE ORANGEMANBAD.EXE"
"OMG, HE'S LEAVING SYRIANS TO DIE! WE SHOULD STAY"

Top Muslim-American Group Protests Against Signing of Peace Agreement Between Israel, UAE, and Bahrain - "A top American Muslim group expressed its opposition to peace with Israel on Tuesday, calling on its followers to protest outside the White House during the signing of the historic peace agreements between the Jewish state, the UAE and Bahrain.The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said in email on Monday that it would be joined by over 50 other organizations in demonstrating “opposition to the US-brokered normalization treaty.”... Hussam Ayloush, the executive director of the Greater Los Angeles Chapter of CAIR, said Jewish-Americans who join the IDF should be investigated by the US government’s Countering Violent Extremism program... Dawud Walid, executive director of CAIR’s Michigan chapter, was repeating the claim that Israel is responsible for US police violence against minority groups.“The same militarized police forces that shoot unarmed black people and do this crowd control like what happened in Ferguson — where do the police chiefs, these people, get trained at? In Israel,” he claimed.This conspiracy theory, widely disseminated by far-left and Islamist groups, has been thoroughly discredited and is viewed as a blood libel by many in the Jewish community.Walid also claimed that the Jewish people were “specifically cursed” by God."
Not everyone wants peace, despite the rhetoric. Some grifters don't want to lose their bogeyman and/or just want to hide their anti-semitism

Palestine Misunderstood - "Humeniuk’s essay lends implicit support to the notion that a Palestinian state will be modern, open, and peaceful, if not positively progressive, and not the bastion of fanaticism that exists in Israelis’ fearful imagination. The wishful thinking this requires is betrayed by his own testimony. Lest Humeniuk and his Jewish-Canadian friend Ari are mistaken for Israeli settlers, they take care to disguise their Nissan Micra by hanging Islamic prayer beads from the rear-view mirror and laying a Keffiyeh—”the black-and-white scarf symbolic of Palestinian opposition to Israel”—across the dashboard. “You’re also,” he adds, “supposed to smoke—constantly—as many Palestinian men do.” This subterfuge is presumably intended to emphasize the importance of local knowledge, but it also suggests that recognizable Jews should worry about attracting the kind of dangerous hostility from Ramallah’s populace conspicuously absent from the rest of Humeniuk’s account. Humeniuk and his companions drive to Qalandia where they gaze respectfully at a section of the border wall decorated with portraits of Yasser Arafat and Marwan Barghouti. Barghouti is blandly described as “a leader of the First and Second Intifada, who’s been imprisoned in Israel since 2002.” Imprisoned for what? Humeniuk does not say, although he reports that a slogan separating the two paintings reads “Free Barghouti” as if he were the victim of an injustice that demands international attention and urgent redress. In fact, Barghouti led Fatah’s notorious al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a terrorist militia responsible for the murder of scores of Israeli citizens by suicide squads during the Second Intifada. In 2004, as the murderous war he and Arafat instigated raged on, Barghouti was convicted on five counts of murder (and acquitted, lest it be assumed this was a foregone conclusion, of 21 further counts), and sentenced to five consecutive life sentences. Barghouti and Arafat did more than most to wreck the prospects of peace, but Humeniuk implies that the mural venerating them is part of a more general Palestinian commitment to the idea of the romantic revolutionary... A statue of Saddam Hussein stands in the city of Qalqilya. Additional public squares commemorating the genocidal Ba’athist can be found in Jenin and Ramallah, and a “Martyr Saddam Hussein School” has been established in Yaabad. Unveiling the Qalqilya statue in 2017, MEMRI reported that the District Governor Rafi Rawajba enthused, “Saddam was an emblem of heroism, honor, originality and defiance, as was the martyr Yasser Arafat. [Both served as] a compass for the Arabs and their resolute decisions, and when they departed, Arabism departed with them.” Meanwhile, a political culture that rewards terrorists and their families and memorialises and eulogises suicide bombers as heroic martyrs is not only destructive to peace efforts, but destructive to Palestinian society itself... It is unfortunately also clear that support for terrorism is prevalent among Palestinians... Survey participants were asked if they had “confidence” in bin Laden “to do the right thing in world affairs,” and in 2003, 72 percent of Palestinians responded in the affirmative. By 2011, when bin Laden was killed by US special forces, 34 percent of Palestinians still expressed “confidence” in him, and the Islamist terror group Hamas condemned the US for assassinating “an Arab holy warrior.”... A Pew survey from 2013 of almost 40,000 Muslims in 39 countries found that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were often among the Muslim populations with the most extreme views about the role of Islam in society: 89 percent of Palestinians said they wanted sharia law; 66 percent endorsed the death penalty for Muslims who convert to another religion; 76 percent supported mutilation as a punishment for theft, and a shocking 84 percent said they wanted adulterers stoned to death. When asked how much political influence religious leaders should have, 29 percent of Palestinians said religious leaders should have a lot of political influence, and another 43 percent said they wanted religious leaders to have at least some political influence. These views are reflected in the Palestinian draft constitution, which stipulates that the “principles of the Islamic shari’a are a main source for legislation.”... Israel’s Arab citizens have developed a distinct identity. According to a poll published in April 2019, a majority identify as either Arab-Israeli (46 percent) or Palestinian-Israeli (19 percent), whereas a minority prefer to identify only as Arab (22 percent) or Palestinian (14 percent). These results are supported by another recently published poll showing that “65 percent of Arab-Israelis are proud to be Israelis.” As the Israeli academic and columnist Alexander Yakobson has rightly emphasized, similar surveys have shown for years that Israel’s Arab citizens have “a strong Israeli identity,” and the poll results also indicate “not just an appreciation of Israel’s advantages (and a fear of the disadvantages of Palestinian rule), but also expressions of pride in Israel.”... they have no interest whatsoever in the so-called “one-state-solution” that would replace Israel with yet another Arab-Muslim majority state... Well defended borders may seem like some kind of chauvinistic anachronism when your home is in Toronto, but when your home is just a short drive from Gaza and a few hours from Damascus, those “lines in the sand” are a matter of life or death."

UN agency for Palestinians is too corrupt to save - "The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which is dedicated exclusively to assisting Palestinians, has begun to lose the support of some of its most loyal donors. Following reports of widespread corruption and abuse at the highest levels of the organization, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Belgium have suspended their contributions. This action may signal the readiness of other countries to pull their support if a full investigation confirms the initial allegations. What may be emerging is a rare opportunity to dismantle a wasteful organization whose ties to the Palestinian cause have protected it until now.An internal UNRWA ethics report leaked by the press in late July contained shocking allegations of "sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation, discrimination and other abuses of authority, for personal gain, to suppress legitimate dissent, and to otherwise achieve their personal objectives."... UNRWA is exacerbating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by turning millions of Palestinians into permanent refugees... One way that UNRWA worsens the Palestinian refugee problem is by granting the descendants of the original Palestinian refugees inherited refugee status in perpetuity, a practice unheard of in other conflicts. Of course, increasing the number of refugees increases the amount of work for UNRWA and the size of the donations it can justify. Moreover, UNRWA has stifled Palestinian development and resettlement through aid dependency.From an initial refugee population of around 700,000, UNRWA now has responsibility for more than 5.4 million Palestinians - a number that includes only about 30,000 individuals who fled their homes during Israel's war for independence. Nonetheless, UNRWA schools promote a "right of return" to Israel for all 5.4 million refugees, even those who now reside in Gaza and the West Bank, which would be part of a future Palestinian state. This sort of return would make Jews a minority in the world's only Jewish state. It also seems especially menacing given that UNRWA schools, textbooks and teachers often promote martyrdom, violence, the demonization of Israel, and religious bigotry. Moreover, the UN's outsize focus on Palestinian refugees has come at the expense of the world's 71 million forcibly displaced persons. UNRWA spends nearly twice as much per refugee and has 30,000 staff, compared to 16,800 for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which deals with all other displaced populations. Regrettably, UNHCR struggles to secure adequate funding."

Potiphar's Whipping Boy on Twitter - "Unbelievable . At King's College right now. About 40 students are shouting and screaming at the Jews to 'free Palestine from the river to th e sea'. They've come to protest because an Israeli hero who saved 1000s,of Syrian lives is talking at an event"
"It make sense when you realize this is social life for these students. They will take even a bad excuse to protest. They protest and then they party and hook up. This is their social life."

Anti-Semitic protestors at York University are pathetic scumbags - "So, a group of people intimidate a bunch of Jewish students, chanting horrific garbage like “go back to the ovens.”Shouldn’t this be a bigger news story?... ‘“Intifada, Intifada, go back to the ovens,” were what Jewish and pro-Israel students had to endure on Wednesday night during a pro-Palestinian protest against a Reservist’s on Duty event at York University.”... why aren’t the elites reacting like they would to a Nazi rally?  Is it because the people chanting that garbage don’t “look” like Nazis?... how the hell did these taxpayer-funded universities become havens for Nazi-style intimidation of Jewish students?... Having been to the Holocaust memorial museum in Washington D.C. as part of a high-school group that was taught about the Holocaust and what led up to it, I know beyond any doubt that these anti-Semitic scumbags must be stopped and dealt with now before they become even more emboldened.  At this point, the fact that these scumbags feel confident enough to straight-up call for genocide and intimidate Jewish students is a clear sign that things are already spiralling out of control."
It's only worthy of notice when you can blame the "far right"

Study shows most supporters of ‘Palestine’ at UC Berkeley can’t find it on a map - "Many students who claim to support the Palestinian cause actually know very little about the Israel-Palestinian conflict... Despite most of the respondents purporting to care “deeply” about the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, “75% of those students cannot locate those territories on a map and 84% cannot name the decade (let alone the year) in which that occupation began”... Shockingly, 25 percent “of these students placed the Palestinian Territories west of Lebanon, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea”... Most students also had no idea how many people actually lived in Israel. Only 17 percent of the students gave the correct answer, while others made guesses that ranged from 100,000 to 150 million. A more moderate stance on the conflict seemed to reflect greater knowledge of the issues, said Hassner. He revealed that the students with more moderate views were likely to know more, and also “more likely to admit gaps in their knowledge.”  The survey wasn’t limited to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rather, students were asked to weigh in on 18 key issues in the Middle East ranging from U.S.-Iran relations, to the civil war in Yemen, to drone warfare. The students were then given a five-point scale to indicate their level of interest in each topic.  The students seemed most interested in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, while expressing indifference towards other instances of alleged occupation, like the Kurdish struggle for independence in Iraq, the Moroccan occupation in Western Sahara and the Turkish occupation in northern Cyprus."
I wonder what could motivate concern only for the "plight" of the Palestinians, but not others

Trump Israeli–Palestinian Peace Plan a Much-Needed Dose of Reality - "It’s worth noting that some of the harshest critics of Donald Trump’s new Israeli–Palestinian peace plan — many of them Middle East “experts” who’ve worked in the Clinton and Obama administrations — are the same people behind catastrophic efforts that resulted in more hopelessness, intifadas, and extremism. These professional peace-processors have managed to harden the Israeli public against even the most abstract negotiations because, inevitably, all of them end in violence. As with the plans that came before it, it’s unlikely that Trump’s plan will succeed. But it is the best of any recent offerings because it doesn’t make any false promises... the reality is that there will never be a Palestinian “right of return” to Israel, since such a policy would destroy the Jewish character of the state. The refugee situation is a 70-plus-year scandal of the Arab world’s making in which thousands of Palestinians are condemned to poverty so they can be used as a cudgel in the propaganda fight against Israel.Palestinians are not getting their great-granddad’s house in Jaffa back any more than the hundreds of thousands of Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Muslim lands after Israel’s 1948 war of independence are reclaiming their property. The difference is that one of these groups accepted reality long ago... Israelis will never pull back to pre-1967 lines, giving up its claims to the West Bank, because no sane nation would reinstitute unsecure borders next to an unreliable potential terror state... there is no way that Israel, a liberal democracy responsible for the security of its citizens, can hand over the Jordan Valley — an area with immense strategic importance irrespective of the Palestinian situation — to a newly created state that allies itself with unsavory nations and entertains the idea of entering into a unity government with Hamas, the theocratic terror group. Perhaps after peaceful coexistence for a few decades this could change... The Trump deal would simply codify these realities while allowing Palestinians to finally have a startup state. Trump’s plan is the first to offer a map laying out what the final borders of the Palestinian nation might look like. In it, Israel cedes around 70 percent of the disputed territory in the West Bank to Palestinians, but doubles its existing territory overall... In return Palestinians would recognize the existence of Israel, agree to solve their refugee problem through integration in their new state and in host Arab counties, and renounce terrorism. In other words, Palestinians would be asked to conduct themselves as does any normal, functioning state. The U.S. would also infuse $50 billion into the new Palestinian state. Stateless peoples yearning for self-determination around the world — ethnic groups that Western elites don’t care a whit about — would, no doubt, be ecstatic for such an opportunity. Palestinians, however, happen to have chosen the right enemies. They just have the wrong leaders. President Mahmoud Abbas hasn’t faced an electorate in 13 years and counting. His title of “president” falsely suggests that Abbas is the duly elected leader of a nation. Neither is true. And while that is his own fault, Abbas and his deputies will no doubt decide to sit in their U.N.-funded mansions while the Palestinian people suffer, and to wait out Trump for more advantageous terms from a friendlier president such as Joe Biden — or Bernie Sanders, who could put Linda Sarsour in his administration.But they won’t be able to wait out Israel. A nation with an open and vibrant economy has no reason enter into a deal that upends its security. Most Israelis — I hate to break this to everyone — aren’t obsessed with the Palestinians. Hamas is largely contained. Fatah is contained. Israel’s existence isn’t contingent on the creation of a Palestinian state, only on security. Israel, in fact, probably feels less external pressure than ever to enter into a deal. Anyone who’s followed this issue understands the historic significance of Bahrain, UAE, and Oman sending envoys to White House unveiling of Trump’s peace deal. Arab nations are coming to terms with the reality of the Jewish State in ways that Americans progressives have not. Nor is there more internal political pressure to enter into a bad deal. Benny Gantz, the Kahol Lavan leader and chief rival to Benjamin Netanyahu, “hailed” the Trump plan because, despite the effort of the American Left to cast Netanyahu as the sole impediment to peace, no major Israeli party on either the right or the left is going to agree to a right of return, a return to pre-1967 lines, or a surrender of Jerusalem.In the past, Palestinian negotiators, who have never once crafted a peace plan of their own — or any deal that wasn’t contingent on the complete capitulation of Israel — sat back and rejected one concession after the next. They offered ever-growing lists of grievances while American leaders tried to pacify them. It’s about time someone injected a dose of this reality into this situation."
Of course, since "resistance" is more important to the Palestinians and their supporters than improving the Palestinians' (partially self-inflicted) plight...

The Left Hates Israel More Than It Loves Palestine - "For most of the left, both in Europe and the United States, support for the Palestinian cause is something of a shibboleth. As Israel moved away from the politics of the 1960s, when the left was often in power and kibbutzim were a national symbol, to the right-wing nationalism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the U.S. and European left’s support for Palestine has solidified. Palestine has been brutalized by decades of occupation, and the suffering of Palestinians raises natural sympathy. Many left-wing Jews share this justified anger at Israel’s policies.Yet both before the establishment of the state of Israel and since, it has been clear that some of the criticism was not driven by policy disputes or by humanitarian concerns, but quite simply by anti-Semitic attitudes. This has become more widespread as many on the extreme left see Israel as a classic imperialist state, acting as an agent of the United States in the Middle East and imposed on the region by outside powers. This is an interpretation that is not only mistaken, but also dangerous to the Palestinian cause itself... This lack of any sympathy or understanding of Zionist history makes it very hard for the European left to form meaningful links with Israel’s own beleaguered, but still significant, leftists. That means advocates cannot use that internal avenue to push the Israeli government on the plight of the Palestinians. Anyone who engages with the Israelis over a particular issue is accused of collaborating with a fundamental enemy. On the far-left, the only acceptable position is a complete rejection of the state of Israel. That, in turn, fuels convictions among members of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party that any criticism of Israeli policy indicates a desire to see Israel itself destroyed. This has produced a model in which total rejection of Israel is demanded of any Jew, lest they been seen as complicit in all the misdeeds of the current Israeli government. This “Zio-centric” model is one reason why the British Labour Party, under current leader Jeremy Corbyn, has become riddled with anti-Semitism. The serious qualms about the government’s actions that otherwise pro-Israeli Jews have are brushed away unless they condemn the very existence of Israel. Anti-Semitism, the “socialism of fools” as the German socialist August Bebel is said to have termed the substitution of conspiracy theory for political analysis, is not new on the left—nor, of course, in any way unique to it. A simplistic reading of Karl Marx has meant that finance capital is seen as particularly evil, which in the extreme leads to conspiracy theories about shadowy cabals prepared to sacrifice men and economies in their search for money and power. Since, for historical reasons, many financiers have been Jewish, this easily spills over into sharing the anti-Semitic tropes more readily associated with the nationalist right. And this, in turn, has implications for what it means to support the Palestinians. If Israel is so bad, then there can be no compromise with it—and solutions that might aid Palestine are neglected in favor of the real focus: attacking Israel... The far-left only cares about the suffering of the Palestinians when Israel is to blame. They do not offer a critique of specific Israeli policies or seek a means to engage with Israel to mitigate harm in the short term—all the while insisting that they support the Palestinians above all else.This is most visible in their enthusiasm for other killers of Muslims who voice the right platitudes on Israel. Thus the leader of the Labour Party can describe Hamas as being “dedicated toward the good of the Palestinian people,” even when Human Rights Watch estimates that dozens of Palestinians have been executed by Hamas in the Gaza Strip since 2007, many of them without any judicial process. Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad is deemed to be anti-imperialist and opposed to Israel, so he is above criticism in the eyes of many often vocal self-declared pro-Palestinian voices such as the writer Max Blumenthal and the British Labour Party MP Chris Williamson... There is much to condemn in Israeli policy and practice. But this critique has to acknowledge that Israel is not the only state in the Middle East that engages in human rights abuses. What matters is to challenge the abuse because it is abuse, not to accept or condemn it according to who is the perpetrator."
Of course, this is a bigger issue with liberals - they hate 'oppressors' more than they love the 'oppressed'. So they only care about racism when they can shit on white people for 'cultural appropriation', but keep quiet when 'minorities' murder other 'minorities'

Trump Nobel Nomination: End the Peace Prize - The Atlantic
Comment: "Trump does something historic and really awesome, gets UAE and Israel to sign peace agreements...and other Arab nations start to follow suit, normalizing relations and whatnot.And then The Atlantic puts this out.Tell me, do you now see the media bias?  This is pretty damn close to the meme that Trump could cure cancer and the media would hate him for it."

Facebook - "I just would like to point out in passing that it is right wing conservative Americans, right wint conservative Israelis, and right wing conservative Arabs that are making peace. The same people the mainstream media has been calling doomsday war mongers."

Reckoning With Palestinian Solidarity and Anti-semitism As a Malay-Muslim Singaporean - "I don’t know if I can blame her, my father, or any other Malay-Muslims in their generation for their distrust of Jewish people. Unfortunate as it is, anti-semitism is common within Malay-Muslim households in Singapore—many other impressionable kids like me have been taught and told that “Jews were bad people”.  Unlike the Western notion that connects Jews with money, our families associated them with wanton cruelty. Jahat macam orang Yahudi (“as wicked as a Jew”) has been a common refrain. Perangai Yahudi (“Jewish behaviour”) is used as an insult, but the enduringly popular perangai babi (“pig-like behaviour”) just rolls off the tongue better.    This ingrained anti-semitism stems primarily from the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian hostilities, a century-long struggle taking place nearly 8,000 km away from Singapore... Why is solidarity with Palestine such an entrenched notion within Singapore’s Malay-Muslim community, bordering on the edges of anti-semitism?   The obvious answer is, of course, affinity with fellow Muslims—especially innocent Muslim civilians who have lost homes, family members, and lives in a bleak humanitarian crisis with no end in sight...   “By the second half of the 1970s, Malay exasperation with military recruitment and discrimination policies reached an all-time high. Even without official data, Malay parents knew that their children alone were not called upon to serve. Malay officers and (non-commissioned officers) who had been transferred from field command positions to the logistics corps were also frustrated. Nearly every officer knew that military units had informal quotas on Malays.”  That distrust from the early days extended into an overarching wariness of Jewish people, compounded by how little they’ve been exposed to Jewish culture or even the small Jewish community in Singapore."
Apparently in Singapore only Chinese people have agency. If someone tried to justify "Islamophobia" as a consequence of Islamist terrorism, good luck to him
Too bad Muslims only have solidarity with Muslim when it's non-Muslims doing the "oppression"
I like how "discrimination" in NS callup somehow turned into anti-Semitism

Critical Spectator - Posts | Facebook - "These are young Israeli Arabs - as you can see they're pretty happy, as they would be. Why? 🔴 Because in Israel they not only enjoy the same rights as the Jews do - but rights they wouldn't be able to enjoy in any Arab country. Yes, the terrible, genocidal Israel is granting its Arab citizens greater privileges than any other country in the Middle East.  Instead of living under some demented dictators, absolute monarchs or outright terrorists, these people enjoy free speech, can take part and run in free elections, enjoy parliamentary representation and can pursue justice in impartial courts if any laws or administrative decisions are deemed discriminatory against them. This is how Israel has supposedly been exterminating them for 70 years. So successfully that over 20% of its population is Arab today. Meanwhile Jewish populations have collapsed everywhere else in the region, with people fleeing religious and ethnic persecution. But "Zionists"..."

Meme - "I DON'T HATE ISRAEL, I JUST HATE THE NETANYAHU GOVERNMENT"
"SO YOUR OPINION IS DIFFERENT NOW, SINCE NETANYAHU IS GONE, RIGHT?"
"... YOUR OPINION IS DIFFERENT NOW, RIGHT?"
Facebook - "Just like Hamas really only hates 'the occupation', which is why all became peaceful when Israel pulled out of Gaza, now we will surely see "Anti-Zionists" change their tune."

Jack Crosbie on Twitter - "just saw a conservative on this site say "property destruction is not violence" in response to israel destroying the AP offices in gaza with an airstrike and my brain instantly melted into a smooth glowing orb"
In Defense of Destroying Property | The Nation - "We cannot conflate the destruction of plateglass with the violence that is being protested."
Debora 🌺 on Twitter - "Because that's all we heard last summer- it's just a building, that's what insurance is for, it's just an idea. Now, suddenly, it's different."
Liberal’s brain melts after hearing a conservative say, ‘property destruction is not violence’ - "1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones said last summer on TV that “destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” That was after Sally Kohn weighed in on the looting and property destruction in Minneapolis, pointing out that “property is insured and can be replaced.” Our brains melted a little bit when we heard both those statements, so we know the feeling. Of course, the AP had renter’s insurance"

Facebook - "I watched a video yesterday of an Israeli General calling a Palestinian security guard to warn him that they were about to bomb the building he was guarding, and to get all civilians out of it. He clarified that first they'd send a warning shot and then it would be followed by the actual bomb strike.  In addition to that, I watched a clip from The Daily Show where they're mocking Israel for "warning of a bombing by sending a smaller bomb". They then show video where Israel dropped a "knock bomb," which is designed to damage nothing, but alerts civilians to exit a building, and only later does the REAL bomb come and destroy the entire building.  And the Daily Show thought THAT was a point AGAINST Israel's moral superiority.  ...somehow.  It's shocking to me the degree to which Israeli people try to minimize collateral damage all while being depicted as the unjust aggressors.  Meanwhile, Palestinians fire rockets from residential areas, hospitals, and schools, using civilians, children, and sick people as human shields, since Israel has to then choose between letting the source of the attack remain unbombed or bomb civilians, children, and sick people. Palestinians know what they're doing when they choose these places to stage their attacks, yet the world just keeps pretending Israel is in the wrong for defending itself merely because they've proven overtime to be more capable than their enemies and thus a power differential presently exists."

Facebook - "It's not a coincidence that the latest chapter in the Palestinian conflict occurred after elections were 'postponed' yet again, and an internal struggle takes place for the Palestinian leadership.   No Palestinian under the age of 34 has ever taken part in a Democratic election. And such conflict is good for those who want to remain in power."

Not Just The Mufti - the real extension of the Palestinian-Nazi collaboration | by Adin Haykin | Jan, 2022 | Medium - "On March 31, 1933, two months after Hitler came to power, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, called on Heinrich Wolff, head of the German Consulate in Jerusalem. In his report to the Auswartiges Amt (Foreign Ministry), Wolff wrote that Husseini said: “Muslims inside and outside Palestine welcome the new regime in Germany and hope for the spread of fascist, antidemocratic state leadership to other countries.” In his view, “current Jewish influence on economy and politics” was “damaging everywhere and needed to be fought.” In the hope of doing economic damage to the Jews, Husseini opined that “Muslims hope for a boycott of the Jews in Germany because it would then be adopted with enthusiasm in the whole of the Muslim world.” Further, he was willing to spread the boycott message among Muslims travelling through Palestine and to “all Muslims.” He also looked forward to trading with “non-Jewish merchants” dealing in German products... In March 1935 the Husseinis also formed a party, called the Palestinian Arab Party. It was, as its president Jamal Husseini freely boasted, inspired by German Nazism. It included the ‘Al-Futuwwa’ (‘The youth ’), modelled on the Hitler Youth, for a while actually called the ‘Nazi Scouts’. The Mufti was on friendly terms with the German consul in Jerusalem and told him that the Muslims of the world, for whom he apparently felt he was spokesman, hoped for the spread of fascism to other countries and would assist a worldwide anti-Jewish boycott... When Hitler proclaimed the Nuremberg Race Laws in September 1935, a number of Palestinian Arabs sent telegrams congratulating him... The shrill calls to take up extremist politics invoked a symbolism that glorified youth, violence, and death. By 1936 Al Difaa, the paper of the Istiqlal movement and the most widely read paper in the Arab community, proclaimed, in clearly fascist tones, that “youth must go out to the field of battle as soldiers of the Fatherland.”... Throughout the 1930s the children of wealthy Palestinians returned home from European universities having witnessed the emergence of fascist paramilitary forces. Palestinian students educated in Germany returned to Palestine determined to found the Arab Nazi Party. The Husseinis used the Palestinian Arab Party to establish the al-Futuwwa youth corps, which was named after an association of Arab Nazi Scouts. By 1936 the Palestinian Arab Party was sponsoring the developments of storm troops patterned on the German model... "Palestinians who fought against the Nazis” is a myth that is widely used to whitewash the historic support the Palestinian leadership and public of the Nazis.  In fact, it was the Jews who pushed the Arabs to enlist because of British discrimination, the Arabs did so mainly for economic reasons... In February 1941, 88% of the Arab Palestinians polled expressed support for Germany, while only 9% supported England... CIA Report Aug 1942:      "A majority of the Palestinian Arabs was fiercely “anti-Jewish” and saw in the approach of Rommel an ideal opportunity to murder all Jews their seize their property."... Arabs’ search for ex-Nazi officers to train units to fight the Jews, by the end of 1946, beginning of 1947, Nazi officers were “liberated” and have been smuggled into Palestine, where they were employed as instructors by “Futuwa” and “Nejada.”... In 1960, it was revealed by a German magazine:  Adolf Eichmann continued his war against Jews at the end of World War II with the help of zealous Arabs — writes the widely circulated West German weekly “Bunte Deutsche Illustrierte”."
It's all the fault of the atrocities perpetrated by the modern state of Israel!

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is Playing Out…In Malaysia - "News editors at a state broadcaster are under investigation and have been given show-cause letters after one of its news reports committed a faux pas by referring to Hamas as a “radical militant” group, thus painting it as less than heroic – although, if we’re being honest, a more accurate description would be “terrorist group.” Just yesterday, police arrested a civil servant for uploading a TikTok video in which he expressed support for Israel, because this video apparently triggered “negative reaction from netizens as it was seen to touch on religious and racial sensitivities,” thus justifying detention under Malaysia’s draconian laws. Did Hamas hijack the Malaysian government when I wasn’t looking such that people here can now be punished for expressing views that don’t fit with its narrative?... Most disturbing of all is the hate I’ve seen so many Malays express towards Israelis and Jews in general; I’ve seen usually smart, decent people post that they’re praying for more Israelis to die. This is despite the fact that most of them have probably never met an Israeli or a Jew, because there are almost none in the country. In a sense, this shouldn’t be entirely unexpected. An article in Tablet magazine called Malaysia “one of the most anti-Semitic countries on Earth.” Sadly, this is probably true. A 2014 poll by the Anti-Defamation League found that 61% of Malaysians admitted to being prejudiced against Jews, making it the most anti-Semitic country in Asia. Malaysia has no formal diplomatic relations with Israel; as a Malaysian, my passport states that it is “valid for all countries except Israel,” and any Malaysians wanting to visit Israel have to go through a complicated process. Malaysia periodically comes up with petty ways to slight Israel. When it hosted an international windsurfing competition in 2015, it apparently delayed the visas for Israeli athletes and prohibited them from displaying their country’s flag or playing its anthem if they won, prompting them to pull out of the event. In 2019, the International Paralympic Committee stripped Malaysia of the right to host the World Para Swimming Championships after it tried to exclude Israeli athletes from participating. Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, our longest-serving prime minister, is unabashedly anti-Semitic and often ranted about international Jewish conspiracies. In fact, Malaysian politicians in general have a ridiculous habit of blaming their crimes and their failures – and the resulting public discontent at them – on shadowy Jewish/Zionist agents. Is Malaysia not attracting enough American investment? The Jews are behind that. Are Malaysians protesting against my vote-rigging and corruption? The people actually love me – the protests are being orchestrated by Jews who want to overthrow our Muslim government. Oh, and the money I’m accused of embezzling from a state fund wasn’t stolen at all – it was given to me by a Saudi prince to help us fight against the Jews. As Zurairi A. R. noted in an article in the Malay Mail, “Tarring someone as pro-Jew or backed by Jews…is an almost surefire way to rile up the majority [Malay] ethnic group with irrational hatred and zealous fear against something.” In Malaysia, Jews have been turned into boogeymen and blamed for virtually anything that goes wrong. Why? Why is a Southeast Asian country so far removed from the Middle East, filled with people who have never met a Jew before, so hostile towards Israel? Some have postulated that this is because the enterprising Jews remind the Malay majority of the market-dominant Chinese minority in Malaysia (who make up about 20% of the population), who they sometimes also resent. There may be some truth to that, but I suspect the answer has more to do with a desire to feel more Islamic... It also probably helps console them in the face of unflattering comparisons between Malaysia and its archrival Singapore (“Sure, Singapore is richer, nicer, and more developed than Malaysia, but they’re not Islamic there, so they’re all going to hell anyway!”), which, not-coincidentally, is sometimes called “the Israel of Southeast Asia,” and makes them feel like their relatively insignificant country is part of something bigger. And since the heart of Islamic civilization is the Arab world, many Malays have taken to copying Arabs, not just in their views and practices, but in their friends and enemies too... Today, certain classes in public schools and universities teach the supposed superiority and purity of Islamic civilization over all others. As a result, many Malays have become what I call Wahhabi wannabes, adopting increasingly intolerant beliefs, eschewing the more tolerant Islam of their heritage, and most Malay women now wear headscarves, something their mothers or grandmothers never did...
This sense of Islamic identity may also explain why Malaysia is hypersensitive to any perceived slight from Singapore, but when it’s insulted by Indonesia, another neighbor, and a fellow Muslim-majority country, it just sits there and takes it."

Links - 26th August 2022 (2 - Trans Mania)

Muslim Drag Queen in Vice Mag: Islam Is 'Inherently Queer' - "In an attempt Thursday to shore up the Leftist/Islamic alliance, a self-described “Muslim drag queen” named Amrou Al-Kadhi, also known as “Glamrou,” has published an article in Vice magazine entitled “why islam is inherently queer” (yes, all lower case; are capital letters homophobic?). It’s a dogged exercise in ignoring the obvious... despite the fact that the hadith collection Muslims consider to be the most reliable (Sahih Bukhari) quotes Muhammad talking about prancing around in the clothes of his child bride Aisha, the prophet of Islam is also depicted as saying this: “Whoever you find doing the action of the people of Lot, execute the one who does it and the one to whom it is done’” (Sunan Abu Dawud 4462).  Unfortunately for Glamrou and Vice, the Qur’an contains numerous condemnations of homosexual activity: “And [We had sent] Lot when he said to his people, ‘Do you commit such immorality as no one has preceded you with from among the worlds? Indeed, you approach men with desire, instead of women. Rather, you are a transgressing people.’…And We rained upon them a rain [of stones]. Then see how was the end of the criminals” (Qur’an 7:80-84). It is no surprise that Amrou Al-Kadhi doesn’t mention any of that in his Vice magazine piece. It doesn’t fit his narrative. But unfortunately for him, many of his coreligionists are well aware of these passages and others like them. The ones who are unaware of them and their implications are gay rights activists in the West. Case in point: back in 2013, when Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), of which I am vice president, ran ads on buses in San Francisco highlighting the mistreatment of gays in Islamic law, gay advocates in San Francisco and elsewhere condemned not that mistreatment, but our ads.   Theresa Sparks, a transgender who was the chief of San Francisco’s Human Rights Commission, declared that Geller was “posting these ads to suggest that all Muslims hate gays. Some cultures do discriminate, and that’s wrong. It all depends who you’re talking to. But she’s trying to generalize and cast this wide net around a diverse group of people.”  The ads actually consisted simply of quotes from Muslim leaders regarding Islam’s death penalty for homosexuality, including Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most influential Sunni cleric in the world, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former president of the foremost Shi’ite entity in the world, the Islamic Republic of Iran. The ads neither stated nor suggested that “all Muslims hate gays.” Sparks was not reported as saying anything about the anti-gay statements of the Muslim leaders quoted in the ads. Instead, Chris Stedman, a proclaimed atheist who is assistant humanist chaplain at Harvard, published an article at Salon entitled “Stop trying to split gays and Muslims,” also attacking our ads...   As far as Stedman was concerned, the real problem was those who called attention to the plight of gays under Islamic law, not the actual mistreatment of gays under Islamic law...   The crowd booed energetically when I attempted to read from Islamic authorities about Islam’s death penalty for homosexuality. Even to read from Islamic sources is hate, apparently, at the University at Buffalo – unless, of course, one endorses such penalties rather than oppose them."

Auron MacIntyre on Twitter - "“Those [dollars] are hers. She earned them.” Drag queen teaches a child to perform for cash tips at a “family-friendly” drag show. The drag queen says that “this is the inclusivity and community drag brings” and suggests that if you are opposed to what you saw in the video you’re part of the “radical Right”. This took place at @CityTapDupont"
"Periodic reminder that the religious right was mocked relentlessly for correctly predicting the future"

NHS gender identity clinic whistleblower wins damages - "A child safeguarding expert who faced vilification after raising concerns about the safety of children undergoing treatment at a London NHS gender identity clinic has won an employment tribunal case against the hospital trust.  Sonia Appleby, 62, was awarded £20,000 after an employment tribunal ruled the NHS’s Tavistock and Portman trust’s treatment of her damaged her professional reputation and “prevented her from proper work on safeguarding”.  Appleby, an experienced psychoanalytical psychotherapist, was responsible for protecting children at risk from maltreatment.  The tribunal heard evidence she raised concerns about the treatment of increasing numbers of children being referred to the trust’s Gender Identity Development Service (Gids)...  some staff were particularly worried about a private GP, Dr Helen Webberley, who on her own initiative was issuing prescriptions for puberty blocking drugs to young people being assessed by Gids, or who were on the waiting list for assessment. They approached Appleby with concerns that taking hormones before assessment could pose a risk to children... She had also questioned whether record-keeping was adequate and recommended the trust introduce a manual or policy to assist “clear thinking” about cases and assess whether there was a history of abuse or safeguarding concerns before initiating treatment. She raised further concerns that staff were too overworked to properly consider safeguarding issues... One witness, former Tavistock and Portman consultant psychiatrist David Bell, said he had also faced disciplinary threats from the trust when he raised concerns about Gids and child safety.  Bell said, after being shown a copy of the tribunal judgment by the Observer, that it showed the Tavistock and Portman trust became “so caught up in the politicisation of the subject of gender identity it had lost sight of its duty to safeguard children."

NHS to close Tavistock child gender identity clinic - "The NHS is to close the UK's only dedicated gender identity clinic for children and young people.  Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust has been told to shut the clinic by spring after it was criticised in an independent review.  Instead, new regional centres will be set up to "ensure the holistic needs" of patients are fully met... an independent review, led by Dr Hilary Cass, said the Tavistock clinic needed to be transformed.  She said the current model of care was leaving young people "at considerable risk" of poor mental health and distress, and having one clinic was not "a safe or viable long-term option"... Dr Cass said:
The service was struggling to deal with spiralling waiting lists
It was not keeping "routine and consistent" data on its patients
Health staff felt under pressure to adopt an "unquestioning affirmative approach"
Once patients are identified as having gender-related distress, other healthcare issues they had, such as being neurodivergent, "can sometimes be overlooked""

We will look back with horror at this mutilation of children done in the name of medicine - "For many years now, some staff at the Tavistock have been concerned about what has been going on there; from putting young people on puberty blockers (which almost inevitably leads to cross-sex hormones) at a very young age to the staggering change in the kinds of young people seeking treatment.  To ask questions about these practices (as I did at my former newspaper) was to be deemed “transphobic” and bigoted. Never mind that I was simply concerned about safeguarding and wondering whatever happened to the dictum Do No Harm.  All of this harm was being carried out in plain sight. The Keira Bell case alerted us to the fact that a confused young woman was prescribed puberty blockers after just three 50-minute sessions of “therapy”.   This rush to put someone on a medical pathway (puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, double mastectomy) at an age when they could not possibly understand the irreversibility of some parts of the treatment was mutilation done in the name of medicine. It resembled no psychoanalytic therapy that had made the reputation of the Tavistock in the first place.   Groupthink and the importation of a particular ideology about gender identity prevailed, much to the dismay of brave souls such as Sonia Appleby who spoke up about it...   In 2011-12 there were under 250 referrals to GIDs, by 2021-22 there were over 5,000. What was particularly alarming was that a few years ago the referrals were nearly all boys, and yet now it is nearly all girls presenting with “gender incongruence” in their early teens.  Is this social contagion? Are there maybe very good reasons why teenage girls feel their lives might be easier without an adult female body? Why are so many of these girls also autistic and presenting with eating disorders and self-harm? In other words, are gender issues the only issue?   Decent shrinks, of whom there used to be many, would sensitively explore the complex causes of these young people’s distress. Tavistock though, in practising “the affirmative model”, was basically accepting that medical transition was the only answer, that altering – perhaps permanently – the body of an adolescent to fit his/her possibly temporary mindset was the answer.  Dr Hilary Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, was brought in to review the whole situation. From the beginning, she said further research was needed into both the short and long-term effects of puberty blockers... She wants a stronger evidence base for the use of puberty blockers.  These are all things that many of us have argued for some time because the future has been modelled in front of us in other countries. We can hand the bodies of distressed young people over to a lifetime of hormones, possible infertility, no libido and multiple surgeries, as happens in the US, or we can support them with “watchful waiting” which is the approach in Sweden and Finland, where they are finding that many of these unhappy girls are simply gay. If adults want to transition, that is another issue...   Even as I write this, I cannot believe that this medical scandal, which I think one day we will look back on as we do lobotomies, was allowed to continue for so long. We have badly let down so many children, both those with gender issues and those without. They deserve so much better."

Now the Tavistock clinic is closing we must ask: where does the trans revolution end? - "The day it was announced that the Tavistock clinic would close, Tom Daley marched into the Commonwealth Games with a pride flag bearing trans colours. If you wondered how it came to this, to kids being given puberty blockers on the NHS, the answer is that for nearly a decade the idea of gender non-conformity has been embedded into our culture, by celebs, doctors, TV, Tory ministers and even the odd bishop. And it is not, as the feminists would have you believe, a wrong-turn in liberalism from which we can now easily reverse – it is the direction of travel.  Trans-ideology is the inevitable culmination of the 1960s cultural revolution. Conservatives warned you this is where it would end; you ignored them; et voila...   Here in Britain, the contemporary trans debate is mostly a family squabble between generations of radicals, a classic case of parents admonishing their children for everything they once did themselves. In the 1960s, Left-wingers deconstructed gender and sexuality. The nuclear family was shaped by a dying faith and an old-fashioned economy, they said; once the Pill was invented and women began careers of their own, we had to reexamine our sense of what was normal to keep pace with how people really lived. Gay activists discredited the notion of aberrant sexual activity. Feminists said gender was a construct and a prison. This coincided with a new take on children, insisting they weren’t miniature versions of their parents but autonomous human beings who should control their own destiny, even their education.  This an incredibly naïve view of children, who, if they’re not being shaped by responsible adults, will take their cues from popular culture or, worse, each other. The Tavistock clinic had been quietly working for three decades when, around 2015... It’s worrying, too, that when Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, asked to meet a patient who had regretted having her breasts removed, she says that civil servants advised her it would be “inappropriate”. And sinister that parents believe schools have affirmed their children’s self-identity without their consent. Revolutions do love to subvert parental authority.   All of this became inevitable the moment Britain’s elite accepted the principle that a “trans woman is a woman” – stated, never forget, by Penny Mordaunt at the Despatch Box. If that’s true, then when a boy says they are a girl, we’re in a weaker position to disagree with them, and any attempt to dispute a statement of fact must, logically, be an expression of prejudice to be driven out of polite society.  Again, this is typical of revolutionary narratives. First, they uproot the old order in the name of freedom; then they identify what a free life looks like; next they prescribe it; finally, they police it. Many people have abstained from the trans debate because they are frightened that if they say what we all thought five minutes ago (you can’t change your sex with surgery), then they’ll be ostracised or sacked. I can’t blame them, but adults owe it to children to be honest... It is often said that if you dispute the diagnosis of “trans”, then you think the individual doesn’t exist – but now and then, other people see us better than we see ourselves. Particularly family; ideally doctors.   The implication that Tavistock therapists prefered one pathway to resolve what could be a wide variety of problems hints at projection, a form of authoritarianism, the revolution entertaining its definition of freedom upon the very body itself. To return to Iran, the reason why this Shia theocracy endorses sex changes is partly because it despises homosexuality: unable to accept that a man is attracted to other men, it prefers to believe he has a medical problem that can be fixed with a scalpel. Here in the UK, some gay activists have warned that girls seeking gender realignment might actually be lesbians, that because their sexuality doesn’t fit with their community, they have found a new pathway to conformity by becoming trans. Given, as I believe, that the 1960s set us on this trajectory, what they are really protesting is the revolution’s appetite for its own children – that when you tear up traditional rules, you liberate but you also create an anarchy from which new fascisms emerge.  It’s testament to the power of ideas, of how they can run beyond reality and begin to reshape it. To accommodate the idea of trans, science has been reimagined; our very language has been rewritten. And no one ever held a vote on it. Politicians are now crying “stop”, but the transformation has already largely taken place, and unless you engage with the basic propositions at play, you’ll never get to grips with what is going on.  Is a trans man a man? I’d like to say, “it’s none of our business”, but Tavistock demonstrates that it very much is."
The "myth" of the slippery slope strikes again

Tavistock gender clinic ‘to be sued by 1,000 families’ | News | The Times - "The Tavistock gender clinic is facing mass legal action from youngsters who claim they were rushed into taking life-altering puberty blockers. Lawyers expect about 1,000 families to join a medical negligence lawsuit alleging vulnerable children have been misdiagnosed and placed on a damaging medical pathway. They are accusing the gender identity development service [GIDS] at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust of multiple failures in its duty of care... Cass found the clinic overlooked other mental health issues in children distressed about their gender, and failed to collect data on the use or side effects of puberty blockers, which she said may “temporarily or permanently” disrupt the development of children’s brains."
The US is so lawsuit-happy but they don't have stuff like this

Restaurant trashed after JK Rowling attends event at sister eatery - "A  restaurant in London has been vandalised after the owner voiced his support for JK Rowling during a transgender row.  The Harry Potter author attended a charity fundraiser with journalist Suzanne Moore at the Pino restaurant in Kensington... Mr Chiavarini added: "The organised pile on from extremist TRAs [trans right activists] is real for everyone to see. They have slandered by business and my character with false accusations in an attempt at vengeance because I (proudly) stand with Suzanne Moore and JK Rowling, both of whom I admire and respect greatly."... The restaurant has been hit with a string of bad online reviews since the fundraising dinner.  “If you’re trans, you’re not welcome here,” states one review, while another accuses the restaurant of being ‘a supporter of transphobia.”"
Clear proof that the world needs to crack down on the far right

Meme - Andi zeisler @andizeisler: "JK Rowling really could have just remained a wealthy, beloved author for the rest of her life. And she chose Twitter instead. Incredible."
Allison Bailey @BluskyeAllison: "And Rosa Parks could have just sat at the back of the bus for a quiet life. You've embarrassed yourself with this tweet & don't even know it."

Konstantin Kisin on Twitter - "It's amazing to see how the progressive left views JK Rowling, a single mum lifelong leftist who has donated millions to charity. All it took was for her to blaspheme against one - just one! - of their sacred commandments, and she immediately became their ENEMY. Wow."

All men abolished, JK Rowling killed – the trans debate is poisoning literature - "The imagination is not meant to be a safe space. We all imagine worlds in which something is different...   Fiction, particularly speculative fiction, is (among other things) the practice of imagining things that may or may not come true, and drawing out their consequences – usually bad. There is always politics in this. Isaac Asimov’s novels, for example, invite us to reflect on what a purely rational, technocratic world might be, and it turns out that humans would be locked up for their own good. (Sound familiar?)  But speculative fiction written along an existing political line, rather than imaginative play, is no longer fiction but propaganda. Sandra Newman, author of The Men, a compelling and enjoyable new novel that imagines a world without men – a world in which their disappearance is hypothesised – has thereby hit a snag. Her novel is sympathetic to trans characters, showing how unfair it would be for trans women to be included in the vanishing, but as the premise of the book involves all people with a “Y” chromosome suddenly vanishing, she has been attacked, predictably, as “transphobic”.  Plenty of other writers have toyed with a similar premise. In her acknowledgements, Newman notes her debt to some of them – Joanna Russ, Alice Sheldon, Sherri Tepper – all women who sought to explore the tensions of sexual difference and a mixed-sex world, and to imagine alternatives. (We could add, among others, Charlotte Perkins Gilman to this list, and note that fewer books in which men imagine a world without women come to mind.)...   Despite the inherently improbable premise of The Men – it’s not every day that half of humanity vanishes – Newman’s readers are demanding what we could call “tyrannical compassion”. All novels must be “kind”, they say, on pain of mass vitriol and abuse.  Like all skilful novelists, however, Newman is exploring ambivalence and ambiguity, asking what would be better and what worse without men. Her female characters are themselves torn. Each in turn loves a particular man – husband, son, brother – even as some aspects of social life become easier; none of them wholeheartedly embraces the new single-sex world. Ambivalence and ambiguity are everywhere in real life too; only a totalitarian would demand that we dictate who or what is “good” and “bad” according to their own personal whims.   Every creative production thrown out into the world must prepare for criticism. But there is a difference between reading (or watching, or listening to) something and asking “does this work on its own terms?” and imposing a pre-existing political framework into which everything must “fit” in order to be approved. Literature in general increasingly finds itself up against extra-literary demands. To read fiction as if it were a blueprint for the world you personally would like to see is, ultimately, to participate in the destruction of the imagination... Gretchen Felker-Martin’s postapocalyptic novel Manhunt has lately ben fêted by the “be kind” crew – despite the fact that in it, in Felker-Martin’s own words, “trans dykes fall in love and f--k and murder TERFs, feral men maraud in the wilderness [and] JK Rowling dies”. Maybe we’re too used to these double standards by now. There is nothing more delicious if you want to be a “moral” person than being allowed by the culture to hate the people you are permitted to hate, in the name of the “good”...   Intelligent readers are strong enough to handle difficult ideas and unpleasant characters. Whatever we believe, we should treat such things thoughtfully, rather than dashing them to the floor in a fit of pique."

Meme - PinkNews @PinkNews: "Gay couple who wanted a son sue IVF clinic after surrogate gives birth to daughter"
Shay @ShayWoulahan: "Why can't they just assign the baby male at birth isn't that how it works?"
"@PinkNews blocked you You are blocked from following @PinkNews and viewing @PinkNews's Tweets."
Addendum: So much for sex and gender being different and only the ignorant not knowing that - if you're "assigned" a sex at birth...

8.4 Sex: It’s About the Gametes – The Evolution and Biology of Sex - "Sexually reproducing anisogamous species generally have only two sexes.  So how do we distinguish the males from the females?  Scientists have created a definition of female that includes all the individuals that produce large gametes (eggs), those that produce small gametes (sperm) are male.  Biologically, this large gamete/small gamete distinction between males and females is the only one that holds up well across many sexually reproducing species"
Liberals only "trust the science" when it suits them. One person claimed that karyotype showed that sex wasn't binary and it was asinine to think that it was

The science journal Nature goes woke, claiming that both sex and gender are nonbinary - "The termites are dining well in the world of science, for the two most prestigious science journals in the world, Nature and Science, are both going woke.  And by that I mean that they’re buying into tenets of Critical Theory Wokeness that are palpably unscientific.  There are two scientific conclusions denied by ideologues because they’re politically inconvenient. The first is that there are behavioral differences between males and females that are both partly genetic and the result of natural selection. The second is that sex is “binary.”... the idea that sex is nonbinary and men and women are, on average, identical in their behaviors and preferences have become conventional views in progressive politics. If you deny them, you’re toast.   I won’t reiterate why biological sex (defined in animals as males having small gametes and females large ones) is binary in most animals; you can see my defense of this claim here, here, here, here and here. And if it weren’t true, biology would be in deep trouble: every paper that looks at differences between the sexes would have to be scrapped because “sexes” are now seen by the Woke as a social construct, not a biological reality. Indeed, all science journals, including Nature (as we see below) tacitly accept the binary nature of sex.  Gender is a bit less binary, as there are individuals who identify as neither male nor female, even though their biological sex is clear. But gender is still strongly bimodal, as the vast majority of individuals identify as either male or female. But let’s leave gender aside and talk about sex, which is the issue when we come to biology... in one article, Nature both denies binary sex and then acts as if it’s real... you know why the editors are doing this. Andy calls it “ideological capture”... I can’t tell you how annoying that I, as an erstwhile researcher in organismal biology, find this. It’s the denial of science to further ideology. And it’s the same madness we saw in the Lysenko episode, in which classical genetics was denied by a Russian charlatan in the service of Soviet ideology. Lysenko’s bogus theory of “vernalization”—really a “blank slate” idea in which inherited changes in crop production were influenced not by genes, but by environmental treatment—resulted in the death of millions by famine, both in Russia and in China, which also adopted Lysenko’s bogus theories."
I wonder if the person who claimed since no scientist claimed sex was not binary science was safe still thinks that

Evolution societies issue misleading statement about sex - "In my opinion, scientific societies shouldn’t issue political or ideological statements except under two conditions:    
1.) The government is trying to gut science or has other policies that would impede our understanding of nature or the functioning of the scientific society. (This includes, I suppose, policies that wreck the environment when organismal biology is concerned, for without an environment and its species there’s nothing to study.)    
2.) The government is misusing scientific data to enact policy, in which case a scientific society (without endorsing or denigrating the policy) should correct that knowledge—when that knowledge is in the ambit of the Society. This is one function of the National Academies of Science: to inform government policy with scientific data...
What I do oppose is scientific societies taking political or ideological stands as if they were a person. That’s because there’s surely a diversity of views among members of a society, but mostly because the purpose of scientific societies is to promote the doing of science and advancing our understanding of nature, not to function as political entities. Examples of statements that I think are misguided include endorsing or denigrating political candidates, or making statementsthat science and religion are compatible (several science organizations have made such statements)... A while back I was President of the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), and, as such, thought that the SSE shouldn’t take stands that didn’t have anything to do with evolution.  But now it has, opposing the Trump administration’s proposed policy that gender must be defined as a binary, based on the appearance of an individual’s genitals and as recognized on that individual’s birth certificate...   The Council (the officers) of the SSE, however, has issued a statement—almost certainly motivated by liberal political views—that claims to show that the Trump administration’s policy is not supported by science. In so doing, it conflates gender and sex, and winds up making the specious claim that “sex should be viewed as a continuum.”...   The statement that “diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans” gives the game away. First, it’s not so true for some traits like sex in humans, and, most egregiously, it’s a prime example of the naturalistic fallacy: because diversity is supposedly ubiquitous, it must be good, and should be promoted in society. Scientific societies should not be in the business of buttressing social policy by saying that it corresponds to nature. If we want to either promote gender diversity or refrain from criticizing it, we should not be looking to science for a justification."
Liberals regularly tell me to educate myself about the difference between sex and gender, but they always conflate them when it's convenient

Is Sex Binary? - "Granted, there are some people who have XXY chromosomes, or just a single X, making them neither chromosomally female nor chromosomally male. But the question was not whether chromosomal sex is binary, it was whether sex is binary. That question has been evaded, not answered. The categories of female and male are in fact implicit in Money’s taxonomy. To be chromosomally female is to have the sex chromosomes typical of (human) females; to be genitally female is to have the genitalia typical of (human) females, and so on. But what is it to be, simply, female or male? Forget Money’s many sex-related categories — what are the sexes? The answer has been known since the 19th century. As Simone de Beauvoir puts it in The Second Sex (the founding text of modern feminism), the sexes “are basically defined by the gametes they produce.”... There is a complication. Females and males might not produce gametes for a variety of reasons. A baby boy is male, despite the fact that sperm production is far in his future (or even if he dies in infancy), and a post-menopausal woman does not cease to be female simply because she no longer produces viable eggs... In the light of these examples, it is more accurate (albeit not completely accurate) to say that females are the ones who have advanced some distance down the developmental pathway that results in the production of large gametes — ovarian differentiation has occurred, at least to some extent. Similarly, males are the ones who have advanced some distance down the developmental pathway that results in the production of small gametes. Definitions in biology are never perfectly precise, and these are no exception. Still, they give us some traction in examining whether there are any humans who are neither female nor male. (It is not in dispute that some non-human organisms are neither female nor male, and that some — hermaphrodites — are both.)...  the issue of whether sex is binary, although of academic interest, is of no relevance to current debates about transsexuality and the changing models for treating gender dysphoria. To those struggling with gender identity issues, it might seem liberating and uplifting to be told that biological sex in humans is a glorious rainbow, rather than a square conservatively divided into pink and blue halves. But this feel-good approach is little better than deceiving intersex patients: respect for autonomy demands honesty. And finally, if those advocating for transgender people (or anyone else) rest their case on shaky interpretations of biology, this will ultimately only give succor to their enemies."
Some humans are born with 6 fingers on a hand. Thus we can't say that humans have 5 fingers on a hand
The author's bio: "Recently I've started working on philosophical issues relating to sex and gender (probably definitely ill-advisedly). To make matters worse, I am writing a book on these topics"

Sex in humans may not be binary, but it’s surely bimodal - "Anne Fausto-Sterling, an emeritus professor of biology and gender studies at Brown university, conflates the issues of sex and gender in her op-ed piece in the New York Times (below), implying that because sex is not “binary” (i.e., there are some exceptions), that it is not bimodal. Now she doesn’t use the word “bimodal”, but the implication here is that somehow science has decided that there are more than two biological sexes, and implying that there is just two is somehow damaging to those individuals who are intermediate. (Again, I’m not referring to transsexuals here, many of whom are born having one distinct biological sex but decide, as a matter of gender preference, that they’re members of the other, intermediate, or are members of some unusual gender.) Her article, as you’ll see from contrasting the title with the last paragraph, conflates sex and gender, and I think that’s deliberate. But it’s confusing and mistaken... Fausto-Sterling concentrates on these exceptions, managing to convey the message that they are so common that we really shouldn’t think that the human population falls nearly into two sexes—that biological sex isn’t even close to being binary. In fact, in the entire article, Fausto-Sterling doesn’t mention the frequency of these exceptions, which we need to consider if we want to know what we mean when we claim that “there aren’t two biological sexes in humans”."

No, Trans Women Are NOT ‘Biologically Male’ - "“Yes, trans women are women, but they’re still biologically male.”  Ever thought or said something like this? You might even have good intentions by stating what you think is a simple fact – after all, gender is a social construct, while sex is biological, right?  Actually, this “simple fact” of trans women being “biologically male” is inaccurate – and this misrepresentation of the truth is being used to justify some pretty hateful things.  So if you really want the facts, and to follow through on your good intentions by being a good ally, check out Riley J. Dennis’ explanation of why trans women are not biologically male.  With Love, The Editors at Everyday Feminism"
"Reality is often disappointing. That is, it was. Now, reality can be whatever I want"
Addendum: So many apologists claim that "Trans people don't claim to change their biology. They are well aware they're still biologically what they were born as."

Is sex a social construct like gender? Nope. - "  Dennis also argues that secondary sex characteristics militate against biological sex because “they can be changed through hormones or surgery.” But that’s again irrelevant to the argument from biological sex as a reality at birth. I could use lasers to remove the sex combs of Drosophila males (stiff tufts of bristles on the forelegs that males use to grasp females during copulation), but that doesn’t mean that sex in Drosophila is a social construct.  Similarly, you can dye a female cardinal bright red to resemble a male (a secondary sexual characteristic), but that says nothing about whether sex in cardinals is a social construct. It can’t be, because cardinals don’t even have a society.  The culturally-induced malleability of biological traits does not mean that those traits aren’t real but merely social constructs; it just means that those traits can be artificially changed to resemble those of the other sex.   Dennis concludes that of the five traits listed above, four of them can’t be used to “accurately determine sex.”(Chromosomes seem to be the exception.) Well, yes, but they are accurate nearly all the time, and when combined are accurate virtually all of the time. There are of course exceptions, but as I said, they’re very rare."

Meme - "Help got clocked
I'm 19, black, mtf and I came out to my roommate and she said she already knew. her dad suspected I was trans bc of the adams apple, land she sald she suspected because of the voice and face??? Her mom said probably not because of my hips and chest, which like...good guess, thanks estrogen But this still really sucks because thought was passing very well, and really thought was stealth until I told my completely trans- incompetent cis proto-conservative roommate. she also said her friend saw me the first time and asked if I was trans too because my name apparently a common one transfem people like. a lot of 'emotions going on. Like she said the facial structure gave it away??? can't help but wonder it my facial structure at fault here or does she Just have little experience with Black female faces? she doesn't come from a very diverse background and it's not hard to imagine that she just like...doesn't realise. But also now I'm wondering can EVERYONE tell??? Most people on tinder don't now I'm remembering this guy who said "I had a feeling..." after I told him My doctors and friends all say I pass, but still this was jarring. Maybe this is just an example of the way black faces are masculinised in non-black settings, and how black female faces are just perceived by non black people as more "ugly" or "manly" but like...ughhhhh I don't knowwwww and now I'm scaredddd trans people I meet say i pass really well and one called me gorgeous today but like....ughskfkejcjsdkkfj I'm just really frustrated by this, because I thought I was passing very well. Just reminds me there's, more work to be done. Any advice?"
"roommate update
So talked about my roommate and her clocking me and whatnot (see here: and it got me thinking: they probably are just racist. like, have no experience seeing black female faces. but that isn't relevant. the point of this update is that I talked to my RAs about her, and now I'm fling title ix complaint against her so she can get kicked out! They made her leave yesterday night and now we're going through the process to make her fuck off officially! thank you everyone for your support! I'll Iyk how it goes!"
False accusations are good to get back at people who notice you're trans. Maybe trans narcissism is fueled by people who pretend they look great because they're afraid of retaliation