The trans community predicted well in advance that cis women would inevitably wind up being targeted by the growing anti-trans hysteria, and that, because trans women are relatively uncommon, the majority of the harassment would ultimately be targeting cisgender women. That has sadly turned out to be the case as members of the public whoâve been whipped into a transmisogynistic frenzy look to vent their rage on any women who doesnât adequately perform femininity. The harassment of Harold after her half-marathon is just the latest in a growing list of similar incidents. Some of these have been relatively mild, such as fleeting encounters in public restrooms where cis women have been challenged or treated disrespectfully by people who believed that they were trans. A few, however, have been violent, including an incident where a woman was maced, dragged, and kicked after a shop attendant got the mistaken idea she was transgender, and one where a woman was murdered by a man who falsely believed her to be transgender. Both of the victims of violent attacks were Black women, who are believed to be particularly vulnerable to transmisogyny, included misdirected transmisogyny.
Incidents like these, where cis women wind up as targets for hatred and harassment intended for trans women, provide an opportunity to shine a spotlight on just how ugly and pointless the anti-trans panic is, even as harassment and violence towards trans women is often ignored and downplayed. However, it also speaks to the irony of a hate campaign that targets a group of women who are small in number, risk averse, and difficult to distinguish from other women. Cis women donât just wind up as frequent targets of anti-trans hate by accident, they wind up as targets of anti-trans hate because the loathing and violent anger engendered by the anti-trans movement has to vent itself on somebody, and there arenât enough visible trans women to slake the bloodlust.
Linkage
Things Katy is reading.
The smug, self-righteous âmoralâ crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base - 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.
Oswald Spengler in âThe Decline of the Westâ predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of âmonied thugs,â people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.
The American dream has become an American nightmare.
The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger and a sense of worthlessness.
I have thoughts backed up, many of them, obviously. As election day approached, I found myself thinking more and more about Lakoff, in the context of the New Republicans' ability to convey a narrative about who they are and what they stand for. It's monstrous, but has a kind of coherence. By contrast the Democrats don't have anything like that. As an institution, they are a moral and civil vacuum. They are rightly seen as calculating and untrustworthy.
However I take issue with Duran and Lakoff's assertion that the Democrats were practicing identity politics. If anything they were doing quite the reverse: identity complacency. The Republicans have been wielding identity politics frighteningly effectively.
In 2024, Kamala Harris tried to move to the right to find the mythical âcenter.â It didnât work. Moving to the right doesn't get you to the center â because there is no center. When a Democratic politician moves to "the right" during an election, it erodes their authenticity. In fact, such tactics might have demotivated Democratic voters who were disillusioned to see their candidate running as a Republican Lite.
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Moving forward, Democrats must stop making these superficial, last-minute lurches toward Republican ideas. They must frame the case not as left or right, but for the people and the public good. Moving to the right only convinces voters that the right has better ideas. It's a desperate short-term strategy with harmful long-term consequences.
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Especially helpful to Trump were large social media accounts that thrive on engagement from outraged Democrats. As in 2016, Trumpâs "opponents" created a parasitic economy in which constant outrage over Trump's every utterance was the name of the game. Again, this was a massive failure â because focusing attention on Trumpâs power â even his power to harm â helps Trump. (Don't expect these professional social media hounds to change their tactics. Amplifying Trump is their bread and butter.)
The attacks on Trump managed to help spread his message far and wide. If Democrats and the liberal press had spent less time reacting to Trump, they might have done a lot better job of trumpeting â and trumpeting loudly â their own candidateâs positives.
This is just a shambles:
A key factor that the industry has been keen to not draw too much attention to for over a year is the number of 4G & 5G devices that would no longer work, or would only work on some networks, including for Emergency Calling.
The idea that a 4G or 5G phone could somehow be affected by the shutting down of older technologies like 2G & 3G is a completely foreign concept to people, and rightfully so.
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Unlike with 2G & 3G, 4G & 5G are Data only standards and have no built-in calling functionality, let alone one as well standardised as the traditional Circuited Switched calling from 2G & 3G (GSM/UMTS).
This becomes a problem as to enable calling over 4G & 5G, devices need to have explicit software/firmware support, especially so for Emergency Calling.
Calling on 4G Networks is enabled through the use of VoLTE (Voice over LTE aka â4G Callingâ), which is a software/firmware VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calling solution for mobile phones.
The world has used VoIP Calling for decades but introducing VoIP data based calling into the mobile sector has proven very difficult.
Voice Over LTE (4G Calling) devices have been around since as early as 2013, however over years the industry has failed to ensure interoperability.
The presence of security guards in a place is arguably a good indicator of this ânegative social capital.â Guards are needed because a place otherwise lacks the norms of reciprocity that are needed to assure good order and behavior. The steady increase in the number of security guards and the number of places (apartments, dormitories, public buildings) to which access is secured by guards indicates the absence of trust.
The number of security guards in the United States has increased from about 600,000 in 1980 to more than 1,000,000 in 2000 (Strom et al., 2010). These figures represent a steep increase from earlier years. In 1960, there were only about 250,000 guards, watchmen and doormen, according to the Census (which used a different occupational classification scheme than is used today). The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the number of US security guards has increased by almost 100,000 since 2010, to a total of more than 1.1 million. As a measure of how paranoid and unwelcoming we are as a nation, security guards outnumber receptionists by more than 100,000 workers nationally.
Sam Bowles and Arjun Jayadev argue that we have become âone nation under guardâ and say that the growth of guard labor is symptomatic of growing inequality. The U.S. has the dubious distinction of employing a larger share of its workers as guards than other industrialized nations and there seems to be a correlation between national income inequality and guard labor.
Hilarious. Joyless monomaniacs near you are looking for loveâŠ
According to useless rag The Daily Mail, who interviewed Watson about her cool new phrenology software, the appâcalled LâApp, like some sort of miserable French pre-dinner mealâwill use âsex-recognition technologyâ to âensure only biological females can sign up.â As ever, I cannot begin to guess what the fuck a âbiological female is,â but maybe if we break down what the app is actually looking for we can come up with a few ideas.
When you sign up on the app, you have to let it scan your face, a decision that any dystopian science fiction film can tell you is a fantastic idea. The app will âanalyzeâ features like âbone structure, the shape and positioning of an individual's eyes, eyebrows and nose shape or sizeâ to determine whether or not youâre a true adult human female or just some sort of poseur.
Watson says LâAppâs transgender detection is 99% accurate, an absolutely stunning number that Iâm absolutely sure is correct and not made up. Considering trans people in general make up roughly one percent of the world population, my back of the napkin math suggests the app canât actually catch any trans women at all.
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Watson admitted to The Mail that sheâs had some particularly amusing trouble fitting in on other dating apps.
âAny time I've joined a lesbian dating app or any other dating app myself, I get banned. To avoid trans-identified males, I will always write a little blurb, nothing disrespectful, saying my preference is for women and please respect my boundaries. And every time I do that I get banned. On one app I was asked to put down my most controversial opinion, so I wrote that J. K. Rowling was right and was banned for that. It's insane.â
Oh yes, Jenny, itâs the rest of the world thatâs gone insane. Youâre the only one who gets it. The rest of us are simply delusional, and thatâs why other lesbians donât want your rancid ass on their dating app. Have fun on your own app where the icky trans girls arenât allowed. Iâm sure the fact that other lesbians keep banning you from their dating apps is no indication of how successful your purity test app will be.
The notion that negative gearing leads to an increased supply of rental dwellings is flawed: 92% of
investment is used to purchase existing dwellings, displacing previous owner-occupiers or tenants to
buy or rent elsewhere, respectively, resulting in little to no net increase in the rental stock. Negative
gearing is a poor investment strategy over the long term for investors pursuing capital gain rather
than rental income as housing prices have increased by an average of 2.4% annually from 1880 to
2011 in real terms (before 1996, housing had delivered a real return of only 0.7% annually). Negative
gearing for purposes of realizing capital gain, however, becomes a viable strategy during the boom
phase of a housing cycle as capital values are substantially appreciating. Contrary to claims that
quarantining negative gearing during 1985-87 caused a surge in rental prices, rents increased in only
some capital cities while stagnating or falling in others.[âŠ]
It is recommended that, at a minimum, negative gearing be quarantined to the purchase of newly-
constructed dwellings, or preferably, be abolished. The Commonwealth Rent Assistance (CRA) scheme
is better targeted towards those who require help in the course of renting rather than subsidising
residential property market investors. Although the CRA could increase rents, it appears to be the
most straight-forward mechanism available to policymakers to aid tenants.
Once upon a time it was razor blades in apples; this year, itâs rainbow fentanyl in candy. But while fears of children receiving narcotic-spiked treats are unfounded, there is a very real danger that Americaâs children face on this most hallowed of evenings: cars.
Thatâs because pedestrians under the age of 18 are three times more likely to be struck and killed by a car on Halloween than any other day of the year. That risk grows to 10 times more likely for children aged 4 to 8 years old, according to a study from 2019 in JAMA Pediatrics.
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But what happens on Halloween isnât an isolated incident. After gun injuries, motor vehicle injuries are the second leading cause of death among children in the US overall. And with pedestrian fatalities (both adult and child) at a 40-year high in the US, itâs worth asking why children roaming the streets is so inherently deadly, and what can be done about it.
âSometimes when you talk about this issue, you get pushback from people and people say, âWell, of course, you have more children on the streets, of course, more children are going to die,ââ Doug Gordon, a writer and podcast host who advocates for safer streets and cities, told me. âBut that accepts a baseline level of danger that I think we as a society have in fact accepted on the other 364 days of the year.â
It is impossible to read anything by Mehdi Hasan without hearing it in his voice. Fact.
Consider the record of recent weeks and months:
- Israelâs prime minister, while standing on stage at the UN general assembly, denounced the body as âcontemptibleâ, a âhouse of darknessâ and a âswamp of antisemitic bileâ.
- Israelâs outgoing ambassador to the UN shredded a copy of the UN charter with a miniature paper shredder while also standing at the podium of the general assembly, and later said the UN headquarters in New York âshould be closed and wiped off the face of the Earthâ.
- Israelâs foreign minister falsely accused the UN secretary general of not having condemned Iranâs attacks on Israel, declared him âpersona non grata in Israelâ and announced that he had âbanned him from entering the countryâ.
- The Israeli government actively obstructed a UN-mandated commission of inquiry trying to collect evidence on the 7 October attacks.
- Israelâs parliament is in the process of designating a longstanding UN agency, Unrwa, as a âterrorist organizationâ.
- The Israeli military has bombed UN schools, warehouses and refugee camps in Gaza for 12 consecutive months, and killed a record 228 UN employees in the process. âBy far the highest number of our personnel killed in a single conflict or natural disaster since the creation of the United Nations,â to quote the UN secretary general.
- The Israeli military is now also attacking UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. According to the UN, âfive UN âBlue Helmetsâ serving with UNIFIL in Lebanon have been injured as Israeli forces inflicted damage on UN positions close to the âBlue Lineâ.â
How is any of this OK? Acceptable? Legal?
Perhaps the biggest question of all: how is Israel still allowed to remain a member of the UN? Why has it not yet been expelled from an organization that it is relentlessly and shamelessly attacking and undermining? Sure, there are other human rights abusers that remain card-carrying members of the UN â Syria, Russia and North Korea, to name but a few â but none of them have killed UN employees en masse; none of them have sent tanks to invade a UN base; none of them have ârefused to comply with more than two dozen UNSC resolutionsâ. It has been more than 60 years since any country in the world dared make the UN secretary general himself âpersona non grataâ.
In Australia, we do much the same by putting a cost premium on dangerous knowledge.
Floridaâs public universities are purging the list of general education courses they will offer next year to fall in line with a state law pushed for by Gov. Ron DeSantis targeting âwoke ideologiesâ in higher education.
These decisions, in many cases being driven by the university systemâs Board of Governors, have the potential to affect faculty and thousands of students across the state. Hundreds of courses are slated to become electives after previously counting toward graduation requirements, which university professors and free speech advocates fear is just the first step toward those classes disappearing entirely.
The stateâs involvement in a curriculum process â which has historically been left to universities â is riling academics and students who oppose how officials are using new authority to weed out courses like Anthropology of Race & Ethnicity, Sociology of Gender, and Women in Literature.
âThis sort of state overreach could spell disaster for student and faculty retention, and the academic standing of Florida institutions,â said Katie Blankenship, who leads a state office for free speech advocacy group PEN America.
Yet the Board of Governors maintains that the state is merely carrying out the intent of the GOP-dominated Legislature, which in 2023 called for a wholesale review of general education offerings to ensure the courses stray from teaching âidentity politicsâ and avoid âunproven, speculative, or exploratoryâ content.