A lot of this comes down to whether or not one believes that womens’ equality depends in some part on separate accommodations for situations where women are particularly vulnerable.
It's almost the inverse, actually.
Or, to rephrase: A lot of this comes down to whether or not one believes that we can reach women's equality by concluding that we cannot actually solve any problems at all. To the extent of being unwilling to stop rape inside _entirely controlled-and-monitored facilities_, so we just have to throw up our hands and make sure that _one_ group doesn't rape women. (Guards raping women, a much larger problem, totally fine. Likewise, other women, totally fine.)
That is the totality of effort: In this one specific case, we are willing to physically stop this very particular sort of rape of some women by a certain specific group.
GO FEMINISM! *raises hands in victory sign* WOO!
Or, new idea: We should not have rape essentially running wild in prison. We should not have male prisoners raping other male prisoners , we should not have male prisoners raping female prisoners, we should not have male guards raping male or female prisoners, we should not have male prisoners raping trans female prisoners, we should not have female prisoners raping other female prisoners, we should not, in fact, have any of that happening at all.
Which is a thing we could trivially do.
Instead, we have built a system where it is happening openly and _encouraged_ by prison staff.
Hey, InMD, I said it to Dark, but did you happen to google v-coding? Do you know what that is? It's when prison guards reward a well-behaving prisoner, or just one that bribes them well, with a trans woman cellmate to rape.
That's completely irrelevant to the point being made here.
Your claim was you didn't think that feminists would like women's sports going away, not some hypothetical 'fairness' argument that _you_ believe but actual feminists do not.
Feminists don't care if there are statistical differences. Feminist theory does not, and never have argued that random things should be 'fair'. I know that's what the _right_ has pretended, for decades, but that's not at all true.
Actual feminists have a lot of things to say on these issues. Here's what, for example, is said about grade schools sports:
Grade school athletics are supposed to be _educational_, not 'a record-defining competition to see who is literally the best'. It is okay and even expected to have differing skill levels. Especially considering that a major factor in ability in grade-school athleticism is literally just 'who is the oldest' and 'who hit their growth spurt first', and when there is that much variation in a single grade, and that sports are often played across grade, it is pointless to pretend girls are weaker, especially since girls usually hit their growth spurt first.
Additionally, sports as provided by grade schools are very weighted towards ones that boys appear to be better at. Almost no one is doing sports programs that girls generally dominate in, like gymnastics. This seems...odd. But there's a reason for that: We have allowed the popularity of sports to be a huge funding source to school, allowing any general societal sexism to dictate what sports exist and demand that teams 'win' instead of just having sports as, again, _education_ and general activities for students, which is what it should be.
To summarize: Claiming that 'girls will not do as well as boys while playing on a mixed-sex team' in _grade school_ fundamentally, and somewhat deliberately, misunderstands why we _have_ sports in grade school. It is not to see which school is 'the best'. It is not to see which individual player is best.
It is because being part of a sport and a team and competing as such is very good experience.
And as for prisons, you _really_ need to talk to some feminists, because most of them have pretty serious problem with the entire carceral system, from top to bottom, especially the level of sexual assault allowed to exist within it.
Within the existing system, feminism generally operates off a harm migration system, where decisions are made about individual prisoners and the risk.
And they have much much more a problem with male guards at women's prisons than trans people. And they also know that v-coding exists, a thing you are about to google and then immediately wish you had not googled.
We have women’s sports and women’s prisons for good reason. I’ve never heard of “feminists” calling for those to be merged.
Then you have never listened to feminists.
Let me explain something that a lot of people get very very wrong about sports: The feminist argument was not that women should get their own team. The feminist argument was that women _should be allowed to play_, period. They were not allowed to play sports in any manner whatsoever before that, and if they were, it was absurdly underfunded segregated dumb games.
The feminist position was, and always has been, that women should be allowed to play with them men. Women's sports do not exist because of feminists. They exist _despite_ feminists. The regulations in Title IX, when it was created in 1972, originally said in 1972: No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
You may notice that doesn't say anything about segregating sports. Indeed, the original regulation, as pushed by the national Organization of Women and other feminist groups, would seem to prohibit it. If an educational athletic team does not allow women, it would be illegal.
Which got a lot of female college potential athletes suing, because they wanted access to sports, to play actual real sports with the men, and still were not allowed to play.
So, eventually, these Federal regulations were made into law, in 1975. And an amendment was added: A recipient which operates or sponsors interscholastic, intercollegiate,club or intramural athletics shall provide equal athletic opportunity for members of both sexes. In determining whether equal opportunities are available, the Director will consider, among other factors:... Whether the selection of sports and levels of competition effectively accommodate the interests and abilities of members of both sexes ...
You may notice _that_ doesn't require a separate women's sports either. But it's suddenly moved from allowing access to any 'education program or activity' without consideration of sex to allowing 'equal opportunities' while considering sex. I.e., recreating separate but equal. With a whole bunch of rules about how we would know if something was equal.
This amendment was added by Senator Jacob Javits, a Republican, although a fairly liberal one who did seem to be pretty much in favor of civil rights. It's called the Javits Amendment.
This was not at all what feminism organizations asked for. It wasn't a step forward, it literally undid some of the existing regulation and created an _exception_ to anti-discrimination law. It was a step _backwards_, designed to fix the new and exciting 'problem' of women attempt to try out for college sports and the revenue impact that was perceived to have on sports.
Or just read this: https://lewisbrisbois.com/blog/category/sports-law/fifty-years-of-progress-the-legal-history-of-title-ix
The law has certainly seen its fair share of adversity and backlash, particularly in its application to sport. Immediately following its enactment (and in the years thereafter), Title IX faced an onslaught of challenges, whether through subsequent proposed amendments or through lawsuits challenging its legality and attempting to narrow its scope. In 1974, Senator John Tower proposed the “Tower Amendment,” which sought to exempt revenue-generating sports from Title IX’s reach. When that failed, Senator Jacob Javits submitted an amendment directing HEW to issue regulations providing, “with respect to intercollegiate athletic activities, reasonable provisions considering the nature of particular sports.”
tl;dr - Women's sports under Title IX do not exist to advance feminism, they exist as an _exception_ to the anti-discrimination rules a school would normally be required to follow, the rules that feminists pushed for. At best, they can be considered as a political compromise made 50 years ago when it became clear that collegiate sports were a particular sticking point for the law.
Hey Dark, you probably should be aware that the UK has been taken over by transphobic assholes, so trying to cite something that the government has said about trans people as proof of anything is kind of ridiculous.
Shockingly, Trump and his crew didn’t handle this issue competently.
As I said, this isn't bad wording that Trump came up with, this is wording that the Gender Criitical movement has been testing for a literal decade, the only thing it has to do with Trump is that he's the person who was willing to do it.
There's not some better version of this out there that he should have used. Mostly because there's not actually a good way to do this, exactly like there's not a good way to determine, under the law, exactly what race someone is.
Big picture we have laws and rules designed to protect women from men.
We not only have not decided that, we have decided the exact literal opposite of that. And by we, I mean second wave feminism, AKA what happened in the 1960s and after.
For those of you who are not aware, one of the foundational premises of second wave feminism is that women should be treated the same as men under the law and by society. Essentially every single feminist law from that era (and beyond) requires women to be treated identically to men. In fact, they don't even say that, they don't say women or men at all, they say the people cannot be treated differently based on sex.
Feminists from that era would be appalled at the idea that the law should do things to protect women, as a class, from men, as a class. It's literally the opposite of what they were working for, in which the law did not see women or men, and in fact made no determination based on sex whatsoever.
Even laws that you would think would only apply to women, like abortion laws, are not written that way, very much on purpose.
This is because feminists were quite aware of the fact that such laws giving rights based on who someone is were very easy to turn against people, by merely redefining the terms used in them so that person isn't under it anymore. As I mentioned in my first post here, feminists knew this because first wave feminism was like 50% lesbians, and if there is one class of women that historically has been de-womaned and excluded from protections granted to women, it is lesbians.
This is why the gender critical movement has spent a decade lying to people and propagandizing that we do have such laws. Claiming that the law gives certain privileges to women, thus making the argument that certain people who don't deserve them should be excluded from those privileges.
There are no such privileges. Women have no special rights, under the law, whatsoever. It is not feminist to claim that they do and try to defend those rights, it is literally the opposite, that is one of the things that feminists actively worked against because they knew exactly this thing could happen.
People, have rights under the law, regardless of sex. That is the law in this country, or sort of is, except we never actually (or say we didn't) passed the ERA...but to the extent that such laws do exist, they do not 'protect women', they protect everyone by requiring the law to treat everyone identically.
And the only reason you need to know who was a woman, under the law, is if you wanted to change that.
Now, so much of it seems to be things like this, little gotchas taken from the Right-Wing-o-sphere that serve as a sort of bait for the folks here who are less inclined to hang out in the Right-Wing-o-sphere.
You have a pretty good point there. No one can actually believe 'Harvard had bodies stolen from it' is actually relevant, in any manner, to this discussion. It's inane to discuss, and probably is best to ignore.
As I've joked serious-seriously, you could write a plausible time-travel story where the concentration of more and wealth in less and less hands, the complicit media refused to explain where the problems are but continue to 'blame literally anyone else, like immigrants', and of course blaming Hillary because she got elected in 2016 results in politics becoming completely broken, or even more broken, by 2020.
So in 2020, or maybe 2024, a charismatic and extremely intelligent fascist leader gets elected, wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. He does not make anywhere near the same mistakes as Trump, he works tirelessly but competently to erode all safeguards in the system. The constitution is continued to be slowly eroded under the guise of 'terrorism', and 'protestor' is treated functionally the same, and the elections are not even slightly free, but all that happens slowly by the _end_ of his term, not spending an entire term doing nothing because he was managed like a toddler, and then doing a bunch of really dumb stuff instantly in his second term.
And by 2050, the US has managed to competently and slowly oppress a large chunk of the rest of the world...possibly not outright conquering, but via puppet governments and threats.
...and the time travelers ask themselves 'How we derail this?' and look around, and, hey say, Donald Trump (Who in the original timeline tried to become Mayor of NYC under fascism and flamed out spectatularly.) is a giant idiot, what happens if we get Obama to piss him off and run in 2016?
It doesn't actually matter if he folds. The ships from China are still sailling empty because they are unsure what tariffs are going to be paid when they get here. There's going to be a month period of shortages, which coincidentally will time itself perfectly with student loan repayment.
Meanwhile, countries are pulling focus to other places, prices are going to rise here because they cannot trust us to buy their goods. Those places may make them less profit, but it is a known consistent profit and they don't have to worry about the random vagaries of the whim of the US president.
Meanwhile meanwhile, a lot of small businesses that rely on cheap goods from China to stay in business, have already decided to shut down, and more of them will fold, before all this gets fixed. Which will work great for concentrating wealth even more in the super rich, but isn't going to help the actual economy much.
None of us have any idea how much actual damage will happen, but it could indeed be a full-on economic calamity. Or not. Who knows.
I'm not really talking at the individual level. Obviously people have had payments paused generally don't want them to resume, although they mostly understand that they will.
My point is that governments, and this government especially, needs enough people, enough powerful people, to conclude that it is not best for this government to be burn to the ground.
It is somewhat amazing watching just how incoherent this version of fascism is, about how it does target its enemies with laser-like precision, as fascism should, but then seems very unclear about how it shouldn't harm the Real American Volk who are supposed to be on its side, and just sort of scatter shots harm towards everyone!
This is because of how incoherent conservative politics was that led into this, which decided things like 'people who went to college' and 'young people asking for jobs that paid enough to live on' and 'women saying things' were the enemies. A revolving door of enemies that probably included every single person at some point in time, whatever was the most politically useful enemies to have at any given moment.
And then it elect someone like Trump, who doesn't understand basic economics of any sort and cannot be reasoned with even by his own party. And who takes all the enemy list seriously, and doesn't have a problem with having 90% of the US population be enemies!
People, fascist people, I don't know why I have to explain this to you, but the law is supposed to bind but not protect out-groups, and you got that right, but it is supposed to protect but not bind the in-groups, and you're failing at the protect part!
We had about a half dozen countries created and/or changed when Brittan pulled out of the Middle East.
And those countries that ethnically cleansed an area to exist were criticized for it and generally stopped, or continued to criticized for it.
I don’t see why it’s “moral” to insist that none of them be Jewish.
The problem with an ethnostate isn't that it exists, the problem with an ethnostate is _what it does to people of other ethnicities who already exist in it_.
No one cares if countries are 'ethnostates' if they only have one ethnicity in them. In fact, no one even bothers to classify them as such. Ethnostates are generally considered as such by how they treat their minority populations.
And, in Israel's case, it's not just the people in actual Israel, it's the fact it clearly wants _all_ Palestine's territory, so it's not only how it treats non-Jewish people within Israel, but how it (currently) treats non-Jewish people within (what it clearly plans to be future) Israel.
Did I say anything about what is and isn't anti-semitic?
Why, I don't believe I did!
Indeed, what I appear to have said is that 'This obviously lying site is spreading very debunked and harmful lies as it say that someone's behavior is antisemitic.'
I think the best quote from that article is this one:
If Trump were to become the president, the Republican nominee, or even a failed candidate with strong conservative support, what would that say about conservatives?
It is somehow incredibly self-aware and non-self-aware at the same time . Yes, National Review in 2016, what _would_ Trump becoming popular say about conservatives?
Sometimes it's easy to believe the Trump Administration cannot be stupider, and then it goes and drags out something like this and you remember who you're talking about.
We can, perhaps, argue about student loans in some other universe, if we should collect them or not, it was an interesting argument before the election.
But...we do understand the economy is about to collapse, right? I'm not kidding about that. Prices about to leap, shortages are going to happen, things are about to get pretty bad as high China tariffs and the 10% on everyone else go into effect. The half-empty ships are already on the way. Things are about To Happen come June 1st.
But don't worry as prices skyrocket and businesses start failing, the Federal government is _also_ going to resume taking loan repayments from your bank account!
This is just...astonishingly implausible, and I don't really have any other words for it, despite 'implausible' not really being applicably to things literally happening in actual real life.
I could say inconceivable, but that feels like a Princess Bride joke.
I can't even figure out the words for this sort of behavior. It is extremely hard to come up with any sort of coherent understanding of the Trump administration besides 'fascism that is determined to saw their own legs off and throw themselves into lava'.
Hey, look, it's the 'Palestinians beheaded babies' hoax on that very page.
I again remind people that was exactly one fatality that could qualify as a baby on Oct 7, 11-month old Mila Cohen, and that was shot in her mother's arms from a distance. Even if you think that was purposeful, I think we can agree that is not 'beheading'. This is incredibly well documented, this isn't up for debate, we have literally the list of Israeli casualties and there is one deceased baby on it, period.
Meanwhile, there are, however, quite a lot of pictures of Palestinian babies that could, indeed, be called 'beheaded by Israeli strikes', and pretending there are not such things while pushing a well-debunked false claim is astonishing.
Are there literally any actual factual standards you will apply to the sites feeding you 'news' about anti-semitism?
Some conservatives believe due process still matters: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/attorney-general-bondis-claim-that-courts-have-ruled-that-abrego-garcia-is-a-member-of-ms-13/
...people have the strangest bedfellows these days.
I could argue it does slightly reflect badly on their _competence_, indeed, they admitted they had poor controls over some of that and no real oversight. And created a policy afterward.
But being incompetent in oversight of a specific thing to stop people from stealing from you isn't the same as 'lacks moral authority'. It's not even Harvard 'being bad at their job'...they aren't a body bank, pretending such things existed. They're a school, their job is education, and schools are often pretty bad at security, and often do end up having wake-up calls when people steal from them.
This case is just somewhat icky because of what was stolen, but that doesn't reflect on Harvard's moral authority unless you think it's immoral for Harvard to have bodies at all. (Which would be a distinctly minority view...most people understand why medical school have cadavers.)
JFK Jr. is also going to start trying to control medications and bodily autonomy of autistic people, literally talking about imprisoning them, and is threatening to cut off ADHD medication. Very eugenic-y things.
Also same about trans healthcare, but somehow that's completely unrelated and fine to a bunch of people here. It's surely not the exact same tendency.
Again, you cannot _possible_ believe that 'arrested for standing Hispanically in a Home Depot parking lot', and two people nearby included gang members, can even _possibly_ be an indication of gang membership that would withstand any legal test.
You are not that stupid.
As for the protective order: His wife is literally advocating for his return.
He also was never actually charged with a crime. We do not punish people for having protective orders against them, because _getting a protective order does not require due process_.
If they want to charge him with assault, they can. Of course, it would be a pretty stupid case as the only witness is his wife, who, duh, they can't legally compel to testify against him.
A reminder of where we are: The habeas filings have all followed the Supreme Court’s 5-4 order in Trump v. J.G.G. on April 7 holding that AEA challenges had to be brought in habeas actions — and vacating the prior classwide order, brought under the Administrative Procedure Act, blocking AEA proclamation-based removals nationwide.
As such, a habeas petition was filed by lawyers from the ACLU on behalf of two petitioners and a “putative class” in the Northern District of Texas on April 16. As with the other recent filings, the aim was for this to protect anyone from AEA proclamation-removal within the district. That is the putative, or proposed, class.
I.e., this is the ACLU following along with the nonsense idea that 'The government can rendition these people without a trial as long as they are warned they are going to be renditioned and do not manage to contact a lawyer and get a habaes petition filed fast enough, and no we won't be specific about the time limitation there or whether or not they can even contact a lawyer'.
The ACLU apparently took that as a challenge, and it appears that _enough_ people in the government take issue with this enough to be leaking information and that a flight was imminent from Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas. Today. On Saturday. So they filed a TRO Friday evening, it got appealed up the chain fast enough, and the Supreme Court had to step in at fricking one in the morning.
'We can send individuals off to be tortured with no due process, and no way to ever give them due process, unless, and only unless, some lawyer learns we're going to do that and manages to get a response from the actual literal Supreme Court faster than we can get a plane off the ground.'
Starting to think we need two sorts of open threads. Normal open threads, and threads for 'current legal status of gulag rendition', which keeps changing so fast no one can really write an article on it.
Anyway, hours after _this_ was posted, the Surpreme Court, at one in the morning on a Saturday, issued a blanket TRO saying the administration cannot rendition anyone from the Northern Distract of Texas under the AEA. This, notable, does not have anything to do with Abrego Garcia, it's because the ACLU filed a blanket habeas for _everyone_ who is going to renditioned. (You know, those people who got the forms the other day.)
This is in addition to the one TRO that already existed within the Southern District of Texas stopping the same thing. (Which I think is the one in the article? And also the one that is currently being looked into for contempt because they did not turn the planes around as the judge ordered.)
It is worth pointing out that the Trump Administration is almost out of jurisdiction shopping. This is the jurisdiction _they wanted_ and they can't even get favorable results from it.
It is completely absurd that no one will issue a nation-wide injunction about this.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Gender Critical: Legally Defining Sex”
It's almost the inverse, actually.
Or, to rephrase: A lot of this comes down to whether or not one believes that we can reach women's equality by concluding that we cannot actually solve any problems at all. To the extent of being unwilling to stop rape inside _entirely controlled-and-monitored facilities_, so we just have to throw up our hands and make sure that _one_ group doesn't rape women. (Guards raping women, a much larger problem, totally fine. Likewise, other women, totally fine.)
That is the totality of effort: In this one specific case, we are willing to physically stop this very particular sort of rape of some women by a certain specific group.
GO FEMINISM! *raises hands in victory sign* WOO!
Or, new idea: We should not have rape essentially running wild in prison. We should not have male prisoners raping other male prisoners , we should not have male prisoners raping female prisoners, we should not have male guards raping male or female prisoners, we should not have male prisoners raping trans female prisoners, we should not have female prisoners raping other female prisoners, we should not, in fact, have any of that happening at all.
Which is a thing we could trivially do.
Instead, we have built a system where it is happening openly and _encouraged_ by prison staff.
Hey, InMD, I said it to Dark, but did you happen to google v-coding? Do you know what that is? It's when prison guards reward a well-behaving prisoner, or just one that bribes them well, with a trans woman cellmate to rape.
"
That's completely irrelevant to the point being made here.
Your claim was you didn't think that feminists would like women's sports going away, not some hypothetical 'fairness' argument that _you_ believe but actual feminists do not.
Feminists don't care if there are statistical differences. Feminist theory does not, and never have argued that random things should be 'fair'. I know that's what the _right_ has pretended, for decades, but that's not at all true.
Actual feminists have a lot of things to say on these issues. Here's what, for example, is said about grade schools sports:
Grade school athletics are supposed to be _educational_, not 'a record-defining competition to see who is literally the best'. It is okay and even expected to have differing skill levels. Especially considering that a major factor in ability in grade-school athleticism is literally just 'who is the oldest' and 'who hit their growth spurt first', and when there is that much variation in a single grade, and that sports are often played across grade, it is pointless to pretend girls are weaker, especially since girls usually hit their growth spurt first.
Additionally, sports as provided by grade schools are very weighted towards ones that boys appear to be better at. Almost no one is doing sports programs that girls generally dominate in, like gymnastics. This seems...odd. But there's a reason for that: We have allowed the popularity of sports to be a huge funding source to school, allowing any general societal sexism to dictate what sports exist and demand that teams 'win' instead of just having sports as, again, _education_ and general activities for students, which is what it should be.
To summarize: Claiming that 'girls will not do as well as boys while playing on a mixed-sex team' in _grade school_ fundamentally, and somewhat deliberately, misunderstands why we _have_ sports in grade school. It is not to see which school is 'the best'. It is not to see which individual player is best.
It is because being part of a sport and a team and competing as such is very good experience.
"
Yes, but more importantly, those problems would be made much worse by hosting prisons inside of active volcanoes.
However, as neither of those proposals are on the table, I don't know why we're talking about them .
Hey, did you Google v-coding yet?
"
And as for prisons, you _really_ need to talk to some feminists, because most of them have pretty serious problem with the entire carceral system, from top to bottom, especially the level of sexual assault allowed to exist within it.
Within the existing system, feminism generally operates off a harm migration system, where decisions are made about individual prisoners and the risk.
And they have much much more a problem with male guards at women's prisons than trans people. And they also know that v-coding exists, a thing you are about to google and then immediately wish you had not googled.
"
Then you have never listened to feminists.
Let me explain something that a lot of people get very very wrong about sports: The feminist argument was not that women should get their own team. The feminist argument was that women _should be allowed to play_, period. They were not allowed to play sports in any manner whatsoever before that, and if they were, it was absurdly underfunded segregated dumb games.
The feminist position was, and always has been, that women should be allowed to play with them men. Women's sports do not exist because of feminists. They exist _despite_ feminists. The regulations in Title IX, when it was created in 1972, originally said in 1972: No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
You may notice that doesn't say anything about segregating sports. Indeed, the original regulation, as pushed by the national Organization of Women and other feminist groups, would seem to prohibit it. If an educational athletic team does not allow women, it would be illegal.
Which got a lot of female college potential athletes suing, because they wanted access to sports, to play actual real sports with the men, and still were not allowed to play.
So, eventually, these Federal regulations were made into law, in 1975. And an amendment was added: A recipient which operates or sponsors interscholastic, intercollegiate,club or intramural athletics shall provide equal athletic opportunity for members of both sexes. In determining whether equal opportunities are available, the Director will consider, among other factors:... Whether the selection of sports and levels of competition effectively accommodate the interests and abilities of members of both sexes ...
You may notice _that_ doesn't require a separate women's sports either. But it's suddenly moved from allowing access to any 'education program or activity' without consideration of sex to allowing 'equal opportunities' while considering sex. I.e., recreating separate but equal. With a whole bunch of rules about how we would know if something was equal.
This amendment was added by Senator Jacob Javits, a Republican, although a fairly liberal one who did seem to be pretty much in favor of civil rights. It's called the Javits Amendment.
This was not at all what feminism organizations asked for. It wasn't a step forward, it literally undid some of the existing regulation and created an _exception_ to anti-discrimination law. It was a step _backwards_, designed to fix the new and exciting 'problem' of women attempt to try out for college sports and the revenue impact that was perceived to have on sports.
Or just read this: https://lewisbrisbois.com/blog/category/sports-law/fifty-years-of-progress-the-legal-history-of-title-ix
The law has certainly seen its fair share of adversity and backlash, particularly in its application to sport. Immediately following its enactment (and in the years thereafter), Title IX faced an onslaught of challenges, whether through subsequent proposed amendments or through lawsuits challenging its legality and attempting to narrow its scope. In 1974, Senator John Tower proposed the “Tower Amendment,” which sought to exempt revenue-generating sports from Title IX’s reach. When that failed, Senator Jacob Javits submitted an amendment directing HEW to issue regulations providing, “with respect to intercollegiate athletic activities, reasonable provisions considering the nature of particular sports.”
tl;dr - Women's sports under Title IX do not exist to advance feminism, they exist as an _exception_ to the anti-discrimination rules a school would normally be required to follow, the rules that feminists pushed for. At best, they can be considered as a political compromise made 50 years ago when it became clear that collegiate sports were a particular sticking point for the law.
"
Hey Dark, you probably should be aware that the UK has been taken over by transphobic assholes, so trying to cite something that the government has said about trans people as proof of anything is kind of ridiculous.
"
As I said, this isn't bad wording that Trump came up with, this is wording that the Gender Criitical movement has been testing for a literal decade, the only thing it has to do with Trump is that he's the person who was willing to do it.
There's not some better version of this out there that he should have used. Mostly because there's not actually a good way to do this, exactly like there's not a good way to determine, under the law, exactly what race someone is.
We not only have not decided that, we have decided the exact literal opposite of that. And by we, I mean second wave feminism, AKA what happened in the 1960s and after.
For those of you who are not aware, one of the foundational premises of second wave feminism is that women should be treated the same as men under the law and by society. Essentially every single feminist law from that era (and beyond) requires women to be treated identically to men. In fact, they don't even say that, they don't say women or men at all, they say the people cannot be treated differently based on sex.
Feminists from that era would be appalled at the idea that the law should do things to protect women, as a class, from men, as a class. It's literally the opposite of what they were working for, in which the law did not see women or men, and in fact made no determination based on sex whatsoever.
Even laws that you would think would only apply to women, like abortion laws, are not written that way, very much on purpose.
This is because feminists were quite aware of the fact that such laws giving rights based on who someone is were very easy to turn against people, by merely redefining the terms used in them so that person isn't under it anymore. As I mentioned in my first post here, feminists knew this because first wave feminism was like 50% lesbians, and if there is one class of women that historically has been de-womaned and excluded from protections granted to women, it is lesbians.
This is why the gender critical movement has spent a decade lying to people and propagandizing that we do have such laws. Claiming that the law gives certain privileges to women, thus making the argument that certain people who don't deserve them should be excluded from those privileges.
There are no such privileges. Women have no special rights, under the law, whatsoever. It is not feminist to claim that they do and try to defend those rights, it is literally the opposite, that is one of the things that feminists actively worked against because they knew exactly this thing could happen.
People, have rights under the law, regardless of sex. That is the law in this country, or sort of is, except we never actually (or say we didn't) passed the ERA...but to the extent that such laws do exist, they do not 'protect women', they protect everyone by requiring the law to treat everyone identically.
And the only reason you need to know who was a woman, under the law, is if you wanted to change that.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/21/2025”
You have a pretty good point there. No one can actually believe 'Harvard had bodies stolen from it' is actually relevant, in any manner, to this discussion. It's inane to discuss, and probably is best to ignore.
On “US Department of Education Announces that it is Restarting Loan Collection”
As I've joked serious-seriously, you could write a plausible time-travel story where the concentration of more and wealth in less and less hands, the complicit media refused to explain where the problems are but continue to 'blame literally anyone else, like immigrants', and of course blaming Hillary because she got elected in 2016 results in politics becoming completely broken, or even more broken, by 2020.
So in 2020, or maybe 2024, a charismatic and extremely intelligent fascist leader gets elected, wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. He does not make anywhere near the same mistakes as Trump, he works tirelessly but competently to erode all safeguards in the system. The constitution is continued to be slowly eroded under the guise of 'terrorism', and 'protestor' is treated functionally the same, and the elections are not even slightly free, but all that happens slowly by the _end_ of his term, not spending an entire term doing nothing because he was managed like a toddler, and then doing a bunch of really dumb stuff instantly in his second term.
And by 2050, the US has managed to competently and slowly oppress a large chunk of the rest of the world...possibly not outright conquering, but via puppet governments and threats.
...and the time travelers ask themselves 'How we derail this?' and look around, and, hey say, Donald Trump (Who in the original timeline tried to become Mayor of NYC under fascism and flamed out spectatularly.) is a giant idiot, what happens if we get Obama to piss him off and run in 2016?
This might be the good timeline, people.
"
It doesn't actually matter if he folds. The ships from China are still sailling empty because they are unsure what tariffs are going to be paid when they get here. There's going to be a month period of shortages, which coincidentally will time itself perfectly with student loan repayment.
Meanwhile, countries are pulling focus to other places, prices are going to rise here because they cannot trust us to buy their goods. Those places may make them less profit, but it is a known consistent profit and they don't have to worry about the random vagaries of the whim of the US president.
Meanwhile meanwhile, a lot of small businesses that rely on cheap goods from China to stay in business, have already decided to shut down, and more of them will fold, before all this gets fixed. Which will work great for concentrating wealth even more in the super rich, but isn't going to help the actual economy much.
None of us have any idea how much actual damage will happen, but it could indeed be a full-on economic calamity. Or not. Who knows.
"
I'm not really talking at the individual level. Obviously people have had payments paused generally don't want them to resume, although they mostly understand that they will.
My point is that governments, and this government especially, needs enough people, enough powerful people, to conclude that it is not best for this government to be burn to the ground.
It is somewhat amazing watching just how incoherent this version of fascism is, about how it does target its enemies with laser-like precision, as fascism should, but then seems very unclear about how it shouldn't harm the Real American Volk who are supposed to be on its side, and just sort of scatter shots harm towards everyone!
This is because of how incoherent conservative politics was that led into this, which decided things like 'people who went to college' and 'young people asking for jobs that paid enough to live on' and 'women saying things' were the enemies. A revolving door of enemies that probably included every single person at some point in time, whatever was the most politically useful enemies to have at any given moment.
And then it elect someone like Trump, who doesn't understand basic economics of any sort and cannot be reasoned with even by his own party. And who takes all the enemy list seriously, and doesn't have a problem with having 90% of the US population be enemies!
People, fascist people, I don't know why I have to explain this to you, but the law is supposed to bind but not protect out-groups, and you got that right, but it is supposed to protect but not bind the in-groups, and you're failing at the protect part!
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/21/2025”
And those countries that ethnically cleansed an area to exist were criticized for it and generally stopped, or continued to criticized for it.
The problem with an ethnostate isn't that it exists, the problem with an ethnostate is _what it does to people of other ethnicities who already exist in it_.
No one cares if countries are 'ethnostates' if they only have one ethnicity in them. In fact, no one even bothers to classify them as such. Ethnostates are generally considered as such by how they treat their minority populations.
And, in Israel's case, it's not just the people in actual Israel, it's the fact it clearly wants _all_ Palestine's territory, so it's not only how it treats non-Jewish people within Israel, but how it (currently) treats non-Jewish people within (what it clearly plans to be future) Israel.
"
Did I say anything about what is and isn't anti-semitic?
Why, I don't believe I did!
Indeed, what I appear to have said is that 'This obviously lying site is spreading very debunked and harmful lies as it say that someone's behavior is antisemitic.'
On “Back When Patriots Opposed Kings”
I think the best quote from that article is this one:
It is somehow incredibly self-aware and non-self-aware at the same time . Yes, National Review in 2016, what _would_ Trump becoming popular say about conservatives?
LOL.
On “US Department of Education Announces that it is Restarting Loan Collection”
Sometimes it's easy to believe the Trump Administration cannot be stupider, and then it goes and drags out something like this and you remember who you're talking about.
We can, perhaps, argue about student loans in some other universe, if we should collect them or not, it was an interesting argument before the election.
But...we do understand the economy is about to collapse, right? I'm not kidding about that. Prices about to leap, shortages are going to happen, things are about to get pretty bad as high China tariffs and the 10% on everyone else go into effect. The half-empty ships are already on the way. Things are about To Happen come June 1st.
But don't worry as prices skyrocket and businesses start failing, the Federal government is _also_ going to resume taking loan repayments from your bank account!
This is just...astonishingly implausible, and I don't really have any other words for it, despite 'implausible' not really being applicably to things literally happening in actual real life.
I could say inconceivable, but that feels like a Princess Bride joke.
I can't even figure out the words for this sort of behavior. It is extremely hard to come up with any sort of coherent understanding of the Trump administration besides 'fascism that is determined to saw their own legs off and throw themselves into lava'.
On “The Lawless Lying Duplicitous Bastards of Abrego Garcia”
Yes, Jaybird, it's 'Trutherism' to point out untrue things you said.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/21/2025”
Hey, look, it's the 'Palestinians beheaded babies' hoax on that very page.
I again remind people that was exactly one fatality that could qualify as a baby on Oct 7, 11-month old Mila Cohen, and that was shot in her mother's arms from a distance. Even if you think that was purposeful, I think we can agree that is not 'beheading'. This is incredibly well documented, this isn't up for debate, we have literally the list of Israeli casualties and there is one deceased baby on it, period.
Meanwhile, there are, however, quite a lot of pictures of Palestinian babies that could, indeed, be called 'beheaded by Israeli strikes', and pretending there are not such things while pushing a well-debunked false claim is astonishing.
Are there literally any actual factual standards you will apply to the sites feeding you 'news' about anti-semitism?
On “Back When Patriots Opposed Kings”
Some conservatives believe due process still matters: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/attorney-general-bondis-claim-that-courts-have-ruled-that-abrego-garcia-is-a-member-of-ms-13/
...people have the strangest bedfellows these days.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/21/2025”
I could argue it does slightly reflect badly on their _competence_, indeed, they admitted they had poor controls over some of that and no real oversight. And created a policy afterward.
But being incompetent in oversight of a specific thing to stop people from stealing from you isn't the same as 'lacks moral authority'. It's not even Harvard 'being bad at their job'...they aren't a body bank, pretending such things existed. They're a school, their job is education, and schools are often pretty bad at security, and often do end up having wake-up calls when people steal from them.
This case is just somewhat icky because of what was stolen, but that doesn't reflect on Harvard's moral authority unless you think it's immoral for Harvard to have bodies at all. (Which would be a distinctly minority view...most people understand why medical school have cadavers.)
"
JFK Jr. is also going to start trying to control medications and bodily autonomy of autistic people, literally talking about imprisoning them, and is threatening to cut off ADHD medication. Very eugenic-y things.
Also same about trans healthcare, but somehow that's completely unrelated and fine to a bunch of people here. It's surely not the exact same tendency.
"
..the guy stole bodies _from_ Harvard, sold them to others, and was fired for doing so when Harvard learned of it.
What a weird thing to think harms Harvard's moral authority.
"
Personally, I don't think the US should go up against the Pentagon, I hear the military they control is the best in the world.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/14/2025”
Again, you cannot _possible_ believe that 'arrested for standing Hispanically in a Home Depot parking lot', and two people nearby included gang members, can even _possibly_ be an indication of gang membership that would withstand any legal test.
You are not that stupid.
As for the protective order: His wife is literally advocating for his return.
He also was never actually charged with a crime. We do not punish people for having protective orders against them, because _getting a protective order does not require due process_.
If they want to charge him with assault, they can. Of course, it would be a pretty stupid case as the only witness is his wife, who, duh, they can't legally compel to testify against him.
On “4th Circuit Court on Abrego Garcia: Read It For Yourself”
A reminder of where we are:
The habeas filings have all followed the Supreme Court’s 5-4 order in Trump v. J.G.G. on April 7 holding that AEA challenges had to be brought in habeas actions — and vacating the prior classwide order, brought under the Administrative Procedure Act, blocking AEA proclamation-based removals nationwide.
As such, a habeas petition was filed by lawyers from the ACLU on behalf of two petitioners and a “putative class” in the Northern District of Texas on April 16. As with the other recent filings, the aim was for this to protect anyone from AEA proclamation-removal within the district. That is the putative, or proposed, class.
I.e., this is the ACLU following along with the nonsense idea that 'The government can rendition these people without a trial as long as they are warned they are going to be renditioned and do not manage to contact a lawyer and get a habaes petition filed fast enough, and no we won't be specific about the time limitation there or whether or not they can even contact a lawyer'.
The ACLU apparently took that as a challenge, and it appears that _enough_ people in the government take issue with this enough to be leaking information and that a flight was imminent from Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas. Today. On Saturday. So they filed a TRO Friday evening, it got appealed up the chain fast enough, and the Supreme Court had to step in at fricking one in the morning.
'We can send individuals off to be tortured with no due process, and no way to ever give them due process, unless, and only unless, some lawyer learns we're going to do that and manages to get a response from the actual literal Supreme Court faster than we can get a plane off the ground.'
...and yet the ACLU pulled it off.
This is an INSANE way to run a legal system.
"
Starting to think we need two sorts of open threads. Normal open threads, and threads for 'current legal status of gulag rendition', which keeps changing so fast no one can really write an article on it.
Anyway, hours after _this_ was posted, the Surpreme Court, at one in the morning on a Saturday, issued a blanket TRO saying the administration cannot rendition anyone from the Northern Distract of Texas under the AEA. This, notable, does not have anything to do with Abrego Garcia, it's because the ACLU filed a blanket habeas for _everyone_ who is going to renditioned. (You know, those people who got the forms the other day.)
https://www.lawdork.com/p/supreme-court-aea-april-late-night-order
This is in addition to the one TRO that already existed within the Southern District of Texas stopping the same thing. (Which I think is the one in the article? And also the one that is currently being looked into for contempt because they did not turn the planes around as the judge ordered.)
It is worth pointing out that the Trump Administration is almost out of jurisdiction shopping. This is the jurisdiction _they wanted_ and they can't even get favorable results from it.
It is completely absurd that no one will issue a nation-wide injunction about this.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.